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We live in an age of fury and confusion. A new crisis erupts before the last one has finished: financial crisis, Brexit, pandemic, war in Ukraine, inflation, strikes. Prime Ministers come and go but politics stays divided and toxic. In such a disaggregated, post-public realm, it is hard to agree on what matters, and hard even to settle on a standard account of what constitutes reality – whether the crowd at a presidential inauguration was big or small; whether or not Covid is real. Between 2015 and 2020 there were three general elections and a referendum. In the past eight years, Labour and the Tories have held six leadership contests between them, not counting Sunak’s recent coronation. Every one of these party ballots required dishonesty from candidates about the challenges ahead. They privileged activist bases that are not representative of the mainstream electorate when setting the terms of debate. British politics is not that polarised. If the Tories lose the next election, there will be no mob storming the Commons to insist that Rishi Sunak stay in No 10. The bumf I had been sent counselled against hugging children or getting close to pregnant women immediately after the procedure. So this is what it means to be toxic, I thought. And not as a metaphor, but literally – walking down the street emitting dangerous particles.
We live in an age of fury and confusion. A new crisis erupts before the last one has finished: financial turmoil, Brexit, the pandemic, the Ukrainian conflict, inflation, and strikes. Despite the frequent leadership changes, politics remains mired in division and toxicity, which means that it’s tempting to disengage, tune out, and hope for a return to normalcy. However, this is the new normal, and our democracy can only work if enough people stay engaged without getting enraged. But how? But does a journalist's 'insider status' cloud their judgement when working out how to write about political stories or policy ssues, or whether to cover them at all? On this edition Rafael Behr talks to Professor Ben Ansell about his new book Why Politics Fails: The Five Traps of the Modern World & How to Escape Them
He cites the annual march through Riga honouring Latvia’s Waffen SS division. I have been on that march, as a reporter for The Independent, and yes there were young Nazis strutting their stuff. But Behr is right to say it is more complicated than that. Politics on the Couch has been chosen by Feedspot as both one of the Top 25 UK Psychology Podcasts and Political Science Podcasts on the web. There was a pale approximation of Trumpian denial in the campaign by Tory MPs for Boris Johnson’s restoration to Downing Street when Liz Truss’s government unravelled last autumn. Sanity prevailed. If, as expected, the next government is Labour and inherits an economic mess, will it be possible for them to make all the necessary hard decisions about taxation and spending, and stay in power? The themes include migration, nationalism, family, identity, culture wars, technology, ideology, Europe, Brexit and a little bit of cardiology.
He writes amusingly and perceptively of those he dubs “Brexit Bolsheviks” and “grievance miners”. He writes, too, of “outrage inflation” – the impact of social media on contemporary political discourse. Confected outrage, a phenomenon hitherto confined to the tabloids, has now begun to infect liberal outlets. “In the 21st-century media, the intensity with which an opinion is held has come to serve as a proxy for its value in a debate. The more ardent the feeling the more deserving it is of attention… A handful of online fulminators will suffice for the threshold of newsworthy outrage to be met.” Does it inevitably become a trade-off between, a steady stream of 'exclusives', and a fair and objective approach to reporting? Ultimately Behr recognises that being entirely sanguine is impossible for the politically interested. Nevertheless, he asks us to put our frustrations in perspective rather than letting them overwhelm us. After all, “anger at the state of politics is proof that we have not given up on the hope of something better”. And our continued focus will be necessary as the false promises of the populists collapse around them. As Behr astutely notes, the original version of The Emperor’s New Clothes does not finish with the child stating the obvious, but, in the absence of any alternative, the emperor walking on “more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all”.
In this wide-ranging and informal conversation*, Rafael Behr chats to former colleague Helen Lewis about whether Whatsapp has changed the way politics is conducted, her favourite Tik Tok channel, the incestous nature of Scottish politics, what's really behind the UK government's immigration policy, what we can learn from Florida culture wars, why the middle ground is so hard to occupy, what we have learnt from the pandemic, and Helen's take on why so many men love listening to other men on podcasts, plus much more. Extreme opinions are doubly lucrative, shared once by those who passionately agree and then again by the other side as exemplars of wrongness. The arena where news and ideas are debated is whipped into emotional frenzy, which is not a mental state conducive to judicious moderation. It is distressingly rare to find convincing defences of liberal democracy against the twin challenges of populism and nationalism. Rafael Behr does the job perfectly. -- John Peet, Political and Brexit Editor, The Economist
I still get angry, but I am better at seeing what portion of the anger is organically mine and how much is synthetic – a poisonous substance sprayed out by the machinery I operate for work. Rafael Behr talks to Rob Hutton, parliamentary sketch writer at the Critic, about the uneasy relationship between Westminster lobby journalists and MPs. Laws written for the purpose of stirring controversy can only achieve that aim at the expense of good government. The need to broadcast a blunt message to voters with limited appetite for policy nuance militates against sophisticated, evidence-driven solutions to problems that are, as Sunak says, complicated. Stitching up elections is not a left or rightwing proclivity. People who like power resent the idea of giving it away, regardless of the doctrine that won it for them in the first place. It is difficult not to conclude that we are ruled by a generation of meat-headed (my phrase) politicians who are either unaware of how rhetoric can chime with the darkest reaches of 20th-century history (to which Behr is attached by virtue of his murdered forbears) or just don’t care (Boris Johnson).
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The prime minister does have two discernible achievements to his name, both of which are corrections of grievous errors by his immediate predecessors. He put out the bonfire of financial credibility lit by Truss and he replaced Johnson’s toddler tactics with adult diplomacy in relations with the European Union. That still leaves him with an unpopular fiscal policy of rationing resources to a public sector already enfeebled by austerity, and a Brexit policy defensible only as palliation of a chronic syndrome debilitating the economy. The ideological core of British Conservatism now shades into conspiracy theory – joining the dots between disparate agents of liberal and leftwing opinion in politics, media, culture and academia to make a pattern of counter-revolutionary obstruction. This is what great political journalism should be like: wise, witty, tough, unflinching, honest and dare I say it, compassionate too. -- Professor Michael Ignatieff, author of FIRE AND ASHES: SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN POLITICS
Clinging on is easy for tyrants with tools of state repression at their disposal in countries that have little or no history of peaceful transitions between regimes. In established democracies, governed by the rule of law, methods of subversion have to be more subtle. She is also the Visiting Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Sussex.
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