The audacity of cynicism

Everyone’s gone over that speech from Hazel Blears. But there’s one point I want to pick up - her conclusion that our political culture can be “rescued from cynicism.” For me, though, the problem is the exact opposite - that there’s not enough of the right kind of cynicism.
By this, I don’t mean cynicism about politicians’ intelligence or motives. Instead, what I mean is that people aren’t cynical enough about the prospects for achieving leftist goals through conventional parliamentary routes.
Blears’ speech itself highlights the problem. She says:

The modern state must… be devolved, decentralised, and dedicated to giving people the power to take on an increasing share of the responsibility for their own lives, and authorship of their own destinies….
Increasingly, modern society, in all its variegation, granularity and complexity, is best served by a decentralised, democratic state, and public services best run from the bottom up.

But despite 11 years in office - the first few of them with a massive majority and impotent opposition - this government has made next to no progress at all in this direction. Or indeed in the direction of leftist goals by other definitions. Income equality, for example, is barely different now from 1996-97.
This suggests that ownership of constitutional powers is insufficient for a government to achieve leftist ends. There are many other obstacles to this.
One set are the cognitive biases that combine to lend support to state capitalism. The availability bias creates a bias against liberty, as the alleged benefits of restricting freedom are always clear whilst the benefits are dispersed. The salience heuristic means its easier to blame immigrants for our ills than bosses or structural forces. The status quo bias means current evils, however big, are preferred to unknown ones, however small. And a variety of attribution biases, such as the valence effect, combine to provide hostility to redistributive taxation even amongst those who aren’t rich themselves.
Blears’ speech gives another obstacle. “Groups and institutions with power are seldom pleased to relinquish it” she says, rightly. Bureaucrats will always think of ways of retaining power for themselves and denying it to the people.
It's not just bureaucrats who can thwart the left’s objectives. Attempts to improve social mobility run into the problem that rich parents will naturally do everything they can to transmit advantages to their children. The Ross-Brand affair shows the power of the right-wing press.
And of course, there is the power of capitalism itself. A successful capitalist economy requires that businesses retain “confidence.“ Policies that jeopardize “confidence” - be they regulation, sustained full employment or redistributive taxation - will therefore be ruled out.
But the interests of capital are fickle. Why are part-nationalization of banks and “Keynesianism” now fashionable? It’s not because they have triumphed in a lengthy intellectual debate. It’s because it is thought there is no alternative to them if capitalism is to survive.
Herein lies a lesson the left have not learned from the financial crisis. Whilst capitalists use the language of necessity to justify their favoured policies, the left remains in a Nietzschean fantasy world in which agency is sufficient, believing it can succeed if only it can find a superman with a strong enough will. Hence the mania surrounding Barack Obama.
Such faith in human agency, and oblivion to the enormity of the structural obstacles the left faces, is a massive manifestation of the fundamental attribution error. On this point, we need more cynicism, not less.

Comments

[Yaffle]

Chris,

Like Obama, you could do to check out the meaning of the word "enormity".

[Bob B]

I'm not so sure about the "attribution error".

What was all that stuff from Blair about the "Third Way" meant to mean or his mantra: "Education, Education, Education"?

Whatever was intended, surely that mantra wasn't meant to translate into:

"Nearly one in five UK 16 and 17-year-olds are Neets - those neither in employment, education or training - a study seen by the BBC suggests. Official figures say such youths make up 7% of their age group in England. . . "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7515042.stm

Seems to me that Hazel Blears is just replaying the old political trick of defining critics as cynics - or nasty Tories or ineffectual LibDems.

Blair's regular way of sidelining criticism was to go around saying: "You can't stop modernisation!" Which suggested that almost any New Labour policy was necessarily beneficial if it brought change, whatever that change amounted to.

You can hardly get more cynical about politics than that. But then to the electorate's immense credit, many recognised Blair for the charlatan he is - between the 1997 and 2005 elections, Blair lost nearly four million votes and half the membership of the Labour Party.

Btw current press reports say that since standing down as PM, Blair has trousered £12 millions from lectures, consultancy, his forthcoming memoirs and all the rest of his lucrative sidelines, which is perhaps best summed up as: Laughing all the way to the bank. Nothing cynical about that.

[chris]

Yaffle - I did! The compact OED says that to use enormity in the sense of immensity "is now broadly accepted in standard English."
On this, I stand shoulder to shoulder with Mr Obama.

[Luis Enrique]

If the left does follow your advice, would that entail seeking alternatives to "conventional parliamentary routes" (revolution!) or what? What routes do you think the left needs to take, to overcome the structural obstacles to leftist goals?

Also, you often write as if you'd like to see capitalism overthrown (or much changed), but also about liberty and trust in individuals and markets over bureaucratic elites. Can you sketch what your non-capitalist yet market-based economy would look like? Do you call, for example, increasing worker-ownership, non-capitalist or just capitalism in a different form?

[Bob B]

"On this, I stand shoulder to shoulder with Mr Obama."

But was IDS standing at the other shoulder this time?

I rather think not.

[dearieme]

'to use enormity in the sense of immensity ....' - but the people who work for the OED wouldn't dream of letting their own children make that error, would they? Nor do they tell us - do they? - just where they buy their broadly-acceptable meter.