I Can't Hear You

The Israeli-born and now US-based Holocaust historian Omer Bartov has been on a journey. Returning on a visit to Israel in August 2024, he was deeply disturbed not only by the rhetoric of IDF soldiers protesting at the very idea of coexistence with the Palestinians of Gaza but at the degree to which such views had become the common sense of the country. He identified two sentiments: a fear and rage that "threatens to make war into its own end", and "the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza". The parallel with his own study of European societies in the 1930s and 40s should be obvious. A year later, Bartov wrote a noted article for the New York Times - I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It - in which he reluctantly came to the conclusion that Israel was "committing genocide against the Palestinian people". Bartov has now published a book - Israel: What Went Wrong? - in which he discusses how this acceptance of genocide came about, and more particularly how Zionism evolved from a movement of liberation to a settler-colonial project.

I've not read the book, and probably won't because the arguments as summarised in his interview with the Guardian are already well-known. Chief among them is "the original sin of Israel’s founding, the resistance to granting meaningful legal weight to the lofty words contained in the nation’s declaration of independence, coupled with the founders’ subsequent failure to adopt a national constitution and bill of rights." The determination of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, to avoid enshrining citizenship in a constitution, thereby either having to grant rights to Palestinians in situ or immediately formalise a system of apartheid, was not some personal eccentricity but the core of the new state's rationale. As such, genocidal intent has been there since the expansion of Jewish immigration in the 1920s and 30s, even before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. To imagine that Zionism has only lately been perverted, that it has "become" genocidal, is to ignore the logic of its declared goal to create an exclusive Jewish homeland. This is the delusion of liberal Zionism: that there was ever the possibility of satisfying the Zionist cause while also respecting the rights of Palestinians. Ben Gurion recognised this.

What is interesting, if depressing, about Bartov's journey is that he still holds out hope for the return of a liberal Israel. As the interview notes, "Bartov does see a narrow path toward the nation’s peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. A section of the book is devoted to the confederation plan championed by a group of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals called A Land for All – a version of which was originally considered by the United Nations in 1947. Under this scheme, sovereign and independent Palestinian and Jewish states would exist side by side, divided roughly along pre-1967 borders. Citizens of both entities would be allowed to live and travel freely throughout the combined territory, but would vote only in their own national elections – not unlike the way an Italian, for example, can live and work anywhere in the EU while voting in Italy." Before getting into the details of what this plan actually means, or how such a Utopia might come about, it's worth marvelling at the strained parallel with the EU.

The first point to make is that the previous version (the "Partition Plan") failed in 1947 because it was so obviously biased. The Jewish state would have 56% of the Mandatory Territory, the Palestinians would have 43% (the remaining 1% being an internationally-administered Jerusalem and Bethlehem). At the time, the Palestinian (and non-Jewish minority) population was twice the size of the Jewish population: 1.2m versus 600k. Among other things, this would have meant that 45% of the Jewish state population would be Palestinian. Given everything that has happened since, notably the mass expulsions of the Nakba in the following year, it is reasonable to assume they would have been second class citizens and encouraged to depart. The Arab states at the UN clearly saw this as a land-grab and voted against it. The second point to make is that the "pre-1967" borders were not those of 1947 but of 1949, after the First Arab-Israeli War when Israel increased its share of the former Mandatory Territory to 78%, reducing the Palestinians to the West Bank and Gaza. What happened in 1967 was that Israel then took over those areas as well and set about steadily eroding them through settlements and military exclusion zones.

The latest iteration of the confederation plan, as explained by Dahlia Scheindlin, is a liberal attempt to craft a solution that avoids pluralism in any form. It is presented in contrast to two inferior alternatives: "the two solutions usually discussed by policymakers: the failed “two-state solution” framework of the Oslo Accords of 1993, and the “one-state reality”—the currently emerging de facto condition of a single state of Israeli citizens and oppressed Palestinian subjects." What is not to be considered is the single state solution - i.e. equal rights for Palestinians in a merged Israel and Palestine. This is because Zionism always trumps liberalism in liberal Zionism. The plan has obvious echoes of 1947 in its asymmetry. For example, "Palestinian refugees can attain Palestinian citizenship, along with the right of residency in Israel. Existing Israeli settlers will retain Israeli citizenship with residency rights in Palestine if they abide Palestinian laws and sovereignty, and most will not be expelled from where they currently reside." Compare "can" to "will". In other words, the illegal settlements in the West Bank will remain. The freedom of movement and residency is "to be implemented over time", which may mean never.

On the question of enfranchisement, the plan proposes that "Palestinians and Israelis will be able to vote in the national elections of their respective states and in local elections, in whichever state they reside." The problem this gives rise to is the tension it creates between the grant of residency and political influence. Palestinian refugees currently in Lebanon or Jordan aren't going to be granted residency in Israel, and indeed there is every reason to suspect that Israeli Arabs would become more vulnerable: "Palestinians who already have Israeli citizenship will retain it, with the option to have dual citizenship in Palestine." As the UK showed with Shamima Begum, dual citizenship is handy if you want to expel a nominal citizen. Will Palestinians in the West Bank be granted residency in West Jerusalem if they can then form a decisive voting bloc in local elections? The suggestion is that it would be the capital of both states but "structured, by institutional design, to represent both communities", which sounds like the power-sharing that has led to paralysis in Northern Ireland. As that parallel indicates, the likely outcome is for local government to become attenuated and more power reserved to the national authority - i.e. direct rule.

The confederation plan is a phantastic object meant to assuage the cognitive dissonance of Israeli progressives and their supporters in the West. At the heart of the Zionist project is the rejection of pluralism in favour of ethnic exclusivity, the original argument that split Jewish opinion between the Zionist nationalists and the socialist Bund. Liberal opinion in Israel survived for decades by denying this reality in favour of a mythos built on self-defence, cultural superiority and a self-conscious democracy. But this has been too difficult to maintain since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the failure of the Oslo process. Israeli society has become more intolerant towards dissent in its own ranks, with the political left redundant and religious conservatism on the rise. Liberal opinion is now firmly on the right of the political spectrum, more concerned with the image of liberalism than its active practice. This isn't exclusive to Israel: this drift to the right is visible in most countries. But Israel has a particularly acute case of it because it is engaged in systematic violence, from settler assaults in the West Bank (deplored but not restrained) to the invasion of Southern Lebanon.

The latter outrage is symbolically important because that country exists as an affront to Israel. As Ussama Makdisi puts it, "Israel’s expansion into Lebanon and apparent weaponization of Lebanon’s religious diversity ultimately underscores its own commitment to its prevailing ideology as a Jewish state committed to subjugating its regional environment: from the occupied Palestinian territories to the Syrian Golan Heights, and now to southern Lebanon. In that way, Lebanon is its antithesis: a state that reflects, however imperfectly, an indigenous pluralism." Makdisi notes that "Hezbollah does not resist Israel simply because it is a Shiite organization supported by Iran; it resists Israel primarily because Israel has repeatedly invaded, scorched and occupied Lebanese land, and because Israel uprooted and terrorized its community." The attempt to cast Hezbollah as simply an Iranian proxy is a conscious tactic to undermine Lebanon as a state and to suggest that the centuries-old Shiite presence in the south of the country is anomalous as much as it is is a threat to Israel. In other words, Lebanon's legitimacy as a state is called into question by virtue of it multi-ethnicity and its historic attempts at power-sharing. Israel has repeatedly undermined the latter over the years, not just for contingent tactical advantage but because it vehemently rejects power-sharing in principle.

This rejection of pluralism is increasingly visible in the diaspora as well. The current demand is that solidarity with the Jewish community against antisemitism must be exclusive, not qualified by appeals to a wider anti-racism and certainly not tainted by association with the idea of equal rights for Palestinians. This is a demand that some in the West have been happy to cynically exploit for domestic political gain, thereby denigrating the entirety of progressive causes in some cases. It might seem odd that this line has been pushed in particular by the Guardian, but that paper's commitment to liberal Zionism is arguably its most consistent value since the millennium. Leftists arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism fail to appreciate that for many Jews they are identical because they have come to identify Israel exclusively with Zionism. There is no domestic anti-Zionist opposition to speak of, outside of those with religious scruples, while diaspora anti-Zionists are routinely dismissed as self-hating Jews.

Israeli society is, as Omer Bartov noted, fearful and angry and lacking in empathy. It should come as no surprise that Jews in the UK are encouraged to exhibit the same traits, if only in sympathy with Israel. The refusal to accept that sincere anti-racists can deplore antisemitism as much as Islamophobia or the denial of Palestinian rights is necessary because to admit otherwise would be to accept the contention that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that would be a betrayal of Israel or, to put it in Bartov's terms, what it has become. The demand for solidarity with the Jewish community therefore comes with strings attached. You cannot dilute it by extending your empathy to other communities. Your solidarity must be exclusive. For liberal newspapers steadily backtracking on their support for progressive causes, from trans rights to the NHS, this is a model exercise in virtue but also a wonderful opportunity to express their contempt for the left. "Where are those who are usually so vocal in their opposition to racism" asks Jonathan Freedland, a man who has had his fingers in his ears for decades.

Will AI Revive the Centre?

In parallel with the media fears that AI will bring about the collapse of Western civilisation, or at least the loss of jobs among journalists and commentators, there has been a countervailing, more hopeful narrative that AI may in fact save us from the horrors of social media, or at least its negative impact on journalists and commentators. The latest to make the link is John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. The headline and lede provides a summary of his argument: "Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite. Large language models elevate expert consensus and moderate views, in sharp contrast to social platforms". He doesn't offer any evidence for the claim that social media is populist, or even explain what that means in this context. The subject of political polarisation plays an important ideological role in the US, as the corollary of "bipartisanship", hence it is there we find the best evidence for historic trends. And what these show is that polarisation between Democrats and Republicans started to increase in the 1970s for well-known political reasons: the decline of the postwar social and economic consensus and the deliberate embrace of divisive anti-state rhetoric by the Republican Party. 

Social media may have helped amplify that polarisation over the last twenty years but it didn't cause it, so the idea that the technology is inherently polarising is unproven, while the claim that it is populist is simply a category error. In fact, there is evidence that social media increases exposure to different viewpoints: that structurally it tends towards diversity rather than the uniformity of the filter bubble, and that it is traditional media that has more consistently amplified political polarisation (i.e. the New York Times or Fox News). This makes sense when you consider that the consumer of social media has far more (potential) control over what they see and read, despite all the tales of malign algorithms, than the consumer of a tightly-edited newspaper or TV programme. Burn-Murdoch's second claim, that LLMs favour expert consensus and moderate views, assumes that these are related: that the one gives rise to the other. The infamous case of climate change, where the expert consensus has been undermined by traditional media airing the views of lobbyists and motivated sceptics in the service of "balance", suggests otherwise. 

The underlying belief of the hopeful narrative is that LLMs avoid the structural bias and partisan editorialising of traditional media because of their omnivorous nature and because they lack the status consciousness and condescension of human experts. In contrast, social media is problematic because it airs the uncurated opinions of millions, many of whom are idiots. In this worldview, LLMs embody the wisdom of crowds while social media embody the madness of crowds. The idea that media have these inherent epistemological qualities is evident in Burn-Murdoch's potted history, which is worth quoting at length: "Every media revolution has transformed who distributes information, what messages are distributed and what form they take. As such, some media are fundamentally democratising and polarising, widening the pool of publishers and views beyond a narrow elite and amplifying radical and anti-establishment voices. TikTok and the printing press arrived almost 600 years apart but share these characteristics. Others push the opposite way: radio and television had high barriers to entry, creating a monopoly for the voices and views of elites and experts."

The idea that the media changes whose voices are heard is crude technological determinism. The reality is that new technology is absorbed into existing power frameworks. There is feedback from the one to the other and thus change - newspapers gave rise to press barons, for example - but the power framework is dominant and adapts. This is evident in the fact that capitalists control most social media platforms and AI chatbots, an outcome that surprises no one. Equally, few people question whether AI must necessarily follow a capital-intensive development path. We worry about covering the Earth in data centres, but alternative paths are unthinkable, particularly those that would democratise decision-making (that would be populist). Burn-Murdoch's yoking of "democratising and polarising" should raise eyebrows, but we should also remember that "moderate" does not simply mean average. The word comes from the Latin for controlled. And it is control which commends AI to centrists rather than its tendency to "elevate expert consensus", just as the valorisation of such concepts as consensus, bipartisanship, civility and the like is ultimately about ensuring that political discourse is kept within strict bounds.

To return to Burn-Murdoch's history lesson, the moveable type printing press, when introduced in the mid-15th century, was a very expensive and initially rare piece of technology that required a team of craftsmen and labourers to operate. It was the IBM mainframe of its day. It was also quickly put under state control - e.g. the Stationers Company monopoly in England. The idea that ordinary people could access and make use of the press, in the way that they can with a social media platform like TikTok today, is absurd. Cheap prints (chapbooks) did not arrive in any great numbers till a century later and were still subject to censorship up until the Statute of Anne in 1710. And while there was a radical fringe, particularly in respect of religious nonconformism and political dissent during the 17th century, most chapbooks were little different to the popular press of later eras, their content dominated by tall tales, true crime and bawdiness.

While television transmission had high barriers to entry, radio did not. Amateur broadcasters ("radio hams") were a feature from the 1920s onwards, which was hard on the heels of broadcast radio's expansion following the introduction of vacuum tube receivers. It's certainly true that the bulk of broadcast spectrum, and the listening audience, was quickly taken over by large commercial firms and state corporations, like the BBC, but radio was always a more democratic medium than both television and print (for most of its history). Even today, despite the impact of the Internet and the decline of radio as a hobby, there are over 100,000 amateur broadcasting licences held in the UK. Understanding the history is important because it highlights how the existing power framework (the role of the state, the dominance of capital) absorbs the new media. But it also highlights how that media can be adopted and potentially repurposed by the people (democracy).

Burn-Murdoch's central claim is "that where social media’s inherent mechanisms push towards personalisation and fragmentation, LLMs are innately “converging” — their underlying dynamics push them towards objective reality". He sets out to prove this by comparing the responses of AI chatbots on political topics to the general population: "I found that while different AI platforms behave in subtly different ways, all of them nudge people away from the most extreme positions and towards more moderate and expert-aligned stances. On average, Grok guides conversations about policy and society towards the centre-right — a rightward push for most people but a moderating nudge towards the centre for those who start out as conservative hardliners. OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and the Chinese model DeepSeek all exert similarly sized nudges towards a centre-left worldview — a slight leftward nudge for most people but a moderating push away from fringe leftwing positions."

The data he provides to justify this is questionable. The profile of the general (US) population employed in his charts above suggests that Americans are mostly to be found left of the political centre and predominantly at the left extreme (the Y-axis is responses). After some toing-and-froing with him on Blue Sky, it became evident that the source data he was using was designed to accentuate differences between Democrat and Republican voters and that the far left position was essentially that of Barack Obama. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that this converging is simply the product of an LLM-based AI chatbot lacking intentionality and simply tending slightly towards a median position, which he describes as "objective reality", despite an LLM being at one remove from reality. More interesting is to wonder why the chatbot doesn't converge to a greater degree. In other words, why don't we see a normal distribution (a bell-curve) in which the moderate position is predominant? That would be the actual "opposite" of the supposed polarising effect of social media. 

One explanation is that AI's ability to counter the anchoring and confirmation bias that users bring to it is undermined by its desire to be agreeable. There is a commercial rationale to this. People won't use a tool that is confrontational and repeatedly tells them that they're wrong, a problem well-known in areas such as public health policy where expertise is often viewed with suspicion (think vaccines or diet). As Dan Williams puts it, "Being human, experts are often biased, partisan, and simply annoying, and when they seek to “educate” the public, it can be perceived—and is sometimes intended—as condescending and rude. In contrast, LLMs deliver expert opinion without such status threats." This tendency towards sycophancy is well-known. Williams recognises the risks it entails, and the related risk that personalisation may simply reflect the idosyncracies of users, but ultimately he thinks "LLMs will produce much more reliable, expert-aligned information than most of these real-world alternatives [i.e. traditional media and information sources], even if sycophancy and personalisation introduce genuine biases."

I suspect the key for Burn-Murdoch and other political centrists is not that AI "elevates expert consensus and moderate views" but that it marginalises what he describes as extreme or fringe positions: "In addition, I found that while conspiratorial beliefs about topics including rigged elections and a link between vaccines and autism are over-represented among people who post to social media relative to the overall population, the opposite is true of AI chatbots, which almost never express agreement with these claims." But some of today's fringe opinions may turn out to be right. LLMs are expressions of conventional wisdom, but that means they will certainly be wrong about many things because expert opinion is currently wrong or incomplete. That he cites rightwing opinions on election rigging and vaccines is interesting, as not a few leftwing "conspiracy theories" have been proved right of late. In fact, many critiques from the political left have been categorised by centrists as conspiracy theories solely in order that they can be dismissed. Ironically, this has led to many centrist conspiracy theories, such as the prevalence of antisemitism on the left.

Noah Smith offers a typically more trenchant view when he claims that "the people who create LLMs have difficulty imparting their political bias to their creations", but also thinks that "Because of the way they’re trained, LLMs will be a force for homogenization and moderation of opinion", which is just another way of saying that they will promote an orthodoxy. As ever, centrism is deemed to be beyond ideology and therefore bias. It's just common sense, or Burn-Murdoch's "objective reality". Smith's claims are contradicted by Burn-Murdoch's data which show that the chatbots in his study do exhibit a bias consistent with the preferences of their owners (thus Grok is clearly more conservative while the others are more liberal) and that they maintain the (apparently) polarised distribution of the general population, despite "nudging" to the centre. In other words, the evidence actually points to the marginalisation of heterodox opinions more than it does to homogenisation.

The confidence displayed by these supporters of the hopeful narrative has to be read in the context of the last 18 years, since the financial crash of 2008. What that event, and the subsequent failure of austerity, showed was that the political centre was bereft of ideas. It was unable to satisfactorily explain why financialisation was always doomed or why neoliberalism would always tend towards greater inequality without conceding ground to the left, and it had no coherent response to the rise of rightwing anger and bigotry, falling between the stools of pandering ("legitimate concerns") and contempt ("deplorables"). The traditional arguments of centrism - of moderation, technocratic pragmatism and the "third way" - no longer work. The problem that centrist politicians face is not that they are poor communicators, a la Starmer, but that that they have no convincing story to tell, a la Macron or Harris. 

The belief that AI may help nudge the population towards more moderate views is a counsel of despair. The democratic ideal of a Habermasian discourse has given way to the subconscious sculpting of opinion through a technology dominated by the rich. This is little different to the ideological role played by earlier media, such as newspapers and TV, even if it takes a more subtle form. For all the talk of "expert consensus" and "moderate views", what matters is simply the marginalisation of views beyond the narrow bounds of centrism. The role of social media in this, or more accurately the caricature of social media as a cesspit of malign propaganda and wilful ignorance, is simply to provide a "worse" alternative that flatters AI by comparison. To that end, the myth of the filter bubble is joined by the myth that social media is inherently polarising and even "populist". AI won't revive the centre by stealth, and it won't marginalise the "extreme" left any more than traditional media have done, but it may well put a few journalists and commentators out of work.

War! What Is It Good For?

Corey Robin recently made the point that "Despite the differences in personnel between the Bush and the Trump administrations, the parallels between the war in Iraq and the war in Iran are pretty straightforward." Central to this similarity was the way in which "a small group of influencers—neocons in Bush’s case, the Israelis in Trump’s case—make the argument for war on two logically incompatible grounds: a) the enemy regime is poised to be so militarily powerful that if the US waits any longer, the enemy will be able to land a devastating blow against it; b) destroying the enemy regime militarily will be staggeringly easy." Fear at the advance of a rival has been a common cause of war since Thucydides spoke of the "growth in power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta", while naked opportunism has never gone out of fashion. But the combination of the two is particularly characteristic of empires engaged in peripheral but asymmetric rivalry.

Once the nineteenth century "great powers" moved beyond the phase of unapologetic incursion and expansion, which globally came to an end with the Treaty of Versailles and the redistribution of German and Turkish possessions, and notwithstanding the temporary revival of territorial aggrandisement by Fascist Italy in Africa and Nazi Germany in Europe, colonial wars were essentially defensive: the "policing" operations and resistance to liberation movements that marked the interwar years and then the 30 years between the end of World War Two and the fall of Saigon. Intervention in Korea and Vietnam were both sold as necessary to prevent communist advance elsewhere (what became known as the Domino Theory), but also as wars that could be contained - an opportunity to strike a decisive blow without risking escalation - because the Soviet Union made it plain it wouldn't put its troops on the front-line in the first and China did likewise in the second.

One reason for presenting these conflicts as discrete reactions to local provocation was to avoid identifying the links and similarities, as Robin has done, other than the convenient link of a communist masterplan for world domination. In other words, to avoid admitting that these were essentially imperial wars of choice "over there" in which the trigger was not a communist plot (the liberation movements were typically nationalist, with communist parties coming to the fore as a result of a Cold War paradigm being imposed by the US), or some barbarian recidivism (the British stance in Kenya, for example), but usually an attempt by the hegemon (global or regional) to force the geopolitical map into a preferred shape or simply to remind the "natives" who's boss. The history of British and American dealings with Iran since the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh is a textbook example.

The claim that the Iran War has been a strategic defeat for the US and Israel should be treated with scepticism, and that's before considering that the war may well not be over as Israel continues to pound Lebanon and Iran continues to restrict access to the Strait of Hormuz in response. The claim is independent of the state of the conflict and stems from the belief that Trump and Netanyahu have failed in their aims and left Iran stronger. Up until literally the day before the ceasefire was announced, these same commentators were claiming that the US did not have any clear war aims, so in what sense has it failed to achieve them? If the actual aim was to (once more) trash a Middle Eastern country, pour encourager les autres, then arguably it's mission accomplished, once again.

Likewise, Israel got cover for its incursions into, and possible continued occupation of, Southern Lebanon. For all the noise made by the Israeli opposition, Netanyahu has not diverged from mainstream policy, whether couched in terms of "mowing the lawn" or Eretz Israel. Israel does not want regime change in Iran as this would jeopardise their own position vis-a-vis Lebanon and Gaza. Tehran's support for Hezbollah and Hamas has always been primarily opportunistic, but so too has Israel's demonisation of both groups (and willingness to covertly strengthen them at times) and the supposed malevolent influence of Iran. The fears of the Israeli opposition centre on the idea that Netanyahu is jeopardising the relationship with the US by alienating the national security establishment in Washington (always more important than Trump, who will be gone ere long). They're less bothered about alienating European leaders, which is why the latter have suddenly been emboldened to criticise Israel's bombardment of Lebanon (in the expectation that Trump will rein Netanyahu in).

The idea that Iran is stronger now because it controls the Strait and will exact a lucrative toll (supposedly worth 20% of its current GDP, according to analysts at J P Morgan) ignores that the waterway is evenly divided with Oman, which presumably isn't about to block its half of it or even charge a toll (as that would monumentally piss off its neighbours in the Gulf). And the idea that the world has suddenly woken up to the vulnerability of the Strait is preposterous. Not only did the 2021 blockage of the Suez Canal bring home the sensitivity of the global economy to the interruption of such strategic sea lanes, but the specific criticality of the Strait of Hormuz was already proven back in the 1980s during the Tanker War episode of the wider Iraq-Iran War. The progress of the war to date has shown that the Gulf states are capable of defending themselves against Iran, short of an unlikely seaborne invasion, and the US fleet will continue to patrol the Gulf, even if the chances of an amphibious landing on Iranian territory remain remote.

The reports of how this particular casus belli sausage was made, notably the New York Times article by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, place great emphasis on Netanyahu's ability to sway Trump. The idea that various people have a hold on the US President, whether through Putin's kompromat or Netanyahu's Svengali-like persuasive powers (an old antisemitic trope, it should be noted), ignores that his decison-making process is often peremptory and even arbitrary. As the article makes clear, Trump wasn't particularly interested in the idea of a popular uprising in Iran and regime change, which were based on optimistic claims by the Israelis that few in Washington thought credible. What attracted the US President was killing Iran's Supreme Leader (whose title must be a provocation to Trump's vanity) and destroying the Iranian military almost at a whim. In other words, it was the spectacle of hegemonic power unrestrained by morality - we can kill anyone we like and no one can stand up to us - that proved decisive.

Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, America's military doctrine has been not only to over-match all possible rivals but to use overwhelming force when conflict occurs. It is the spectacular use of that force that has driven strategy, rather than any attempt to bring about genuine regime change, let alone democratisation, hence the decision not to invade Iraq after the shock and awe of the First Gulf War, and the abject failure of "nation-building" after the Second Gulf War. As Jean Baudrillard noted in 1991, this isn't war but a masquerade: a performance of war that amounts to an atrocity. Since then, the US has conducted atrocities, in this sense of spectacular expressions of destruction and killing power, across the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, and its approach has enabled similar atrocities by Israel (in Gaza and Lebanon) and the Gulf states (via proxies in Syria and now Sudan). The assassination of foreign leaders is at one with the bombing of schools and hospitals. The violence is an end in itself, not the means to any geopolitical reordering.

Local and Global

There's a new think-tank in town. Verdant introduces itself as "A new kind of think tank for a just and green future". Let me say from the start that I'm all in favour of justice and environmental responsibility, and the initial proposals are progressive, but what I'm interested in here is the form that this endeavour has taken (implied by that "new kind"), what that says about its future trajectory, and what that might mean for Green Party policy in thorny areas beyond justice and the climate, such as social, economic and foreign policy. It would be easy to dismiss Verdant as James Meadway and a couple of eager kids in a trenchcoat, and the Guardian's framing of its initial report on efficiency savings as a "Doge of the left" was clearly patronising, though James sensibly welcomed the publicity, but what its launch immediately confirms is that there is an appetite for new thinking on the left, which reflects both the intellectual void that is the current Labour Party and the dedicated obscurantism of Your Party. The question is, what does Verdant see as the gap in the market?

I put it in those terms because what is striking is the way that Verdant has positioned itself in the mainstream of think tank culture, with its emphasis on the marketplace of ideas and its employment of generic business-speak. Again, this looks tactically astute as it increases the chances of coverage by the likes of the Guardian and even Bloomberg, which previewed the launch back in December as an "attempt to bridge the distance between party members who favor radical socialist reform, and those who recognize the UK’s dependence on international investors for its debt-financing requirements and want to swing left while keeping bond markets on-side." What this in turn suggests is that Verdant will avoid creating easy targets for dismissal and derision by the media, so don't expect dense essays on Modern Monetary Theory, let alone Critical Race Theory. What we can expect is adherence to liberal shibboleths such as pragmatism and fiscal prudence. As co-founder Deborah Doane describes it, Verdant is "a deliberate effort to build the kind of institutional power that turns positive environmental and socially just ideas – especially underpinned by sound economic thinking – into deliverable political outcomes". 

The implication of a focus on practical policy is that the Greens are on the verge of power, or at least of sufficient Parliamentary leverage to influence a future government. The emphasis on "sound economic thinking" shows that they recognise the biggest threat to the project would be to be labelled as fiscally incontinent and thus administratively incompetent, which in turn makes it clear that this will be a well-behaved left initiative - i.e. green-tinged social democracy. That Doane's opening blog post foregrounds Liz Truss is not simply to decry the pernicious influence of the Tufton Street eco-system of rightwing think tanks. It is also intended to offer reassurance to the markets. At some point, Verdant will come up against the hard constraints of contemporary political economy (constraints becoming ever more apparent with the fallout from the war on Iran), but for now the greater constraints are those of the think tank sector itself.

Chief among these is the idea that think tanks are producers launching new wares into a choosy market: "Have you considered beige, madam?" The model of policy entrepreneurship originates in the American political system and was driven by two trends. One was the growing role of market research and opinion polling in the development of policy from the 1950s onwards, and the other was the growing role of money in determining policy priorities. This combination arrived in the UK, boosted by Margaret Thatcher's cultivation of the neoliberal thought collective, in the 1970s. Prior to that, policy think tanks tended to be straighforwardly partisan, such as the Fabians and the Bow Group, or had originated in charitable endeavours concerned with social policy that acquired an invigilatory role in an expanded welfare state, such as the Nuffield Trust, King's Fund and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Neoliberal hegemony has meant that, regardless of their historical origins or ideological bent, think tanks today subscribe to a common style when it comes to what they deliver (the commodified report, the press release etc) and the language they employ in delivering it (the vocabulary is a mix of corporate-speak, journalese and the tropes of academic respectability).

Verdant's homepage starts by saying "We are committed to shaping inclusive policies that don’t just analyse ideas; we build them collaboratively, bringing citizens and experts together to design the next chapter of progressive politics in the UK. We want to ensure that the people most affected by policies help to shape and refine them, strengthening their legitimacy with politicians, media and the public." That is good as it emphasises inclusion and democratic legitimacy, but it is telling that the page ends with key deliverables for three groups: policymakers, journalists and funders (Bloomberg noted back in December that "It is in discussions around securing funding with philanthropic organizations and high-net-worth individuals"). Again, this is pragmatic, but it highlights the constraints of the sector: the need for money and the necessity of keeping the media supplied with "Clear analysis you can quote" (sic).

Verdant's first report - Waste Not: How the UK government can save money and support public services - further highlights the constraints of the genre. It was "developed with input from a short discussion with 10 varied members of the public from across England who had previously taken part in citizens’ assemblies and juries organised by Shared Future". You can either see this as dependence on the focus group method, which is well-known for being steered to provide predetermined conclusions (consider the Labour Party's investment in the construction of its "hero voter" by Deborah Mattinson et al and the reality of a shrinking electoral bloc), or as evidence of a real commitment to inclusion and dialogue. What I would emphasise is that the report thus appears to be generated out of rational debate, like a perfect example of Habermasian communicative reason, even though it frankly admits to using this simply as a filter for prepared ideas (not many voters will be au fait with the lessons learned from the Government Digital Service). 

What is missing here is the diagnosis that informs the prognosis. While some think tanks happily provide this within limits, e.g. the structural failings of a specific industry or public service that justifies "reform", there is an avoidance of systemic critique, e.g. why does capitalism produce poverty? You're not going to get a regular hearing in the Guardian, let alone Bloomberg, if you do that. The report does provide context for its proposals on how to reduce waste and save costs by focusing on how not to do it, specifically the self-harm of austerity and the vandalism of DOGE (amusingly, Heather Stewart's report in the Guardian mentioned the latter four times but the former not once). But this serves to obscure the gap in the analysis of its chosen areas. For example, why is defence procurement "broken" and "notoriously wasteful"? The answer surely has as much to do with defence strategy and priorities (those pointless aircraft carriers) as it does with poor government process and industry graft.

The proposal for a Chief Savings Officer, borrowed from Zohran Mandami's fledgling administration in New York, is obviously an example of corporate-speak infesting the public realm, but it is also an example of the idea that the machinery of government can be galvanised by appointing another mover and shaker with corporate nous. Given the long line of "Tsars" and "champions" appointed by the government over the years, you'd think some scepticism might be in order (on a more positive note, the report does urge a "word of caution" on the ignorant technophilia of Peter Kyle in respect of the state's adoption of AI, which rhetorically followed the template of Tony Blair's embrace of globalisation twenty years ago and has clearly learned nothing from history). The report does pay tribute to the value of tacit (i.e. shopfloor) knowledge in its proposal for an inhouse management consultancy, but it is couched in the terms of pull ("bringing it into the management consultancy and generalising the lessons learned") rather than push (worker autonomy).

Despite the growing tendency of the rightwing and centrist press to paint the Greens as loony lefties, now apparently infested with cranks and antisemites, it is clear that the party's strategy isn't to push leftwards so much as to occupy the centre-left space vacated by Labour as the latter attempts to dominate the centre-right in place of the Conservatives. This means there will be a certain amount of singing the old songs of social democracy, from nationalisation to more progressive taxation, and a lot of appeals to the mythos of the "soft left" (the relative popularity of Ed Miliband's green turn has benefited the Greens far more than Labour), but more radical proposals around wealth distribution, industrial democracy and foreign relations will probably be marginalised in order to keep the bond markets on-side. Zack Polanski has personal and political capital sufficient to argue for a more Spain-like posture in relation to the US and Israel, and to advocate de-proscribing Palestine Action, but he isn't going to be implementing BDS across government or closing airfields to US planes.

What will be interesting as we approach the next general election is the extent to which Verdant pushes the envelope of the possible in relation to Green policy beyond the crowd-pleasing vibes that distinguished its Gorton and Denton by-election victory. Its first report is a positive sign that it hopes to smuggle in some more radical ideas under cover of the think tank genre. The idea that only the government can secure public spending savings through better control of procurement and outsourcing is radical insofar as it challenges the neoliberal consensus about private sector efficiency and the wisdom of markets. Personalising this in the role of a Chief Savings Officer is forgiveable. Likewise, developing management expertise within the state is a recognition that public services have unique needs in terms of coordination and control that do not map well onto private sector models. Institutionalising this as inhouse consultancy or a centre of excellence is, again, forgiveable. 

There are plenty of opportunities to educate the public on the merits of collective ownership, particularly in respect of environmental protection, and ample (and topical) examples of the supply-chain vulnerabilities caused by globalisation that can only be mitigated by the state. What remains less certain is whether the electorate understands that reducing (let alone reversing) climate change can only be achieved by forswearing the traditional model of economic growth, and that this inevitably entails either the systematic redistribution of wealth, both intra and inter-nationally, or a war of all against all. The tension at the heart of green politics is between the competing demands and attractions of the local and the global. The phrase "Think globally, act locally" is actually an avoidance of that truth in that it neatly segregates them into parallel zones. 

Verdant's first report focuses on the local, albeit at a national scale befitting a think tank that needs to attract the national media. What will be interesting is whether it will broaden the horizon of British voters in future - highlighting the connections between settler violence in the West Bank and low pay in Blackpool, for example, not just the linkage between the Straits of Hormuz and the price of food - or whether it will keep to the comfort zone of domestic policy. Arguably, it was the failure to expand postwar public education to the international stage - a result of the UK wishing to whitewash its colonial history - that ultimately undermined British social democracy by reducing policy to a series of domestic zero-sum struggles: the fiscal (taxpayers versus claimants), the industrial (the unions versus consumers), and the social (sectional interests, aka identity politics, versus the imagined community of the nation). If I have a concern about Verdant it isn't the reliance on corporate-speak but the fear that marginalising the international dimension may go beyond tactical prudence.

The Habermas Machine

The death of the German public intellectual Jurgen Habermas at the age of 96 provides a useful starting point to consider the current developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). I referred to him as a public intellectual, rather than a philosopher or a sociologist, because his political role - and I do literally mean his performance of a role - is the bulk of his legacy. In the future, few outside of academia will read his works, such as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere or The Theory of Communicative Action, but his ideas about democratic discourse, suitably vulgarised, will survive in the memory of his liberal admirers. This memory was summarised by the Guardian's editorial that marked his death in two statements: first, "that our nature as linguistic beings puts reason and the search for consensus at the core of who we are"; and second, that Habermas's "concept of the public sphere, where rational debate can take place and disagreements be brokered, implied pluralism, civility and inclusion." 

The first statement is little more than obeisance to the just-so story of the Enlightenment, which ignores the realities of power and the irreconcilable interests of class in favour of an essentialist abstraction: Rodney King's "Can't we all just get along?" In particular, it sidelines the key criticism of instrumental reason advanced by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was the intellectual context of Habermas's emergence in the postwar era as a junior member of the Frankfurt School before he struck out on his own. The second statement ignores the structural constraints on the public sphere that make a mockery of such terms as pluralism, civility and inclusion. An object example would be the closing down of debate on Gaza in Germany, which Habermas himself contributed to by co-signing a statement by established academics in November 2023 that Israel's response to the October 7th attack was "justified".

Being on the wrong side of history is an occupational hazard for any public intellectual, but in Habermas's case losing the public argument became a distinguishing feature. As Peter Verovšek put it: "While it is certainly true that Habermas was accorded a certain respect as the éminence grise of the German public sphere, this recognition is more visible in the vehemence with which he was attacked than in the agreement his interventions found. ... Habermas never lost his commitment to democracy — to the idea that he could only present arguments, leaving his fellow citizens the communicative agency to decide what they thought and what they wanted to do, even if their decisions would often go against him". What this highlights for me is the extent to which Habermas was engaged (perhaps unwittingly) in a performance, like the court jester whose lèse-majesté is indulged but ultimately ignored.

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued that there was a fundamental shift in the 18th century from a "representational" culture centred on the court, where power was imposed through ritual and splendour, to a "public" culture centred on dialogue, criticism and consensus in multiple, more modest and disparate arenas, from coffee houses to Masonic lodges, which arose as a result of capitalism. There are two points to make about this. First, that the historical reality was less clear cut, the simple disjuncture of Habermas's tale ignoring the epistemological traditions of scholasticism and the Rennaisance as well as the persistence (and even recrudescence under Fascism) of overpowering ritual and splendour. And second, that the public sphere birthed by capitalism was just as much of a performance of power, a point noted not only by Adorno and Horkheimer but by later theorists such as Michel Foucault. The quadrille may have replaced the minuet, but they were both dances.

So what has all this got to do with AI? One claim is that AI may help achieve consensus in the realm of politics by mediating discourse: a theory tested by Google DeepMind's so-called Habermas Machine. Large language models (LLMs) are built on discourse in the form of written statements. These may be assertions (discourse is not limited to dialogue), or they may be commentary on other statements: disputations, counter-arguments, critique. These statements may or may not have a truth value. Though the appetite for more training data has meant that more and more of what is fed into the machine is low-grade, and increasingly the recycled slop of AI itself, the original intent was to privilege academic and technical literature on the grounds that this would be more reliably truthful. This meant absorbing the academic (even scholastic) paradigms inherent in the data: exegesis, citation, disputation. This preference isn't novel in digital technology. Google's Page Rank is a paradigmatic application of peer review, after all. 

The result is that AI's determination to be authoritative leads it to "generate detailed “reports”, including names and dates, references and sources – the kind of material that suggests deep research and understanding, but may in fact be hallucinated or nonexistent." AI aims to be plausible by mimicing the forms and tropes of academic and scientific publication. Given all that we know about the institutional biases of academia, the prevalence of hoaxes and the crisis of replicability, is it any wonder that AI generates bullshit? AI's determination isn't a product of the data but of the programming. It has become fashionable to talk of LLMs as inscrutable, which leads to the anthropomorphism of "consciousness", but the reality is that they are curated and operate within quite strict boundaries. AI is problematic because of the biases inherent in the training data but also because of the trainers' own biases encoded into the guardrails - e.g. the pre-emptive interventions intended to stop it going full Mecha-Hitler - and the micro-decisions of thousands of human data "cleaners". 

The American blogger Noah Smith recently claimed that "AI is a force for moderation. If I'm a Republican, and I talk to AI, I'm talking to something that was trained on data from both Republicans and Democrats. So the AI is more likely to pull me towards the center." The assumption that LLMs are big enough to avoid bias, like the idea of an equidistant "center", ignores the role of selection (both in the sense of what gets published and what is absorbed into the model) and misunderstands that there are real differences in political language. While to outside observers the Democrats and Republicans look like two wings of the same party, as Gore Vidal once memorably noted, they employ distinct vocabularies and rhetorical forms. The Democrats also want to bomb Iran and provide more money and arms to Israel, they just deplore the vulgarity of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. 

In simple terms, conservatives tend to be more assertive while centrists place a higher value on civility. Each can be considered a strategy of domination, arguably echoing Habermas's distinction between the representational (imposed) and the public (consensual). In other words, Republican and Democrat data (written statements that reflect their ideological positions) are not necessarily the same, not just in their differences of vocabulary ("liberty" and "wealth" versus "society" and "investment" etc) but in the force and style of their arguments (confidently normative versus cautiously empirical, for example). Consequently, there is no good reason to believe that AI will avoid bias in its interpretation. It depends on what it has come to value through training and what parameters it has been given by its all-too-human programmers. 

We also have to bear in mind that AI is backward-looking, just as the academic and scientific milieux it relies on are. It privileges established knowledge (which may be wrong), which means it is inevitably conservative: there can be no paradigm shift, let alone a singularity. It lacks the imagination that distinguishes genuine human intelligence. In Habermas's lifeworld, knowledge is advanced by research and the gathering of more data, ultimately through the continuing growth of the global population - i.e. by the reproduction of human intelligence and the renewed experience of the world. The problem for AI, which has been brewing for some years and cannot be offset by "more compute", is that the quality of fresh data has plummeted because we've already used all the good stuff. Its attempts to originate knowledge, to create novel data by inference, too often result in hallucinations that strive for the credibility of form, not of substance. 

Habermas fulfilled a necessary role for postwar Germany, advocating and personally exemplifying a theory of participatory democracy while the Ordoliberal establishment secured market liberalism from democratic challenge. At the crucial juncture of 1968, he turned against the socialist student movement. Thereafter, for all his denunciations of the right in the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) and his later criticisms of the EU's shortcomings, he functioned as the tame conscience of German liberalism. Just as Habermas lapsed into irrelevance, so AI will become ever more conservative as it strives for authoritativeness (borrowing the name of an eminent German thinker without his permission being an example of this) and as the economic incentives encourage a dumbing-down for safety's sake (being sued for consequential damages is a bigger worry than being sued for copyright breaches). Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will remain as much of a Utopian ideal, just out of reach, as a public sphere where pluralism, civility and inclusion reign.