I want to talk about ideals versus ideas, but before that, let's clear the idea of what exactly happened last week, which as far as I can tell is the following. Corbyn's Labour party did much better in the recent election than just about anyone was expecting, including, I daresay, the man himself. This is interesting and important. I am particularly impressed by the increase in subscriptions to the Labour party. That said, the party gained 3 seats. That's pathetic, especially in the context of a weak opposition leader with a terrible campaign built almost entirely on prosecuting an awful policy that barely had 50% support in the first place. We're now looking at yet another term of conservative administration, and this time with the DUP in cabinet. This is hardly a win for progressive values in England.
Now onto ideals versus ideas. Most of the discussions I'm seeing in my Facebook thread and in places like The Guardian are about whether 'more socialism' was a successful strategy, or whether left parties in the OECD/Anglosphere should continue to pursue pragmatic centrism in order to attain power regularly, even if it means compromising on some core values.
I think this misses a deeper message.
'Socialism' and 'Centrism' are both ideals - they are ideological constructs, largely devoid of content in the form of policy. What I think the consistent message of recent elections has been is that the people want ideas. Many of my centrist friends think that the centre is synonymous with ideas - with technocratic policy - but this isn't necessarily the case.
Sanders was very successful in the US, certainly, but Trump got elected talking about big (and dumb) ideas like building a wall, declaring China a currency manipulator, replacing the college tuition system with an income contingent loan, pulling out of the TPP etc. Clinton couldn't get the base out in part because of her political position and rhetoric, which is a very important consideration, but it should also be emphasised that she didn't have many big ideas for improving the livelihoods of working class people (hundreds of small ideas though, which I think should be acknowledged and credited) and she palpably represented a continuation of the status quo. Many people in the left's base responded to Sander's big ideas, but these ideas were mostly stupid if taken on face value, like free tertiary education and dismantling big banks through the ingenious method 'we'll pass a law', and weren't articulated in any way that encouraged people not to take them at face value. This will only ever appeal to the left's base, and I don't think that's enough to win you an election.
In France, Macron is a typical centrist candidate certainly, but more importantly, he represents fresh thinking about policy and is not afraid to make frankly courageous statements about big changes to France, notably on sorely overdue labor law reforms.
I don't know much about Trudeau, but it seems to me like the electorate was crying out for a change from the conservative Harper administration, and Trudeau figured how to outmaneuver the left party and steal their vote share. I wouldn't put it down all that much to centrism or anything else for that matter. Don't underestimate raw charisma.
Here in Australia, Kevin Rudd was elected in a landslide on an ideas platform but disintegrated after the Greens voted down an emissions trading scheme (how their support didn't collapse after that I will never understand) and he balked at the promised double dissolution. We have since then stumbled from leader to leader looking for someone with a coherent transition plan away from mining and into our next comparative advantage (it's green services, access to and expertise in the Asia Pacific Market, and renewable technology developed, though not manufacturing). The closest we got was Gillard with the carbon pricing architecture of the RET and ARENA, but her government was dragged down by political infighting and poor PR advice. Malcolm Turnbull saw the stratospheric approval ratings when he took over. He's a centrist, but that doesn't matter. People thought he had a plan. That he had ideas. When they didn't materialise and he started playing politics his approval ratings collapsed overnight.
What all this points to I think, and what political dealignment points to more generally (dealignment refers to people no longer reliably voting for the same party their whole life) is that people are a bit scared of the future and want someone with good, deep ideas for how to secure reasonably equitable prosperity into the future.
A quick note to the Australian's following along: Shorten doesn't have ideas! His Centrism won't save him from his clearly Machiavellian character. Nobody is going to believe you've got ideas after you run an ad about 457 migration into Queensland. Ugh. Australia is currently sitting on a backlog of nearly a dozen reviews chock full of policy. Meanwhile, Shorten's approach is to complain about a levy on all able-bodied individuals to support all disabled people because it's 'unfair'. Blurg.
Returning to ideals versus ideas, what's interesting in this regard about the Corbyn campaign was that it did have ideas. While there were some clangers in the Labor manifesto, it was mostly good. I say that as a card carrying economist with a fondness for efficiency. The document was a neat 120 pages or so - long enough to suggest a coherent and somewhat thought-out plan, but not so long as to turn technical (like Fightback perhaps did). A lot of the advertising was heavy on socialist rhetoric, but the bedrock of the labor manifesto was just sensible policy (often with a clear New Labour flavour!) designed to fix problems, and all of it was quite reasonably costed with an increase in the corporate tax rate that would have kept the UK still very competitive in terms of corporate tax rates in the OECD. Something like 120 economists endorsed the plan, and it wasn't just Stiglitz, Kean and others with known progressive biases (a progressive bias to me just means that you place a very large relative weight on equity over efficiency - it's not a bad thing, but it is a normative thing not a scientific thing: you can't be an 'expert' in it, so saying an expert with a left bias endorses a left-wing document doesn't give it any extra credibility).
The rise of Corbyn's faction in the Labour party has also energised some remarkable activity at the grassroots level. Perhaps this was always going on and has only now started to achieve publicity, but certainly it is the first time I have come across a lot of the activities going on to restore economic stability to deindustrialised and otherwise marginalised communities like large social housing tenements. Some of this stuff strikes me as quite innovative, but I will leave it for another article.
So all I want to say to say is that perhaps all the arguments about ideals right now are missing the more fundamental lesson. This isn't a triumph of socialism over 'neoliberalism', because the conservatives are still in power and austerity is still in effect (the centre-left of Blair, Keating, Trudeau and Macron is also incredibly far from neoliberal). It also isn't necessarily a call for more centrism, because plenty of centrists are losing elections (though I would argue that a weakness of the Labour manifesto is that it uses a lot of ideas and rhetoric from the 60s that are known instinctively by many people to simply not work, like energy subsidies). The consistent message from the citizens of the developed nations is that they are aware that there is a major transition on (a new industrial revolution some are calling it) and we need leaders with a plan. Voters aren't very good at adjudicating between plans because they aren't policy experts, but they sure as hell boot any politicians who play political fiddlesticks instead of providing solutions.
Now onto ideals versus ideas. Most of the discussions I'm seeing in my Facebook thread and in places like The Guardian are about whether 'more socialism' was a successful strategy, or whether left parties in the OECD/Anglosphere should continue to pursue pragmatic centrism in order to attain power regularly, even if it means compromising on some core values.
I think this misses a deeper message.
'Socialism' and 'Centrism' are both ideals - they are ideological constructs, largely devoid of content in the form of policy. What I think the consistent message of recent elections has been is that the people want ideas. Many of my centrist friends think that the centre is synonymous with ideas - with technocratic policy - but this isn't necessarily the case.
Sanders was very successful in the US, certainly, but Trump got elected talking about big (and dumb) ideas like building a wall, declaring China a currency manipulator, replacing the college tuition system with an income contingent loan, pulling out of the TPP etc. Clinton couldn't get the base out in part because of her political position and rhetoric, which is a very important consideration, but it should also be emphasised that she didn't have many big ideas for improving the livelihoods of working class people (hundreds of small ideas though, which I think should be acknowledged and credited) and she palpably represented a continuation of the status quo. Many people in the left's base responded to Sander's big ideas, but these ideas were mostly stupid if taken on face value, like free tertiary education and dismantling big banks through the ingenious method 'we'll pass a law', and weren't articulated in any way that encouraged people not to take them at face value. This will only ever appeal to the left's base, and I don't think that's enough to win you an election.
In France, Macron is a typical centrist candidate certainly, but more importantly, he represents fresh thinking about policy and is not afraid to make frankly courageous statements about big changes to France, notably on sorely overdue labor law reforms.
I don't know much about Trudeau, but it seems to me like the electorate was crying out for a change from the conservative Harper administration, and Trudeau figured how to outmaneuver the left party and steal their vote share. I wouldn't put it down all that much to centrism or anything else for that matter. Don't underestimate raw charisma.
Here in Australia, Kevin Rudd was elected in a landslide on an ideas platform but disintegrated after the Greens voted down an emissions trading scheme (how their support didn't collapse after that I will never understand) and he balked at the promised double dissolution. We have since then stumbled from leader to leader looking for someone with a coherent transition plan away from mining and into our next comparative advantage (it's green services, access to and expertise in the Asia Pacific Market, and renewable technology developed, though not manufacturing). The closest we got was Gillard with the carbon pricing architecture of the RET and ARENA, but her government was dragged down by political infighting and poor PR advice. Malcolm Turnbull saw the stratospheric approval ratings when he took over. He's a centrist, but that doesn't matter. People thought he had a plan. That he had ideas. When they didn't materialise and he started playing politics his approval ratings collapsed overnight.
What all this points to I think, and what political dealignment points to more generally (dealignment refers to people no longer reliably voting for the same party their whole life) is that people are a bit scared of the future and want someone with good, deep ideas for how to secure reasonably equitable prosperity into the future.
A quick note to the Australian's following along: Shorten doesn't have ideas! His Centrism won't save him from his clearly Machiavellian character. Nobody is going to believe you've got ideas after you run an ad about 457 migration into Queensland. Ugh. Australia is currently sitting on a backlog of nearly a dozen reviews chock full of policy. Meanwhile, Shorten's approach is to complain about a levy on all able-bodied individuals to support all disabled people because it's 'unfair'. Blurg.
Returning to ideals versus ideas, what's interesting in this regard about the Corbyn campaign was that it did have ideas. While there were some clangers in the Labor manifesto, it was mostly good. I say that as a card carrying economist with a fondness for efficiency. The document was a neat 120 pages or so - long enough to suggest a coherent and somewhat thought-out plan, but not so long as to turn technical (like Fightback perhaps did). A lot of the advertising was heavy on socialist rhetoric, but the bedrock of the labor manifesto was just sensible policy (often with a clear New Labour flavour!) designed to fix problems, and all of it was quite reasonably costed with an increase in the corporate tax rate that would have kept the UK still very competitive in terms of corporate tax rates in the OECD. Something like 120 economists endorsed the plan, and it wasn't just Stiglitz, Kean and others with known progressive biases (a progressive bias to me just means that you place a very large relative weight on equity over efficiency - it's not a bad thing, but it is a normative thing not a scientific thing: you can't be an 'expert' in it, so saying an expert with a left bias endorses a left-wing document doesn't give it any extra credibility).
The rise of Corbyn's faction in the Labour party has also energised some remarkable activity at the grassroots level. Perhaps this was always going on and has only now started to achieve publicity, but certainly it is the first time I have come across a lot of the activities going on to restore economic stability to deindustrialised and otherwise marginalised communities like large social housing tenements. Some of this stuff strikes me as quite innovative, but I will leave it for another article.
So all I want to say to say is that perhaps all the arguments about ideals right now are missing the more fundamental lesson. This isn't a triumph of socialism over 'neoliberalism', because the conservatives are still in power and austerity is still in effect (the centre-left of Blair, Keating, Trudeau and Macron is also incredibly far from neoliberal). It also isn't necessarily a call for more centrism, because plenty of centrists are losing elections (though I would argue that a weakness of the Labour manifesto is that it uses a lot of ideas and rhetoric from the 60s that are known instinctively by many people to simply not work, like energy subsidies). The consistent message from the citizens of the developed nations is that they are aware that there is a major transition on (a new industrial revolution some are calling it) and we need leaders with a plan. Voters aren't very good at adjudicating between plans because they aren't policy experts, but they sure as hell boot any politicians who play political fiddlesticks instead of providing solutions.
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