On Consensus

Hannah Arendt, in a footnote to The Origins of Totalitarianism, quoted a twentieth century American political historian, Arthur N. Holcombe, on a distinctive feature of political duopolies: "[he] rightly stressed that in the double party system the principles of the two parties 'have tended to be the same. If they had not been substantially the same, submission to the victor would have been intolerable to the vanquished'". This provides an insight into the tendency to tack towards the political centre, but it also explains how politicians can come to accommodate a more radical departure towards what in effect becomes the new centre, as happened to Labour over the decade between 1983 and 1993. One reason why Corbynism failed to dominate the party, despite many of its prescriptions quickly becoming hegemonic, is that it ran out of time. It wasted two years trying to compromise with the PLP and then dissipated its post-2017 credit by vacillating over Brexit. The continuing hysteria of the Labour right up to December, and the current determination of the media to consign Corbyn's tenure to the oubliette of history, indicate that we were still in the second of the five stages of grief: denial. The bargaining had yet to begin. If history is any guide, Corbyn would have needed another five years and a succesful post-Brexit election.

Holcombe's theory suggests not only that one party can set the political agenda, but that it can effectively exert a gravitational pull on the policy platform of the other, for reasons pyschological as well as psephological. The obvious examples from the UK are the way that Labour in the late-40s set the parameters of political dispute for the next 30 years, while the Conservatives did likewise in the late-70s. In Holcombe's reading, this was as much due to an anxiety to narrow the distance between the parties as any profound shift in convictions or an accommodation with the presumed preferences of the electorate. Of course, we shouldn't exaggerate the idea of a sharp turn. As David Edgerton has pointed out, the Tories had laid the foundations of the welfare state in the interwar years, while Labour had begun to shift right on economic policy in 1974 (the SDP failed because while the Tories opened up a space on the centre-right, Labour was already moving to fill it - Bennism was fundamentally defensive, and arguably so was Corbynism). That said, for all the pragmatic talk of "new realities" and "what works", New Labour's turn to neoliberalism exhibited the messianic zeal of the convert (the Blairite dismissal of Corbyn's supporters as a cult was always guilty projection).

In contrast to the long half-century after 1945, the post-2008 era has been marked by abortive consensus, most notably on austerity. As is his wont, Simon Wren-Lewis attributes this to the influence of the press: "The opposition’s initial attempt to strike some balance between the goals of reducing the deficit and protecting the recovery (a misguided balance - the recovery should have come first) were abandoned because the media had decided that reducing the deficit was the only game in town". Revealingly, he is talking here about the post-2010 years, when Labour was the opposition. In retrospect it is clear that whether Gordon Brown saved the financial system in 2008/9, by encouraging the major economies to move quickly to bank bailouts and temporary nationalisation, he most definitely failed to set the political agenda in the run-up to the 2010 general election when he had the advantage of incumbency. One plausible explanation is that he couldn't free himself from the mental straitjacket of prudence, which allowed the Conservative party, with the ample assistance of the media, to make the political weather.

Austerity has few defenders today. It failed to shrink the state, as many of its advocates hoped, while leaving it weakened and vulnerable, as many of its critics feared (the imminent collapse of the NHS under the impact of seasonal flu has been forecast for some years now, so the greater impact of Covid-19 should surprise no one). The result is a new appreciation of both the state's capability as a backstop in the face of market collapse and social disruption, and of the need to build resilience and contingent capacity into public services (instead "We have built a fragile state", as Chris Cook puts it). This suggests that a new consensus is emerging around a reinvigorated state but there is no guarantee that this won't prove to be as abortive as austerity. The Tories appear to have stolen some of Labour's clothes in embracing intervention, but it's clear from the detail of the Chancellor's various announcements that there will be no shift in the balance of power between capital and labour and that the Treasury view will be reimposed at the earliest opportunity.

The reality of this new "one nation Toryism" will probably be an incoherent mashup of post-Brexit deregulation and grands projets in the style of the 50s and 60s (many of which were also aborted). The cost of Covid-19 to the exchequer will no doubt lead to renewed calls for cuts in public expenditure and increased taxes on labour (rather than wealth), which will be justified as "belt-tightening" and "shared sacrifice", while the Brexit-amplified recession will stimulate demands for better social protection and yet more valorisation of the Attlee years (I'm surprised the BBC hasn't already commissioned a historical drama about "Clem", with Patrick Stewart in the title role). There seems no obvious resolution of the tension between state and market on the horizon. The idea of a radical departure to a new consensus, such as the Green New Deal, has pretty much died a death with the political demise first of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell in the UK and now of Bernie Sanders in the US. Those hoping that Ed Miliband will single-handedly revive it are likely to be disappointed. 

Both Corbyn and Sanders were ultimately vilified for refusing to subscribe to the jerry-built  consensus of the last decade on the incapacity of the state and the need to restrain public expenditure. That they have been proved right by events is irrelevant. In the two-party system what matters is that you don't move too far away from the other and make submission intolerable to the vanquished, as Holcombe put it. Despite Trump, the Republican party has not shifted ideologically since the days of George W. Bush, nor have the Democrats since Bill Clinton, reflecting the persistence of the Reagan consensus. In the UK, the recurrent talk of a government of national unity and the militant tone-policing directed at the left serves to narrow the gap further. The early talk of "responsible opposition" around Keir Starmer is not encouraging. It would be easy at this point to wheel out the old Gramsci quote about how the new cannot be born and so gives rise to morbid symptoms, but it would be more fruitful to ask why a new consensus cannot be forged, which in part means asking why Corbynism failed.

The essential charge against Corbyn is that he wasn't ruthless enough. He didn't remake the party, beyond inadvertantly prompting the auto-deselections of the Change UK clique; he tried to accommodate both pro and anti-Brexit forces, rather than sticking to his early principled stance, thereby fatally undermining the party's chances in a Brexit-dominated election; and his collegiate approach to policy development meant that the platform, while thorough, was slow to coalesce and too little thought was given to selling it outside traditional movement channels. This suggests that "Corbynism" suffered from the man's own subordinate history within the party and his personal decency, but a better interpretation is that he was institutionalised and also at heart a liberal (an irony that will go unappreciated by his critics). As Katrina Forrester puts it, "one of its strategic failures was trusting in the imaginative force of policy to create political constituencies. Corbynism was a kind of socialist project—the appeal, for socialists, was in large part its movement-building promise and its potential for antagonism—but at work in the election campaign was nonetheless a liberal trust in the power of policies to persuade."

Labour has always been an alliance between a wider socialist movement, a narrow trade union movement and a party apparat that disproportionately represented the professional classes. The fragmentation of the first following the rise of the New Left in the 60s and 70s, and the decline of the second from the 80s onwards, led to the dominance of the last in the form of New Labour and an associated shift towards neoliberalism: the "third way". What Corbyn offered was a rebalancing, but one in which the historic tensions between the New Left and the unions, around topics such as immigration and diversity, could be glossed over in support of a common economic policy and a sincere commitment to individual and collective rights. In the event, Brexit created a new fracture across all three groups, throwing Corbyn's delicate coalition out of balance. It's too early to say what "Starmerism" will actually be, but it's not too early to note that it is already marginalising movement socialists and the unions (or at least Unite), while promoting representatives of the professional classes to sustained liberal applause. This, rather than the New Statesman's invention of a soft-left in mild antagonism with the old right, is what will ultimately matter in terms of the party's positioning relative to the Conservatives.

This shift doesn't preclude Labour making the weather with a policy platform that inherits much from the Corbyn era, particularly given the current propitious circumstances in which to make the case for a more dirigiste national economy, but it's hard to believe that this radicalism would be enthusiastically maintained in the absence of the Covid-19 crisis, particularly once the media got to work on Starmer, and there remains the suspicion that in the debate on how to pay for the recovery the liberal defence of historic wealth will tip the balance towards a mix of "smart austerity" and increased taxes on workers and consumption. A new consensus is possible around state activism, but it is likely to prove abortive because neither of the two main parties are willing to commit to it wholeheartedly. We may well see a revived interest in the foundational economy and basic services, but I doubt we'll see significant nationalisation or a basic income funded from wealth expropriation and capital growth.

Even if the intellectual hegemony of neoliberalism is finally broken (which I think unlikely in the near future), the self-interest of the Tories' electoral coalition will rule out wealth taxes and restrain public expenditure, while Labour's dominant liberalism and the social prejudices of its professional apparat will prompt policy caution and a renewed respect for "wealth-creators". For all the "changed utterly" takes, Covid-19 may simply not be damaging enough to jolt politics into a new groove. More worringly, the "holiday of exchange value" occasioned by the crisis might futher encourage the moral valuation independent of the price system that has already been enabled by digital technology (what Will Davies has referred to as platform social-ism). Combine that with the petty authoritarianism of the police and the press, recently on show in the scolding of sunbathers, and the willingness of many British people to turn informer ("Are we the baddies?"), and we might well find that the future political consensus looks something like the Chinese social credit system with added Union Jackbootery.