Debate: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right...

 

GOOD: Douglas Murray; BAD: Sunny Hundal

 

email

print

Also in this section:

• History says 'Labour's history'

Andrew Hawkins

• Enough said

• Yes he can, no he can't

Tim Shipman

Douglas Murray says... Good

 

A day or so after the failed Parliamentary candidate Sayeeda Warsi was elevated to the House of Lords as Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action, I happened to be on a television programme with her.

 

Just before going on I asked her why David Cameron (who had just promoted her) liked her. She answered: "Well, you see Douglas, I'm not ideological and nor's David, so I think we like that in each other." I was almost sick on her shoes.

 

Few statements I've heard in recent years have depressed me quite so much. And few have spoken so frankly of the awful state of our politics. With the old ideologies deemed dead, we have entered an era of managerialism. Where once there was a war of ideas there are now simply applications for the top job. It is contested by people who believe that they would be better at performing that job. But the job is the same. Nobody epitomises this era better than Cameron and Warsi – two people who I can't believe don't wake up each morning pinching themselves that they've gotten away with it again.

 

What do they believe in? What do any of them believe in? An unintrusive state? They never give us one. Families? Yes: so many people are against them. A strong economy? On and on it goes. You can trot the phrases out  yourself and attribute them to any or every party.

 

On the left, the loss of ideology has come about because theirs exploded. Aside from a few remaining hirelings at The Guardian, most people from the old left recognise (though rarely concede) that their ideology – particularly the ideology of collectivism – was the most catastrophic mirage of the 20th century.

 

Yet peace has been reached because the collectivists' battle has been won at some lower, more tolerable, level. Conservatives in this country are too cowed to openly argue for a roll-back of the welfarism which has done such a good job of destroying our society and economy. So a rotted ideology has been instituted by a new generation who, from all sides, mistake it for the status-quo.

 

Meanwhile, what used to be the right has retreated in a melange of self-distrust and self-doubt. They are particularly susceptible to this. For it is conservatives that most often distrust ideology as a force, thanks to a school of conservatism which believes conservatism itself to be a non-ideology or an anti-ideology.

 

Knowing followers of Michael Oakeshott, the conservative philosopher and historian, retain this position from an intellectual perspective. The Atlantic columnist Andrew Sullivan used to argue just such a case, though the ascent of Barack Obama and the failings of the second Bush administration pushed him – as it pushes almost everyone – into realising that nonideology is itself an ideology, and that though it might be able to exist in the pure realms of philosophy, it fails utterly when tested in the field of practical politics.

 

Mankind needs ideology to orient itself. Where beliefs are entirely relative they risk slipping – first into contradiction, then into nihilism. On the other hand, if you believe that your instincts are enough – that common sense (as you see it) must have universal consensus – then your ideas will collapse the first time you meet someone whose ideology is grounded in reason. Conservatives have lost the culture wars (and are now losing the economic argument) because they imagine that surely everybody would see things their way if they took the time. They have stopped arguing for their position; have lost the ability to argue their position and so have – in large part – forgotten that they had a position.

 

But there are personal reasons why politicians cannot do without ideology. It was never summed-up better than by Winston Churchill on the death of Neville Chamberlain when, in one of the most magnanimous tributes in political history, Churchill said: "The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour."

 

It is possible to feel sorry for those who distrust ideology, because it shows that they cannot differentiate between ideologies which are bad and ideologies which are good.

 

Yet today, rather than feeling pity for the anti-ideologues, I feel anger. Assaulted across the globe by the ideology of Islamism – most recently in Mumbai – our political class is stuck. They do not have an ideology, so how can they believe that their enemies do? Or identify what it is? Thus terrorists become criminals while their targeted victims are said to be chosen at random.

 

Believers in the open society should be ideological in defence of that society. At the very least they should know what ideology is in order that they can confront its fouler manifestations when they confront them. We have a political class that cannot rise to this challenge. This is not just how politics becomes boring. It is how democracies perish.

 

Douglas Murray is director of the Centre for Social Cohesion

Sunny Hundal says... Bad

 

If politics is war by any other means, then ideology surely represents the array of weapons in that war. Coming from an avowedly liberal-left commentator and blogger, it may seem odd for me to say that ideology is a bad thing in politics, but there is logic behind this.

 

Ideology is usually defined as a set of political ideas and beliefs - which form a narrative of sorts. But more than that, in our increasingly ideological world, it acts as a form of a rallying cry to the faithful and a chance to paint the world in broad brush-strokes.

 

There are immediate problems with both these aspects.

 

Narratives are usually all encompassing in that they include social, economic and personal worldviews that build upon each other. For right-wing social conservatives for example, their ideology will not only define their personal conduct (they are more likely to be religious), but also how they relate to others and the sort of government they want. The same applies to socialists - who see different aspects of the world through the prism of class inequality. Similarly, there is the oft-quoted feminist saying: 'the personal is the political'.

 

In other words, ideological loyalty requires that you don't pick and choose different - in most cases you have to buy into all parts of the tribe and join it. But while ideological lines are usually clear, people are more complex and contradictory. There are vast swathes of people who are socially liberal but economically on the right and hate the idea of change and progress - preferring to hark back to a traditional idea of society. There are vast swathes of voters in the UK who are socially conservative but economically left-wing, and expect the state to support them against the middle and upper-classes.

 

Bringing in ideology usually screws things up because people are pragmatic - they want the government to do its job properly rather than impose its ideas on them. They want their rubbish picked up, their hospitals to be clean  and easy to use, and their schools to be well resourced. A government that focuses too much on ideology loses sight of the ordinary requirements of its voters, and loses them.

 

Following on from this, ideologues like their politics along simple lines, but politicians realise that compromises have to be made. Even Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, despite being intensely ideological, had to compromise on their principles. The point here is that no policy in its extreme works. Economic right-wingers tell us every day that markets work and that capitalism is best left alone by government intervention because companies always look out for their shareholders.

 

However, the events of the past few months, and the big collapses thanks to gross mismanagement has swiftly killed off decades of Milton Friedman. Now, Keynes is king.

 

But in reality neither ideology: left-wing government interventionism nor right-wing laissez-faire, works when taken to its extreme. In financial markets we need government intervention to ensure shareholders, consumers and employees get treated fairly, while having a hands-off approach that ensures the government doesn't run private business or tell them how to do their job.

 

Ideology leads people to fit problems into pre-existing solutions rather than taking an evidence based approach or learning from past mistakes. This applies as much to economic policy as it does to our approach to drugs, resolving crime or dealing with medical advances.

 

There are two more problems with ideology in politics, and here I take the example of Barack Obama.

 

Obama first came to prominence with his now famous speech where he said there wasn't a black or white America, or a red and blue America... but a United States of America. Ideologues love the idea of a political scrap that puts vast difference between them and their opponents, but inevitably people get sick of partisan fighting. A politician should seek to represent everyone, not merely the narrow majority that elected him or her. That is the mark of a true leader.

 

Secondly, this has strategic value. Obama has not only emphasised bi-partisanship but actively courted Republicans following his election.

 

One has to remember that Obama learnt from the organiser Saul Alinsky, perhaps the best proponent of 'pragmatic idealism'. With a wide swathe of support among Democrats, Independents and Republicans, Obama now has the mandate to carry out even more reforms within America: on healthcare, foreign policy and the economy, than an ideologue who only appealed to his base such as George Bush.

 

All this isn't to say ideology is entirely useless, because it offers a sense of vision that can drive bold change. But  it has increasingly become simply a rallying cry for the converted and descends into mindless bashing of opponents. This not only makes politics unnecessarily poisonous but puts off ordinary people when they see politics descending into farce.

 

It's worth remembering that ideology has severe limits: it can only make broad generalisations without anything concrete on individual lives, dealing with our own contradictions or how to balance extremes in any situation. Any successful politician would be right to ignore it and focus on bread and butter issues.

 

Sunny Hundal is the editor of LiberalConspiracy.org