CHAPTER FOUR

The Case for Good Authority

The crisis of post-politics and anti-politics is bound up with the crisis of authority. Authority has become the least fashionable virtue there is. Nobody now makes a case for it. Deference, we are told, is dead. Pedestals everywhere are crumbling, and we are repeatedly informed that this is a positive development. According to the ubiquitous mantra, the old hierarchies are obsolete, unfair and ripe for replacement. ‘Over the last few decades’, reads the blurb of one business bible entitled Never Mind the Bosses: Hastening the Death of Deference for Business Success, ‘power, information and resources have moved from being concentrated in the hands of a few, to being disbursed across many’.¹⁴ David Cameron announced in 2010 that ‘We are the radicals now, breaking apart the old system with a massive transfer of power from the state to citizens, politicians to people’.¹⁵ Peter Mandelson pronounced in 1998: ‘We entered the twentieth century with a society of elites … But that age has passed. … People have no time for a style of government that talks down to them’.¹⁶ Douglas Carswell has claimed that ‘deferential democracy is dead’.¹⁷ And it was Mark Zuckerberg, the archetypal fake-egalitarian tech baron, who said that ‘When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power’.¹⁸

This is yet another narrative that has the ring of media cliché about it, therefore, but if examined properly is highly ambiguous. Is it a description or a prescription? If the old authorities have ‘had their day’, is this a call to unseat them, or an acknowledgment that they are already toppled? As I will argue in this chapter, this narrative is also both false and counterproductive. Promoted by the Right and Left alike, it is largely responsible for the mess we are in.

For a start, despite all the iconoclastic rhetoric, the embarrassing reality is that we are more in thrall to authority than ever. Contestants on Masterchef and The Apprentice hang on the judges’ every word. Yes Chef, No Chef, they say. Thank You, Lord Sugar. Despite their funky, informal brand image, Apple and Google are run by a highly controlling and secretive management. Bond markets and ratings agencies have become gods: an economist at BNP Paribas bank said in 2010 that ‘if the austerity measures had not been delivered the markets would have gone mad’. Populist parties on right and left are led by charismatic leaders. The Queen is greeted with fulsome tabloid praise. People have for the last seven years voted in governments that pose as responsible parents with a strict and prudent control over the economy. This has only been reinforced by the supposedly revolutionary chaos of Brexit. As one Tory MP is said to have murmured after the EU referendum, ‘It’s time for Mummy’.¹⁹ Why is nobody commenting on the mismatch between the supposed death of deference and the advent of authoritarianism? Authoritarian populism has become a cliché in journalistic commentary without any understanding or analysis of how this paradox fits together.

In its quasi-Maoist sweeping away of all previous orders and traditions, I claim, this facile anti-deference has failed to distinguish aspects of hierarchy that are positive from those that are negative. It has failed to distinguish between expertise and democratic institutions, and arbitrary power, wealth and inequality. So when right-wing populism burst onto the scene, we had no way of responding apart from gazing at it in horror and then attempting to emulate it.

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As I’ve been arguing here, the Right have systematically turned the beam of public scrutiny away from financial and corporate power and onto professional and educational authority: onto knowledge and responsibility and care and expertise. Instead of targeting inequality and the outrageous liberties taken by oligarchs, banks and multinationals, we the public are encouraged to take aim at political leaders, social workers, food inspectors and hospital doctors. It is they, we are told, who are committing the worst offence, in presuming to know what’s best for ‘ordinary people’.

Those who provide political representation and social security are thus maligned as overweening nanny-staters and patronising do-gooders. The fabric of the government and state is being dismantled, with people realising too late that the institutions and bodies they were led to despise are actually the checks and balances that protect people from arbitrary power. In the worst of all worlds, now, hegemonic authoritarianism is combined with making it up as you go along. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, including the ruling class.

As with authority, therefore, so with the concept of the ‘elite’. The Right’s aim is to confound the two meanings of elite as privilege and office; to convert the Left’s complaint against inequality into an attack on political representation. This is the impact of figures like Eric Pickles and William Hague, and Steve Hilton, whose political crowdsourcing platform Crowdpac aims to ‘give politics back to people’. The 2009 expenses crisis seemed anti-elitist, but it actually functioned as a counterproductive safety valve, diverting public anger about the role of bankers in the financial crisis onto expense claims for bath plugs costing 88p. Politicians have ceded their power to finance and corporations, but we punish them by eroding their power still further. We forget that politics is, after all, a means for designing ways to improve peoples’ lives. Public outrage about the capture of the system is turned on the system itself. The Right can therefore present themselves as championing autonomy and ‘people-power’, while behind the scenes promoting the real elites and maintaining the status quo.

It’s true that the majority of MPs are drawn from a narrow social and educational class. They are career politicians, which means their interest is in maintaining their position. Their interest in the concerns of ‘ordinary people’ is thus instrumental to this end, and it shows. But it’s important to distinguish between the contingent characteristics of today’s political leaders and the merits of political office per se. There’s an unhelpful muddle about whether it’s leadership itself that’s the problem, or the people who are currently occupying the positions of authority. It’s often the case that in practice, status maps onto privilege; but this is not necessarily so.

We have today a paradoxical situation: highly authoritarian politicians who have nonetheless lost all confidence in their own office. The elites have withdrawn, because that’s what they think we want, but this only makes things worse. It is politicians themselves, as Peter Mair observes in Ruling the Void, who have undermined their own position in a bid to become less unpopular with the public. Not understanding the distinction between office and the abuse of office, masochistic yet self-interested politicians render themselves less authoritative, less ideological, less political – in a desperate attempt to be more ‘relevant’ to voters. And in the process, they become ever less relevant. They dig themselves into an ever-deeper hole. I think they would be more popular if they just stood up and owned their position as advocates. All the post-fascist, remarkably neutral and even positive talk of ‘strong leaders’ can be read as a transposed desire for the authority that politicians so damagingly eschew.

Our era is in some ways post-political, yet we have constant elections, testament to a constant need to obtain validation from the electorate. So this paradox is in part an apparent one: politicians’ authoritarianism is shrill because their grip is weak. We have the worst of all worlds: right-wing governments enjoy an absence of meaningful or powerful opposition, yet we have to all intents and purposes succeeded in knocking politicians off their pedestals, resulting in a situation in which we don’t even have the critical or satirical space to lambast them, because they no longer have any proper status. Satirists themselves like Private Eye’s Ian Hislop and Spitting Image’s John O’Farrell actually would like politicians to be held in higher esteem, because they understand that once we have no political authority, we are in a totalitarian space.²⁰ In our reckless iconoclasm we have got what we wished for, and in doing so we have unleashed the demon of despotism.

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Paralysed by accusations of condescension, the Left is failing utterly to make any kind of positive case for authority. MPs such as Stella Creasy and Jon Cruddas advocate the ‘co-production’ of services and the devolvement of power to local communities. In some ways, co-production is empowering; it’s a response to the one-size-fits-all, top-down administering of services. But autonomy, resilience and self-care can also mirror bootstrap Thatcherism; it’s the injunction to not rely on the state; to look after yourself.

In an age of anti-authoritarian and non-affiliated politics, the belief in grassroots people-power on the Left is often indistinguishable from the pro-individual-autonomy agenda of the Right. The ‘sharing economy’ is advocated by some progressive believers in the new economics and the rentier moguls of Uber and Airbnb alike. Even if we know the sharing economy is a sham, the Left is hampered in its critique because it too has been advocating the paradigms of peer-to-peer and bottom-up. The anti-establishment Left and the Right’s little platoons are united in an antipathy to the big state.

Social movements and the more radical activist left, for their part, have responded to the neoliberal corruption of political authority, as well as the historical dominance of privileged white men, by opening up a space outside of existing hierarchical structures: they have attempted to create horizontalist formations where nobody is in charge. These groups espouse digital technology, self-organising systems, and the network theory of Manuel Castells, in particular his 1996 book The Rise of the Network Society. In my own experience, left-wing groups that have no formal or explicit hierarchy always have soft, informal hierarchies operating unacknowledged – which are harder to challenge. The American feminist scholar Jo Freeman called attention to this tendency in the context of the Women’s Movement in her seminal 1970 essay ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, but its lessons are not generally heeded on the radical Left, which prefers to pay a kind of endlessly essentialising lip service to ‘power and privilege’ without altering or acknowledging its actual power structures.

It’s true that, as Hilary Wainwright and others have noted, modelling non-hierarchical society in micro form, prefigurative politics, and ‘being the change you want to see’ can spark broader political change. We need a dual approach: to articulate what good authority looks like in mainstream politics, and to fuel the political imagination through radical experiments in agency and control. But we also need to be wary of pitfalls. For a start, network theory and systems theory is strikingly similar to the neoliberal Californian Ideology. This is in part the result, again, of co-option. But it’s also symptomatic of a post-political tendency on the Left.

According to this way of thinking, people do not only use social networks to express themselves and organise campaigns; they also behave like computer networks. The hive, the swarm, the crowd is a way of conceiving of humans as machines. Centralised strategy and top-down leadership are to be replaced by the autonomous power of grassroots networks to propagate links, build movements and realise emergent political will.

As Adam Curtis has shown in his documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, systems theory originated in Silicon Valley, a fusion between Sixties hippy culture and the Californian Ideology. Its advocates believe that computers, the internet and, latterly, big data are best placed to manage society – and politics. We have gone from being governed by markets, therefore, to being governed by markets and machines; but the political valence has changed. Systems theory has been enthusiastically embraced by Left as well as Right, and it is often impossible to distinguish between right-wing proponents of the Californian Ideology and the left-wing activists wedded to social media and networked forms of organisation.

Networks are not inherently egalitarian: the ‘Google effect’ strengthens monopolies and mirrors real-world power dynamics. Horizontalism has not proved capable of challenging broader power imbalances. As Yotam Marom of Occupy puts it, the movement was ultimately doomed by its ‘mantra of leaderlessness’, which

foreclosed on the possibility of holding emerging leaders accountable, created a situation in which real leaders (whether worthy or not) went to the shadows instead of the square, and made it impossible to really develop one another (how, really, could we train new leaders if there weren’t supposed to be any in the first place?).²¹

The fact that anti-authority rhetoric is manifest on Right and Left alike, therefore, should in itself make the Left think again. On the Right, it’s essentially a co-option of left-wing localism and autonomy, masking a natural tendency towards elite monopoly; on the Left it is both imperfectly applied and strategically compromising.

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So what should the Left do? We need to separate out distinct issues that are often conflated: authority in the structure of political movements, authority in political institutions, authority in the state and authority in the wider society. Left movements’ internal eschewal of hierarchy, the transferal of attention away from social inequality and onto organisational forms themselves, removes their ability both to critique the predicament we are in as a society and strategically to organise to do anything about it. I argue that we need to stop being organisational narcissists and start to assess what it is about those traditional qualities of structure and hierarchy – both in the movement, and in politics and society – that is valuable and that we’d like to retain.

We need to separate authority from privilege, and work out ways to ensure that authority is constituted by experience, knowledge and expertise, and underpinned by democratic validation. If iconoclasm can’t be put back in its bottle, what new forms of organisation can realistically take shape? The task is to find different models of democratic leadership and structure that recognise the need to value everyone equally, while also recognising that people differ in their skills and levels of experience and also their time and inclination to lead.

I want leaders who actually lead, rather than follow; who proudly declare their beliefs and principles, rather than reading out questions from Lorna of Luton. We need leaders who are capable of strategic planning and mass mobilisation and who connect with social movements. It’s not that politicians have too much power; it’s that they don’t have enough, and are relentlessly and indiscriminately trashed by the public. The abuse, trolling, violence and threats of violence that politicians suffer is talked about only in terms of its personal effects, or as if it just goes with the job: it’s not generally connected up with anti-politics, or denounced as such. We need a version of government that is capable of representing its citizens and affording them safety and support. It is not sufficient to just talk small, talk local, talk ‘people first’ – because that is simply to repeat what the Right is arguing for too. The Left needs to think structural, and think big.

Without leadership it’s impossible to produce coherent, scaled-up, lasting change. The new Left organisations that are effective have a clear and rigorous structure, strategy and leadership. As Sigmund Freud, Max Weber and Hannah Arendt have noted, we humans have a profound need for authority because it gives our lives shape, potential and meaningful limits. We need leaders to stand up for the buried demands of the Left, to take responsibility and to represent grassroots interests when not everyone can turn up for meetings. As we will see in the next chapter, we need a state that exemplifies what the cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls the ‘nurturant parent’ model – one that can provide unconditional care for us in the different stages of our lives – through schools, healthcare and social care. We need good authority in our movements, in our politics and in our society.