When reading nonfiction, every so often you will come across a phrase that will really crystallise an idea in your mind.
I had such an experience recently whilst reading The End of the End of History, a book from last year that makes the case that we are at a juncture between two political epochs. An era that began with the end of the cold war has just ended, and we currently find ourselves in a chaotic period awaiting something new.
One of the effects of the crumbling of the old, according to the authors, has been a protracted period (and here’s that phrase) of ‘elite hysteria’. This has been characterised by powerful actors adopting the techniques of conspiracy theory (Russia caused Brexit/Trump), name-calling (everyone who disagrees with me is a fascist), and histrionics (the fate of the West depends on this election!).
The root cause of this behaviour is no different than if it were any other group turning to conspiracy theory and panic. A class of people have lost the ability to explain the world around them through the frameworks they usually use. This leads to fear –in this case a fear of loss of status, standing and control among people who were accustomed to having a great deal of all of those things under the previous order.
Technocratic counter revolution
I had these ideas in my head whilst reading another piece of non-fiction recently, which was Oliver Eagleton’s biography of Kier Starmer. The Starmer Project’s primary achievement is an incredibly illuminating deep dive into its subject’s career as a lawyer and his time as Director of Public Prosecutions. It portrays Starmer as a man who is deeply committed to the idea and ideals of the British state and its capacity to deliver justice and ‘good’ in the world.
Reading Eagleton, you get a sense that Starmer’s attachment to ‘process’ goes beyond a simple lawyerly affectation - and instead has become a sort of worldview in itself. Regardless of who’s in government, regardless of the policy questions of the day, if we can just follow procedure, the complex machine that is the state will simply spit out justice. This is what explains his penchant for suspending critical thinking on cases such as Gary McKinnon, or others surrounding police abuse, and instead simply surrendering to the internal momentum of institutions.
How does this strange approach to politics and statecraft relate to the concept of elite hysteria? Reading The Starmer Project it struck me that this was exactly the kind of mindset, and exactly the kind of person, that was experiencing a post-2016 meltdown.
The period described by The End of the End of History has been one in which the efficacy and legitimacy of old political institutions has been challenged from forces of varying stripes. One side have had enough of experts and want to leave the EU. The other feel the economic status quo has fucked them over and want to overthrow neoliberalism.
These currents have very different end goals - but they have the same things, and the same people, in their crosshairs. And those are the forces that the Labour leadership have tried to assemble behind it. They are the liberal counter-revolution against Brexit and the left.
They are a very 21st century kind of statist. They do not necessarily want to grow the public sector. Indeed this goes against the instincts of many of our hysterical elites. However, they do want to demonstrate what they perceive as the inherent morality and legitimacy of the British state (and themselves), and to unleash it (and themselves) once more as a force for good onto the world.
This is why the faction of the Labour party around the leadership is so concerned with what it considers ethics and values in public office. The machine of the state is malfunctioning in the hands of people who aren’t fit to operate it. The pitch is that if we can just put qualified drivers back behind the wheel, we can make the state great again. We can show you why we arranged things like this in the first place.
In this conception, policy matters little. The system is good, so it will deliver good outcomes if it can just be run properly.
A curious mirror image
In this day and age, however, the urge to demonstrate the might and morality of state power is not simply the preserve of liberals.
The recent controversy over deporting migrants to Rwanda has shone a light on similar impulses on the right. Much of the criticism of that policy has focused on its cruelty, efficacy, illegality and underlying racism. All of these points are of course valid – but by focusing purely on the performative spite, I think we miss something about what is truly motivating our government here.
If you read the Policy Exchange report that laid the groundwork for this policy (which Wonk Watch reviewed at the time here), you’ll find a strange and revealing passage.
Migrants arriving in Britain via small boat, the report argues, is “specially objectionable” even if it does “not differ from the legal and humanitarian features and ends of all other types and modes of irregular entry” into Britain. This is because, the authors write, that “by inviting the assistance of national rescue services, they [the migrants] involve the state as a participant in the highly public spectacle of the conspicuously successful flouting of its control of irregular migration”. This spectacle, the very fact of desperate people arriving in this manner, makes “the state an instrument and ring-master of its own impotence – a failure of a democratic self-government”.
For many years the right made arguments based around the claim that the state is incompetent. But now, they perceive state ‘failures’ not as a fact of life that proves we need to privatise things, but as national humiliations. The conservative elite is entering its own version of hysteria.
Scandalised by forces beyond their control, they now believe that state power now needs to be wielded to enforce moral goods on the world. They too believe in the power and importance of the state, and want to make it great again.
This, in many ways, gets us right to heart of what the new culture wars are as a right-wing agenda. They are (as others such as the Know Your Enemy podcast has argued) a way of defining who counts as a friend and who counts as an enemy, so that the power of the state can then be used to reward and punish accordingly.
The turn away from libertarianism and small-state Thaterite orthodoxies on the right has, it seems to me, been misread. People predicting a shift towards ‘right on culture, left on economics’ have gotten ahead of themselves. Whilst monitoring the output of rightwing thinktanks as this blog does, I’ve never come across any serious economically-left proposals.
What we have seen though is an embrace of the state as a force. A coercive force, a creative force and a moral force. We have seen an embrace of its potential. That is a key component of new border regimes, and it also underpins things like Tory reforms to media and to universities. They feel that libertarianism has failed to build the world they dreamt of. They now intend to change that.
Like those discussed in the first half of this blog, they want to demonstrate that the state, and therefore themselves as the class of people operating it, can deliver things – reshaping market forces, flows of people and the direction of travel of academia.
The days of laissez-faire are over. The new consensus across the factions in Westminster is, for differing reasons, to bank on the power of the state.
I hope you found this interesting. After a little reflection, this blog is going to post less-often, but more in depth. This is precisely the opposite of what the content kings say you should do to generate reads on here, but hopefully the blogs are going to be more interesting both to read and to write!