Though Cowards Flinch

How can we best explain the genre of the political book? I like to place the components of this genre on a sliding scale that takes no account of ideology. On the one side you have some of the greatest books of the 20th Century. On the other, you have the bargain basement punditry, sold god knows how and soon found in second-hand bookshops all over the country, often several copies to a shelf.

In the first category, I would list books such as Karl Popper’s Open Society, Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty or Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. I vehemently disagree with vast chunks of all of these books, but no one can doubt that they are profound works that have contributed much to our understanding of the political issues which confront us today. Nor are all three purely theoretical, though they lean that way.

Moving towards the second category, you begin to notice a change between the theoretical and the un-theoretical. Obama’s Audacity of Hope was one; it was a manifesto rather than a political treatise. McCain’s Faith of my Fathers was another, designed to endear him to the Republican base without actually grappling with the key political questions of his time. These books are thoroughly political, but they aren’t theoretical at all.

At the very bottom of this scale, you have journalists like Guy Sorman. Sorman has published around twenty books on ‘contemporary politics’ ranging from discussions on socialism, to the ‘happiness’ of the USA to human rights in China. Sorman was a professor at a university in Paris, but his journalistic traits are very much evident in his written works, for example here.

I have used words like ‘un-theoretical’ and ‘journalistic’ to describe these works which I hold in less esteem, though they are still bound together by the genre of political books. This illustrates my key problem with them; when not fully and openly engaged with the ideological contentions of their opponents and their own, they are compelled to fall back on the commonplace, the truism - and that is dangerous.

To illustrate my point, let me utilize Monsieur Guy’s latest oeuvre, linked to above.

European socialists have failed to address the crisis cogently because of their internal divisions. Born anti-capitalist, these parties all (to greater and lesser degrees) came to accept the free market as the foundation of the economy. Moreover, since 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet system, the left has lacked a clear model with which to oppose capitalism.

The truism is that all Left parties adapted to observe the free market as an unbreakable law of capitalist economics. The danger is that this truism informs several bald assertions that simply do not stand scrutiny, firstly that the Left lacks a clear model with which to oppose capitalism and secondly that ‘European socialists’ have failed to address the crisis in a coherently fashion because of internal divisions.

However the truism ignores that actually, it was the leadership of the Left parties which adopted wholesale the free market. By the admission of factions, Sorman’s other contentions are thrown into difficulty. First of all, no group of political factions ever address any issue in exactly the same way, so the cogency of the Left response is nothing to do with factions. Secondly, there has never been a universal model with which to supplant capitalism.

In fact, following the fall of the Soviet Union, the potential alternatives multiplied many times – whether they’re all workable or not is irrelevant, but their basic feature is workers’ control. It is unlikely to convince professional economists, but then those same economists have spent their lives working on exceptionally ideological premises that are simply bypassed by changing the means of capital accumulation.

Let’s try another.

Since George W Bush showed the way towards bank nationalisation, vast public spending, industrial bailouts, and budget deficits, the socialists have been left without wiggle room. French president Nicolas Sarkozy tries to rekindle growth through the protectionist defence of “national industries” and huge investments in public infrastructure, so what more can socialists ask for?

By this, Sorman attempts to establish that socialist = protectionist, Keynesian. For all his erudite mention of the new Left groupings coming into being, alliances of ‘Trotskyites, communists and anarchists’, evidently the chap has never been slipped a copy of the Transitional Programme, much less an Erfurt-style Maximum Programme. This self-important political hack would piss his pants.

In the UK, Sorman’s type of cliché is one deployed by New Labour regarding Old Labour; no going back to the days of tax and spend, boom and bust etc. Well, in New Labour’s case, it has become spend and spend, but that’s besides the point. Sorman and others who play this sort of game rely on this vague, generally accepted view of the Left to deploy concepts which aren’t just wrong, they are a catacomb of lies and misinformation.

Another:

These institutions [the EU], based on free trade, competition, limited budget deficits, and sound money, are fundamentally pro-market; there is little leeway within them for doctrinaire socialism. This is why the far left is anti-European.

That the far left is anti-European is axiomatic and it suits our political establishment to say that over and over again. It ignores the fact that while the Sarkozys and their like were fighting for King or Republic, the socialists were trying to construct pan-national endeavours that would put a stop to war. The far left isn’t anti-European, and to say so deprives it of its anti-capitalist, anti-bureaucratic critiques.

It is anti-EU.

Once again then:

European socialists are also finding it hard to distinguish themselves in foreign affairs. They used to be reflexively pro-human rights, much more so than conservative parties. But ever since Bush included these ideas as part of his democracy-promotion campaigns, European socialists have become more wary of them.

Moreover, without the Soviet Union, European socialists have few foreign causes to take to heart: few understand Putin’s Russia, and today’s totalitarian-capitalist China is too far and too strange. And, since Barack Obama’s election, anti-Americanism is no longer a viable way to garner support. The good old days when Trotskyites and socialists found common ground in bashing the United States are over.

Socialists hate America; socialists are now in bed with those who are anti-human rights; socialists were Soviet or PRC second campists. The number of clichés with which these paragraphs are riddled is stunning – but none of them make the underlying contentions any more accurate. Socialists have plenty to keep them busy on the international stage, beginning with the anti-war movement and moving to Venezuelan and other Latin American solidarity campaigns.

If that were dying out, surely we’d get some remittance from Harry’s Place?

Secondly, the fact that Bush has appropriated words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ for America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the War on Terror generally, has had no effect on the human rights stances of the Left. The anti-war movement was universally opposed to the war on the grounds that it would completely shaft the people it was ostensibly supposed to help. I’d call that a defence of human rights.

I would go so far to say that even beyond the traditional socialist activists, to the average punter who reads the Daily Mail or the middle class family chap with 2.4 kids, there was revulsion at Bush’s gung-ho attitude to the invasions. In no small part this was shaped by Bush’s bastardisation of language, his petty jingoism about ‘evil-doers’ in light of the crimes that the American military has committed elsewhere.

As for being ‘reflexively pro-human rights’, that very doctrine is empty of political content and so it can be picked up as a shield and used to cover the most heinous of purposes. Such as imperial aggrandizement – witness Russia versus Georgia. I’d be appalled by the thought that the Left has ever been reflexively pro-human rights. We are much more politically sophisticated than the four-legs good model implied by that statement.

The bottom line is that this chap Sorman is making things up as he goes along, and he doesn’t even have the wit to provide at least some empirical grounding to cover his assertions. They are sustained by truisms, things he expects everyone will simply take as read in order to follow him in building a pyramid of perception – the only problem being, the metaphorical cornerstones are missing from his construction.

There are plenty of journos and political types who get up to this, and don’t have the redeeming man-of-the-people comedy of that arsehole Jeremy Clarkson. Jonathan Freedland, Timothy Garton Ash, Nick Cohen…all of them sell books numbering in the thousands off the back of their media careers as talking heads. Yet none of them have ever produced insights to rival Berlin or Popper.

Instead they are to such great minds as the cheeky girls are to Mozart; ripped off, dumbed down and playing to the gallery, rather than interested in creative and intellectual endeavour. It is this truistic behaviour which we should root out from among the shelves of our bookstores and burn them in a giant pile, in the middle of town squares all across the country, with the cry:

“No more mediocrities!”