There is no more intellectually incurious a person than the average Conservative politician. All they care about, in work, are status and process — fuelled by their inner drives for self-advancement and clubbishness. I can’t comment on Theresa May as a woman. As a politician, though, she is no different. Her natural awkwardness is an unthreatening veil for an hard-edged ego.
"There's an elephant – or should we say more accurately a leviathan - in the conservative room. This is the fear of admitting that the policy agenda they have sold to the public at election time is regularly being quietly ‘improved’ (ie neutered and made more civil service-friendly) at the legislative drafting stage. Sometimes ministers find themselves at war with their own Whitehall machine but even more times they simply cave in because there isn’t really that much they can realistically do about it. The Leviathan coils itself around their precious policy agenda and squelches the life out of it. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
Question is whether it’s down to cowardice or complicity? Or maybe it doesn’t matter. Most revolutionaries don’t care if their functionaries are idealogues, opportunists, indifferent or scared. Same result.
Sep 18, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023Liked by Ben Sixsmith
Granted that most conservative parties are stupid and ineffectual (from the point of view of a conservative intellectual). Granted that e.g. the US GOP is largely run by grifters, lobbyists and libertarian donors, who hold GOP voters in contempt. Still, there is something uniquely un-conservative about the UK Tories. They should rename themselves "The Liberals."
EDIT: Ed West's account of "anger towards the Conservative Party, even a Freudian desire to kill it" on the part of the young conservatives was quite striking:
Sep 16, 2023·edited Sep 16, 2023Liked by Ben Sixsmith
An interesting video here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVNZSMLtDdE - from a situation where the polarization is extreme, to the point of killing. People in power work to create polarization in the people they rule, it's just divide and conquer. These people do it to distract the people whom they are working together to rob blind, and it's very effective. When people cannot come together, but fight each other, they will be taken up totally by what they perceive to be an existential threat from Those Evil Other People, and not concern themselves with the nefarious and corrupt acts of their rulers. Social media aids and abets this process, the people who control social media actively work to create and foster this polarization, and those people are in league with the rulers. "You are either for us or against us" - as G W Bush said - allows for no middle ground. It's of course nonsense, people are neither Right nor Left, neither black nor white, but usually something in between. Talking to people in person, unmediated by the false "virtual community" of corporate social media, you'll find a lot of commonality in core interests - both "sides" will see the corruption in government, but be unable to come together - except on a face to face level - to do anything about it, and that serves to further the corruption, and that's the point of the matter. Eventually it reduces people to a state of learned helplessness, where people, repelled by the conflict, end up unwilling to discuss things with their perceived enemies - with whom, unbeknownst to them, share common core interests - and become "apolitical", unable to do anything about the actual threats to their free existence posed by their rulers. Polarization is a *tool*, and it is very effective, going all the way back to Julius Caesar. Sun Tzu, too: "If your opponent is united, divide him." So that's the point with fake political parties and the polarization they knowingly and intentionally create. in the US and UK alike.
I think that's a good definition of 'woke,' but I think you've missed the meaning of 'polarisation.' I take it to mean something like people's ideas cluster, so that you can predict whether someone supports Net Zero, for instance, if you know what they think about BLM (although these are completely unrelated). It's the opposite of consensus.
I'm reading Peter Turchin's "End Times" and he contrasts current polarisation with (in the USA) "the Era of Good Feelings" ("roughly coinciding with the presidency of James Monroe (1817-1825)") and the Post War Consensus. One way of paraphrasing Turchin is to say that things get done in consensus periods and don't in times of polarisation. (What's been achieved in the Tory years since 2010?)
Shorter me: I think Mrs May means by "polarised positions" something like positions predetermined by political tribe rather than thought through. And who doesn't think that's a bad thing?
Very happy to agree that that is an unfortunate tendency, but I suspect she just means people taking very different positions. I can't think why else she supposes that things could be hashed out in person.
Yeah, I think what she said is just boilerplate centrist/reasonable politics: it's good to be sensitive, and bad to be kneejerk. Her statement (why do Substack make this hard?) seems to have two halves which don't cohere. I was talking about the second half, and you're talking about the first. Reading it again, I don't thing there's anything there; there's no thought behind the words, no mental image, as George Orwell would have it--just the buzzwords. Still, she's hardly the first person to make entire speeches out of "I'm for good things, and against the bad things." (What's lacking is anything resembling a plan of action.)
Don’t we need polarisation for ideas to have fervour and compete with other ideas. That’s when things get done, good things as well as bad ones. Consensus is also the lazy way out where bad ideas don’t get challenged. So far our consensus politics have given us Net Zero, Iraq, globalisation, free movement and mass immigration, and so on - not a great start.
I think the real problem with what I call polarisation is not ideological polarisation, but the fact that people seem to think the other side are moral monsters.
Looking at the puberty blockers debate, the pro-blockers side think that TERFs don't care about kids committing suicide, while the anti-blockers side accuse pro-trans people of being paedophiles.
This is especially relevant for me because my partner is TERF sympathetic and many of my friends are extremely pro trans. None of them are monsters).
‘whose achievements in office truly had no beginning’ - priceless.
"There's an elephant – or should we say more accurately a leviathan - in the conservative room. This is the fear of admitting that the policy agenda they have sold to the public at election time is regularly being quietly ‘improved’ (ie neutered and made more civil service-friendly) at the legislative drafting stage. Sometimes ministers find themselves at war with their own Whitehall machine but even more times they simply cave in because there isn’t really that much they can realistically do about it. The Leviathan coils itself around their precious policy agenda and squelches the life out of it. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
Question is whether it’s down to cowardice or complicity? Or maybe it doesn’t matter. Most revolutionaries don’t care if their functionaries are idealogues, opportunists, indifferent or scared. Same result.
But - the London Olympics, yeah? Heir to Blair! Sensible centre!
I'm impressed you managed to keep this piece so compact. It would have been all too easy to let it sprawl out, and dissipate its effect.
Granted that most conservative parties are stupid and ineffectual (from the point of view of a conservative intellectual). Granted that e.g. the US GOP is largely run by grifters, lobbyists and libertarian donors, who hold GOP voters in contempt. Still, there is something uniquely un-conservative about the UK Tories. They should rename themselves "The Liberals."
EDIT: Ed West's account of "anger towards the Conservative Party, even a Freudian desire to kill it" on the part of the young conservatives was quite striking:
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/making-plans-without-nigel
An interesting video here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVNZSMLtDdE - from a situation where the polarization is extreme, to the point of killing. People in power work to create polarization in the people they rule, it's just divide and conquer. These people do it to distract the people whom they are working together to rob blind, and it's very effective. When people cannot come together, but fight each other, they will be taken up totally by what they perceive to be an existential threat from Those Evil Other People, and not concern themselves with the nefarious and corrupt acts of their rulers. Social media aids and abets this process, the people who control social media actively work to create and foster this polarization, and those people are in league with the rulers. "You are either for us or against us" - as G W Bush said - allows for no middle ground. It's of course nonsense, people are neither Right nor Left, neither black nor white, but usually something in between. Talking to people in person, unmediated by the false "virtual community" of corporate social media, you'll find a lot of commonality in core interests - both "sides" will see the corruption in government, but be unable to come together - except on a face to face level - to do anything about it, and that serves to further the corruption, and that's the point of the matter. Eventually it reduces people to a state of learned helplessness, where people, repelled by the conflict, end up unwilling to discuss things with their perceived enemies - with whom, unbeknownst to them, share common core interests - and become "apolitical", unable to do anything about the actual threats to their free existence posed by their rulers. Polarization is a *tool*, and it is very effective, going all the way back to Julius Caesar. Sun Tzu, too: "If your opponent is united, divide him." So that's the point with fake political parties and the polarization they knowingly and intentionally create. in the US and UK alike.
I think that's a good definition of 'woke,' but I think you've missed the meaning of 'polarisation.' I take it to mean something like people's ideas cluster, so that you can predict whether someone supports Net Zero, for instance, if you know what they think about BLM (although these are completely unrelated). It's the opposite of consensus.
I'm reading Peter Turchin's "End Times" and he contrasts current polarisation with (in the USA) "the Era of Good Feelings" ("roughly coinciding with the presidency of James Monroe (1817-1825)") and the Post War Consensus. One way of paraphrasing Turchin is to say that things get done in consensus periods and don't in times of polarisation. (What's been achieved in the Tory years since 2010?)
Shorter me: I think Mrs May means by "polarised positions" something like positions predetermined by political tribe rather than thought through. And who doesn't think that's a bad thing?
Very happy to agree that that is an unfortunate tendency, but I suspect she just means people taking very different positions. I can't think why else she supposes that things could be hashed out in person.
Yeah, I think what she said is just boilerplate centrist/reasonable politics: it's good to be sensitive, and bad to be kneejerk. Her statement (why do Substack make this hard?) seems to have two halves which don't cohere. I was talking about the second half, and you're talking about the first. Reading it again, I don't thing there's anything there; there's no thought behind the words, no mental image, as George Orwell would have it--just the buzzwords. Still, she's hardly the first person to make entire speeches out of "I'm for good things, and against the bad things." (What's lacking is anything resembling a plan of action.)
Don’t we need polarisation for ideas to have fervour and compete with other ideas. That’s when things get done, good things as well as bad ones. Consensus is also the lazy way out where bad ideas don’t get challenged. So far our consensus politics have given us Net Zero, Iraq, globalisation, free movement and mass immigration, and so on - not a great start.
I think the real problem with what I call polarisation is not ideological polarisation, but the fact that people seem to think the other side are moral monsters.
Looking at the puberty blockers debate, the pro-blockers side think that TERFs don't care about kids committing suicide, while the anti-blockers side accuse pro-trans people of being paedophiles.
This is especially relevant for me because my partner is TERF sympathetic and many of my friends are extremely pro trans. None of them are monsters).