Although this essay discusses politics in France, the observations and analyses can be applied to most Western nations.

Useful Shadows.

Maybe creating the “Extreme Right”was a bad idea.

Aurelien

I don’t know what ideas Festival of Humanity would conjure up in the mind of the average Anglo-Saxon. Happy-clappy guitars, perhaps, peace and love? Desmond Tutu and Ursula von der Leyen? In fact, it’s all to do with a newspaper.

L’Humanité was founded by the great French Socialist Jean Jaurès, and was the Party’s official newspaper until 1920, when after the Congress of Tours, the departing Communist faction took it with them. From then until reality dictated otherwise in 1994, it was the official newspaper of the PCF, and since then, it’s clung on as an all-purpose leftist publication. A tradition for almost a hundred years, is the annual Festival, largely based around music, taking advantage of the fact that popular French musicians have often had leftist sympathies. I haven’t been there for twenty years, when the old militants of the PCF were still in charge. It was all very French then, (the crowd sang the Marseillaise as well the Internationale). These days, it’s been taken over by Mr Mélenchon’s fan club (LFI is not a political party: subscribing adherents have no voting rights and it’s closer to a private company), but it’s still an essential stop for any left-wing politician, and speeches are always carefully analysed as indicators of the way the Left may be moving. This year there were some interesting nuances, and I’ll touch briefly on them, and some other recent events, as examples of what I think are fragile straws in the wind, faint indications that parts of the Western Left have begun to see a little more clearly now what needs to be done. This week and next I’ll discuss whether this is in fact so, and what they may indicate in the world we are moving into.

Let’s start this week though, with the nature of the problem itself, which is anything but a secret. The great historic political parties of the West have been progressively absorbed into what I call just The Party, after Orwell’s famous creation. As in 1984, the Party has no ideology, although it pretends to, and is simply interested in power. It promotes a style of technocratic neoliberal managerialism which is in fact highly political, but is hidden beneath a blanket of meaningless verbiage and empty ritual. The traditional subjects of politics—power, wealth, political representation, taxation and spending priorities, major social questions—are not publicly discussed, and those who dare to raise such issues are dismissed as “extremists.” Elections today are thus best understood as power-struggles within the elite: rather like the crew of a pirate ship arguing over the division of the spoils.

I’ve pointed out several times that the lack of ideology—or even any overall vision—allows and even encourages the flourishing of identity groups organised to get a greater share of the booty for themselves. This, essentially, is what contemporary politics consists of: not just in elections, but rather more, in fact, in drafting laws and influencing government policies. It is a bleak, despairing, zero-sum ideology and programme: there can be no better future for society as a whole, so all that remains is a bitter struggle between factions of the elite over what is left, often through new laws establishing new “rights” for their client groups. The rest of us can get stuffed.

The evacuation of the traditional questions of politics has been accompanied by an obsession with process and procedure, and consequently by the triumph of a purely formal and thus wholly superficial concept of political success and failure. To be in power, or at least in office, is an end in itself. The shortest and greasiest of political poles is by definition worth scrambling up, since politics consists of nothing else but the kind of pursuit of power and money that we usually associate only with the pre-democratic age. Any sacrifice, any humiliation, any defeat on a political issue, is acceptable as a long as you retain power or keep your job. And because our political elite, and the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) that services them resemble nothing so much as the Nomenklatura of the old Soviet Union, this logic applies equally to the media, to NGOs, to administrators of arts foundations, to Chancellors of Universities, and even to scientists, pundits and artists. Winning prizes is everything. Achieving things is beside the point.

One of the worst mistakes of the early identity warriors like the feminists—and heaven knows there were enough of them—was the reinterpretation of success to mean just individuals and groups capturing formal and often superficial positions of high status and high pay. Victory and progress meant an “important” position, a large office, lots of staff and a big salary, as well as perhaps appearances in the media and a lucrative later career. Asking such people later what they had accomplished in their career would produce a blank stare in reply: the point is not to do, but to be. Becoming the first X to hold position Y doesn’t mean anything, in reality, any more than winning the Lottery does, but it is interpreted as a factional victory in the never-ending intra-elite struggle for power and influence.

Yet we all understand from our own experience, in everything from personal relationships to the way institutions work, that what you see is very seldom all that there is, and may in fact be the opposite of what there is. Actual influence may be exerted at every level, in quite different ways. Through the promotion of a trivially reductive definition of success, limited to access to formal types of status, money and power, identity politics has drained modern political life, and indeed professional life in general, of content and meaning. It has substituted a definition of politics based entirely on the capture of positions of status, such that a member of an identity group who has reached a high position in a hedge-fund or has a lucrative media career is considered a success, whilst someone from the same group who works as a doctor or a teacher in a deprived area with social problems is accounted implicitly a failure in life. Success is reduced to the equivalent of who has the largest diamond ring, or the most expensive company car. Ironically, the worst and most macho features that were traditional in the private sector have now been generalised across society as a whole.

In my analogy of the PMC as a pirate ship, it is necessary not only to loot what can be looted, but to prevent others from competing with you. The PMC generalises its own value- and ethics-free concept of politics, to politics as a whole, and regards political groupings outside the Party simply as enemies to be destroyed. The enmity is not political or moral, but strictly business. Non-Party groupings, whatever their ostensible political colour, are to be defeated because they threaten the acquisition of power and the looting of wealth that are the Party’s only reason for existing. The Party would no more engage other groups in discussion of political and ethical issues than a pirate ship would pause to discuss maritime law with a victim.

Where the analogy breaks down, is that ultimately we live in political systems where parties have to win votes in order to take power. Much as the PMC and the Party may despise you and me, they have to find some way of persuading us to vote for the right people: themselves. But they have nothing to offer ordinary people, and no basis on which to claim legitimacy. They do not even have the doubtful traditional legitimacy of conservative right-wing parties linked to Church and Monarchy. Indeed, they go out of their way to despise and antagonise ordinary people, to sneer at traditions, and to cultivate specialised client groups instead. Thus Mr Mélenchon has described himself as “a Maghreban,” (he was born in Oran) and so not really white and French at all. White French people, except for urban intellectuals, are the Other, in his New France, which consists of immigrants, sexual minorities, and those white urbanites who are prepared to forsake houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for his name's sake Such sentiments are surprisingly common in the Party, at least in theory, because they weaken the dreaded forces of nationalism, and promote the Brussels concept of countries as just interchangeable international hotels.

But you can’t win elections on that basis. The Party has to find some way of persuading people to vote against their own interests, and against political parties that in many cases represent those interests better The tactic up until now, making use of the PMC’s strength in the media, has been to threaten and intimidate the electorate; not so much to vote for the Party (which only a small percentage do enthusiastically) but against the opposition. Mr Mélenchon’s LFI contains a great many careerist aspirant members of the PMC—I refer to them as the Outer Party—and they overlap considerably with the PMC proper. But if he actually looked like winning (and he has said that he might suspend the Constitution and rule by decree) than no doubt the old Extreme Left skeletons would be brought out from their post-Cold War retirement.

Nonetheless, in France as in most European countries, the “threat” at the moment is alleged to come from the “Extreme Right,” which, in one of those morbid jokes that Karma is so fond of, is basically the creation of the PMC itself. Now, first let’s recall that a genuine Extreme Right does exist, and has existed in Europe since the rise of mass politics in the 1920s. There are small groups of ultra-traditionalists, often linked to the Catholic Church, who have influence in some elite circles, and there are also small groups of populists who are the fairly direct descendants of the fascist groups of the 1920s and 1930s. The latter extol violence and nationalism, and it was acceptable to be worried about them until some of them went to fight in Ukraine after 2022.

That said, the Party is getting increasingly concerned that other, more consequential, political forces outside its control are gaining support and even winning elections. Many of these parties promote patriotism in place of the bloodless internationalism of the Party, economic populism as opposed to neoliberal dogma, and an appeal to history, tradition and culture in place of the unchanging featureless present of the Party. That is to say that in most cases, these parties of the “Extreme Right,” would fit comfortably into the mainstream of the political system of fifty years ago. The neglect of ordinary people and their interests, the insults and the verbal assaults of the Party, have led people to support these new parties that at least can claim to have retained some idea of what life is like for ordinary people. This is why, by extension, populist groups of the Left can be equally successful, since people will often vote for whichever party they think can most effectively give the PMC a bloody nose. But the PMC, with a view of politics drawn from sports competitions, thinks only of the electoral success and failure of individual teams, and never what that might signify. The success of the Left in the recent elections in Berlin, was not “a defeat for the Extreme Right,” but just another way of resisting the Party.

The second reason is the increasing tendency to banish any difficult or controversial ideas to this same forbidden territory of the “Extreme Right.” It’s not just that this includes mainstream opinions of fifty years ago, it’s that even discussion of such ideas is forbidden because it might “strengthen the Extreme Right.” For example, discussion of policing and security is discouraged because (deep breath) such discussion might not be able avoid somebody raising the fact that in virtually every country immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crimes, so the “Extreme Right” could possibly try to hijack the discussion and turn it into one on immigration, which could possibly be a bad thing because it might lead to communities from which the criminals came being “stigmatised.” Therefore, it is better if we (including recent immigrants in crime-ridden communities themselves ) do not mention the topic, to avoid causing ‘“harm.” (Why “harm” from being “stigmatised” should be thought to be worse than harm from the attentions of criminal gangs terrorising their communities is a curiosity which I shall try to explain in a moment.)

It is in these two ways that the “Extreme Right” is largely a creation of the Party and the PMC. It serves partly as the Other and the Terrible Threat that must be invoked to justify the demand for discipline and obedience, and partly as a way of preemptively ruling out discussion of any issues that the Party might find internally awkward. Thus, the electoral strategy of the Party, insofar as it has one, is to cajole and threaten the electorate to vote, not so much for them (why would anyone do that?) but against the terrible forces that at any moment threaten to plunge the country into a Nazi dictatorship. Or something.

Yet this strategy is clearly working less and less well. In general, people don’t like being coerced and threatened, and in a democracy they have a right to demand what they are supposed to vote for, and so what it is that the Party is actually going to give them, as opposed to further taking away. There are several reasons why the Party cannot do this. One is its inheritance of the intellectual and working methods of the Marxist groupuscules of the 1970s and 80s, who viewed themselves as Vanguard parties, forever purging dissidents and refusing, as the phrase went, to “appease the electorate.” The content of the politics may have changed, but the form and the arrogance live on.

Another is the lack of any coherent political or moral vision which could be sold to the electorate, or for that matter used as a basis for internal discussion and debate. The Party doesn’t have discussion and debate, though: it has screaming matches where the loudest screamer wins.The result is not only (as I’ve pointed out before) political programmes that are utterly incoherent and resemble patchwork dolls, but also a deeply unattractive series of disconnected moral commandments, based on nothing but the power to issue them. In theory, of course, coherent political or moral programmes ought to begin from basic ideas, and proceed to more detailed examples. Now, yes, we are talking about practical politics here, with its inevitable special pleading, its dishonesty and its betrayals, but nonetheless, until fairly recently parties and political movements could at least point to some general principles to justify arguments and proposed policies. Now, no such pretence is even made. Rather than seeking to accomplish things (or even undo things in some cases) the Party presents itself as “struggling” or “fighting.” The last, desperate slogan of the French Socialist government, before it went down to defeat and almost extinction in 2017, was “the struggle against all forms of discrimination,” as though governments actually spent their time organising protest marches and Internet pile-ins.

In an essay a couple of weeks ago, I cited Charles Taylor’s musings about the modern sense of Identity, and the reduction of public values to private preferences. But elsewhere in his book, Taylor notes a narrowing of the very concept of morality to what I would call an essentially transactional one. Modern thinking focuses on “what is right to do rather than what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life.” Indeed, I suspect that if you were to ask a member of the PMC what a good life consisted of, all you’d get would be a strangled noise and waving of hands as a response. And if you asked an elderly PMC-ite whether, on reflection, they had lived a good life, and whether they might have lived a better one, you’d be lucky to escape with an aggressive silence. Such questions make people uncomfortable and so should not be asked. How would you even begin to teach, say, Plato and Aristotle, or for that matter the sayings of the Buddha? How could you ever hope to persuade people by argument that they should live a better life, and that this would be for their happiness and benefit?

Thus, modern thinking recognises only two ways of influencing human conduct, notionally for the better. One is through the Lockean contract, law-governed, where I agree to be bound by laws and regulations in return for the sustenance and protection of the state. The other is through Kantian moral imperatives, whose overwhelming force leaves me no option but to behave in a particular way. It is immediately obvious that neither of these modalities can be reduced to, let alone shown to be based on, any pre-existing coherent moral system. They are closer to a Highway Code or a workplace anti-sexism code of conduct, than a system of ethics.

Taylor sees this situation as a modernist phenomenon, originating in the seventeenth century. That may well be true, but I suspect the situation has become considerably worse over the generation or so since he was writing. In effect, even with the decline of organised religion as a point of reference for moral debates, other social factors did to some extent fill the gap. Tradition, families, social pressures, patriotism, local and civic pride, as well as political beliefs like Socialism, did provide moral points of reference, and helped to supply some of what was missing.

But most of these points of reference have now disappeared. Families are no longer encouraged to transmit values, and observably do not do so. Neoliberalism has destroyed families anyway, along with communities, and any kind of collective feeling and belief. Most of all, modern theory has deconstructed the very ideas of community, nation and public good, and recast them as ideologies of power and domination. Even if few people actually live their daily lives according to this nightmarish vision, any more than they behave in practice as though all points of view were equally valid, the rickety scaffolding that enabled discussion about wider issues of good and bad outcomes for society as whole has now been taken down. All that remains is competitive special pleading without limits.

And all that is left as a common currency of debate is that hoary old idea Human Rights. But as well as the notorious practical problems with this fluid and ill-defined concept—power and money determine outcomes, most human rights are in conflict with other human rights etc. etc.—there remains the substantive problem that Human Rights have no objective existence: they are human constructions and have only the force that we choose to give them. They are best seen as the discourse that the Party uses to conduct its internal battles, much like Marxist-Leninist theory in the old Soviet Union. So another week, another controversy: the very PMC Constitutional Council in France has ruled that it’s against the Constitution to forbid children under fifteen to use Internet social networks. Now admittedly the Constitution doesn’t actually say anything about social networks, but the Council decided that it implicitly did, and this is what it should have said. Much of the PMC/Party media warmly applauded.

Now hold on, I hear you say, what about the acknowledged harm that is done to children, that social media companies privately recognise? Well, that’s a different issue, you see. As I and others have long said, the PMC lives in a world of ideas and symbols, where all battles are ideological and all victories are symbolic. What matters is not how many extra teenage suicides there will be, but whether human rights have been upheld, and thus a more important kind of harm avoided. Indeed, the two discourses do not and cannot exist in the same universe.

One mundane reason why the PMC thinks entirely in symbolic terms is that it knows very little about real life, but somewhat more about intellectual constructions. Indeed, it’s doubtful whether we have ever had a ruling class more detached from the reality of the world. I don’t mean just intellectually, either. The problem of Credentialed Idiots is well-enough understood: young people learn how to get the credentials they need to succeed in the PMC, and learn what opinions are acceptable for them to express.The real life I have in mind here is, you know, real life, as we experience it every day. At least an eighteenth century aristocrat was a landowner, a huntsman, a farmer, mixing with all classes of people, probably privately educated to a reasonable standard, maybe having done the Grand Tour in his youth.

Today’s PMC is about as isolated as you can get. It’s not, at least primarily, about money. The PMC-in training—the Outer Party—would actually benefit from redistributive populist socialist policies, assuming a political party could be found to implement them. The short-term contract NGO researcher and their partner the social media start-up employee probably have an existence more precarious than that of the engineer who comes to repair the washing machine. But they see themselves as belonging to a superior social caste, and they have ambitions. One wants to be the head of a prestigious NGO, the other the head of a successful company. They are willing to put up with quite a lot of ideology and Party shit in the meantime: after all, what else are they qualified to do? Everyone they know, everyone they work with, any contacts they have retained from university, has the same basic ideas, reads the same books and media sources, and enjoys the same distance from the realities of life, especially the unpleasant ones.

The externalisation of the urge to do good that we find in this caste is not new. The Victorians were famous for worrying about conditions overseas that were not much worse, and maybe not worse at all, than those in contemporary London. Now, though, it’s become an industry, and sometimes it presents itself so blatantly you think you may have stumbled into a morality play by mistake. On a winter’s evening not so long ago, outside our local station, I saw two charities operating at the same time. One, mainly middle-aged and elderly people, was feeding hot meals to the homeless, probably all they would eat that day. The other, wearing smart red anoraks with backpacks, and consisting of idealistic young people, was collecting money to apparently pressurise the government to do more to relieve world hunger. But the PMC cannot bear very much reality, unless it is filtered through ideology, and kept at a safe distance, preferably in another country. The poverty and misery under their noses, the begging and the petty crimes, the serial violence against women and children, and the child prostitution rings, the rule of drug gangs, the return of illnesses not seen for generations: these are purely virtual phenomena. Keep them away from me. Let me continue to live in my world of Ideas and symbolic struggles, and don’t try to get me out of it unless you want to be called a fascist.

But there are times when the actual struggles of ordinary people concern events so appalling that their stench forces the PMC to look down if even for a moment. Last week saw the trial of the Hamidovic gang, a group of Rom of Bosnian origin who ran a pickpocketing ring which apparently netted an average of €25,000 per day. They used girls of between 10 and 18 years old, who were kept out of school, given business targets each day and terrorised with beatings, sexual assaults and burnings if they did not perform. Children were bought and sold between clan families, whose adults lived in luxury. Some were trafficked from other countries. To its credit, Le Monde did actually publish an article about the trial, and not all of its commentators accused it of racism for doing so. But the trial itself was scarcely covered in the French media—too sensitive—and ironically the best account was in The Guardian. The PMC indeed cannot bear very much reality.

But the wearying thing is this has been known for years. Everyone who used the Metro saw the gangs of young girls, and there are examples of arrests and trials of clan members going back nearly fifteen years. But nobody made a fuss. Where were the defenders of children’s rights? Arguing for the right to use mobile phones in school. Where were the campaigners opposing violence against women and girls? Busy campaigning against the Taliban’s activities in Afghanistan. Evil is always easier to engage with safely if it’s kept far away. (Other clan members will now, no doubt, be taking over the trade.)

But this illustrates a wider point. The PMC is very good at ignoring what is going on under its nose: indeed, it’s a survival skill. This mean that the opinions of ordinary people are a mystery to them, because they are based for the most part on experiences the PMC carefully avoid. There’s something grimly comic, for example, about the studied inability of the PMC to understand public concern about immigration. Not so long ago, I heard a downmarket Party hack on the radio arguing that if France could accommodate fifty million tourists a year it could surely take another couple of million immigrants without any problem. Some of these people seem to have had their sense of reality surgically removed. Yet in many cases “immigration” as such is not even the problem: it’s the sudden requirement for western societies to cope with massive numbers of people from very different cultures, now extending into a second generation, many of whom have no desire to integrate, and for which absolutely no preparation was done. It’s comforting to see this as “racism” except that’s not how those involved see it. Oh, there are plenty of unpleasant bigots and white supremacists. There are also people who are shocked that, just down the road, there are women who are only allowed out of the house with a male escort and families who routinely send their daughters back to places like Mali to be genitally mutilated. But then we must learn to be tolerant of the customs of other societies, it says here.

The PMC never encounters such issues, or if it does is trained to ignore them, to avoid doing “harm” to communities they have never really met, but feel vicariously protective of. They are nice people, you see. Everyone, in the end, is much the same everywhere, and if it were not for extremists peddling hate, we would all live together happily. So even fairly realistic PMC commentators will grudgingly rehearse some of the reasons for the unhappiness of ordinary people—unemployment, precarity, poverty, financial insecurity, the decline of public services and security—and then, with an air of weary caste superiority, say that of course extremists falsely blame all this on immigration. This is doubly a lie, since nobody seriously argues that de-industrialisation is a product of immigration, and this discourse is designed to invalidate criticism of de-industrialisation by associating it with “extremism.” But it is also a lie because many social problems are directly related to immigration. Parents expressing concern about the proportion of immigrants in their children’s class at school are of course routinely dismissed as “racists” if not actual fascists. One wonders if these critics have children of their own, or are capable of understanding the consequences of having a quarter to a third of a class without enough of a grasp of the native language to follow the lessons: some may also be orphans from war zones. Again, it’s not immigration that’s the problem it’s the inability or refusal of western governments to recognise the problem and devote resources to dealing with it.

The everyday reality is something like this. Your daughter comes home from school one day in tears asking what a prostitute is. She’s been harassed by boys telling her that it’s indecent for a woman to show her legs, so she shouldn’t wear a skirt. So you go to see the Principal of the school, who is sympathetic, but says there’s nothing that can be done. Their instructions are not to “make waves.” The subject is too sensitive. Anyway, why doesn’t your daughter just wear trousers? There’s the swimming lessons for girls which are cancelled because too many Muslim parents objet, and so on and so on. All it would take here is a small acknowledgement that there was a problem, a small recognition of the need to find a solution, and support for the “Extreme Right” would fall sharply on this issue, as on others. But why should I vote for a political party that insults me, rather than a political party that claims to understand my problems?

Widening the focus for a minute, a lot of this blindness of the PMC is based on the fact that they actually know very little of the world anyway. Oh, they’ve travelled: here’s my passport, we went to this meeting in Tokyo, I was in New York twice last year, there was that conference in Cape Town, there was that working group in Jamaica… This is Business Class World, with its luxury hotels and its English-speaking restaurants. They meet people who think like them and were often educated like them. By 2021 the only Afghans the average senior PMC-ite would have met would be western-educated Ministers and officials. They’re pretty much like us, really, the Afghans, so the tens of thousands we have casually brought over should have no trouble living in our society..

This goes together, I think, with the incoherence of belief and ideology that characterises the PMC, and that the Party couldn’t care less about. It has no ability to process moral and ethical problems of any complexity, and it takes refuge in what are essentially random conditioned reflexes. Without the moral depth and strength to confront the nastier aspects of reality, under its nose or over the sea, the PMC falls back on symbolic ideological struggles, where words are more important than deeds, and where “harm” means someone hearing the wrong word. Reality, if they should ever see it, would probably frighten them to death. It occurred to me recently that this is why Literature syllabuses in Universities have become so impoverished. Neither teachers nor students could cope with the moral and ethical issues that great literature customarily raises. Can you imagine teaching King Lear today to an undergraduate audience? Shakespeare’s darkest play, with its prefiguring of Beckett, where there is no hope, and the very earth seems to tremble beneath our feet? Imagine if Christopher Nolan’s film had been recounted in the spirit of Homer’s original. Traumatised audiences would have fled the cinemas.

Thus, the PMC and the Party have nothing to offer apart from empty slogans, symbolic warfare and unceasing hatred of people who have the wrong ideas, which is most of us. Here, in principle, is the electoral opportunity of all time: an open goal into which the dimmest left-wing politician could kick. It doesn’t even require a fundamental departure from the history of the Left. Ordinary people want safe streets, good schools and decent public services, and who are the PMC to say they can’t have them? And as far back as 1880, the electoral programme of the first French Socialist party under Jules Guesde, included legal provision to stop bosses employing immigrant labour at wages lower than those of French workers. He was advised by one Karl Marx, of Hampstead, London, and indeed opposition to trafficking in low-cost immigrant labour remained a policy of the Communist Party until the 1980s.

So at the Fête de l’Humanité last month there were indeed some stirring speeches. Fabien Roussel, the PCF leader was almost calling for an insurrection, and Mr Mélenchon himself was spotted using the traditional language of the Class War. Here and there, in various countries, leftist politicians whose programmes have included mild socialist measures have actually been elected. There have also been a number of timid attempts to deal with the practical problems raised by immigration. In Britain, where the Gadarene rush towards privatisation began, the trend is actually going into reverse because the private sector has shown it can’t hack it. (Some of us foretold that forty years ago.) So-called “Socialist” policies may have to be adopted in a number of countries simply as measures of survival, because the alternative is going to be worse.

But we shouldn’t get too excited. So limited are the political and ethical horizons of the Party and the PMC, even among those belonging to parties of the Notional Left, that it is doubtful whether many of them can actually wrap their neurones around what is wrong, and what needs to be done. And this is an entire caste we are talking about: your spouse, your relations, your friends, the people you work with, the people you hope to work with one day. After all, what shall it profit a politician if he gain the whole world and lose his place in the PMC, as St Mark would have put it? Which is why, if there is an answer, it will have to come from outside. More on that next week.

Source: Trying To Understand The World