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Politics

Page history last edited by Paul Hazelden 2 years, 10 months ago

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Politics

Introduction

What has gone wrong with our politics, and what can be done to put it right?

 

 

Entitlement

One understanding of the problem is described in "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?", a recent book by the moral philosopher Michael Sandel.  He speaks on the subject in a 9 minute TED Talk, which  begins with the words : "Here's a question we should all be asking: What went wrong? Not just with the pandemic but with our civic life. What brought us to this polarized, rancorous political moment?  In recent decades, the divide between winners and losers has been deepening, poisoning our politics, setting us apart. This divide is partly about inequality. But it's also about the attitudes toward winning and losing that have come with it. Those who landed on top came to believe that their success was their own doing, a measure of their merit, and that those who lost out had no one to blame but themselves."  The ideas are also covered in a 3 minute RSA summary, and a 50 minute interview from the Bristol Festival of Ideas.

 

I find these ideas persuasive, but am not convinced this is the whole story. 

 

 

Alienation

For most of my early life, it seemed like the world was, on the whole, heading in the right direction.  We could see the successes of the civil rights movement in the USA; in the UK, the Bristol Bus Boycott led to the passing of the Race Relations Act.  Women were not only being allowed to work but also being paid (in theory, at least) the same as men.  Homosexuality was decriminalized.  The British Empire was being handed back.  Universal healthcare was spreading across the world.  Countries were freely coming together to cooperate, partly to promote trade and prosperity, and partly to make war between them impractical as well as undesirable.  It seemed like we could expect progress to continue, and the only real issue was: how fast could this progress happen?

 

At least, that is the story that I and my fellow liberals told, the picture we could see.  What we did not see was either the limit or the cost of this progress.  We can illustrate this from the area of race relations, but it could just as easily be illustrated from most of the other areas.

 

The progress was limited.  The Race Relations Act made overt racial discrimination illegal, but it did not stop people being racist: it merely drove the racism underground.  And people resented it when 'those in power' prevented them from choosing who they employed or let their properties to. 

 

And the progress had human costs we did not recognize.  People from other races came, bringing their languages, culture and food with them.  Traditional British culture was no longer the normal, 'right' way of doing things: it was just one option among many.  It was no longer 'my' country, it was multicultural, and people from these other cultures were treating the place like they lived here.  Change is always difficult, and while we sometimes recognized how difficult it was for the people coming in to adjust, we hardly ever recognized how difficult it was for many of the people already here.  And this difficulty compounded itself as each wave of immigration arrived, and the people from the previous wave resented the changes brought by the people in the next wave.

 

Far too many people feel that they are no longer at home in their own country.  The changes I supported and celebrated served to alienate those who felt these changes were forced upon them.  We passed the laws and thought all we needed to do was to enforce them: we did not recognize that we still needed to gain the hearts and minds of those who did not support the changes, who felt more unheard, powerless and pushed aside each time the country changed around them.

 

And we also have the problem that many of the people who came to this country were not welcomed; their children and their grandchildren now feel all to often that, despite living here their entire lives, they do not really belong, they are not accepted and not wanted.  They, too, feel that they are not at home in their own country.

 

 

Impotence

Alongside the alienation for many people is a feeling of powerlessness.  Tribal identities are very important here: it doesn't matter very much if I don't have any power, but it matters if my people, my group has no power, and it hurts when my group used to have power but that power, as we see it, has been 'taken away' from us.

 

 

Failure

In a country where success and status are largely associated with money, failure is mainly an issue of economic failure.  Large parts of the establishment have bought the idea that 'the market' is the way to create and allocate material resources.  Adam Smith insisted that the market must be made to operate in a moral way, but this has been translated into the market operating in a legal way.  And those with power are always able to ensure that the laws allow them to do what they want to in the marketplace.  This results in markets which keep the rich and powerful successful, and ensure that the majority are always struggling, and a significant number do not even manage to struggle.

 

 

Response

What can be done?  As a starting point, here are some thoughts.

  • People - all people - need to feel they are recognized and respected.  Even people we disagree with; even people whose beliefs and actions we find abhorrent.
  • People need to be educated and empowered.  We need everybody to understand the structures (legal and cultural and all the rest) which make modern civilized society possible, and to understand both the mechanism for changing those structures and what they can do to participate in changing them.

 

 

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