(Just so no one misunderstands, this is Mandos writing, not Ian.)
Over the years I’ve collected a laundry list of potential problems that left-wing movements have in obtaining and exercising official power “through the system” in developed Western societies, but at least two of them have to do with the question of personnel and talent. These are problems that that manifest themselves both in the way that movements operate in the electoral space and then again reveal themselves if the progressive-leftist party gets really lucky and manages to hold official power. Some of them apply to populist right-wing movements too (but I think less so; the reasons for this we can leave to another day) and is at least a contributing factor to the extent to which the neoliberal order appears so crisis-resilient.
(1) Personnel for Getting into Power: We live in a mass media society where cheap communications means that messages are propagated very quickly. This means that almost all political campaigning is going to involve an aspect of mass advertising and marketing. I know that a lot of lefty people for obvious reasons have a bit of an allergy to the idea of political ideation as selling something, but unfortunately, that’s what it is. Selling stuff is a profession, talent, and skill.
The neoliberal establishment side of the equation has a lot of money to attract the kind of talent who can sell stuff. But that’s true of everything: The left always lives with a headwind of money that favours the establishment. What is more fundamentally difficult, however, is that the neoliberal demeanour has a very natural and smooth affinity to the notion of selling and is very deeply founded on the idea of competing psychological influence over individual choice; in fact, it openly celebrates this as a cornerstone of its fundamental political truth. The modern left, on the other hand, views advertising and marketing as an attempt at corrupting individual authentic choice. But in an environment of technologically-accelerated information dissemination, there’s no escape from selling political ideas and from a need for the talent required to do that. It seems unlikely to me, however, that, money aside, the sales talent is in large numbers going to abandon an ideological affinity for the governing neoliberal attitude.
(2) Personnel to Run the Show: Once in power, the problems have only started. Large industrial societies actually require a great deal of technical skill to run, both on matters of economy and finance as well as general administration and regulation. While leftists deride the prognostications of academic economics, there are nevertheless technical skills and concepts that are still required to have a modicum of control. Unfortunately, most people educated in these disciplines were also made sympathetic to neoliberalism. We saw in the Greek crisis that there was a layer of Greek bureaucracy that actively resisted the original form of the Syriza government. That is partly class interest — but a lot of “technocrats” genuinely believed that they were doing a good deed from preventing what they thought was stupid or impossible policy from being implemented, rather than respect democratic decision-making or question the political assumptions they take as positive truths. This is potentially a deeper and more difficult problem than (1).
The problem of finding technocrats willing to administer a moderately left-wing, post-neoliberal state feeds back into the original problem of electability. If the public (quite reasonably) gets the sense that left-wing parties simply lack the expertise to make existing systems work on a day-to-day basis, they’ll choose a seemingly better-administered political outcome, even if it actually represents long-term decline.
I won’t pretend to have immediate solutions to these problems. But I think they aren’t very closely discussed in these sorts of environments.
Stirling Newberry
That’s why centrism works – take off the few, and they take care of the body guards. The rest get out sourced. Works until it doesn’t.
V. Arnold
So, in other words; we’re a deeply superficial society (politically speaking) who can’t handle the realities that really, really matter to the citizen’s day to day existence…
someofparts
Or, in yet other words, maybe our species is proving itself incapable of surviving in the long term.
Maybe being unable to upgrade ourselves past dysfunctional cultural forms is a subset of that.
V. Arnold
someofparts
July 18, 2016
Or, in yet other words, maybe our species is proving itself incapable of surviving in the long term.
Yes; that appears to be, in fact, the present dynamic; zero long term survival.
As the geologists like to say; we’re but a mere blip in the geologic time line; just one of myriad species to come and go.
As the Zen monk says: We’ll see…
Stirling Newberry
Government work by doing things which reap the most votes for the least effort.
DZ
The problem of needing technocrats to run a bureaucracy, but those technocrats are not won to the leftist ideology, is one reason Mao tried the Cultural Revolution. It did not work- (before neo-liberalism took hold worldwide.) The technocrats were elitist and nationalist and they won and transformed China in their image. In the Soviet Union they became the elite and transformed the country to protect and enhance their interests. The problem of how you run the country and – how you get deep daily grass roots participation, creativity, innovation is the ongoing unsolved question.
Dan Lynch
Selling: one of America’s few successful lefties, Huey Long, worked as a door-to-door salesman before going into law and politics.
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Technical expertise: while many jobs in Huey’s administration went to political pals, important technical positions for things like road & bridge construction, hospitals, and education were staffed with experts.
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Mandos’ points are valid.
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My pet peeve with what passes for the current left in the U.S. is it’s mostly young urban professionals. Not that I have anything against young urban professionals, but they’re out of touch with the working class and with the “flyover” states. In fact, they generally despise the working class and the red state voters. By contrast, Huey Long and FDR were able to build broad coalitions that included the working class and rural voters.
someofparts
Maybe we could use “graphic novels”. (Feel free to tell me what I am supposed to call them now that comic books is not an acceptable usage.) Mao’s people staged plays to get their message out to a population that was largely illiterate. Maybe we should take that page from Chinese history and use comic books to reach the urban technical intelligensia.
zotter
You know, the world really does take all types to keep going ’round. It’s strange to me that people don’t take this into consideration when talking politics or cultural affectations. You see it all the time: the charismatic leader who couldn’t balance a ledger if he had all day to do it, the incredible wonk at your job who would rather die than utter two words in front of a group. As soon as you are one thing, you’re usually just not going to be a bunch of other things (behavioral opportunity costs?)
Why do we expect groups to be different? I honestly don’t think populist lefty and righty regimes are meant to be in power too long. The lefties make a mess of things and tend to develop monetary diarrhea, the righties … well, dust off the jackboots and get in line. But they do affect change, just in small, intense doses. They set the tone that the technocrats (or moderates) then swoop in and manage until the “system” no longer works (or is slowly corrupted), leading to the next left/right uprising. FDR sets the New Deal and it takes 80 some years to build it out (and whittle it back down.) The money always gets to the moderates, it’s like water eroding the edges off rocks. But are the smooth rocks bad, should all rocks have edges? They serve their purpose at times and at other times they are in the way.
Sanders is a great example of this human system; he really could not govern as well as Hillary (IMHO), but he needed to be there to push her into supporting the issues she needed to support to have a coherent left wing. The job there certainly isn’t done, I expect a ton of moderate/progressive skirmishes over the next few years (progressives will win them IMO) but again Bernie set the tone, Hillary has to learn how to manage in this new political paradigm.
We’ll see, but like I was saying you need the radicals (left and right) and the technocrats to ultimately get anything done long term.
realitychecker
Always reject whoever is found to be lying to you or otherwise trying to dishonestly manipulate your thought process.
They are committing the most profound acts of disrespect possible when they do that. So, why would any thinking person ever expect them to show you any appropriate respect or consideration?
Mandos
Humans are emotional and aesthetic beings. Mass communication practically entails communication that takes this into account. This attitude, common on the left, that views this in purely negative terms — cultural frivolity and dastardly manipulation — is one major reason Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. We are, at some point, going to have to live with and indeed embrace the idea that even the reasoned truth also needs to be presented well and effectively.
realitychecker
@ Mandos
Well and effectively is fine. Dishonestly and manipulatively is never OK. Integrity is not negotiable. Trying to make it so is the real root of all our problems, IMHO. Pandering to the perceived emotional and other ignorant beliefs of the audience just continues the game that always works to te detriment of the regular folks.
Hugh
“potential problems that left-wing movements have in obtaining and exercising official power “through the system” in developed Western societies”
The system is rigged. This is like wondering why you never win in a casino even though you know that all the games are fixed, the house cheats, and anyone who despite this somehow manages to win a little gets thrown out.
We need to split technical expertise which is necessary in a complex society from the unnecessary and excessive privileges that groups claim for their expertise, especially those cases where the “expertise” is without social value or even destructive of society. The guy who picks up the garbage or drives a bus is doing a much more socially useful task (and is neither asking nor getting special, and often heriditary privilege and wealth, for doing it), than the elite which is serving its interests at the expense of everyone else’s.
The old adage is that you can’t beat something with nothing. It’s not that the right is better at selling its views. It’s that the left and progressives can’t organize a two car parade. The Sanders campaign did not discover the web and online organizing and fundraising, but it did illustrate how these can be used to fight entrenched power and wealth. Where it failed was in not having a vision of the society it wanted, only a list of programs. And it failed in its leader who was too much a part of the elites to really fight them.
Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Well, the converse is true too. It’s easy to get someone to understand something if their paycheck depends on it. But we need to remember that most of us don’t live just for the money. Give people something to believe in and they will accept great sacrifices to achieve it.
I have said this before. Have a vision of the society you want, organize, educate, and I would add train where you need to. Saying we need our elites is just a godawful self-defeating statement. It is like saying we need the captain and crew of the Titanic. Sure, they are going to run us into iceberg after iceberg and kill most of us, but We Need Them. No, we don’t. We need to decide where we are going and how to get there. And if they won’t do it, then they can learn to swim and we can learn their jobs. Of course, it won’t really be the same ship (or system) if we do this, but that’s the point.
AlanSmithee
I haven\’t the foggiest clue what the author is going on about. Either he doesn\’t understand how deeply the American electoral system is rigged, or he\’s mistaking Sheepdog Bernie and his fauxgressive followers for actual leftists. Having participated in numerous local and state Green Party campaigns, I can testify that the biggest hurdle to getting a candidate elected is the wide variety of insanely rigged ballot laws.
reslez
Leftist populism is always a tough sell to credentialed technocrats, who by definition benefit from elitist systems. They’re amply rewarded for their credentials – a powerful bulwark against change. Technocrats are always willing to support reforms that put them more firmly in control. Change that takes money from their pockets, even if it serves a fairer distribution –let me think about this for five seconds — umm no. As Ian always points out, a sliver of people are strong enough to do “good” and support those kinds of reforms. Everybody else is significantly motivated by self-interest. In the absence of wide-scale revolution, if the technocrats don’t get a slice, reforms do not occur or are significantly undermined.
It also strikes me that a lot of the comments in this thread are myopically focused getting support from white leftists as though there aren’t any other kind. “Young urban professionals.” Really? Young urban professionals are the first to sell you out. When they grow up they watch Fox News. The left is more than that.
Sub-Boreal
Timely topic; thanks for providing space for this.
NDP supporters in Canada and most provincial sections must be getting pretty tired of the “Groundhog Day” sensation of seeing the same, lame, afraid-of-its-own-shadow campaign repeated again and again.
I’m wondering if there isn’t a pretty simple explanation: they just don’t have very good hacks working for them. There don’t seem to be any serious career consequences for incompetence – witness the leading roles of the same people in the 2015 federal campaign who’d blown the 2013 BC election. Is this a matter of matter of institutional inbreeding, or a fatal niceness about not wanting to fire someone for screwing up?
Many years ago, a wise friend observed that the NDP’s major organizational weakness came from having too many of its apparatchiks coming from a trade union organizer / communications officer background. Those career paths may develop skills for controlling an organization with a fairly homogeneous (and often pretty disengaged) membership, but don’t transfer well to dealing with either the diverse constellation of somewhat allied constituencies or the wider electorate. You may be really good at seizing control of your own little sandbox (e.g. packing a nomination meeting), but fall flat on your face at connecting with the bigger community.
Regarding the role of technocrats, my own experience in the lower ranks of the BC public service during the 1990s NDP government was instructive. In my ministry, the overwhelming majority of my co-workers welcomed the new government in 1991. But it quickly became dismayingly obvious that the Cabinet let its inherent timidity get reinforced by the upper ranks (ADM, DM) of the public service. They simply paid no attention to warnings from my level when something was going off the rails or the government’s goals were being undermined by senior mandarins. A career Deputy saddled my Ministry’s largest division with a disastrous ADM who actively subverted its key regulatory initiative – we were stuck with them for almost 6 years! After rumours of the ADM appointment began circulating in the Ministry weeks in advance, I got a well-connected consultant friend (who was married to a government MLA) to warn the Minister about what a bad idea this was. Even at the point, it appeared that the Minister wasn’t prepared to question the appointment, and gave the appearance of complete helplessness.
Spinoza
Before you shoot the arrow of truth, dip it in honey.
Jonathan
The problem with the vast majority of lefties is that they are technologically illiterate and take great of pride in their ignorance. They believe it perfectly OK, for example, to criticize the oil companies without having the foggiest notion of just what must happen to get gasoline to their corner store. They are all plugged into a fat technological umbilical cord and refuse to even acknowledge its existence. Gratitude for those who keep it all running is beyond their comprehension.
The key members of the real economy are by and large, extremely reasonable people. If they are supporting Trump it’s probably because, for all his flaws, Trump has actually built something. If you are having trouble communicating with these people, I feel sorry for you. It means your scorn for real work causes “misunderstandings” that make your car three time more expensive to run and that leaky roof never gets fixed properly.
And yes, without these people, your “revolution” WILL fail.
someofparts
“Well and effectively is fine. Dishonestly and manipulatively is never OK. Integrity is not negotiable. Trying to make it so is the real root of all our problems, IMHO.”
There’s your bright line, right there.
Mandos
No one is arguing for out-and-out lying, but I suspect that our thresholds for what we mean by “dishonesty and manipulativeness” in political communication are different. I see a left-wing movement entrapped by a kind of misguided moralism about information and communication, as though presenting everything straight-up, without taking into account the “negative” aspects of human nature (personal vanity, status competition, etc), will result in some kind of public realization of their own True Rational Interests. It’s as though people think “Speaking Truth to Power” is a real thing. News flash: power doesn’t care.
Peter
One of the proven tenets of successful advertising and marketing is to try and avoid casting a large part of your potential audience as racist, uneducated, homophobic, old, nostalgic, and fundamentalist detritus who will hopefully soon die off..
Mandos
That’s one of the problems that has to be solved. There’s a goodly section of left-wing progressives who are driven to progressive politics partly because of the personal identity issues, and that’s not wrong. For them it’s not an option to accommodate to a desire from, e.g., conservative members of the working class to continue to maintain some identity groups as less equal. ie, no more sacrifices of civil rights for better economic systems…
But that’s part of the issue. Reconciling potentially irreconcilable ideas is one of those “marketing skills”.
Peter
For them it’s not an option to accommodate to a desire from, e.g., conservative members of the working class to continue to maintain some identity groups as less equal.
Of course not. But the explosive stereotyping of 17 million Brexit voters as one big collective that voted for that reason regardless of what they said was not exactly an expression of respect that would impress a marketing prof.
When black, women, Jewish, immigrant etc. etc. leaders speak for their constituency, they advocate for their interests regardless of their personal frustrations with their members. Mainstream progressive leaders tend to apologize for theirs and agree they are the problem. Their members know this very well. Ergo Trump, LePen, etc.
realitychecker
@ Mandos
“No one is arguing for out-and-out lying, but I suspect that our thresholds for what we mean by “dishonesty and manipulativeness” in political communication are different.”
Are you really telling me it all depends on what is is lol? “No out-and-out lying . . .,” but any kind of lesser lying is OK?
No, Mandos, intent to deceive is intent to deceive, period. To argue otherwise is blatant mindfuckery, and our problem is that all the public dialoguers are agreed that mindfuckery is wonderful.
Start at the beginning of the logic process (and clearly in all western countries the consent of the governed is the most basic element that legitimizes a government and distinguishes it from monarchism), and please explain to us step by step how you get from “consent of the governed” to “It’s OK to lie to them a little bit IN ORDER TO FRAUDENTLY CLAIM YOU HAVE RECEIVED THAT CONSENT”!!!!! Go ahead, I dare you.
Your way just insures that we never get any choice but a choice between liars. How has that been working so far? Recognize that when you urge that we should just become better liars, you are arguing on the side of the elites and the Devil.
There are costs and benefits to lying vs telling the truth, you cannot reap the benefits without also incurring the costs. This is about logic and integrity, not alchemism. Garbage in, garbage out. If you want to see yourself as a good person, I suggest you need to check yourself on this issue right away.
“There’s a goodly section of left-wing progressives who are driven to progressive politics partly because of the personal identity issues, and that’s not wrong.”
Again, you miss the boat. Of course it’s wrong to vote just because someone belongs to your tribe, because it means that you recognize zero obligation to uplift the values of the larger community as a community. Being selfish for yourself is one thing, but doing so when that choice means selling out all out all other important community values is a betrayal of enormous magnitude. Aside from the demonstrated fact that your own tribe may betray you while pursuing their own selfish interests (as with Obama, Clarence Thomas, many others), identity tribalism can , and demonstrably has in the last years, meant that you do not mind if the liberties of all of us are taken away. Habeus corpus, anyone? Right not to be assassinated by your President, anyone? Fourth Amendment, anyone? Rule of law, nation of laws and not of men, anyone?
This weekend, we had brunch with a female Ph.D friend, who ferociously insisted that she would vote for Hillary because all she cares about are abortion rights and equal pay for women, and she insisted that Obama was the greatest President EVER. When I asked her if she was OK with him abolishing habeus corpus in the 2012 NDAA, she asked, “What’s habeus corpus?” Then she got mad when I told her that she was ignorant of the facts, to wit, “DON’T CALL ME STUPID!!!” (All our highly educated liberal women friends, mostly CDC people, seem to share the same viewpoint. None of them are stupid, quite thhe opposite, but all are blissfully ignorant of any facts that would challenge their tribal/identity political choices. Or they simply dismiss those facts w/o explanation.)
That is where tribal/identity politics leads us, sir. (I won’t even mention blind black allegiance to Obama.) How very strange to see it supported by the left, which has always had my agreement when they argued that we had to think in terms of the community.
You can’t build a strong and equitable society on a foundation of dishonesty. Relying on crumbly bricks at the bottom always insures a collapse later on.