Authoritarians and Dirtbags

Earlier this week, Paul Mason circulated a pre-publication draft of a new paper by the political scientist Paula Surridge. Entitled 'Values, volatility and voting: understanding voters in England 2015-2019', it is the latest installment in the ongoing debate about the role that "values" play in the preferences of the electorate, relative to traditional "economic" concerns. The paper focuses on the last three general elections, with the obvious implication of "hard lessons for Labour". It thus ignores the 1980s, which is arguably when values - as expressions of cultural norms rather than philosophical principles - were formally reintroduced to politics with the reaction to the permissive legacy of the 1960s that Margaret Thatcher supposedly embodied (see also the parallel history of the US Moral Majority). It also ignores New Labour's appropriation of values in the 1990s ("Tough on crime" etc) and its steady loss of public support in government during the 2000s despite its increasing commitment to reactionary rhetoric and authoritarian social policy. In other words, this is about Labour post-Blair.

What caught my eye were the statements employed to locate survey respondents on the two contrasting axes: the left-right (economics), and the liberal-authoritarian (values). It is telling that the statements used to position voters on the two scales have quite different "voices". The materialist statements read as if they were the product of a vox-pop or focus group; in contrast, the non-materialist statements read like newspaper editorials.

Left-right scale:

- Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off
- Big business benefits owners at the expense of workers
- Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation's wealth
- There is one law for the rich and one for the poor
- Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance

Liberal-authoritarian scale:

- Young people don't have enough respect for traditional values
- Censorship is necessary to uphold moral values
- For some crimes, the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence
- Schools should teach children to obey authority
- People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences

Of course, we shouldn't imagine the one as authentic and the other as inauthentic. The economic statements could have come from a Boulting brothers' film, while the value statements can be easily-sourced in most pubs. Both sets of statements are freighted with priors ("ordinary", "fair" etc), but there is a clear difference in tone. One explanation is that newspapers, as predominantly rightwing propaganda, tend to focus more on values than economic justice, so they are simply more likely to use the associated vocabulary, which then reinforces common parlance. But this doesn't explain why the five value statements should focus on respect, morality, crime (twice) and authority. Compassion and tolerance are values too, but neither is explicitly addressed and can only be negatively inferred (consider in this context the tortured attempts by Labour politicians to describe "British values" in recent decades). There is an ideology implicit in the choice of these particular statements.

Surridge claims that "These two value dimensions are theoretically, and empirically, uncorrelated at the individual level. This means that it is not possible to predict where a voter is positioned on the ‘liberal-authoritarian’ dimension by knowing their position on the ‘left-right’ dimension." And yet she also notes that "The means [i.e. statistical averages] of the scales indicate that on average voters were to the left of the notional centre point of the left-right scale and to the ‘authoritarian’ end of the liberal-authoritarian scale." In other words, we have a structure that suggests a sweet spot just inside the "left authoritarian" quadrant. Any biaxial analysis will claim that the axes are independent, but in this case they're clearly interdependent. Much of what we articulate as values are actually the product of material conditions and our response to them (e.g. fear encourages mistrust), while statements about those conditions are in turn coloured by our values (e.g. the expectation of fairness). In this sense, the social history of Britain since the late-1970s has been about how changes in the economy and associated ideology have influenced sentiments. For example, precarity has eroded solidarity while the notion of human capital has encouraged a dismissive attitude towards welfare.

The focus on values and how they interact with the material dimension has allowed the political field to be conceptually fragmented, first into quadrants and then into more granular groupings of dubious accuracy. This is much more pronounced on the left than the right, which is a reflection less of social reality than the belief that the left is fissiparous coupled with the overwhelming media power dedicated to proving the point by encouraging factionalism. The media's anthropology of the right tends towards court politics (who now remembers the Cameroonians?) while largely ignoring the differences between fractions of capital (hence Brexit was analysed more through the lens of values than economics). In contrast, the media's anthropology of the left is obsessive about lineage (e.g. Tom Newton Dunn's notorious exposé) and difference, from the rivalry between Unite and Unison officials to the heterodoxy of the dirtbag left. The aim is to deny the possibility of a progressive coalition centred on economic justice and social equality. As this combination is ostensibly respectable, it has become necessary to associate it with repellent characteristics, hence the insistence that the Nazis were socialists or the perennial attempts to link the left with support for terrorism.

Many of the Surridge's findings will come as no surprise: that voters on the centre-left economically but in the middle of the values scale were more likely to vote Conservative than Labour in both 2015 and 2019 (it was 50/50 in 2017), which obviously calls into question what centre-left actually means; that Remain voters with right-wing economic views preferred the Conservatives, despite the supposed importance of Brexit to them; and that voters with left-wing economic views but authoritarian values similarly biased towards the Conservatives, particularly in 2019. This simply reinforces the anecdotal evidence of last December when soi-disant liberals once more found excuses to vote for a government that they were sure would be terrible, while Labour found its vote eroded by both FBPE obduracy and "Corbyn is a terrorist-lover" smears. So what does it mean? Mason's stated concern is coalition-building: "I do want to build the labour movement as a coalition that includes the so-called 'authoritarian' left voters, but to the extent we fail to keep the so-called left authoritarians (nationalise railways and bring back death penalty, as @p_surridge describes) you have to then construct a wider alliance with the 'left liberals'".

As a journalist, Mason tends to talk in terms of discrete electoral blocs, but it should be obvious that the electorate is more complicated than that, and certainly more complicated than the quadrants implied by the biaxial model. After all, it is possible to support nationalising the railways but not the death penalty. If you don't recognise that complexity, you end up appealing to a fictional population: missing your target because the rhetoric is that little bit off while alienating previous voters. New Labour's attempts to reinforce its electoral coalition by shifts towards the authoritarian pole had a poor record (so much so that's its now trying to burnish its anti-Nazi history). The party's one success in broadening its coalition was in 2017, post-Blair, when it retained leavers while attracting younger, more liberal voters. Mason understands this (he's not an idiot), but his popular frontism suggests not just electoral expediency but a pessimism of the intellect. He clearly doubts that the "left authoritarians" can be won back in sufficient numbers and suspects that Labour is at risk of losing "left liberals" to minor parties or demoralisation. This points to a tendency towards catastrophism on the left, as distinct from the utopianism with which it is usually charged, which was all too evident in the reactions to the December election result.

The left (or "far-left", in contemporary liberal parlance) is distinguished by a scepticism about grand narratives, a contempt for hypocritical virtue and a love of parody. It is, in other words, postmodern, which in itself is a red rag to the bull of the right. The left is criticised by the right and centre for its rudeness and its distaste for traditional political shibboleths, but this is to ignore that its style is a critique of its own past errors rather than simple bad manners. It has adopted facetious cynicism as a way of dealing with its historicised anxiety. The horrors of the bureaucratic left in power (and I'm using "left" here in its widest possible sense), from the gulags to Iraq, have left it burdened by guilt and suspicious of its own promises, despite those historical episodes proving that the "left" in power is rarely actually left. This is why sarcasm is as characteristic as optimism. In contrast, the right has regretted nothing and learnt even less. Its lack of reflexive cynicism is evidence that it is untroubled by its own history, hence dressing up as a Nazi or celebrating Pinochet is at worst a breach of etiquette, while showing off your collection of racist and eugenicist books is barely worthy of comment.

One consequence of this is that the organised left lacks ruthlessness, as seen in the lost opportunity of the Labour party under Corbyn, a man whose mild ethical socialism and collegiate style proved inadequate in the face of bad-faith and hypocrisy. The Labour left's enjoyment of the Labour right's discomfort between 2015 and 2017 was a classic strategic error. Instead of reforming the party, they assumed the right was a busted flush, or could at least be contained by a left-leaning membership and supportive unions. The recovery of the right was not preordained, but it was always likely given the social and political forces determined to blackball the left. Surridge's paper does not resolve Mason's dilemma about how to build a broad left coalition, essentially because it isn't designed to. Rather it situates the debate ever more firmly on the values dimension. For the left, fighting on that territory is a profound mistake that plays into the hands both of the Labour right and the Tories. Harold Wilson, who trimmed between left and right throughout his career, said that "The Labour party is a moral crusade or it is nothing". In reality, Labour is the party of the economic dimension or it is nothing.