In the third part of my Thoughts on Social Divisions series, I’m very happy to present of the UK’s most formidable thinkers in International Relations and Politics, Tara McCormack. Tara has written for Spiked online and is well-known in the Covid dissident community in the UK. Tara is a great gal, too, half Irish and half Serbian, to match her rebel views. The cover art for this issue, a still from Prefab Sprout’s The King of Rock’n’Roll (1988), is a bit of a homage to her Irish ancestry (yes, I know they are from Newcastle, but Paddy McAloon is a name so Irish it makes a Guinness look like a bottle of Pale Ale).
Enjoy and let me know what you think in the comments.
In 1997, the British Labour party manifesto argued that when it came to policies, “what matters is what works”. This statement encapsulates a transformation in liberal democratic societies in which social and economic policies are no longer justified in terms of interests, specifically class interests, but are increasingly justified in terms that are framed technocratically or ostensibly non-politically. This has taken the form of a supposedly neutral polity; one that is based on ‘the people’ as a whole who have objective needs or general interests that can be answered through expertise and technical know-how. Because of the removal of class interests as points of social division, the logic of the technocratic state based on “what works” replaces social divisions representing class divisions with moral ones.
The background to the flattening out of class interests is to be found in the political context of the 19070s and 1980s, a time of what Charles Maier called a crisis of “overloaded democracy”, in which the state could no longer manage the competing demands of citizens. This transformed the post-war consensus state. The post-war consensus state was premised on managing contradictory class interests (within very limited parameters) through representative political parties, social institutions such as unions and the provision of certain social goods. The post-war consensus came to an end with the shift in capitalist economies as a consequence of the oil crisis and the start of deindustrialisation in the developed world.
As Fritz Bartel has commented, if the first decades of the post WWII period were about expanding the social contract, the period from the 70s was about governments working out how to shrink the social contract and shut down their role in providing goods for citizen (Bartel 2022, 4-5). A central part of this was to flatten out class divisions and transform the way in which representation via political parties and social institutions functioned. Rather than representing class interests, political parties shifted to being “catch all”-parties or single-issue parties, social institutions have faded from importance in public life (see for example Peter Mair or Colin Crouch for more analysis on this shift). This was because arguments (even limited ones) about how to organise political and social life and how to distribute goods could no longer be permitted. This transformation is often misunderstood as a withdrawal of the state from policies (e.g., neoliberalism), but it is in essence a long-term political project that aims to withdraw the citizens from the state.
This then is the political context in which technocratic or ostensibly non-political justifications for policy emerge. In a society with acknowledged class divisions the question of what works will immediately be addressed with another question, but for whom? As there is an acknowledgement of conflicting class interests these are obviously political questions to be argued. Something perhaps counter-intuitive happens with the shift in political discourse that accompanies the technocratic legitimation of policies as neutral and objective goods for all. The corollary is a kind of radical moral claim for policies. Social divisions that used to be understood politically and in terms of class are recast as moral ones. Erasing the “for whom” question and framing something simply as What Works transforms policy into an unassailable good of the kind previously accorded to religious doctrine or the divine rights of the Monarchy. Who after all could be against What Works and what is best for The People? To be against What Works is to be for “what doesn’t work” and surely only a malevolent actor or perhaps someone out of their senses could be for “what doesn’t work”?
Nowhere was that more evident than in the way in which the state, for example here the British state, attempted to frame objections to the policy choices that the government made in relationship to the respiratory virus labelled as SARS-Cov-2. There was simply No Alternative to Following the Science, i.e., an entirely technical legitimation for what British citizens were told was an existential emergency for the country, the worst danger since WWII. An existential emergency that “we were all in together”. The aim of government commentary and media coverage was to tell citizens how all right-minded people must view government policy choices. Those who objected to or differed in response to the policy choices made by the British government and framed in the name of What Works, were cast by the government and most of the media as freakish, immoral and perhaps mentally unstable. To oppose lockdowns or masks or attempted vaccine mandates (in the UK) was to pursue a malevolent path, hot in pursuit of killing off their fellow citizens. Or perhaps those who were not actively seeking to “kill granny” were deluded, groomed by online propagandists who dared to suggest that What Works wasn’t in fact working and may have been actively causing harm.
Lockdown policies had a devastating impact on many of the most impoverished within developed societies and within the developing world. The class nature of the impact of Covid policies, nationally and internationally, was so clear that it should have been an open goal for those on the left. Unfortunately, many on the left entirely went along with political class mantras, for some engaging in a fantasy that the state was once again embarking on a social contract with citizens. What those on the Left who supported government policy choices misunderstood was that government policy choices in response to Covid were not a relaunch of the social contract but a consolidation of the removal of citizens from policy making and a legitimation of policies using a moral division of society into Good and Evil.
An early example of the attempt to use morality to legitimate policies can be seen in the 1990s when Western political classes begin to frame Western foreign policy in moralised values terms. No longer was war to do with interests or ideology, and thus something to be argued about in political terms, but for ethical reasons. When NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999, it was bombing for “our values”. This was to forestall debates about ends, means, intentions, alternatives and, most fundamentally, about the intervention in itself. Thus, to oppose the intervention was not to be engaged in a political disagreement but to be shut down with charges of genocide denial. Debates about climate change have also been framed in terms of The Science with no debate about What Works (or the Science) and with those opposed increasingly framed as malevolent or not in their right mind, climate change deniers.
Of course, after WWII, it was not unusual to argue that those on the opposing political side were immoral, anti-patriotic etc, whether industrial disputes or opposition to foreign policy. The difference was that there were coherent political arguments available that were rooted in an expression of different class interests. Domestically, to draw on an example in Britain, during the miners’ strike of the mid 1980s, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher branded the miners as the ‘enemy within’. That was countered with a set of political arguments that miners were fighting for their jobs and communities and ultimately against a set of broader economic policies and vision of how the state should be organised. Internationally, the existence of the Communist bloc provided alternative arguments for understanding foreign policy and domestic distribution of social goods. The moral division of society into those who support What Works and those who support What Doesn’t Work takes place in a world in which class divisions have been successfully flattened out.
Since the spring of 2020 we have seen the consequences of the end of class based social divisions with moral divisions for us as citizens. Governments across the world presided over truly voodoo policies in response to Covid; policies based on anti-scientific mysticism, manipulation of data, propaganda and the use of fear and shame to manage populations. Persuasion, argument, agreement are all mere historical memories in a political context in which what matters is What Works for The People. It is clear in relationship to European and American responses to Russia’s war with Ukraine and in terms of discussions about the climate. This is now the norm for the political class.
What can be done in response to this? We need to bring the political back in to all discussions of policy, whether public health, the economy or foreign policy. The first step is to refuse social divisions based on What Works and start asking the “for whom?” question. We are not “all in it together”. Whilst governments have flattened out class interests from representation, we still live in societies divided by class and marked by inequalities and structured by power and interests. Governments make political choices; they are not neutral conduits for general interests that can be answered by technical expertise. As citizens, we need to reject the argument that There Is No Alternative. We need to reject radical moralisation of these policy choices. There are political choices to be made and political arguments to be had.
References:
Bartel, Fritz (2022), The Triumph of Broken Promises (Harvard University Press)
"What those on the Left who supported government policy choices misunderstood was that government policy choices in response to Covid were not a relaunch of the social contract but a consolidation of the removal of citizens from policy making and a legitimation of policies using a moral division of society into Good and Evil."
Bullseye!!!
Thanks to Tara for the article and to you Elena for putting it here. It's spot-on.