Sovereigns and Scapegoats

A paradox of the Covid-19 crisis is that not much has substantially changed in our lives, despite the vogue for "all is changed, changed utterly" opinion pieces. We are restricted under lockdown, but not unbearably so. I appreciate that I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege and that many vulnerable people are suffering, but the point is that they were vulnerable before the pandemic and already suffering. Just as the prime Minister's suddenly plummeting popularity has shocked a commentariat that had forgotten the level it was at before the "rally round the flag" effect boosted it only two months ago, so we risk forgetting that history is mostly continuity. Covid-19 has exacerbated the situation of the poor and vulnerable, but it has hurled down few of the mighty, which would be a better sign that we were witnessing a catastrophe. Measured in unemployment and lost output, the economy is not markedly worse than it was in previous recessions, such as in the early-80s and early-90s, though a lot is still in the post. The idea that stockbrokers jumped off the ledges of Wall Street in 1929 is a myth, but it did reflect a moment of genuine despair. In reality, the damage arising from the Great Crash was largely the result of bad policy in response rather than the bursting of a stock market bubble.

Though recession is forecast, and increasingly expected to run for many months, particularly if a vaccine is slow in arriving, we should bear in mind that we've experienced anaemic growth for years. The economy may have come to a spluttering halt and even slipped into reverse, but we were only travelling in first gear anyway. A V-shaped recovery is easier to engineer if you don't have to increase speed beyond a crawl. There are reasons to fear a depression, but many of those concern secular trends rather than an adverse shock. Austerity was a foolish policy response in 2010, but it had a less damaging effect than the comparable response in the early 1930s and part of the reason it was pursued was that economists and politicians expected that to be true and thought, correctly as it turned out, that the politics could be managed to maintain public support. The automatic stabilisers of the welfare state, despite the cuts, together with the refusal to move away from the debt-fuelled basis of finance, despite new checks and safeguards, meant that the position of capital could be preserved (and even enhanced through quantitative easing) at a cost to labour that was shown to be tolerable. Democracy in the 1930s threatened capital but it has served to defend it over the last ten years.

One explanation for this combination of economic resilience and minimal social disruption is that productivity long ago reached a point at which growing profits could be guaranteed to capital while subsidising make-work sufficient to create a democratic defence of the system, through a privileged electoral bloc of the in-work who could find common cause with the increasingly privileged bloc of the elderly and rentiers. The "feather-bedded" public sector of yore was mostly myth, but the contemporary equivalent of a corporate class dependent on the better-paid bullshit jobs and technology-enabled distraction is all too real. This has been made obvious by the pandemic, as professionals grapple with Zoom or complain that they're still too busy to clean their own homes. It has also shone a light on where the actual labour exploitation occurs: that is, where the make-work is negligible but wages are depressed through pecarity, zero-hours and a dog-eat-dog labour market. This truth has been partially acknowledged in the media, but it has largely been drowned-out by waffle about sourdough starters and home-schooling, emphasising the solipsism of the "isolated" (but not really isolated) family unit. This, together with the mawkish valorisation of key-workers, has made the child's coloured rainbow drawing the symbol of our collective state of mind: a happy place we can retreat to when we can't bear too much reality.

In the early days of the lockdown, the British media's attitude towards the public swung between the sentimental and the Hobbesian. This isn't new - it's the house style, after all - but the pandemic has allowed these traditional frames to be deployed at a national scale, rather than being limited to minorities or representative individuals. The collective "clap for the NHS" was the supreme example of the sentimental, while the panic-buying of toilet rolls was the chief emblem of the Hobbesian. In reality, relatively few people have consistently done either. Most of us have clapped at some point, usually in the first week or two, but only a minority of the population have kept it up despite the positive social engagement that has become a feature. Likewise, a majority of us bought a little more at the supermarket at the beginning of the pandemic, and rationalised our own actions as prudence, but we've since reverted to normal patterns of buying adjusted to the nature of lockdown. There might have been an uptick in the sale of guns and ammo in the US, but in the UK it's mostly been booze and flour, suggesting our war of all against all will be limited to drunken bakers.

From the tutting of the Guardian to the invective of the Sun and Mail, the assumption in March was that people were untrustworthy, selfish and stupid, with the "covidiot" very much to the fore. As the supermarkets adjusted their supplies, and officious police clamped down on guerilla sunbathing and picnics, unnecessary and self-indulgent travel became the chief spectacle of antisocial behaviour. Of course, this meant focusing on an even smaller minority of the population, literally picked out by police drones in some cases, which led the press to replace its narrative of Hobbesian conflict with the trusty scapegoat: the individual whose egregious disregard for the rules shows contempt for our solidarity and collective sacrifice. Dominic Cummings is a perfect choice for this role, given his combination of privilege and arrogance and the suspicion of hypocrisy that comes with being in the public eye (a suspicion that reflects both popular cynicism and the Hobbesian worldview of the press). What has been funny (at least to me) is that his defence of his actions has been impeccably Lockean, from his insistence on the tolerance of competing beliefs through the justification of selfish reason to the rights of property (that bluebell wood). 

Where Thomas Hobbes and John Locke famously intersect is in the realm of social contract theory. At the heart of this is the question of how much liberty an individual will surrender to the authority of the state in return for social protection and the maintenance of order (in plain English, the protection of property). While Hobbes saw authority (the sovereign) as an inherent necessity of society, Locke saw it more as the collective delegation of self-interested individuals. Both were contractarians, but Locke emphasised the contract as rational rather than essential or instinctive. In this regard, Boris Johnson has proved himself to be a Lockean rather than a Hobbesian, and this as much as anything may explain his sympathy for Cummings. Despite his childhood ambition to be "World King", he is clearly a reluctant sovereign (as an aside, it is amusing to see liberals berate him for being an ineffective dictator). Like David Cameron, the danger he poses to society is largely the product of his class prejudice and intellectual laziness, rather than the megalomania, paranoia or bigotry that have distinguished previous inhabitants of Number 10. Far from imposing his will as if it were justified by divine right, he is currently engaged in trying to make a deal with the British people, just as he did over Brexit.

That deal concerns not only the trade-off of lives for economic health, but the degree of responsibility to be shared in easing the lockdown. Johnson has been obliged by circumstance to act as the sovereign, but he would far rather the people exercise their own judgement - use "good British common sense" - to determine what was appropriate, just as Cummings supposedly did. In this sense he is far more of a dealmaker than the arbitrary sovereign in the White House. His chief adviser is a lightening-rod for those who oppose an early easing of the rules, but he has also become a useful stick for anyone who wishes to beat the government generally or Johnson specifically. Keir Starmer's decision to not join other opposition party leaders in demanding Cummings's resignation is less a cunning plan of sitting back and allowing the Tories to kick lumps out of each other and more an indication that he is understanding of the government's dilemma and supportive of its intent. As such his message is intended for business, not the electorate, and that message is that balancing the needs of the economy and public health is a matter superior to party politics. This is the purest essence of neoliberal thinking, in which loud virtue and the clamour of the mob gives way to rational deliberation among men of property. John Locke would have been proud.