[W]hat form of life can bring off the following feat? Start with a multitude that does not know what it wants but that is suffering and complaining: obtain, by a series of radical transformations, a unified representation of that multitude; then, by a dizzying translation/betrayal, invent a version of its pain and grievances from the whole cloth; make a unified version that will be repeated by certain voices, which in turn–the return trip is at least as astonishing as the trip out -will bring back to the multitude in the form of requirements imposed, orders given, laws passed, requirements, orders, laws that are now changed, translated, transposed, transformed, opposed by the multitude in such diverse ways that they produce a new commotion: complaints defining new grievances, reviving and spelling out new indignation, new consent, new opinions.

Bruno Latour: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. An Anthropology of the Moderns.  Cambridge, Mass., London, England. Harvard University Press 2013. p341

Introduction

Politics has changed and not for the better. I recall the ‘good old days’ or, as we thought at the time, days when much was wrong and politics was the possibility of improvement. Interests clashed, conflicts could not be avoided. These were contained within a shared horizon, that of the nation, to whose welfare the state was committed. Thus civil war was averted as competing visions of how that welfare could be advanced submitted to the judgement of the ballot box. While issues spotted within the horizon attracted by far the most attention, the horizon itself came into question from time to time; for example, when membership of the EEC was proposed. 

Debates on social and economic issues could be described, with some accuracy as between the ‘right’ and the ‘left’; between the winners and losers (if only comparatively speaking) in the capitalist game. Much more could be said but this is enough for my purpose: matters significant to peoples’ lives were in play in ways that more or less respected conflicts of interest. This is no longer the case. The brakes have been taken off capitalism’s dynamic towards to inequality; poverty continues to wreck lives. And the threats of climate change join the list. The terms left and right remain in vogue but their reference has changed. I scribbled these few notes to orientate myself in the new landscape.

Normal Politics and Its Limits

Bruno Latour’s account of politics is the best succinct account of politics that I know. It captures the dynamics and reminds us that politics does not resolve conflicts so much as manage them. Reading it, three types of question are apparent. The first explores how grievances make their way on to the agenda; how interests converge and diverge; how policies are formed, implemented and adjusted. The second type of question examines the institutions that keep the wheel turning, the process on track. How does this institution fit into the design for democracy?  The third type of question invites us to step back and appraise the system as a whole. Does the unified representation succeed in representing the multitude?

Each type of question prompts its own critique. We can point to distortions in the ways in which grievances are handled. We can trace how widely held grievances are kept off the agenda. We can diagnose institutional failure observing, for example, how the civil services fails to devise and implement policies. Or, we can find that the ‘unified representation’ fails to represent. This last critique is the hardest to entertain.  Certainly, it is the one to which we are least drawn. Yet, it is the most fundamental; the one most likely to uncover dangerous flaws. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to trace how some find their grievances  ‘hitting a brick wall’ so bringing the system into question.

Populists, both left and right, bring grievances into politics. Populists on the right protest immigration, those on the left racism, and a variety of other victims. For many these appear manageable in the normal run of politics. It’s a matter of pushing them onto, or up, the agenda while demanding changes in law and policies. 

What is worth noting is how quickly both give up on normal politics. While the right are adroit in publicising immigration and its problems, they show little interest in proposing laws and policies that might ameliorate them and less still in the institutional reform that could find them. Taking BLM as an example of the left, we find the same pattern. For the outsider, the number of Black lives lost in the major cities of the United States as gangs fight and the social order disintegrates is the scandal. Alice Goffman, for instance, describes what is a veritable civil war between police and the inhabitants of West Philadelphia in On the Run. The proposal to replace the police with social/health workers hardly matches the seriousness of the problem. If  ‘institutionalised racism’ is the problem, then surely unravelling the causal chain should be a priority ? 

Issues with Identity

We must suppose that in both cases the grievances are symptoms of problems that cannot be resolved in the ‘game’ as it is played. The problems are problems of identity. Descartes should have written ‘Ego agnita, ergo sum’ ‘I am recognised therefore I am’. Both right and left, in different ways, find that the liberal-democratic status quo does not secure, or acknowledge, their identities. They cannot find themselves in the ‘unified representation of the multitude’. This is a serous matter for them, and perhaps for all of us.

On the Right

We can learn a lot of what is going from Jose Pedro Zuquete who studied one strand of the European Right, the ‘Identitarians’ groups of whom can be found in most European states. While there number of activists is in the lower thousands, a much larger number follow them on social media. Immigration is their favoured point of entry into politics. The anxieties which some feel, and which, of course, they feed, provide opportunities to expound their world view that explains why the powers-that-be refuse to take the problems seriously. French thinkers, critical of modernity, from the Nouvelle Droite, play an important role in shaping that view. The European Union exemplifies all that is wrong with the modern world. As it proceeds, sovereignty drains from nation-states; what is local, particular, rooted is diminished as technocrats with their instrumental rationality dominate; the political landscape shrinks to the management of economic exigencies. 

Their hostility to the EU is not in cause of nationalism. Their allegiance is to a Europe with its diversity of national cultures encompassed by one civilisation. Some see the unity  grounded in race, others in ethnicity and culture. All agree that the civilisation is threatened within and without. Cultural elites apologise for rather than celebrate their cultural inheritance. In their eyes, the sins of Europe out weigh its splendours. The political elites bow down before the imperatives of a globalising economy.  Neither have the will or the resources to tackle the external threat: immigration. Immigrants flood into Europe. They have little incentive to integrate, their cultures being more vigorous than their hosts’. Muslims pose a particular threat – Islam, the ancient enemy of Christianity and the West, is intent on world domination.  That all native populations fail to reproduce themselves compounds the dangers. Europe is in crisis. It must escape the soulless universalism and find again its soul. Suspicious of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, whose monotheism that preaches the equality of all before a God who offers salvation to all fed into that universalism, they look back with admiration to ancient Greece, its gods and its myths. They find evidence for Europe’s racial origins in the Greek myth of the Hyperboreans. This race of giants who lived ‘ beyond the north wind’ were the Europeans’ ancestors. Their courage, love of liberty, fidelity to tradition, honour, mark them out as a superior race.

I give only a flavour of the details of the homeland into which they invite us. These are people who need to ‘belong’. It hardly needs reporting that fear and hatred give strength to their unity and energy to their cause.  

On the Left

I have not found a comparable study of left-wing identity politics. Unlike the right whose views are so distasteful to right thinking people that they dismiss them, with a shudder, in a shower of adjectives, sprinkled like anti-louse powder, the left receive more sympathetic treatment. Their views appear aligned with liberal aspirations and so are more generously supported. So I feel confident that I can offer a few comments.

If right-identitarians seek a home with which to identify, left-identitarians seek to escape a home which disparages and denies their identity, squashing their autonomy. Victimhood is central to their identity. Any exploration, questioning, assessment, of their status as victims deepens the wounds and must be ruled out of court. They draw a boundary to liberal tolerance with its defense of free speech. Those who cross it must be silenced, banished. Social media is their tool; mobilising armies of angry haters in short order.

Belonging and Autonomy

There is a close relationship between ‘belonging’ and ‘autonomy’. Autonomy is a space in network of relationships in which you have freedom of movement. Suppose that you belong nowhere, that you are not in a network of relationships, then can you be autonomous? The logic works in reverse. What is the merit of belonging if you have no autonomy? Identity is found in a struggle to find this balance in our culture and its institutions. How well any  culture facilitates the balance is easy to ask but difficult to answer. Recasting it as question of political culture reduces the difficulty. We can identify regimes that are out of balance in one direction or the other. Communist regimes carried belonging to an extreme while Neo-liberal regimes valued the autonomy of a free market far more than any belonging.  Can we imagine a regime that fails in both? I propose that we are living in it.

When cultural resources for either ‘belonging’ and ‘autonomy’ are weak, we should expect some to seek belonging while others look for ways to assert their autonomy. An individual’s family background and temperament will play a role in directing the choice. Wider social circumstances are important. Here’s an hypothesis: those on the winning-side of the Neo-Liberal order, nurtured on its individualism, are likely to assert their autonomy in belonging to a group of victims. Those on the losing side who see the gap between them and the winners increase, will seek to remake ‘community’; moved, perhaps, by memories of the social order shattered when a society with a market became a market society.

Neither will attend to the injustices of an untethered capitalism’s increasing inequality; to threats of climate change; to the construction of an international order matched to a global economy.

That agenda requires a ‘form of life’ that can find a ‘unified representation of the multitude’.  How can the conflicts  that the deep divisions among us warrant occur in its absence?

Books noted.

Goffman, Alice [2015] On the Run. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Zuquete, Jose Pedro [2018] The Identitarians. The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe.  Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.