Two types of politics

There's an under-appreciated division in politics. It's expressed in this tweet from the Sleaford Mods:

Don’t be asking me to pick sides for something I ain’t got any real idea about, at a gig. I’m a singer. My job is music. The only real thing I know about War is that I’m sick and tired of premature death like we all are. Of the murder of anyone, under whatever fucking belief grid.

Now, the thing is that the Sleaford Mods are a political band. So why are they loath to express a political opinion about Gaza?

It's because their politics arise from lived experience, of struggling to get by in crap towns. (Jason Williamson comes from Grantham and is thus an expert on the latter). Such a politics can be contrasted to that which arises from abstract thought, be it academic reading or, more often and much worse, the media. All most of us know about Gaza is what we get from the latter, which gives us only a partial picture even with the best journalists. Hence the Sleaford Mods saying "I ain’t got any real idea about" the conflict*. They are channelling Charlie Munger's wise words: "one skill is knowing the edge of your own competency."

The diametric opposite of their attitude is that of the talking heads on poshcuntstalkshit shows who spout off on all subjects (or at least all of those deemed acceptable by pro-capitalist ideologues) and whose views are drearily predictable: if you know their opinion on, say, Israel you know their view on austerity, "wokeism", Brexit etc**. The edge of their competency is a mystery to them.

We see the contrast between the two types of politics more broadly. The politics of lived experience arises from having bad jobs, stagnant wages, long waits for one's court case or difficulties in seeing doctors. The politics of abstraction, on the other hand, is that of "stop the boats" or fretting about "wokesters"; very few people outside coastal towns have actual experience of being inconvenienced by migrants arriving in small boats, and even fewer have lived experience of being seriously incommoded by "wokesters".

Of course, sometimes the same political position can arise from either. Hostility to trans people, for example, can be the result of being harassed in a changing room by a man in a dress or it might arise from theorizing about what it means to be a woman. And, of course, smarter people combine lived experience with theoretical learning.

Lived experience does not necessarily push one to the left. Much of Thatcher's support in the 70s and 80s came from people having personal experience of being inconvenienced and harassed by striking workers, or from them profiting from having bought their council house cheaply. Yes, most of the press supported Thatcher, but many didn't need to look at a newspaper to tell them to vote Tory; they only had to look at their bank balance.

Similarly, a good portion of support for Brexit - enough to tip the balance - wasn't based on abstract arguments about the EU but upon the lived experience that things weren't going well.

The outcome of the Brexit referendum took most of the political class by surprise. That was because much of that class was detached from individuals' lived experience and better keyed into the chatter of talking heads. The rise of Corbynism was also a surprise for the same reason: journalists, politicians and "commentators" (the fact they are a thing at all is revealing) talked among themselves and under-appreciated the lived experience of young people with high debt, unaffordable housing and bullshit jobs.

Lived experience is not always articulated, or even articulable. It can take the form of what Polanyi called "tacit knowledge", a gut feel that something is wrong. Just as successful entrepreneurs can have a hunch that a new product will sell well or investors an inarticulable sense that an asset is overvalued so too can voters have a feel that things aren't right.

Which brings me to the problem with basing politics on lived experience alone. It generates only local and circumscribed expertise: people might be experts on the performance of their local GP surgery but not that of the NHS in general, or experts in how their own business is performing, but not the economy as a whole. And so on. And of course expertise in diagnosing a condition does not mean knowing the cure.

In principle, this needn't be a problem. A sensible polity would aggregate fragmentary and sometimes inarticulated particular information into genuine knowledge in the way that Hayek supposed that a well-functioning market aggregated dispersed information. Technocrats - genuine technocrats not vacuous centrists - could then get to work on solving those problems.

But of course, we don't have such a polity, which is why we have opinion polls and not fact polls. Part of the professional deformation of the political-media class is to overvalue the mere verbal fluency of people like themselves and undervalue the dispersed tacit knowledge and local expertise of outsiders. Worse still, that class exploits people's anger at their lived experience of economic stagnation and failing public services and misdirects it into support for Brexit, hostility to migrants or antipathy to the sort of "elite" which comprises youngsters who can't afford a house but not millionaire cabinet ministers or newspaper barons.

I'm not offering solutions here; there's no point writing recipes when you don't have a kitchen. I'm just pointing out what the distorted perception of many journalists and politicians doesn't see - that there are ways of thinking about politics which are not heard in TV studios.

* You might reply that you don't need especial expertise to know that bombing children or murdering teenagers at music festivals is wrong. True. This does not, however, help us solve the more difficult problem of how to stop it.

** It needn't be so. One of my friends describes his politics as Thatcherite economics and Corbynite foreign policy. This might seem odd today, but it would have made perfect sense to, say, Richard Cobden.

Comments

[ltr]

"A sensible polity would aggregate fragmentary and sometimes inarticulated particular information into genuine knowledge in the way that Hayek supposed that a well-functioning market aggregated dispersed information. Technocrats - genuine technocrats not vacuous centrists - could then get to work on solving those problems."

Brilliantly expressed. Completely necessary for a properly functioning polity.

[ I am so glad that you have returned to writing. ]

[Jan Wiklund]

I once expressed the same thing as the contrast between the "republican" and the "evangelical" tradition in popular movement history, see http://www.folkrorelser.org/inenglish/less%20morality.html. The republican traditioin, with its ultimate roots in medieval peasant and artisan movements, express themselves "we are the people, we defend our rights", while the evangelical tradition, with its roots in medieval religious movements "bear witness against sin".

When they work together, as they actually did in the 20th century labour movement, they can achieve stupendous things. When the republican tradition, or the evangelical tradition, go by itself it's a nuisance.

[rsm]

"A sensible polity would aggregate fragmentary and sometimes inarticulated particular information into genuine knowledge in the way that Hayek supposed that a well-functioning market aggregated dispersed information."

Isn't this just another intellectual ivory-tower theory? What if prices are just noise, as the practitioner Fischer Black proposed in "Noise"?

[Katherine Wright]

"Hostility to trans people, for example, can be the result of being harassed in a changing room by a man in a dress..."

Except, of course, that it doesn't. Because this is not a thing which actually happens. And I deeply hope you're not suggesting that trans women are, in any sense, men in dresses.

Disappointing from you, honestly.

[James Moore]

My tacit knowledge leads me to believe that in practice Thatcherite economics precludes a Corbynite FP, and vice versa.

[ltr]

"My tacit knowledge leads me to believe that in practice Thatcherite economics precludes a Corbynite FP, and vice versa."

I agree, but why should this be so?

[Ben Philliskirk]

Your argument seems to be invalidated by the simple fact that 'lived experience' does not automatically map into any political practice or attitude, and that how people react politically to what they see in everyday life is heavily influenced by the media and political actors. Why, for example, should so many people have decided that their 'lived experience' made them blame the EU, or their local council, more than the Tory government that had been in charge nationally for some time? The problem with 'Brexit' wasn't that people rejected the position of the elite (which was divided anyway), but that it was an issue that only a minority held strong views on yet which ended up dominating the entire political agenda to the extent of paralysing the government for a short period. All while very few people had any idea what 'Brexit' could/should/would mean in practical terms.

[Blissex]

«their 'lived experience' made them blame the EU, or their local council, more than the Tory government that had been in charge nationally for some time?»

To me that seems like typical "Remainiac" propaganda that the "simpletons" did not realize that EU and the government are distinct entities where the EU has very limited authority and the government has very wide authority.

But their lived experience told that that they could not change the government under FPTP voting, but they could change EU membership under PR voting, and this would at least in part would change the government, and the "simpletons" were right as to that.

«very few people had any idea what 'Brexit' could/should/would mean in practical terms.»

Many of the "simpletons" were able to figure out that in practical terms that would mean screwing up the Cameron government, and damage severely the "globalist thatcherite" faction, and that indeed happened.

As a protest vote it worked pretty well, even if the main medium-long term outcome was to persuade the "thatcherite globalist" ("whig") faction that no major party would be allowed again to have a leadership that was "thatcherite nationalist" ("tory") or "non-thatcherite internationalist" ("social-democrat"), to ensure that voters of either persuasions were not represented.

[Blissex]

«A sensible polity would aggregate fragmentary and sometimes inarticulated particular information into genuine knowledge in the way that Hayek supposed that a well-functioning market aggregated dispersed information.»

I wonder which "sensible polity" does not have conflicts of interests among classes, so preferences can be cleanly aggregated, and politics being thus unnecessary only "genuine technocrats" are needed:

«Technocrats - genuine technocrats not vacuous centrists - could then get to work on solving those problems.»

Out blogger is so steeped in his passion for wykehamist philosopher-kings that he does not realize that the "vacuous centrists" are not vacuous at all, they disguise themselves as such while being committed thatcherite globalists in order to ensure that "There Is No Alternative".

[Blissex]

«But their lived experience told that that they could not change the government under FPTP voting, but they could change EU membership under PR voting»

A pretty good principle is that in China you can change the policies but not the party, and in "The West" you can change the party but not the policies (all major parties follow Her command that "There Is No Alternative").

[rsm]

How successful were the Tiananmen Square protests at changing the Chinese Communist Party's policies on free speech?

[Ben Philliskirk]

@ Blissex

My point is that, irrespective of the 'lived experience' and motivations of a large chunk of Brexit voters, they were blissfully unaware that for most Brexit-supporting politicians it was an opportunity to declare unilateral free trade and a bonfire of social and environmental controls. This was masked by the fact that the public debate revolved around idiotic mantras like 'take back control' or blatant lies involving extra billions for the NHS. I'm not saying Remain's campaign was much better or more honest, just that the effects of 'lived experience' are essentially obfuscated and repurposed through the media and political actors.

[Blissex]

«My point is that, irrespective of the 'lived experience' and motivations of a large chunk of Brexit voters, they were blissfully unaware that for most Brexit-supporting politicians it was an opportunity to declare unilateral free trade and a bonfire of social and environmental controls.»

This point is different from the earlier one that: "their 'lived experience' made them blame the EU, or their local council, more than the Tory government that had been in charge nationally for some time?"

But your new point seems a bit simplistic to me: there were a number of major motivations to vote Brexit, and that one of them was "Britannia Unchained" might not have mattered to those who voted for Brexit for "abstract thought" notions like "sovereignty", or symbolic reasons like "blue passports", or because they wanted to declare unilateral protectionism and stronger social and environmental controls.

Also I reckon that it did not matter to those who saw it simply as a protest vote, an opportunity to screw The Establishment, and never mind if this meant "Britannia Unchained", because the "lived experience" of a lot of those people was that things for them were already at that level.

Also note that the first reaction to the Brexit vote was not "Britannia Unchained" but "Level Up", however much it was just talk.

«This was masked by the fact that the public debate revolved around idiotic mantras like 'take back control' or blatant lies involving extra billions for the NHS.»

But how successful was that masking? How many "simpleton" brexiters were fooled by that posturing? Many of the major groups that voted brexit went into the campaign with their positions (protest, "sovereignty", protectionism, globalism, ...) already fixed.

The same for remainers: how many of those smart thinkers were persuaded by arguments about a catastrophic depression after an exit vote or by "abstract thought" reasons like a "common european identity"? Most probably had an already fixed choice based on the "lived experience" that EU membership had little effect on them, other than freeedom of travel and cheaper tradespeople.

Overall the brexit vote was fairly close, so either side can claim that the propaganda from the other side perverted the result.

But there is one fundamental asymmetry: I reckon that many saw an "exit" vote as a protest against the misery of their "lived experience" from the thatcherite national government and that on not many saw a "remain" as a protest against anything. At most a few voted "remain" as an endorsement of national government thatcherite politics.

[LL]

@Katherine Wright

Agreed. I think a better example might be a woman who has been subjected to domestic abuse and who is now living in a women's refuge suddenly coming across there a trans woman, whom she still sees as a man and therefore a potential abuser.

There is no need for the trans woman to be an abuser; just that her presence triggers the prior lived experience of the abused woman.

[Ben Philliskirk]

@ Blissex

Yet we can't assume that Brexit voters all wanted to register a protest against the 'thatcherite national government' at all, and indeed many were affluent home counties residents of the type that you quite correctly pinpoint as members of the contented property-owning Tory section of the community. I'm suggesting that the differing 'lived experience' and motivations of Brexit voters can be interpreted in many different ways and could potentially lead to many types of Brexit. What made them significant was that certain political actors and sections of the media were able to mobilise that 'raw material' in ways that benefitted their own agendas. 'Lived experience' alone leads to very little in terms of significant political impact unless it is packaged, presented and interpreted by organised movements/interests.

[ltr]

@Katherine Wright

Agreed, also.

[ltr]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/business/palantir-nhs-uk-health-contract-thiel.html

November 21, 2023

Palantir Wins Major U.K. Health Contract Despite Criticism
The Peter Thiel-owned company overcame opposition from activists, doctors and lawmakers to sign a lucrative deal with England’s National Health Service.
By Adam Satariano

[ That a British software company could not have built a fine platform for the NHS shows a stunning and ironic neglect of domestic business development under Conservative government. Ultimately, Conservative government has proven increasingly anti-business. ]

[ltr]

The obvious point should be that under a Corbyn government, business' that could have built a platform for the NHS would have been born and prospered.

Conservative government has proven an increasing block to business innovation.

[ltr]

Also, as for "There Is No Alternative," there are always policy alternatives and the slogan is mere advertising for particular policies but entirely empty in general.

Jeremy Corbyn was so frightening to the Conservative-Labour "elite" because Corbyn represented policy alternatives.

[Blissex]

«Also, as for "There Is No Alternative," there are always policy alternatives and the slogan»

Whether it was originally just a claim, it has been for a long time not a slogan but an imperative, which has been obeyed now for 40 years.

«Jeremy Corbyn was so frightening to the Conservative-Labour "elite" because Corbyn represented policy alternatives.»

He disobeyed Her imperative. :-)