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Celebrity and Politics

So, Esther Rantzen has confirmed that she will by standing at the next election, in spite of my entreaties.

I do not think she will win, but she may be a harbinger of what is to come. I have suspected for a while that media figures are capable of moving into politics very successfully, through the more normal mechanism of joining major parties rather than running as independents. In the long run, the question is not so much whether celebrities will be able to win seats in parliament, as why they would want to.

It is necessary to understand what an MP is. Technically, MPs are legislators, who vote in parliament on bills and motions. However, that is now a ceremonial role, with no effect on the government or the country. The position of MP is an apprenticeship to the ministers or shadow ministers. In the same way that apprentice footballers have the irrelevant job of cleaning boots to keep them in their place and instill obedience, MPs have the irrelevant job of turning up for votes in accordance with the whips’ orders. (They also have the even more irrelevant job of acting as a kind of Citizens’ Advice Bureau for their constituents, but I’m not sure whether that’s to give them practice running an office, or for some other nefarious end.)

Therefore being an MP is, in itself, no more desirable a prize than being a football club boot-cleaner. OK, it is rather better paid, but that’s not much of a pull for the average TV star. It doesn’t even provide much publicity – does anyone remember hearing much about, say, Gyles Brandreth during his time in the House?The position of MP is only meaningful as a step towards the front bench, just as a football apprentice is only in it for his chance at the first team.

The advantage that a celebrity has is recognition. But while recognition is an advantage while rising in a political career, it is a handicap as the top approaches. When it comes to a party leadership contest, the most important factor is actual power – Gordon Brown was able to succeed Blair because he was already powerful. But after that the biggest advantage is not being disliked. In a leader-of-the-opposition contest, the ideal is for the general public not to know anything about you at all. That worked for Cameron, Duncan-Smith, Hague, and Blair. (Howard was an exception, but he was never intended or expected to win a general election).

Therefore, if a soap star or newsreader wanted to succeed in politics, they could probably get selected as a candidate, probably get into parliament, would probably be able to rise quite rapidly to a junior government role – PPS, or Minister of State, but would find it quite difficult to reach a major cabinet position, because of all the people who didn’t like them.

We see glimmers of the future in Brown’s elevation of Alan Sugar. Not being an MP, Sugar is out of the main political career path, but if his entrance had been a bit more planned he could have got a seat in the Commons and been better situated for a less temporary role. He would have gained his current position in his first parliament, but the odds would not be in his favour for further promotions.

The celebrities with the greatest advantage would be those whose public roles gave them credibility on political issues; the interviewers, newsreaders, and pundits. Robert Peston, say. Or more lightweight figures like Nicky Campbell, or Rantzen twenty years ago rather than now.

I suspect the step has been slowed by the reluctance of party grandees to admit potential rivals with such inbuilt advantages. In today’s environment, however, the potential candidate only needs to announce his intention, and the onus is on the party to explain why they are refusing him.

The key question, as I said, is whether celebrities would want to abandon their media careers for politics. Most wouldn’t, at the moment. We have seen that those that did, like Martin Bell and Robert Kilroy-Silk, set their expectations too high.

But once a few more oddities have blazed the path, the game changes, because ambitious young things with eyes on the greasy pole will see media as the career path to the cabinet – not in one explosive burst but by working through the ranks just a bit quicker than the normal rate. Rather than hanging around the think tanks and party research offices, they’ll be driving with all their ambition into the local TV studios, working the system with whatever influence they have at their disposal to get them the foothold of popular visibility, so that they can then switch to party politics with a head start over their anonymous rivals. Rising stars will be guided by their political mentors through tame TV or newspaper departments. The end result is that the two sectors just merge into one. Media figures will expand their reach from the political areas they currently own (such as the London Mayoralty) to those which are currently held against them by the party machines. Shifts from media to politics and back, like Kilroy-Silk’s will become commonplace.

What’s most important is not the effect on politics, but the effect on media. That is always the way – politics stays the same, but what it touches gets polluted. The Robert Pestons and Jeremy Paxmans (Paxmen?) of the future will not be doing their jobs because that is what they set out to do – they will be doing their jobs to get the public reputation that will put them in high government office. The detrimental effect on the media will be equivalent to the detrimental effect on Parliament of making an MP job nothing more than a stepping-stone. The lines have been blurring for some time.

Voter Power

In my previous post, I wrote

. It is not controlled by the electorate, but neither is it independent of the electorate. The effect of the electorate’s limited power of choice is not catastrophe, but the slow expansion of the bureaucracy into every area of life, along with a slow decline of effectiveness in everything it does.

That probably needs to be explained more carefully. I’ve talked about the three-way game between civil servants, politicians and voters before, but there’s a lot more that can be said. It’s easy to argue in terms of “Democracy means the people control the government” or “Our democracy is fake”, but the truth is more complex.

To a first approximation, democracy in Britain is fake. The real power lies with the civil service, who have to reach a compromise with other powerful interests in the media, other industry, the universities.

They also have to deal with the politicians who are nominally in charge of them, and who themselves are answerable to the electorate. In theory this is what gives the voters the power.

The politicians want to satisfy the voters by doing popular things, but that only works for them if they can appear successful. If the permanent establishment wants one thing, and the voters want another, the politician will do better in elections by following the wishes of the establishment than by following the wishes of the voters. Because if they do what the voters want, the establishment can make them look bad – everything that goes wrong (and lots of things always go wrong) will look like the politician’s fault if the government is following a policy which the establishment opposes.

What it amounts to is that the fact that politicians are elected is an essential part of the system, which would be very different without it, but that its effect is not to take power away from the permanent establishment to any large degree. The voters have no fine control over policy, but within the permanent establishment (which obviously itself contains factions and differences of opinion) policies which have more appeal to voters will always have a slight advantage over policies which have less.

On this very coarse level, what most clearly gains votes is the expansion of the clients of the state – those on benefits or those in government employment. An establishment policy which cuts government employment will be one which politicians will be able to resist, one which adds them will be very hard to resist. Detailed arguments about economics or technicalities are insignificant in electoral terms compared to that – because the context in which they are presented to the voters is set by the civil service and media.

Two Kinds of Democracy

Arguing against democracy can get confusing because democracy exists in two very different forms.

What we have in Western Europe and America I call “Old Democracy”. It has parties and regular elections, which are carried out fairly, and it also has powerful non-party institutions of civil service, law and media which stabilise the whole edifice. These powerful institutions get their power mostly from tradition – from the fact that they have had power for a long time and are widely respected as such.

These systems of government are very different from those created by a pro-democratic revolution or a pro-democratic invasion. Those normally produce “Young Democracy”, in which power is concentrated in elected institutions.

One cannot argue for or against democracy without distinguishing these two forms. Their merits and faults are quite different.

Old Democracy is the system of which it is tiresomely said, that it is the worst form of government ever tried, except for all the others. The claim is irritating but more than plausible – the most successful governments of the last hundred years, leaving aside a few city-state tax havens, have been of this kind.

Young Democracy, on the other hand, is what Old Democracy purports to be. The voters can vote for what they want, and they get it. Any theoretical, rather than empirical, defence of democracy applies to Young Democracy, not Old Democracy.

Young Democracy, however, is highly unstable. If the people can vote for what they want, then before long they will vote for “Strong Government” which will put an end to free, fair elections. The best case for a Young Democracy is that the unelected institutions solidify power and it becomes an Old Democracy before that happens.

The faults of Old Democracy are more subtle. It is not controlled by the electorate, but neither is it independent of the electorate. The effect of the electorate’s limited power of choice is not catastrophe, but the slow expansion of the bureaucracy into every area of life, along with a slow decline of effectiveness in everything it does.

The endpoint of Old Democracy is the utter bankruptcy of the state and its collapse under the weight of its ineffective functions. I don’t think that has ever happened in the West – economic growth has kept up with the growing cost of government – but I would expect it to look something like the end of the Soviet Union. which I do not classify as an “Old Democracy”, but which in its late stages shared many of the characteristics of a very old Democracy.

Alternatively, it might not be coincidence that economic growth and the expansion of the state keep pace with each other. It may be that Old Democracy exercises just as much waste as the economy can afford. The growth of the state is not an inevitable process of Old Democracy per se, it is its inevitable response to economic growth. Old Democracy would therefore be stable in the long run.

The virtue of Old Democracy is its stability. I have made the case before. While Mencius Moldbug may have come up with something better, he has yet to describe how it could come about, and my own suggested path to non-democratic government is no more than a sketch.

Supporters of Democracy are able to switch between the two forms as it suits them. Thus a commenter at UR was able to say

You like to offer up weak, fledgling democracies that collapse into dictatorships as arguments against democracies, but really they’re just arguments for creating democracies that can stand up to the overly ambitious sociopath and his cronies.

But a democracy that can stand up to its new leader is one that can stand up to the voters – i.e. an Old Democracy. The implication that it is voter power which protects democracy from tipping into totalitarianism is the opposite of the truth.

I must admit finally that the labels “Old Democracy” and “Young Democracy” are not ideal. Not every Old Democracy was previously a Young Democracy – the non-elected institutions in Britain are older than the mass suffrage, and I’m curious about the history of post-war Germany. And Old Democracy is only one possible outcome of Young Democracy – the Old’s link with the Young is more a matter of its own propaganda than a natural one.

Hierarchy of security needs

Mencius Moldbug’s latest has a real gem where he talks about the political needs of a society as a hierarchy of needs parallel to Maslow’s psychological hierarchy of needs.

there are four levels of sovereign security. These are peace, order, law, and freedom. Once you have each one, you can work on the next. But it makes no sense to speak of order without peace, law without order, or freedom without law.

His claim is an essential tool for understand how I can whinge about ID cards and yet make allowances for brutal policing in China or Iran.To analyse the reasons behind the hierarchy, the first need is peace, and the second order. Order is valuable, but if an enemy is present, the inhabitants must use violence against the enemy. If inhabitants are using violence, you do not have order. Therefore, peace must come before order.If you have peace, you can then impose order, and stop inhabitants using violence within the realm. We also desire law, meaning that by following some published laws, I can be assured I will not be the subject of violence from or approved by the state. But if violence is not controlled between inhabitants, then safety from the state is of little value. The state has to first reduce violence between inhabitants to a low level before we can get benefit from the state following law.Once we have law, there is then value in freedom. Freedom means that the state will not restrain me from doing things I want to do, to the greatest extent practical. I cannot have any freedom if I do not know what the state will and will not punish, so law is a prerequisite to freedom.Therefore, the hierarchy is : peace, order, law, freedom.I want to live under a good government, and a good government is one which will provide freedom. But I cannot have freedom unless there is law, there cannot be law unless there is order, and there cannot be order unless there is peace.We have order where I live, and mostly we have law. I would like more freedom than we actually have, and I think it is entirely practical to allow more freedom without compromising the more basic social needs of order and law.In China, there is order and they are working on law. There is much less freedom than in Britain even under New Labour, but allowing freedom to political rivals is almost sure to wipe out law and severely reduce order. We can see that order has broken down in part of China just recently.The hierarchy of needs also explains some of my differences with Mencius. We could do with a little more order and law around here, but we have enough to support freedom. Mencius gives the impression that in his area, at least, order has broken down. Now, I don’t live in the leafy, peaceful suburb where my mother went to school, my grandfather used to play bowls, and I used to play in the park when I visited, and where the Shine My Nine gang now kills those who encroach on its women. But then, I live in Luton, which isn’t exactly cut off from the problems of the rest of Britain. And yet in my view we have at least the necessary minimum of order. I would like more, but I don’t think we have to abandon law and freedom to get it.(Is it not possible to have order without the state, some will ask? I think not, though that’s another discussion).

The Chinese Civil War

My blogroll is full of pictures of the unsuccessful attempt twenty years ago to overthrow the Chinese government.

I have seen little discussion, however, of what the result would have been if it had succeeded. We have the example of Russia to show us that even the peaceful overthrow of a one-party state is not any guarantee of decent government. That’s of limited use as a guide, however, as the USSR had internally failed before it fell, whereas the Communist Party of China was and is still very much in control.

It is not the case that, because I oppose the ideology of democracy, I think the appearance of democracy in China would have been a bad thing. I still hold the position I took here – governments need to stay in power, and the less destruction they have to cause to do it, the better, and in an advanced economy, democracy is the least destructive way of preventing a change in government. I think some time this century China will need to transition to a western-style civil service-based democracy.

That is jumping the more important question, however, which is whether the collapse of the CPC (as would have occurred if it had been showed to be incapable of controlling its own capital) would result in a western-style democracy. These are notoriously difficult to build, not least because those building them appear to have no understanding of what they actually are. (The most important ingredient, of course, being a united media establishment which tells people what to vote for). The chances of one emerging out of China in 1989 would be practically zero. I don’t think there would be much chance today.

My other thoughts on Chinese Democracy are on my other blog

The Hole in the Ceiling

I do wonder how it is that people are able to support democracy, while at the same time having any understanding of the outside world.

A partial explanation has appeared in the comments to my post on Nadine Dorries’ lucid and mostly accurate explanation of the MPs’ expenses issue.

If the voters support a good policy, that’s what you expect.

If the voters support a bad policy, that’s not because voters are incompetent, it’s because of the media brainwashing them.

Therefore, all the policies that the voters actually support are good, and once we stop the media from getting them to support bad policies, everything will be fine.

The thing is that this has already happened. The establishment – the civil service, the BBC, the state education system – tells people what to vote for, and they do. The results are considerably better than would be the case if voters simply made up their minds based on the facts. The most damaging options are not even offered to the voters.

But the control of the establishment is not complete – notably, unlike in America, it does not control the newspapers. Usually, the business interests behind the newspapers stay in line, but on this occasion – and this is precisely Nadine Dorries’ complaint – the Telegraph stepped out of line, and told the voters that MPs had taken effectively twice the pay increase they admitted to since 1991, in the form of allowances.

That is what happened. I say so, Nadine Dorries says so, the commentator who was arguing says so. Why are we arguing?

I am arguing that what this shows is that the system of government in this country is a pretence. The establishment tells the voters what to vote for, the voters do it, and we thereby get a bad but not catastrophically bad government.

I suggest taking the voters out of the loop. Their independent influence is small, as we all agree, since we all agree that one newspaper read by 2% of the electorate is the real decisive factor in this story. Small as it is, I see no reason to assume the influence is beneficial. However, the necessity of keeping up the pretence leads to astonishingly bad policies, such as, in the most extreme case, trying to export the voting part of our system to countries which don’t even have a civil service/media establishment to tell the voters what to vote for! I mean, how is that ever going to work?

I want a ruler, or ruling establishment, that treats this country like an asset. I want them to say “this is my country and I’ll take what I want from it”, whether that be duck islands or third homes or 76 Rolls-Royces. If they did that, they wouldn’t need to lie to us from the cradle to grave to keep us from voting against them. They wouldn’t need to turn half the population into dependents on state handouts to keep them from voting against them. They would only need to run the country efficiently so as to maximise their loot.

Of course, this can’t happen. And the reason it can’t happen is because such a government would have to waste an even larger chunk of the country’s potential in defending itself from the mob, which believes a government is legitimate if and only if it lets them draw a cross on a piece of paper twice a decade.

The hole in the ruling establishment caused by the Telegraph letting the expenses cat out of the bag is not the point. It is a hole that shows us that the ceiling is not the sky.

Nadine Dorries

Nadine Dorries (Conservative MP for Mid Beds) said the following:

No Prime Minister has ever had the political courage to award MPs an appropriate level of pay commensurate with their experience, qualifications and position; as recommended by the SSRB, year after year.

Prior to my intake in 2005, MPs were sat down by the establishment and told that the ACA was an allowance, not an expense, it was the MP’s property, in lieu of pay; and the job of the fees office was to help them claim it.

I find this quite believable. More, I genuinely sympathise. It is a reasonable explanation of what happened — MPs weren’t paid as much as they and everyone around them thought they should be paid, so “the establishment” found a solution in letting them take money under the table on the additional costs allowance.

That’s a perfectly good explanation to me, but that’s because I don’t believe in democracy. To a democrat, however, MPs are the establishment. If they are not able to pass a law giving them a higher salary, that means the electorate doesn’t want them to have a higher salary. If they conspire with officals to take the extra money anyway, then they are thieves and usurpers.

So here’s the situation: If we live in a democracy, then our MPs are thieves and usurpers. If we don’t, then… what the hell are our MPs? Not anything good, surely.

Dorries’ further point, and the reason her blog that I took the quote from exists now only on Google’s cache, is that the press were in on this all along but the Telegraph decided to blow it open only now, in order to cause a sea change in British Society by getting a few more minor party candidates elected as MEPs, or something. Personally I think having sharks with laser beams attached to their heads would be a better strategy, but there you go.

The real story here is this: MPs did not believe that voters had the right to determine what they were to be paid. MPs did believe that some “establishment” consisting of party whips and civil servants did have the right to determine what MPs were to be paid. The MPs worked for this “establishment”, and not for the voters. Therefore our democracy is a complete fraud. If voters can’t be allowed to decide what MPs get paid, what can they be allowed to decide? If nothing, what are MPs for anyway?

The normal conclusion to draw is what I was told this afternoon by the “No2EU” party (which turns out to be an alliance of the RMT and a few minor leftist parties) — that we need to “restore” our democracy. Of course, I disagree. The voters really aren’t capable of making sensible decisions, about MPs pay or anything else. The conclusion that should be drawn is that we need to abandon our democracy, and the establishment that runs the country needs to stop pretending.

But since most people still believe we should have a democracy, admitting that we don’t is just asking for trouble. Is that Dorries’ point? I don’t think so.

On reflection, she probably believes that we have a democracy that works adequately for everything except deciding MPs’ salaries. It’s a possibility that didn’t initially occur to me, but might make sense to MPs.

Dying Government

In the political news of the last few weeks – the minister’s husband’s porn, the dirty tricks website, the home-video address to the nation – we have the stereotypical last days of a failing government.

What causes this syndrome? It could be an effect of desperation on the part of the government; knowing the odds are against them anyway, they try long shots to get any chance of winning. Most or all of the long shots backfire, but they don’t have that much to loose.

Another possibility is the media attitude. The media is often accused of bias, but I have always felt they are more biased towards what seems like a good story than to any political position. Part of what makes a good story is a familiar overriding narrative – history may be one damned thing after another, but there’s no satisfaction in reporting that. The tragedy of a dying government is a good strong theme you can fit events into, so events that fit the theme are more likely to be reported.

I don’t think either of these is the real reason, plausible as they are. The real glue that keeps government – particularly the party-political part of government – together is loyalty founded on the expectation of future favours. A government without a realistic chance of still being in power in twelve months just doesn’t have any leverage to keep people in line. The result is petty treason: leaks, frauds, and personal vendettas overwhelm the overall direction.

This applies also to the press. As has been evidenced again by the McBride saga, the lobby journalists are very much insiders in the system. They are as keen to qualify for future favours as any backbench M.P. And, like the backbenchers, when there is no expectation of future favours (or punishments), they find themselves free to report what a year previously they would have covered up or at least spun in a less damaging way.

My reason for bringing this up is that it is impossible to understand our system of government, with its millions of employees, contractors and valueless activity, without understanding that patronage is the gravity that shapes it. Almost every political question, whatever the theories and ideals that seem to impinge on it, is eventually decided on the basis of who gets the loot – either in economic value or in more influence, meaning more opportunity to channel loot to others and thereby control them.

To quote one of my favourite lines of Mencius Moldbug’s:

If seventeen officials need to provide signoff for you to repaint the fence in your front yard, this is not because George W. Bush, El Maximo Jefe, was so concerned about the toxicity of red paint that he wants to make seventeen-times-sure that no wandering fruit flies are spattered with the nefarious chemical. It is because a lot of people have succeeded in making work for themselves, and that work has been spread wide and well.

Proved

A commenter on my Propertarianism piece asks “isn’t this the moment when Libertarianism is totally proved wrong?” On reflection I think that deserves an answer.

Many libertarians predicted the crash very accurately. Ron Paul and the hardcore Austrians have been totally proved right. I would be pretty smug around now, except that I had thought they were a bit loony on the whole money & credit thing.

To a libertarian, “libertarianism” is the stuff they talk about at length, in their ineffective folk activism. To a non-libertarian, “libertarianism” is whichever bit of that actually gets practised. The difference between the two was largely what my post was about.

Of course, everyone whose policies have failed always claims that they failed because they weren’t carried out thoroughly enough. Russia wasn’t communist enough, James II wasn’t royalist enough, insufficient threats were made against Saddam Hussein, and when the threats failed insufficient military force was used.

For such excuses to have even the possibility of being worthwhile, one has to say not only why the right policies failed, but also why it is that next time they are tried, they will work better.

For what it’s worth, the economy has failed because it wasn’t deregulated enough, because the state wasn’t sufficiently separated from the financial markets, etc. etc. etc. But it’s not worth much, because next time libertarian idealists get into bed with big business interests to attempt to deregulate the economy, exactly the same thing will happen. So, yes, inasmuch as libertarianism means “anti-statists getting into bed with big business interests to attempt to deregulate the economy”, which is pretty much what it does mean to outsiders, it has indeed been proved wrong.

Again, that was my point, which is why I initially didn’t think this response needed to be made. But I might as well repeat myself a little if it makes things clearer.

What I was primarily addressing was that because the only approach that has put libertarians anywhere near political power has failed, and will fail again, other approaches must be considered. Ron Paul got 10% of the Republican Primary vote. Bob Barr got 0.4% in the presidential election. There is a fundamental reason why libertarianism cannot win elections – political parties are built on patronage, and libertarianism is incompatible with patronage. You cannot win a political struggle on a promise to grab power and not use it.

The best that can me done is to make more people (not necessarily a majority) understand that all governments impose bad policies in order to stay in power. That would not solve the problem, but perhaps limit the bad effects in future. It also fits very well into a Marxist or other far-left viewpoint. The left is not much closer to power than are libertarians, but it does have much greater impact on the culture, through its strong position in education and the media. Ideas leak from the left into the mainstream all the time, and this one could too.

Giles Bowkett

I’ve been reading Giles Bowkett’s blog a long time because he’s doing some interesting things programming in ruby, which is a language I like but haven’t done anything serious in.

He throws in some other good stuff – this piece on the potential demise of record labels echoed almost exactly what I thought when I read the same NYT article.

But then he started producing what seemed like random insults aimed at libertarianism. And I got rather pissed off with that. I mean, I’m all in favour of hearing diverse opinions and all that (in theory, of course, not in practice), but there wasn’t even any content.

On Wednesday, he got around to actually explaining his position. And, in keeping with his normal output, he made some very good points.

Things he says which are true:

US libertarian think-tanks end up advocating policies which advance corporate interests at the expense of the general interest.
The libertarian movement has been royally screwed by the Republican party
This was in principle predictable
If you intervene in politics, good intentions are trumped by bad strategy
‘If politics were chess, Libertarians would be trying to win by holding up the pawn, saying “my pawn has a machine gun!”, and making little pew-pew noises. It just doesn’t work that way.’

I couldn’t have put that last one better myself. I know that because I’ve tried.

What I gather from all that is that Bowkett is in fact a libertarian. He’s just one of the substantial number who are hostile to the “think tanks all over Washington”. In fact, despite his generally outspoken tone, he’s a lot gentler on them than many of his fellow libertarians are. The phrase “Orange Line Mafia” does not appear in his posts.

The other quibble I have with him (and my real point here is that I mostly agree with him about concrete issues, as opposed to what labels to use for things), is that even the Washington Libertarian establishment has its good points. Look at what Radley Balko has achieved, and may yet achieve, in the sphere of police and judicial abuses. Look at the fact that the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today says things like “The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you”. That in a piece that opens with the writer’s account of his days at Cato. Would we be better off if the WSJ wasn’t saying that? In November Bowkett admiringly quoted Roderick Long’s article about the pro-corporate bias in much libertarian activism. But, you know, Roderick Long is certainly included in what I think of as “libertarianism”, and that article was published by Cato.

The issues Bowkett raises aren’t immediately relevant to me, because I’m British and the libertarian movement in the UK isn’t even powerful enough to do any damage, let alone to do any good. But, taking a longer view, they’re the exact same issues I’ve been writing about in connection with the recent pieces by Jacob Lyles on Distributed Republic, they’re the same issues I was talking about in the pub last night with the LPUK. And I’m going to be writing a lot more about them.

But even if it’s true that Libertarian activism is counterproductive, doesn’t it matter whether libertarian theory – that government would be better if it did very much less – is actually true or not? If it’s true, it’s worth spreading, even if there’s currently nothing useful we can do about it.