Mass democracy has failed – it's time to seek a humane alternative

Trump's theatrical politics are a betrayal of the disenfranchised. To move forward, we need better analysis of and investment in local civic activism.

No one knows yet what Donald Trump will do as president. Optimists predict that, once in the Oval Office, he will be reined in by advisers and bureaucrats or frustrated by Congress; or that he will not have the political energy to carry through the projects that he announced during his campaign – projects that will be open to all sorts of legal challenges and practical obstacles. We can hope. Yet the reality is that a US president’s freedom to appoint advisers, and Supreme Court judges, is pretty generous, by European standards. And Trump has a House and a Senate that not only share his (very) nominal party allegiance but are fully aware of his electoral significance. His patronage will be crucial for the future of many of these politicians.

We have seen elsewhere how extremists have been elected with the optimistic collusion or tolerance of those who believe that such people can be “managed” in office; and we have seen them discover, bitterly and too late, their error. Nor is there any indication that Trump’s energy is in short supply. However limited his grasp of the complex issues that he has opened up, the force of his personality will generate a hectic climate of plans and half-plans, expenditure and public rhetoric, that will be almost as damaging as the projects themselves.

We don’t know. However, we do know what this election has shown about politics in the US – confirming what was already apparent on this side of the Atlantic. Yes, it is to do with the discontent of the disenfranchised and insecure. Yes, conventional politicians of the right and the left have failed to understand this. But that might tempt us to think that there was still a solution available within the politics of a market society, in which ideas are shaped by public demand.

The problem is deeper. Trump’s campaign succeeded in spite of the cast-iron demonstrations of his total indifference to truth (not to mention decency). It has offered not a connected strategy for national reconstruction, but an incoherent series of crowd-pleasing postures; as if Trump’s real aim was not to do anything as president but simply to be president, to be the most important man in the Western world. This election represents a divorce between the electoral process and the business of political decision-making. It is the ersatz politics of mass theatre, in which what matters most is the declaration of victory.

As such, it is the most cynical betrayal of those who are disenfranchised. It confirms that they have no part in real political processes; they can only choose their monarch. They have become detached from the work of politics by the erosion of liberties and economic opportunities – one reason why there is such pressure to displace this on to a feverish defence of archaic “freedoms” such as gun ownership, and on to whatever scapegoated minority can be held responsible for unemployment or general insecurity.

The politics of mass democracy has failed. It has been narrowed down to a mechanism for managing large-scale interests in response to explicit and implicit lobbying by fabulously well-resourced commercial and financial concerns (ironically, one of the things that Trump has undertaken to change). The 2008 financial crisis sent a tremor through that world but failed to change its workings. The effect has been a growing assumption that what goes on in public political debate does not represent any voices other than the privileged and self-interested. And so, for significant parts of a population, “theatrical” politics comes to look like the only option: a dramatic articulation of the problems of powerlessness, for which the exact details of economic or social reality are irrelevant. This delivers people into the hands of another kind of dishonest politics: the fact-free manipulation of emotion by populist adventurers.

There is an issue here about education. Yet this can become another hostage to fortune if all it is saying is that a benighted populace should be educated out of false consciousness by those who know better (the “experts” we are now encouraged to hate and mistrust). The learning that matters is the experience of genuine political debate and decision-making at local levels, the experience of identifying challenges, negotiating sustainable solutions, and learning to manage conflict without violent rupture or the demonising of minorities. This is the work that goes on in co-operative practice at every level – in education and industry, and through citizens’ organisations (President Obama’s political nursery), food co-ops, microcredit institutions and voluntary street pastors.

Instead of the chilling, neo-Soviet talk (here as much as in the United States) about something called “The People” and its supposed will, we need better analysis of and investment in local civic activism. And this implies a rethink of party politics as we have received it. The conventional accounts of what is “right” and “left” are fast becoming tribal signals, rather than useful moral categories. The leviathans of the party system will sooner or later have to look at their structures and accountability – not as a step to plebiscite populism, but in terms of what they can do to nurture discussion and decision in the actual communities to which people (not The People) belong.

Naught for our comfort; but at least an opportunity to ask how politics can be set free from the deadly polarity between empty theatrics and corrupt, complacent plutocracy. What will it take to reacquaint people with control over their communities, shared and realistic values, patience with difference and confidence in their capacity for intelligent negotiation? It’s the opposite of what Trump has appealed to. The question is whether the appalling clarity of this opposition can wake us up to work harder for the authentic and humane politics that seems in such short supply.

› There's something fishy in our food – or not. . .

Rowan Williams is an Anglican prelate, theologian and poet, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. He writes on books for the New Statesman.

This article first appeared in the 17 November 2016 issue of the New Statesman, Trump world

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The Staggers

21 November 2016

No, John McDonnell, people earning over £42,000 have not been "hit hard" by the Conservatives

The shadow chancellor's decision to support this tax cut is as disappointing as it is innumerate.

John McDonnell has backed Conservative plans to raise the point at which you start paying the 40p rate (that’s 40p of every pound earned after you hit the threshold) to above £45,000 by April 2017 (part of the Conservative manifesto pledge to raise the 40p rate so that it only covers people earning above £50,000 by 2020).

Speaking to the BBC, the shadow chancellor said that those affected “need a tax giveaway at the moment because the mismanagement of the economy by the Conservatives is hitting them hard”.

Is he right? Well, let’s crunch some numbers. Let’s say I earn £42,000, my partner doesn’t work and we have two children. That puts our household in the upper 30 per cent of all British earners, and, thanks to changes to tax and benefits, we are 1.6 per cent worse off than an equivalent household in 2010. Have we been “hit hard”? Well, no, actually, in point of fact, we have been the least affected of any household with children of the coalition.

The pattern holds for every type of household that will feel the benefit of the 40p rate hike. Those with children have seen smaller decreases (1.0-2.3 per cent) in their living standards that those in the bottom three-quarters of the income distribution. The beneficiaries of this change without children, excluding pensioners, who have done well out of Conservative-led governments but are unaffected by this change, have actually seen increases in their tax-home incomes already under David Cameron. There is no case that they need a bigger one under Theresa May.

But, nonetheless, they’re getting one, and it’s the biggest bung to higher earners since Margaret Thatcher was in office. For context: a single parent family earning £42,000 is in the top 15 per cent of earners. A family in which one person is earning above £42,000 and the other is working minimum wage for 16 hours to look after their two children is in the top 13 per cent. A single person earning £42,000 is in the top 6 per cent of earners.

That’s before you get into the big winners from this policy, because higher earners tend to marry other higher earners. A couple with one person earning £45,000 and the other earning £35,000 is in the top three per cent of earners. A couple in which both are earning £45,000 with one child are in the top four per cent. (Childless couples earning above average income are, incidentally, the only working age demographic to do better since 2010 than under New Labour.)

And these are not cheap tax cuts, either. To meet the Conservative proposal to raise the 40p rate to £50,000 by 2020 will cost £9bn over the course of the parliament, and giving a tax cut to “hard-pressed” earners on £42,000 will cost around £1.7bn.

The political argument for giving up on taxing this group is fairly weak, too. Hostilty to tax rises among swing voters extends all the way up to the super-rich, so Labour’s commitment to the top rate of tax has already hurt them among voters. To win support even for that measure, the party is going to have to persuade voters of the merits of tax-and-spend – it makes no sense to eschew the revenue from people in the top five per cent of earners while still taking the political pian.

Which isn’t to say that people earning above £42,000 should be tarred and feathered, but it is to say that any claim that this group has been “hit hard” by the government or that they should be the target for further tax relief, rather than clawing back some of the losses to the Exchequer of the threshold raise and the planned hike in the higher rate to £50,000, should be given extremely short shrift.

Stephen Bush is special correspondent at the New Statesman. His daily briefing, Morning Call, provides a quick and essential guide to British politics.