Though Cowards Flinch

As a result of the BNP being invited on to a BBC debate show, there is a lot of discussion in blogoland about how best to combat fascism. A recent online poll by Metro newspaper, which was twittered and blogged by people of different opinions, showed a large majority (76%) against allowing the BNP on Question Time. Those in favour often voice the opinion that the best way to beat the BNP is to take them apart live on air, so that their lies may be exposed once and for all. Richard Seymour amusingly dubbed this a demand not for Question Time but for show trials.

On one level, it seems a fair enough demand. The BNP flagrantly lie – any cursory examination of their electoral material proves as much – and there can be no harm in letting them repeat these lies explicitly for the purpose of proving them to be lies. As intellectually satisfying as that might be – and I’m among those who go positively purple when I hear porkies being told and no one challenging them – I’m not entirely sure the broader point is correct. Who, exactly, is going to be convinced even if representatives of each major party gangs up to ‘expose’ the BNP?

Nine hundred thousand people voted for the BNP in the European elections this year; is it them we’re aiming at? We don’t know how many of them will be watching, we don’t know why they voted BNP and we don’t know if – no matter how much evidence to the contrary – they will change their views or their votes. Without clarifying these variables, I don’t really see that there’s an argument to be made in favour of allowing the BNP a platform simply for the purpose of putting up people who will attack whatever they say – whether the platform is the Oxford Union or the BBC.

The broader question I’m getting at here is this; does rational argument, on its own, change minds? Like me, many inhabitants of blogoland will have experience debating. Whether with friends, relatives, in formal debating tournaments, as part of political parties or in response to comments on blogs, debating is common in the blogosphere. Many of us too have experience of people changing their minds – but what we can’t say is that we know it to have been in response to rational argument – we simply can’t narrow down all the variables to one.

Friends and relatives will naturally be more susceptible to what we say, because we have a personal relationship with them – a bond of trust. People may not change their opinions solely based on the ties of family and friendship, but as a factor it can’t be ruled out. Secondly there’s the old chestnut of how someone says something. If you have two people stating essentially the same argument but in two different ways, and one ‘persuades’ more people than another, can we really say that it is as a result of rational argument rather than rhetoric?

Thirdly, the concept of persuasion by rational argument need not take into account experience. Someone can watch a national figure citing statistics and examples to back up their point, but when it comes down to it remain unmoved. Their own personal experience of discrimination against white people (or whatever) colours their judgment – just as our own experiences, and the experiences of the notional speaker, colour our judgments. Marketing in politics makes the argument that it is possible to co-opt this experience to the advantage of the speaker.

Yet to invert that position, perhaps it is more important that we change the experience than change our argument. Then there is the concept of hegemony; what is referred to as ‘common sense’ is part of a wider system of ideas. These ideas are selected and endorsed with a given context of material and power, widening or narrowing their reach according to laws that take no account of the inner rationality of the argument. Indeed arguments can be openly contradictory and still pass relatively unscrutinized – for example the Nazi conception of the Jew.

As Slavoj Zizek puts it: “This is also why fascism definitely is a populism: its figure of the Jew is the equivalential point of the series of (heterogeneous, inconsistent even) threats experienced by individuals: the Jew is simultaneously too intellectual, dirty, sexually voracious, hard-working, financially exploitative…” (In Defense, p279). The victimization of Jews did not pass unchallenged by German society – both intellectually and in activist terms. Yet rational inconsistencies didn’t prevent Der Sturmer publishing its bullshit nor people from lapping it up.

To give a different example, people are presented with concepts that challenge specific items of religious faith pretty regularly. Most of them simply filter out those arguments they dislike and continue along their merry way. This makes it especially irritating to debate with these people, who often display the most glaring inconsistencies and hypocrisies – and yet they have millions of followers, and not for want of being exposed, shamed, challenged and so forth. Ideas continue in circulation not merely because of their rational content but because of how their content (rational or not) interacts with a variety of other factors, material and ideological.

Straightforward rational argument, as I hope I have demonstrated, will not affect the factors which ultimately determine the success or failure of the BNP argument. People sympathetic to the BNP will find ways around open confrontation with the evidence presented to them: the arguments of mainstream politicians can be dismissed as self-interested twaddle. There is thus no reason to allow the BNP to consolidate their support with an invitation to be oppositional pricks at a mainstream political debate and the subsequent pep rally that would certainly result.

At the very least, even if I find that my disavowal of rational argument alone is ultimately unsupportable, I think that we can beat the BNP without giving them a national platform. Someone appearing on the doorstep of a voter’s house, supporting a candidate who has just called into the house next door, is a stronger statement than anything a professional politician can say to refute the BNP whilst on television. It combines the experiential and the ideological – and offers scope to involve people in changing the material, if the candidate has the right policies.

Here is the key problem; it’s not that the BNP haven’t been called out or exposed, or that the media has given them an easy ride. As a political party, the BNP are really quite villified, even by the right-wing press, which loves salacious and criminal gossip about them. The problem is a) that the mainstream alternatives aren’t offering the chance to change things and b) that the context of political debate is being framed by people who are hostile to the BNP but buy into a lot of their preconceptions – and who don’t care if they are objectively wrong.

This is why the fight against the BNP is ultimately Labour’s to win or lose. Labour is the only political party founded on the basis of the organisation of workers, in the workplace as well as in communities, and the formulation of a political programme on their behalf. The mass organizations implied by this are the basis on which people can be incited to engagement, to force the pace of change rather than passively reacting to it. The growth of fascism is essentially a reaction to change, an expression of powerlessness resultant from the collapse of mass politics.

The growth of fascism among workers is little different from the growth of terrorism. People see a problem, they look for a way to fix it – and if we aren’t offering better ways to fix things, then they’re going to choose the extreme options. And make no mistake, Labour and the trades unions aren’t offering an alternative; in this gap between the rhetoric of leaders of the party and the experience of the members, disillusion, anger, frustration and irrationality find perfect breeding grounds. If this doesn’t change, no ‘debate’ will halt BNP support.

Labour Party leaders – and no doubt leaders of the other parties too – use their national platforms to ask people to get involved. Thus grows the belief that it is people themselves who are changing, and that the era of mass politics has passed, that people are more interested in other things. With one hand this encouragement, with the other the systematic centralization of power and the persistent failure to give actual power to the representative organs that survive from the era when millions of people were members of political parties instead of less than a million between all of them.

No wonder then that ‘debate’ takes on the appearance of a colossus astride the national political scene – because it’s not backed by anything. Certainly not by any political activity except its lowest common denominator: delivering leaflets. This is as much true for the debate with the BNP as it is for the debate between Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown – just as it is true for the speechifying of Jon Cruddas and other semi-popular figures on the Left. Whatever the configuration of national politics, everyone knows what needs to be done on the ground – but none of them are actually doing it.

Enter the BNP.