CHAPTER SEVEN

Bring Back Ideology – In a New Language

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was still acceptable – desirable even – to subscribe to an ideology. Politicians set out their beliefs and principles explicitly and passionately in speeches and manifestoes; people grew up with an ideology that arose out of family or community allegiance; they could also change that allegiance as the result of persuasion and debate. The important thing was that people had a political identity, a political language and a political home, even if they didn’t class themselves as ‘political’ animals at all.

But ‘ideology’ has, like ‘politics’, been rejected as a concept. The old ‘isms’ – communism, socialism, even liberalism – are now regarded, paradoxically, as both defunct and dangerous. Politicians on all sides insist that it’s only the opposition that’s motivated by ideology; ‘we’ are simply doing ‘what works’. Those who follow an ideology are either – again paradoxically – naïve dreamers; or they subscribe to a pernicious agenda that wilfully disregards ‘the evidence’. Tony Blair famously declared that New Labour was ‘beyond ideology’. As he was elected president, Barack Obama pledged ‘a new declaration of independence ... from ideology and small thinking’. Obama has claimed that President Trump is ‘non-ideological.’ Trump certainly denounces ideology. In reality, of course, politicians are all still ideological; it’s just that now their motivations are hidden.

The toxification of ideology is one of the great puzzles of our era; yet it’s rarely remarked upon. The OED reminds us that ideology is ‘a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy’. It’s hard to see why that is so terrible. So how has ideology been transformed from a neutral, descriptive category to one that is negatively inflected? And if we were to revive ideology, how could it be cleansed or reinvented?

The turn against ideology originated in the 1990s with Blair, Clinton and Third Way politics. Instead of setting out a platform of beliefs for voters to choose between, politicians began to canvass their voters to find out what they cared about and then attempted to appeal to those concerns. Although it seemed as if politicians were now listening to voters more, in fact they were turning the whole operation into a marketing exercise. ‘Third Way’ politicians posited a static ‘centre ground’ which they then attempted to win over, ensuring that politics became more and more bland; that the clear blue water between parties became ever narrower. If you just target swing voters based on their intrinsic identity, making it all about who they in essence are, you fail to see ideology as capable of swinging those voters in a different direction.

Ideological allegiance used to be shaped communally and from the ground up by group circumstance and social context. We often hear from the media that class categories are much more complex than they used to be, but as I’ve been arguing, they are still present – if disavowed. What has changed is that the institutional, social, communal and cultural platforms for enacting this identity are falling away. Tabloid newspapers still exert a strong pull on working-class communities, but this force-field is increasingly rigid and shrill, perhaps capitalising on the fact that the communal fabric of their readership is wearing thin. The political theorist Alan Finlayson has described how ideological affiliations used to be marshalled and defined by the rhetorical bond between politicians and their supporters – either in public meetings or through the medium of newspapers, radio or TV. But as the public sphere and the media landscape fragments, those relationships of identification are breaking down – or at least we have a general fragmentation combined with the occasional intervention by a demagogic leader such as Trump. Our media culture – online echo chambers combined with the residually powerful tabloids – has produced a kind of monopolistic monoculture that mimics in its blanket rhetoric the mass media of the 1930s while also differing from it in important respects. While ideology was once propounded through rhetoric, we have declared rhetoric, like ideology, dead – despite the dominance of what was once ‘spin’ and is now ‘post-truth’.

Rhetoric, like ideology, never died – what we have now is a rhetoric of no rhetoric. Donald Trump exemplifies this combination of extreme rhetoric and anti-rhetoric: he is a ‘blowhard’, yet an ‘ordinary guy’. Our political culture is all about authenticity and hard hats and hard work and early mornings and productivity. Politicians avoid setting out a platform of ideals and policies in favour of ‘consulting’ the electorate at every opportunity – formerly in focus groups, now ‘on the doorstep’. We have the worst of all worlds: we are constantly asked for our opinions, yet we neither have any power nor are properly taken care of, because those in charge are only interested in pursuing their own careers while at the same time relinquishing ideological leadership.

I’ve argued in this book that anti-politics and post-politics are part of a vicious circle whereby the aspects of the political system that are identified as solutions are actually part of the problem. Ideology – and the state – are the obverse: they are aspects that are regarded as problems but are actually part of the solution. The post-ideological turn is self-perpetuating: the more ideology is dismissed as inflexible tribalism; the less politics becomes anything that people could really care about. It is mutually reinforced by politicians, the media and the public. In fact, it’s at the heart of a widespread misunderstanding about the cause of our political malaise. While ideology is regarded pejoratively as the harbouring of a vested interest, practical empiricism is viewed positively as ‘getting the job done’. So we may think we’re against technocracy, but we are all technocrats now. The ‘problem with politics’ is identified as its confrontational style – outmoded in an age in which the old polarities supposedly no longer pertain. ‘My toddler behaves better than MPs at PMQs’ is a familiar complaint. But while the performance may be confrontational, this masks the fact that the ideas are not. As Chantal Mouffe notes, we need politicians to have genuine disagreements based on fundamental ideological differences – that’s what agonistic democracy is all about.

The public’s distaste for ideology is presented by politicians and the media as an issue of demand – that people are inherently apathetic and uninterested in political difference. But as Peter Mair, and the 2006 Power Inquiry’s report into Britain’s democracy – ‘Power to the People’ – have noted, apathy is something of a myth. It’s actually a problem of supply: parties do not set out clear alternatives, so why should the public be enthusiastic about choosing between them? This is why polarised politicians such as Trump and Sanders become so popular – because they appear to offer ideological distinctiveness. The difference between them is that Trump is just noisy and outspoken, whereas Sanders says what he believes. It’s something that worthy Electoral Commission reports don’t get. They don’t associate apathy with post-ideology; they just keep trying to ensure that politics is about ‘issues that are relevant to people’. Without conviction and idealism, it’s no wonder that voters regard politicians with cynicism, as just in it for their own gain.

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There’s another, bigger question here, however, which I first raised in the introduction – a question which is central, in fact, to our understanding of contemporary politics and culture in general, and which must govern our response to post-politics. Is the turn against ideology part of a broader postmodern rejection of grand narratives, or is it the result of a specific neoliberal strategy designed to foreclose the possibility of a left alternative?

As I noted earlier on, Francis Fukuyama was a Neocon when he wrote ‘The End of History?’, but he rather accurately diagnosed our present condition: political debate is indeed moribund – at least on the level of explicit articulation. Today’s young activists may still sit around campfires, but lofty debates about principles and ideals have given way to exchanging predictions about concentrations of CO². Of course there are always politics in everything – there are winners and losers in climate change, and international climate summits illustrate the power dynamics between developing and developed countries. But climate change is an existential challenge. It’s a post-political problem, but if it’s to be curbed in time it demands political action.

So has the triumph of neoliberalism caused the death of ideology? It’s probably too early to tell. What is clear is that they go hand in hand: as Colin Hay argues in Why We Hate Politics, the last three decades have seen the rise of the depoliticising assumption that politicians and the public alike are ‘self-interested rational utility maximisers’ – that all political decision-making is driven by economistic expediency. Neoliberal ideology has managed to disguise itself as ordinary common sense and market naturalism. Any reference to creating a better world is greeted with eye-rolling; austerity, low taxes and market ‘reforms’ are successfully presented as the only game in town. This is fake-realist politics, framed rigidly by the ‘Overton window’. David Cameron launched his austerity budget with the declaration that ‘We are not driven by some theory or some ideology. We are doing this … because we have to’.²⁷ This disavowal of ideology is the most ideological utterance of all. It’s designed to stop people thinking, questioning and challenging received opinion. Left and Right are still meaningful categories, therefore, but by demonising ideology and deploying the apolitical vocabulary of the household budget, today’s neoliberal elite conceals and promotes its partisan agenda. The Left is vulnerable to the fact that ideology is most strongly associated with pie-inthe-sky socialism. In fact, as I’m arguing in this book, politics is itself identified as left-wing. The Right, meanwhile, can present themselves, misleadingly, as non-ideological.

When the Right do make overtly ideological statements now, they employ the language of the Left. It’s significant and not often noted that the co-option only goes in one direction: the Left has moved to the right, but only the Right co-opt the language of the Left, not the other way around. This begs some interesting questions: is it only the Left that is good, that is ethical? Is it only the Right who lie, who say one thing in public and another in private? What exactly do the Right say in private about what they are doing – do they sincerely believe they are following their own route to creating a better world, or are they simply finding ways to publicly legitimate the defence of wealth and privilege? The problem for the Left is that their ideas only appear credible when articulated by the Right; and that when they do express their own ideas, they find themselves just repeating the messages of their opponents.

Left-wing parties are told repeatedly by politicians and the media that they need to move to the right in order to win the support of working-class voters and get elected; then they duly move to the right, and they lose anyway to a more right-wing party. Many disaffected voters are aware that right-wing politicians will forsake them, but the hegemonic power of the Right is now so strong that those voters exercise the only power they have left, which is to forsake the Left for moving to the right. The Right is popular because the Left sold out and moved to the right. So the solution is for the Left to keep left.

While ideological polarity seems to have returned over the last few years, and particularly with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the shift towards the culture wars is still dominant: we see bitter divisions based on social ‘values’, identity and place. The return of history we have witnessed most dramatically has been the up-surge not of leftist resistance but of right-wing populism. The resistance has been ‘the people’ against the political establishment, not Left against Right. Fukuyama famously claimed that liberal democracy had triumphed, but the ‘return of history’ has been a reaction against liberals and social democrats. Ironically, liberals are now figured as left-wing. The return of history has been to a large extent in the service of the Right.

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It’s deeply problematic, therefore, that the Left has accepted the post-ideology development seemingly without questioning it.²⁸ Grassroots localism is a facet of this tendency, as is the embrace of single-issue campaigns and action over words. A typical comment is that by one representative of an otherwise admirable campaign group on the New Economy Organisers’ Network (NEON) email list, during a discussion about the term ‘alt-left’: ‘If something still comes with the labels of left or right attached, it’s hardly an “alternative”. Any attempt at a genuinely unifying politics has got to leave those binary categories behind, otherwise you’re only ever speaking to your own. It’s inherently oppositional’. For me, opposition is not aggressive or negative; it’s properly democratic.

Commentators have replaced what they label the ‘old’ left-right binary with other, more modish categories: Jon Cruddas claims that the new political division is between those who believe in central control and those who believe in distributed autonomy – as if anyone would say they believe in central control. David Goodhart’s much-discussed distinction is between the ‘Anywheres’ and the ‘Somewheres’ – a formulation which in my view is both inaccurate and also simply reproduces the existing stereotypical tabloid categories. To me, Right and Left still have purchase.

The Left’s attempt to move beyond ideology is not surprising, since the ability to self-articulate has been so comprehensively tainted. But although the refusal to make demands can open up a space for radical imagination, it is also deeply compromising in terms of strategy and purpose. It leaves the field clear for the Right to claim to be post-ideological and decentralised while privately operating an integrated hegemonic infrastructure of think tanks, media commentators and the central party machine.

Without necessarily putting their finger on the problem, many left commentators are now attempting to fill the ideology-shaped hole. There is much talk of ‘framing’ and ‘narratives’; but these strategies are derived from a cognitive-essentialist political-science tradition, and are beset by confusion as to whether they are about branding or deep principles. The appeal to ‘moral’ values neglects the political dimension: it fails to appreciate the clash of competing views, and the fact that the Right has principles too. Without any historical sense or understanding of the meaning and life of ideology and its recent rejection, the Left is unable to correctly identify the loss and how it might be remedied. We need to talk explicitly about what has happened to ideology and why we need to bring it back or replace it.

There are signs that things may be changing. On the Left right now there is a profound desire to ‘envision real utopias’ to borrow the title of a book by the sociologist Erik Olin Wright; to articulate a vision and purpose. We want to be able to opt out of marketisation and financialisation, low tax, low wages and a small state, but how do we define what progressive principles are? There’s a recognition that without a clear expression of what we are for, it will be impossible to scale up all the myriad campaigns and initiatives into a concerted, enduring alternative. Attempts to define what this might look like are emerging, albeit in isolation. There’s the Kilburn Manifesto in Soundings, NEON’s Framing the Economy project, the work of the Public Interest Research Centre, George Monbiot’s vision in his 2017 book Out of the Wreckage, Adbusters’ ‘Blueprints for a New World’, NEF’s paper ‘From the Ashes of the Crash’, Common Weal’s ‘All of Us First’ and many others. We need to share and combine and conserve these manifestos and blueprints: we need to assemble the building blocks of a new left ideology.

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In our postmodern, pre-linguistic predicament, we need new words. It’s not enough – as the populist Left inspired by Ernesto Laclau believe – to simply recolonise the territory of ‘common sense’. This movement regards common sense as a linguistic moveable feast: Laclau took from Saussurian linguistics the idea that words mean nothing in themselves; they only acquire meaning in relation to other words that they are not. But politics is about interests and demands that arise out of a particular lived experience and socio-economic position. It is true, however, that any new ideology will need to connect with people’s sense of the real and the credible. The challenge for the Left is to find a new way to express this – and through the channels of communication that now influence public opinion. Can we brush off and re-use the word ‘left’? Or must we, like Podemos, conclude that its currency is irredeemably tarnished?

Ideological articulation does emerge at key moments of stress and opposition – in confrontation with an immediate and specific threat, like forced eviction or the Grenfell fire. At those moments, people are reminded of the value of collective definition and affiliation. But if this is not consolidated and generalised, such moments are both fleeting and politically slippery – such as the ‘broom brigade’ as a response to the London riots of 2011.

Ideologies are both emotional and cerebral, about both reactive anger and idealistic hope. They provide identity of purpose and build communities of solidarity and resistance. Ideologies acquire shape – crucially – through conflict, by taking sides: as the political theorist Kate Dommett notes, we know who we are, and who we are with, by what we oppose. This is why ‘values’ aren’t a substitute – ideologies are about what we are against as well as what we are for. ‘Divisiveness’ is only toxic when ideology is replaced by identity. In some ways consensus is benign, but in others it’s total-itarian. The reason why the much-hailed ‘new politics’ doesn’t stick is that – like marketing – its watchword is ‘engagement’. The Third Way was a politics without an enemy. And that was why we opposed it.

Ideology, like politics, is about real choice, about human agency. It’s about opening the Overton window, perceiving that the constraints upon us are planetary, not economic. In an age of unprecedented freedom and resources we have succumbed to the daily grind and the mean straightjacket of austerity and various forms of determinism – Darwinian, cognitive, technological, market. False inevitability and false expedience is placing the Left outside the realm of legitimate possibility. What kind of society deems it unthinkable to requisition empty private apartments for the homeless residents of a burned-out tower block? What has happened to our capacity to decide, collectively, what kind of world we want to live in? We don’t have to be miserable and work hard all the time. We have the wherewithal to look after our citizens and treat them generously. We can reclaim humanity and the good life from markets and machines. It doesn’t have to be this way.