Skip to content

Bridges of cant.

I’VE READ A number of publications by various think tanks over the years, some intelligent, some informative, many just fanciful. The most recent, The Bridge, issued by Compass, falls into the latter category. It’s short, thank heaven, but since its subtitle is “how the politics of the future will link the vertical to the horizontal” you’ll understand why its brevity commends it. I don’t think I could manage to read more than the eight pages to which it already stretches itself.

This offering bears a lovely picture of a bridge on the front. I’m tempted to believe the authors, Uffe Elbaek and Neal Lawson, have been watching too much Scandinavian crime TV recently, but that may just be my jaundiced view of the world, tickled by the superficial concatenation of the Danishness of Mr Elbaek and the fantastical nature of what’s proposed.

As well as being a multi-talented chap, Mr Elbaek’s bio informs us, also lives in a “big old apartment in the centre of Copenhagen”. In the centre, you notice, because he’s at the heart of happening stuff. And not in one of the working-class estates populated with the unintegrating immigrants he’s probably keen on inviting into his country.

His co-writer, Mr Lawson, among other things, has worked “as an advisor to Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson”. That’s not really something you should be admitting to, is it? I could rest my case here, but I think it’s worth pressing on.

THEIR THESIS IS that the internet has liberated the global citizen from the clutches of the corporations and the state, inaugurating a “profound paradigm shift” (yes, one of those), with the result that the old vertical hierarchies are now being flattened (that’s the vertical and horizontal bit explained), thus changing politics for ever. “No one takes orders any more,” they proclaim, “ No one can command because no one is in control.” Hands up everyone who is not either giving orders or taking them? I thought so. Same as always.

Our visionaries continue: “around the globe we see the big old institutions struggling; the banks, the media corporations, old political parties, the state itself, all are left reeling.” It’s a veritable revolution in progress, in which our ”singular identities as either consumers or producers are merging. We are becoming fully rounded citizens.” I think we can envisage the fully-rounded citizen as being someone who reads Huffington Post, thinks Brown and Mandelson were Good Things, decries the goodies of consumerist society but likes their smartphone, and probably lives somewhere fashionable, such as the centre of Copenhagen.

The banks seem to be doing all right, stuffed as they are with public money given to them by the politicians, and the media are busy shedding their printed selves while muscling in on the blogging world they ignored then plagiarised for so long. Politicians and their parties may be losing credibility, but there’s no evidence they’re really losing their grip on power, so what is the problem here?

What really bothers Elbaek and Pearson is the the threat of “authoritarian populism” emerging from this flux of networking; that is, large numbers of people who don’t agree with them. And what’s their answer to this dangerous, amorphous, democratic liquidity?

Well, it’s nothing new, I’m afraid, because their answer is the state. Having rubbished both corporations and government, Elbaek and Pearson say it’s “essential to these ‘new times’ as the only big resource with public legitimacy to act and invest”. New times, old answers.

And there’s the rub, for not only are we left with the same old bureaucratic leviathan but we must also rely on “the party”, suitably undefined and as “liquid” as this new democracy, to act as “The Bridge” between us and them, between the vertical and horizontal.

You don’t need to think too hard about what the nature of this bridging party will be. It’ll be one obsessed with ”gay rights, greater gender equality and the end of apartheid”. Speaking as a consumer, producer and self-confessed imperfectly-rounded human being (rather than citizen), I have to say I’m really bored with the first two and puzzled as to where this “apartheid” exists because I thought it vanished when the ANC took over in South Africa. Should I make a jaundiced guess they’re thinking of Israel, the shibboleth of progressive identity hatred? I’m pretty sick of that, too, chaps.

What’s wrong with this thesis by Elbaek and Lawson? It’s a mixture of utopian naivety and traditional statism, that’s what.

The internet and associated technologies have indeed changed life dramatically over the last two decades. So what’s wrong with this thesis by Elbaek and Lawson? It’s a mixture of utopian naivety and traditional statism, that’s what.

At the heart of their naivety is a typical progressive misreading of ordinary human beings. Most people know that casting a vote every four or five years is an imperfect way of running a democracy, but they accept it for a couple of reasons.

The first is they know they have to trust the politicians not to stray too far from their pledges – and that they have the chance to kick them out when they do. The second reason is that they don’t want to be occupied day in, day out with politics. They don’t want to spend all their time righting the wrongs of inequality, homophobia, sexism, Islamophobia, poverty, racism and God knows what else the prodnosed progressives slap on the menu. They want to get on with their lives. They want to be left alone.

Progressives are always making this plea for “active citizens” because they just can’t leave anyone alone. It’s no more than a ploy to bully more people with their self-righteousness. All the better if you’ve got the state backing you up.

So we end up with quotations from Marx, and such vacuities as “We are particles in the wave of the future”, and being “the change we wish to see”. But behold! On the other side of the technologically-liquidised democracy we can discern the humped form of the state again, and linking us to it, the shiny Bridge of the New Party, cobbled together from the same old cant of yesteryear.

Step on the bridge, if you wish, comrade. I think I’ll stay on this side and set up my own think tank.

Michael Blackburn.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x