Introduction

This book started life five years ago, when I started observing and commenting on a set of emergent tendencies: the disavowal of ideology, the rise of populism, and a profound confusion surrounding political authority, the kind of democracy we want, and the role of the state in the twenty-first century. It seemed to me that these tendencies were interrelated. They were about a widespread opposition to politics – or at least politics as we know it. They embodied a general sense that our system has become outmoded, defunct and obsolete. And they expressed an uncertainty about whether politics could be revived – and what possible form that could take.

And then, of course, these tendencies burst into the mainstream. Populism is suddenly everywhere, and anti-politicians have taken charge. An American president has set about dismantling the institutions of government. A British MP has been murdered and many others have faced trolling and threats. Westminster is crumbling, literally and metaphorically. Parliamentary democracy is a hollow sham. Professionalised and robotic MPs mouth a series of indistinguishable and mangled propositions. The public is cynical and disengaged. Traditional class identities and affiliations are breaking down. What was once a coherent public conversation on policy issues is fragmenting, as newspaper readership dwindles. Following the shock result of the EU referendum, Parliament has been cowed by a pernicious compound of oligarchy and majoritarianism.

When I began work on this book, the trend towards post-politics was coming from the marketised post-democracy of the neoliberal Right, but also from the radical Left – from what Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek call ‘folk politics’: alternative democratic experiments and the deliberate refusal to make demands. Neoliberalism is now combined with a virulent right-wing populism, and this is both destroying mainstream politics and taking it over. Yet we saw signs of hope in the 2017 general election, with Jeremy Corbyn making unexpected gains, and public opinion shifting to the left. Suddenly it seemed that formal politics was not defunct after all. The implications of this have not yet been absorbed and incorporated on the Left. One of the central contentions of this book is that the Left needs to think in a joined-up way about the relationship between marginal and mainstream politics, and not consign the latter, iconoclastically, to the dustbin. After all, if the political system is a dinosaur, why is it now coming back to life?

With events moving so fast, any book about the state of politics is a hostage to fortune. Yet I believe that to give up on writing about the big picture is to accept that our only possible mode is fire-fighting. If we only write about politics in journalistic form, our commentary will be restricted to the topical and the reactive – we won’t see the wood for the trees. In the all-consuming and all-erasing daily news churn, as Guardian readers reload the homepage once again and Twitter users scroll down their feeds, it’s difficult to get hold of the subtext – to feel situated in a historical moment; to grasp how we got to be in this predicament and what its characteristics signify in the grand scheme of things. This book is a reflective intervention at a critical juncture. It makes the case that we need to ask the big questions, think clearly and anatomise our impasse if we are to strategise our way out of it.

Because for all the commentary about politics in the media and the public conversation, I don’t think we really know how to answer or even frame some fundamental questions. Why has politics, as a ‘thing’, become so toxic that a member of Tony Blair’s cabinet, Charles Falconer, could promote the ‘depoliticising of key decision-making’?¹ If we are all desperate for some sincere idealism in politics, why has the word ‘ideological’ become an insult? If politicians of all stripes and campaigners alike now advocate for grassroots community and local autonomy, what role is left for the public sphere and the state? What is the right size for a jurisdiction: local, national, European, global? What is democracy, rightly understood: representative, or direct and participatory? Does authority have any rightful place in politics? In a postmodern age when history itself seems to have ended and grand narratives seem a thing of the past, is the ‘death of politics’ an inevitable sign of the times; or is it the result of careful right-wing manoeuvring? In other words, is post-politics disproportionately affecting the Left? And is politics per se dead, or just its traditional form? This book attempts to offer some answers, or at least to crystallise the big questions that lie beneath these dynamic, baffling times.

* * *

It’s curiously difficult to encapsulate in words what’s happening to politics. In part, this is because so much of it – Brexit, Trump and so on – was not predicted. This is in itself dismaying: after nearly four decades of neoliberal dominance, why would people assume the situation was set to improve? Yet although such events may have seemed unthinkable in political and journalistic discourse, in literature, film and TV the dystopian despot is a tired staple – from Citizen Kane to The Simpsons. The media has not built up its capacity to anticipate and critique these figures; yet they are also somehow too clichéd to even parody. Furthermore, the protagonists we wish to lambast have already got there with the self-aware irony: Donald Trump has said that his own favourite film is Citizen Kane – a Putin-esque theatrical reflexivity that makes critics look po-faced.

Furthermore, journalistic commentary can’t help but take on the received terminology of the day, which is opaque, circular and constrained by the ‘Overton window’, a concept defined by the political scientist Joseph Overton as the range of ideas the public will accept. As the philosopher Roberto Unger notes, the Overton window is not in reality fixed; it’s ‘a bastardised conception of political realism which is proximity to the existent’.² The word ‘Brexit’ is an example of this – a word that gains currency, validation and meaning it doesn’t deserve through frequent political and journalistic usage. It characteristically combines the mangled zombie lexicon of Westminster briefings with the veneer of vernacular informality. Deploying the accepted terminology defines you as part of the conversation, but the conversation is not connected to any theoretical or historically contextualised understanding of what is going on. So much of what we see around us is paradoxical – the people just want to see the system shaken up on the one hand, or the people just want a confident leader on the other. The media deals alternately in these utterly opposed clichés, without joining the dots and questioning the cognitive dissonance.

In my previous book, Get Real, I wrote about how political language – particularly the language of the Right – not only obscures reality but turns it on its head; often by co-opting progressive language. The strategic use of concepts like ‘engagement’, ‘participation’, ‘people-power’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘revolution’ signal this manoeuvre. The Conservatives are now the self-proclaimed representatives of ‘ordinary, working people’. In addition to these Orwellian and Humpty-Dumpty inversions, many contemporary political phenomena are reaction formations: equal and opposite responses to the overriding reality. So if there appears to be an upsurge of nationalism, this is taken at face value as a contemporary phenomenon, when in fact it is also a response to the breakdown of the nation state as a unit of jurisdiction. The prevailing tendency is sometimes the reverse of what we see.

The difficulty of getting a handle on the current situation and providing an effective critique is compounded, therefore, by the fact that many of our political problems masquerade as the solution. The new breed of authoritarian right-wing populists – Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, Nigel Farage – pose as new brooms, sweeping away unaccountable leadership, the chronic neglect of working-class communities, political spin and the decline of rigorous journalism. Donald Trump tweets: ‘The media is FAKE’ and asks ‘Are we living in Nazi Germany?’ Trump causes outrage, but he thrives on outrage. Similarly, the ubiquitous journalistic commentary on ‘post-truth politics’ appears to analyse and counter the problem, but it actually serves to normalise it, compounding it further. The populist anti-politics we have now is the symptom and the fake remedy in a single package. So in order to write or talk about this surreal era it’s necessary to first undertake the labour of translating the accepted terms into their real meanings.

* * *

It may seem ironic that the subject of this book is anti-politics. It sometimes feels in fact as if we are saturated with politics – what some have called ‘permalection’. As Brenda from Bristol has said, ‘There’s too much politics going on at the moment’. For me this is not a sign that politics is alive and well, but rather an unhealthy rearguard action, indicative of a lack of confidence on the part of politicians, who keep asking for reassurance and verification from the public. Politics is in a bad way, but – as I’ll argue in this book – while the solution is not more elections, it’s not anti-politics either.

At the same time, since the financial crash of 2008– 09, there has been a resurgence of positive political energy, particularly on the Left. That is what prompted me to get involved in political activities and indeed to begin work on this book. One of my central arguments, however, is that unless these groupings abandon the anti-political and post-political tendencies that have become dominant in recent years, they will not make meaningful headway, and they will not endure.

Of course, we are not and cannot ever be post politics. Politics pervades every aspect of public and private life. We couldn’t get beyond it if we tried. Politics is in every choice, every obstacle, every act of pulling rank and every gentle nudge. It’s in the courtroom and the canteen, the boardroom and the bedroom. But somehow, we have come to hate politics as a thing, and also to declare that it is dead. This combination of statements is contradictory. If it is dead, why should we have to hate it, or kill it off? But that is axiomatic of political and public discourse now: we say ‘the elites’ or ‘deference’ have had their day, that they are obsolete dinosaurs; yet that is a pretext to knocking them off their pedestals. If they are already obsolete, why should we have to attack them?

I have always been hooked on politics. Not in the sense of addiction, or even attraction, but in the sense of a hook, a snag. When you can see something as political, it has purchase – it has bite. I’ve always got immediately interested when you can look at a statement or a stance – particularly when it’s framed as neutral and unmotivated – and say, actually, that’s political – meaning that the situation has political dynamics; it’s animated by identifiable positions and agendas. Things come alive: they have meaning and differentiation.

In this book I am going to argue that although it’s impossible to be beyond politics, our antipathy towards politics as a category, and the parlous state of politics in its organised form, is detrimental to us humans in our individual and collective lives. In some ways, this book echoes the defence of politics by the late political theorist Bernard Crick in his 1962 classic, In Defence of Politics, which argued that – with all its messy compromises – politics is still the best and only defence against despotism; although I depart from Crick’s rejection of ideology. Crick’s book was updated for the modern political scene by the politics professor Matthew Flinders in his 2012 book of a similar name.

It’s true that politics has become so remote, abstract, dreary and masculine that we’ve forgotten what the word even means in its neutral state. As the OED reminds us, politics means a lot of different things. It’s the business of governing, it’s about leadership and about how power is organised, it’s about the distribution of resources and – via the state – the provision of services. It’s about the structure of power relations and the play of power dynamics. And it’s also about division and debate, sets of beliefs or principles, and competing visions of how the world should be. It’s about agency and solidarity, but also the disagreements that animate us and define who we are and who we are not.

The concept of politics takes us into really fundamental territory: the relationship between words and meanings. Perhaps more than other words, the word ‘politics’ – along with the word ‘democracy’ – describes a de facto arrangement or system. It’s rather like the ‘Overton window’ – what comes to be regarded as a set of acceptable policies. But at the same time, politics is also – confusingly – supremely abstract. It describes a theoretical blueprint that could come into being if the will and the vision were there. Could we collectively transform politics so that it came to mean agency and solidarity, and creative and idealistic change; or is there actually something fundamental about politics to do with grubby power struggles and a pragmatic cheapening and the corruption of idealism that defines its essential nature?

Curiously, politics is both the reality and the analysis of that reality. It defines the status quo and how we critique the status quo – as well as how we transform the status quo into something better. If we are post politics, we are post all these things: we’ve given up on government as a way of running our society, on visions of how the world could and should be, on beliefs and principles. And we have given up on power analysis, the ability to call attention to the disavowed forces that dominate our world. We need to remember what politics is, to realise what we’ve lost. Anti-politics throws into relief what politics is, and why it’s intrinsically valuable. Of course, those who critique our system would not necessarily say they are post politics per se, but – as I’ll argue in this book – there’s often a practical and a theoretical slippage between the two that needs addressing.

* * *

Since we no longer seem to know what politics is, we fail to distinguish between what it is and what it has become. Should we regard the system we currently have as politics proper, or is it a corruption of what politics should be, in its true nature? Did politics used to be better, and how does that sit with our powerful sense that things always improve over time? Does improving politics mean taking it back to an earlier state, to some neutral mean, or imagining it anew? Those who criticise our current politics and politicians don’t seem to know whether the problem with politics is inherent or circumstantial: whether the system needs taking over, or replacing altogether. This ambiguity is paralysing our attempts to identify both problems and solutions.

The following chapters will address these vital questions. And they will explore the prospects for detoxifying and rejuvenating politics, so that it can once again function as a tool with which to create a better world. I will consider whether post-politics is about being post politics as it is currently practiced, or being post politics as a formal category – entering a future which regards itself – dangerously in my view – as being devoid of politics. Right-wing populism has taken us into that era, at least ostensibly; it is open to question whether a resurgent Left is reintroducing politics, ideology and indeed history to the public conversation. As I’ve said, politics is very much alive, whether overt or covert – and we will always need it. But it’s tainted in a way that seems to threaten its very existence. What is not yet clear is whether it needs to be restored, redefined or reinvented from scratch.

These issues have been addressed by a number of political and cultural theorists of a left-wing persuasion, such as the late Mark Fisher, Slavoj Žižek, Jodi Dean, Wendy Brown, David Graeber, Jeremy Gilbert, Nina Power, Erik Swyngedouw, Aaron Bastani, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. But to the general public they remain largely opaque. As far as more mainstream political theory is concerned, it is often dry and detached from radical theory, from the public and from politics as a practiced business and a vital force. As the philosopher Lorna Finlayson argues in The Political Is Political, political philosophy has itself been depoliticised, along with the rest of the world. Political theory is not, furthermore, in the habit of perceiving politics from the outside, as a category – and this is especially important at a time when politics as a category is reviled by the public and is suffering an existential crisis.

While this book is influenced by the thinkers I’ve just mentioned, it does not offer a digest of the relevant theory and it is not formally situated within that body of work. Instead, I offer a fresh perspective as someone who is trained in detecting and identifying tendentious strategies and hidden agendas, and who has spent the last five years analysing and participating in a number of left-wing campaigning and think-tank groups – often in and around Compass and the New Economics Foundation. I have absorbed and contributed to debates about ideology, democracy, leadership and strategy. My experience has provided me, therefore, with an unusual vantage point from both inside and outside left-wing organisations from which to examine the advent and nature of anti-politics and post-politics, and assess the prospects for politics’ renewal. My focus is primarily the UK and the US, but I will also refer to other countries in Europe, and beyond.

One of this book’s central themes is that while anti-politics and post-politics are in some ways general trends, they appear to be impacting the Left in particular. Compounding this, I will argue, is that the Left’s response to what’s happening is often inadequate, even counterproductive; in some ways it has played straight into the Right’s hands, unwittingly reflecting and contributing to the very anti-political tendencies that are so limiting to the Left. I discuss the shortcomings of the Left’s current modes of operation and the options for its future.

Can we begin to see an alternative, positive meaning of post-politics: taking politics beyond the current stalemate and into new and different forms? The fascinating paradox about politics is that it’s about dry structures and institutions, but also about the explosive energy that disrupts them when they are revealed to be inadequate. Likewise, post-politics – and anti-politics – represents the apparent death of politics, but also its possible rebirth. Is it the case that these apparently destructive trends signal the return of politics proper – that the post-political is the most political?³

* * *

Each chapter of this book is an iteration of its central premise – that our critique of what has happened to our political system has come to cloud our view of the system itself. We are witnessing a perfect storm in which the big institutions – those of politics but also the media, culture and higher education – have been corrupted by finance power and marketisation, and at the same time, the Right has turned the public against those institutions when they are at their most vulnerable. Public anger is directed, therefore, at the effects of the problem rather than the cause. In response, we need to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and junk support for those institutions, but rather to strengthen and reclaim them.

As I’ll argue, there are a number of ways we can attempt to get beyond post-politics. First, we need to understand the insidious workings of neoliberalism, which are virulently political and anti-political at the same time. Neoliberalism has placed both past precedents and macro solutions seemingly out of bounds. In response, we need to think deeply about key questions of temporality, history and progress – to decide whether we need to restore politics proper, or whether politics – and the Left – needs to be transformed into something new. As well as thinking temporally, the Left needs to start thinking structurally and spatially. We need to resist the neoliberal depoliticising drive towards fragmentation and think about organisation, co-ordination and jurisdiction. While the Right denounces politics yet quietly takes it over, the Left stops at denouncing it. We need to think collectively, holistically and strategically; and distinguish between what is really obsolete and redundant, and what has been unfairly rendered so by the Right. If we are to remake politics for new times, how can we find a new language with which to articulate it; one that is palatable to a jaded public?

I begin by analysing our current anti-political and depoliticised predicament; in particular, the rise of populism. I then describe how we got to be in this situation, and critique elements of the Left’s response. The next four chapters focus on areas where I believe the Left has to rethink its position in order to get beyond our apparently post-political malaise: authority, the state, democracy and ideology. I conclude by assessing possible pathways to a better political future. ‘It’s time for a new politics’ is a regular refrain in political and journalistic commentary, but what are the grounds for this actually coming into being? And is newness even really what we need?