The centre cannot hold – the failure of Change UK and the atrophying of political thought

The latest disasters to befall Change UK – Chuka Umunna’s decision to join the Liberal Democrats and the party’s decision to change its name for a third time – are a good excuse to think about sad fate of one of the most unfortunate parties in Britain. political history.

It wasn’t so long ago that Change UK was on the verge of revolutionizing British politics. There are many reasons why that never happened: Heidi Allen turned out to be an incompetent acting major; the party failed to call itself a ‘Remain party’, but instead hesitated to reinvent the centre; it called itself Change, but demanded that, as far as Europe was concerned, things remained the same. But the biggest reason was the results of the council elections at the beginning of May, in which Change did not participate. There was only room for one anti-Leave party at the center of British politics, and the Liberal Democrats’ strong electoral performance ensured it would be that party. From then on, people who were as keen on staying in the European Union as Nigel Farage’s supporters were on leaving were drawn to the Liberal Democrats.

Although this episode of Change UK is extremely short, it is important because it resolves a long-standing debate within the Labor Party. Since Corbyn’s 2015 coup, members of the parliamentary party have debated whether to stay and fight or leave en masse. For a while it looked like Tom Watson would follow Chukka Umunna and others in the company. The implosion of change has settled the argument in favor of stay-and-fight, although unfortunately it doesn’t look like the stay-and-fighters have much of a chance of winning. Corbyn’s decision to humiliate Emily Thornberry by dropping her as his deputy at Prime Minister’s Questions, for example, is intended to demonstrate that he has the support of 80 percent of party members, while she is effectively on her own .

It is also important because it teaches an important lesson about the nature of modern parties. Change UK was an attempt to create a party from the top down. MPs from both Labor and Conservatives left their ancestral parties and focused on attracting more MPs to their cause. But the days when politics at Westminster were fought primarily between professional politicians are gone, along with Francis Fukuyama’s essay on “The End of History.” The Labor Party is now both a movement and a party, thanks to the arrival of several hundred thousand committed Corbynistas. The same thing is happening on the right: the Brexit Party can appeal to dozens of pro-Leave movements that have grown from the bottom up and are driven by genuine anger at the status quo. Centrists don’t just have to build a traditional party infrastructure, with MPs, local offices and dutiful but tame members. They must create all the trappings of a mass movement: think tanks to provide a constant source of ideas, foot soldiers to campaign on the ground, keyboard warriors to fight the Twitter war.

The obvious core of such a movement is the People’s Vote campaign, but this is intertwined with the Labor Party. Many of the leading figures of the People’s Vote campaign are Blairites who continue to wage a Labor civil war, not least Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s chief spin doctor. He was expelled from the Labor Party because he admitted that he had voted for the Liberal Democrats, but nevertheless remains a member of the bickering Labor tribe.

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Another group trying to shake things up are the so-called new progressives – the broad collection of people who embrace the politics of social justice and identity. I understand why young people are drawn to the social justice movement. They are victims of one of the greatest acts of intergenerational justice in decades: the fact that the baby boom generation has gobbled up the fruits of post-war prosperity (free college education, second homes, generous pensions) and then discovered fiscal rectitude when it comes to design policies for their successors (student loans, defined contributions, green taxes). But the social justice movement certainly has not produced a compelling text on par with the liberal classics that emerged from the same sense of injustice of the mid-Victorian era, such as John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” or Matthew’s “Culture and Anarchy” Arnold.

One reason for this is that the new progressives seem determined to break the intellectual dead end of identity politics. Identity politics seems to be confused about what it’s really about: identity. Sometimes identity seems to be socially constructed: hence, for example, the preoccupation with gender fluidity. We are told that gender is a social construct and that people can jump from one gender to another at will. Sometimes identity seems to be taken as an adamant fact: one’s identity as a woman or as a member of an ethnic minority seems to trump all other considerations. For example, Catharine MacKinnon, a leading feminist theorist at the University of Michigan, has argued that members of each ethnic, gender, or cultural group have their own specific moral and intellectual norms. “The white man’s standard for equality is: Are you equal to him?” she argues. “That is certainly not a neutral standard. It’s a racist, sexist norm… But if you affirmatively and self-respectingly present yourself as a member of your own culture or gender… if you insist that your cultural diversity be positively accommodated and recognized in a way that is the same as the way theirs has been, that is not seen as an equality problem at all.” This sounds a bit like the social biologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who argued that the world is divided into distinct racial-cultural groups engaged in an inevitable struggle for dominance and that each group uses epiphenomena such as truth and morality as tools of group power.

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But I suspect the problem is more general than this: we are suffering from a general atrophy of political thinking, not just within political parties and movements, but across the board. Academics have either been captured by identity politics or have chosen to retreat into narrow specialisms. Particularly in America, the noble science of politics has been taken over by political scientists who use increasingly powerful quantitative techniques for increasingly trivial purposes. The most interesting political theorists writing for the general public today are still Isaiah Berlin’s (somewhat old) students, such as Sir Larry Siedentop and John Gray. The chair that Mr. Berlin once graced in Oxford lies empty. Public authorities in general, encouraged by pressure groups but also, I suspect, driven by their natural sympathies, have tended to close down debates on issues considered too controversial, such as diversity (which is built into social policy without serious debate is taking place). its benefits versus its harms) and, increasingly, different aspects of sexual mores.

How long will this great stagnation of political debate last? I even suspect that we are actually on the eve of a golden age of political thinking. The collapse of neoliberal hegemony, the rise of a raw but sometimes exciting populism, the growing revolt against progressive totalitarianism on campus and, increasingly, in corporations… All this will lead to a resurgence of interesting political theories. The human spirit is too fertile to be tamed by all kinds of high priests – in the parties, the media and the corporations – trying to enforce yesterday’s tired orthodoxies.

I suspect this resurgence will come from the periphery of today’s established political and intellectual empires (it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything thought-provoking or original from publications with “New York” in their titles or from professors with chairs in the the world’s ancient universities). It will come from repentant liberals and conservatives who want to understand why the great intellectual traditions they once embraced have degenerated so rapidly in recent decades. I am particularly struck by the mea culpas about (neo)conservative over-reach that regularly appears in the American Conservativee and de Claremont review of books.

It will arise from the clash between different intellectual traditions. Conservatism has always been most exciting when it tries to tame the individualistic excesses of liberalism (Walter Bagehot liked to say that he was as liberal as he could be while still conservative, and as conservative as he could be while still liberal). I also hope that the clash between progressivism and older traditions will also be fruitful. Gay marriage, one of the most sensible social reforms of recent decades, was brought about by conservatives like British-born American journalist Andrew Sullivan, who wanted to offer a conservative solution (marriage) to a progressive question (why should should not be so)? Can I express my sexuality in the public sphere?)