Another New Labour

A central theme of the study of political parties over the last 50 years is how they adopted forms and techniques from the commercial world. This was a reflection of neoliberal hegemony, in which parties presented themselves as competing in an electoral market and voters were imagined as consumers of policy offers (to the extent of suffering "buyer's remorse", on occasion), however it would be easy to forget that the presentation of politics as self-interested and transactional goes all the way back to Plato's criticism of democracy for responding to people's impulses at the expense of the common good. What neoliberalism did was not change the way that politics was conducted but provide a gloss by which it could be held to be as virtuous as business, at a time when business was idealised. The mimicry of commercial practice, from policy entrepreneurs to market-testing, in turn legitimised the political claim that there was no alternative to neoliberalism. This was simply the way the world worked.

But the "disenchantment of politics by economics", as Will Davies described neoliberalism, proved to be unstable and temporary, with the years since 2008 producing a return to the older models of populist revolt and the strong sovereign. Modern populism has taken many forms, from the Arab Spring through Occupy to the American right's recent assault on the Capitol, but a common thread has been the rejection of the political market, whether in a search for a new politics, a boycott of the limited goods on offer, or a claim that the market is rigged. The return to the political imaginary of the strong sovereign, variously presented as a bulwark against globalisation or the revival of a paranoid nationalism, likewise involves a rejection of the neoliberal frame of politics as a search for technocratic excellence in favour of a politics of autonomy and will. As the UK and China have shown in their different ways, an emphasis on sovereignty is not incompatible with capitalism, but it does lead to a winner-takes-all dynamic that is problematic for the concept of a political market based on recurrent elections, as in Britain. Competing sovereignties cannot take turns: there must be a decisive winner. 

One way of thinking about the British Labour Party's current travails is that while it understands the latter point - and so will not revisit Brexit or even risk doing so by heavily criticising the consequences - it remains invested in the idea that populism is illegitimate and can be successfully resisted (as has been done from Cairo to Washington). What this means is certainly a restoration of the old order, hence the conscious nostalgia of many on the party right (the weird obsession with "Trots", the fetishisation of SureStart etc), but we should be alert to what has changed as much as what they hope to continue. The move to one-member-one-vote was originally intended to reduce the power of the trade unions, and did so. But the sting in the tail was that it made leadership elections more difficult for the PLP to manage, in 2010 as much as in 2015. The current attempts to stymie internal democracy, such as in Liverpool this week, aren't a notable departure from past practice, but what is novel is the lack of any credible justification, whether in the form of the malign bloc vote or sinister entryism. Momentum isn't Militant, no matter how hard its critics try to suggest otherwise. 

Starmer appears to be quite happy to signal that he sees his chief internal opponent not as the unions or any organised left faction (the Socialist Campaign Group are hardly causing trouble), but activism in general. His careful distancing from the National Education Union and Black Lives Matter are both illustrative. This isn't a straightforward return to the politics of New Labour, even if many of the policy positions and personnel are the same. If anything, the Blairites prized activism - albeit of the right sort - whether in the form of internal factions like Progress or lobbyists within the para-state hinterland of think-tanks, charities and sympathetic business groups. Of course this was managed, top-down activism rather than the organic, bottom-up variety that was encouraged during the Corbyn interregnum, and you can see it still thriving in the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, with its policy entrepreneurship and easy access to the media. The recent reports of Starmer's dialogue with old New Labour stalwarts suggests both an anxiety that he isn't leaning on them as much as he should and also a recognition on his part that he needs to do so if only to get the commentariat on board. 

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Starmer appears to not trust the Labour party. This isn't simply the result of his own lack of political experience and a career within the "neutral" establishment, and it goes beyond the constituency left to include much of the PLP, even including elements of the right. It appears to stem from a belief that Labour should be an integral part of the political establishment, hence his ease with the "ceremonial" elements, such as PMQs, but also that it should rely on a small core of advisors whose strengths are more bureaucratic than political, hence some of the recent mis-steps and tone-deafness. Blair was criticised for his "sofa government", but we shouldn't forget that a lot of different people, both MPs and others, plonked their arses on that sofa at different times. It is that circulation that appears lacking in Starmer's regime, hence both backbenchers who supported his leadership bid and some shadow cabinet members are now signalling their dismay at the lack of engagement. What I think this suggests is that Starmer may be the vector for the introduction of a form of political organisation more familiar on the continent: the cartel party. Though the term is often used narrowly in the context of corruption, it also has a broader meaning that overlaps with the concept of the party as a business, which can be seen in famous examples such as Forza Italia and En Marche.

The most significant feature of the cartel party for my argument is not its reliance on state resources (whether formal funding or informal patronage) or collusion across party lines (though 2019's ludicrous government of national unity vogue was suggestive) but its wholesale rejection of party activism. As Colin Crouch explained in Post-Democracy (2004), this springs from a fundamental suspicion: "Tensions occur within any organisation basically resembling the democratic model when the leadership suspects that the activists are a very biased sample of even the loyal electorate; since they are self-selected, this is likely to be true. It can then be expected to use other methods of discovering voter's views". The party then looks beyond itself for policy direction, a characteristic evident in the Labour leadership since Neil Kinnock. As Peter Mair described it in Ruling the Void (2013): "The articulation of popular interests and demands now occurs more and more often outside the party world, with the preferred role of parties being that of the receiver of signals that emanate from the media or the wider society". 

This goes beyond suppressing internal democracy and fixing selection contests. Established lobby groups that are integral to the politico-media caste, such as movements for electoral reform or greater female representation, will be encouraged and celebrated, along with evanescent civic campaigns committed to orderly conduct and a narrow reformist platform, such as the People's Vote, but dynamic groups rooted in protest, such as Black Lives Matter, will be treated with suspicion rather than being seen as potential allies or even as recruiting sergeants. New Labour was famously obsessed with opinion polling and focus groups, but the indirect approach was combined with the direct approach of lobbying for privileged interest groups, such as business and the third sector, and a careful cultivation of the media. The pandemic has obviously limited Starmer's ability to schmooze, but there is little evidence that it is how he intends to operate anyway. His regime looks like it will rely much more on the indirect, hence the prominence of the likes of Claire Ainsley and the mounting concerns of the old guard.

For all the attempts of the Conservatives to link Starmer in the public mind with the bogey of "activist lawyers", the Labour leader is clearly not an activist of any stripe. His appearance on the Wapping picket line was long ago. He didn't fight his way to the top of the party, but glided into a safe seat and shadow cabinet role before joining the 2016 coup and finally securing the leadership by making promises he had no intention of keeping. He is at ease with his own entitlement and the necessity of public deception for the common good of the establishment. Activists are destabilising, because contention can be presented as division, and risk painting the party into a corner by forcing it to adopt policies deemed electorally problematic (Starmer's decision to commit wholeheartedly to NATO and Trident this week is pre-emptive). Given the nature of Labour, this means that the problem of activism is largely the problem of the left. Blair's attitude towards the left was "they have nowhere else to go", which implied a willingness to keep at least some of them under the same roof but without any influence. Starmer's attitude appears to be more hardline: a determination to drive the activist left out, whatever the cost.

The salutary lesson of the SDP convinced Labour's neoliberals that they had to work from within the existing institutions of party and trade unions. This bred a procedural contempt for the left but also an emotional tolerance that was lacking among the old Labour right, composed of equal parts sentimentality (many Blairites had themselves started on the left, or at least espoused leftwing views to reach the first rung of the ladder) and pragmatism (you still needed canvassers). I think the mayfly of Change UK provided another lesson, which is that the possibility of a challenger party of the centre cannibalising both Labour and Conservative electorates is nil, no matter how much media support it garners. The SDP failed because of first-past-the-post, but Change UK failed because party loyalty is too entrenched in Britain (Labour's "terrible" result in 2019 saw it win 32% of the vote). There could be no En Marche, with or without a charismatic Macron. Faced with these constraints, Starmer appears to have settled on a strategy of constructing a cartel party by stealth. Ironically, the chief threat to this may turn out to be not the left but the habit of activism on the right, and in particular the expectation of privileged access by the Blairites and their camp-followers.

Stuck in the Past

Adam Curtis's latest documentary series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, is subtitled An Emotional History of the Modern World. That adjective is significant both because he has previously criticised emotionalism in public life (even to the point of admiring the sincerity of Enoch Powell) and because it suggests that what he is offering is a personal interpretation. This is an example of Curtis's meta approach to narrative: he is highlighting the importance of the singular ego in a story that revolves around the conflict between individualism and collectivism, but he is also suggesting that this makes the story suspect and that he may be an unreliable narrator. But maybe this particular hall of mirrors (cue archive shot of a hall of mirrors) is just a double-bluff. The criticism that he has faced in recent years - for his patrician omniscience, selectivity and flirtation with the ideas of the libertarian right - has perhaps made him more guarded. Despite this precaution, it is clear from the opening episode that he hasn't abandoned his signature technique of building a narrative around a binary opposition, hence the starring role awarded to Boolean logic. Nor has he eased up on the surprising (but insignificant) connections: thus the final episode reveals that George Boole's great-great-grandson is Geoffrey Hinton, who was central to the development of the use of neural networks in artifical intelligence.

Adam Curtis's worldview lends itself to TV, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that TV selects for the likes of Adam Curtis, but this prompts the question: why aren't there more people doing this sort of thing? It's true that trawling the archives and securing music rights takes up a lot of time and money, so this isn't cheap programming, but as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon reminds us, crafting a collage of coincidences and bizarre relationships isn't that hard to do. The fact that Curtis is unique (outside of YouTube parodies) merits some thought. I think the answer is that he embodies the BBC as an institution in a way similar to previous figureheads such as Richard Dimbleby (who makes an appearance in the latest series interviewing Anthony Blunt before the latter was publicly unmasked as the "fourth man" in the Cambridge spy-ring). With David Attenborough on his last legs, Curtis increasingly looks like a throwback to an ideal of public service broadcasting, but with a pessimistic and even misanthropic edge. For all his hip music selections and apparently radical reinterpretations of history, Curtis - or more precisely his soothing middle-class voice - is a comforting presence. This is authoritative as much as authored broadcasting, and for that reason it has to be singular.

The relationship of individualism and collectivism is unquestionably a theme central to our understanding of modernity, but what Curtis's approach ignores is that most of us live in the messy space between these two poles. This allows the viewer to remain detached as she watches film of people experiencing the extreme manifestations of one or the other: a transsexual struggling with unsympathetic doctors or Red Guards waving their little red books. Keeping emotions in check is clearly part of Curtis's method, but the purpose appears to have more to do with neutralising empathy than cultivating dispassionate and clear-eyed judgement. Whereas non-diegetic music is traditionally used to prompt an emotional response, here it is used to create a distancing effect. Whereas montage is traditionally used to suggest connections separate from (and even contradictory to) the commentary, here it is used to flatten complexity. As ever, Curtis makes some good and interesting points along the way, but I can't help thinking that what he's really engaged in is essentially a critique of the "dumbing-down" of TV news and current affairs (so this really is personal). 

Central to CGYOMH is the question of the self. In an interview in the New Statesman, Curtis claims "The vision of our time is that individualism would create strong and empowered individuals. But at the same time, many of the human sciences that studied people started to eat away at the idea of the confident self. ... What I’m asking in these films is why in the great age of individualism, which promised empowered individuals, have we ended up with entire societies that are uncertain, anxious and distrustful". Is the self simply "An accessory of the brain that tries to make sense of this incoming chaotic data", imposing a narrative on our impulsive and often irrational behaviour? Daniel Kahneman is presented as a proxy for the essentialist view that false consciousness is the inescapable nature of the human mind. This makes change impossible, a point reinforced by chaos theory - i.e. we cannot anticipate the consequences of our actions, which is why revolutions fail. All we can do is maintain good order. From this follows the idea that society (or the "dreamworld", as Curtis puts it) must be managed for its own good, and that, from the 1970s onwards, has meant mass surveillance.

Writing on the subject of Trump's second impeachment for the LRB, Eli Zaretsky noted how the prosecution case was unusual in putting Trump's action into a wider, historical context: the US constitution, the pathologies of the American right and the fomer president's employment of the "big lie" (the idea that the 2020 election had been stolen). In contrast, "Modern journalism, even before the internet, makes it almost impossible to form a realistic picture of what is going on in the world. It breaks knowledge up into unco-ordinated categories and ignores context and connection, which are the soul of historical understanding. Above all, the news distracts". This could have be written by Curtis, indeed this is essentially his critique in HyperNormalisation (and the abbreviated Oh Dearism films he made for Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe) of the way that the mass media leave us feeling disempowered. But the difference is that Curtis isn't presenting a "wider, historical context". Indeed, his occasional attempts to do so are often ridiculous, such as the idea that Brexit was prompted by nostalgia for a rural idyll, or that this persistent delusion had earlier led Getrude Bell to prefer the rural tribes to the urban middle-class of Iraq after 1918, thereby eventually causing an ISIS army to advance on Baghdad.

In Zaretsky's reading, the history of the democratic era in the capitalist West was the avoidance of revolution by the formalisation of class politics in electoralism and trade unionism. But this was eroded: "in the second half of the 20th century, changes in the socio-economic system weakened and eliminated the class-based identities that had provided this rough stability. This weakening opened new structural faults for politics, such as gender, race and sexuality, but it also precipitated the emergence of the modern masses, the so-called ‘age of the crowd’. While a new politics of identity emerged, so too did large numbers of individuals whose identities were not socially given, or explicit. These individuals served as the social basis for mass psychology." This shares Curtis's view of (and implicit distaste for) the masses, but it proceeds from a structural critique that is lacking in Curtis's work. He tends to start in the realm of pure theory (someone comes up with a startling and unconventional idea) and exhibits a pronounced scepticism about the empirical (not always unjustifiably - e.g. the replicability crisis of behavioural pyschology).

There are four features of an Adam Curtis documentary that I think are worth dwelling on. First, his belief in the power of ideas. This is an idealism that almost completely ignores material factors, allowing him to conflate different movements, with radically different interests and motivations, such as American neoconservatives and Islamist jihadis in The Power of Nightmares, or suggest a dubious parallel between the Opium Wars and Oxycontin in CGYOMH. Second, the emphasis on the individual seer, such as Edward Bernays in The Century of the Self, which is ultimately just an eccentric great man theory of history (Jiang Qing features in the latest to help redress the gender balance). As Dan Hancox puts it, Curtis is "fascinated by the intellectuals, and thoroughly bored by the masses". Third, the idea of conspiracy theory as a substitute for our lost grand narratives. Much of CGYOMH is concerned with how conspiracies have been manufactured and concludes with the irony of supposedly objective liberals succumbing to conspiratorial delusions about Brexit and the election of Trump. Fourth, his foreshortened history, which is probably a combination of the constraints of the medium (we have no archive footage of 1789) and his preference for a horzion that doesn't go back much further than living memory.

In combination, these features suggest a radical conservative outlook that can be summarised as follows. What matters are beliefs, rather than material circumstances, and those beliefs spring from the insights of unorthodox individuals. But postmodernism has left people bereft of coherent social narratives while neoliberalism has cultivated an ever more isolated and anxious subject, so undermining belief. This void has increasingly been filled by conspiracy theories, both populist (i.e. against elites) and state-directed (i.e. engineered by elites). Democracy has been corroded by individualism, leading politicians to see themselves as representatives not of the people but of financial and technocratic power (Peter Mair is cited). Curtis appears to see himself as a progressive, but is hazy on what progress would look like beyond a more robust self and a sense of collective purpose. While many critics have associated him with Frank Furedi, and not unfairly, I would pay him the compliment of pointing to Edmund Burke and Friedrich Nietzsche as intellectual influences rather than the idiot messiah of Living Marxism. I'd also suggest that many of his concerns around the self and personhood, whether it is the pliable monad of B.F. Skinner's behaviourism or the robust "entrepreneur of himself" described by Michel Foucault, go back to Hobbes and Locke.

The final word goes to the man himself, from that New Statesman interview: "I make pretentious films arguing that we’re stuck in the past and can’t imagine the future." Despite the self-deprecation, the real misdirection here is the use of "we" rather than "I". David Graeber (who, if he were alive today, would probably have pointed out that the periodic sacking of Mesopotamian towns by rural tribes goes back millennia, something he wrote about in Debt: The First 5000 Years) provided the epigraph and conclusion for Can’t Get You Out of My Head: "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently". But Graeber famously failed to make it differently when he helped steer the Occupy movement into the dead-end of prefigurative politics: constant debates about decision-making that produced few meaningful decisions. Like him, Curtis offers no vision of what that remade world would look like. In Graeber's case he had the ready excuse of anarchism (not imposing a vision is the point). In Curtis's case I suspect it's because he remains more interested in the failed visions of the past (there's an interesting overlap here with Mark Fisher's nostalgia for lost futures) and is stimulated by imaginary futures only insofar as they reflect that lineage. The immobilisation is personal.

The Red and the Green

Back in late-2014, I suggested that the popularity of the Greens was bad news for Labour because it indicated a conservative turn in politics, even if the immediate effect in the forthcoming general election would be to siphon off votes from the Liberal Democrats after their disastrous period of office in coalition with the Tories. And so it proved. The Greens won almost 1.2 million votes (3.8%) in 2015, a quadrupling of their otherwise decent 2010 showing of 286 thousand (1.0%) and a greater quantum increase than that recorded by the Conservatives (600 thousand). This fell back in 2017 to just over half a million votes (1.6%), showing how much Corbyn succeeded in attracting their more progressive supporters (and probably the younger cohort in particular), but then jumped up again in 2019 to 836 thousand (2.7%). While it was leavers in "Red Wall" seats who largely monopolised the media's attention, with a minor walk-on roll for centrist "spoilers" in constituencies like Kensington, there is no doubt that the Greens now have the potential to split the anti-Tory vote in consituencies nationwide. 

As Phil Burton-Cartledge noted this week, in the context of Keir Starmer's alienation of the left, "Labour does not stand to lose some core support in the big cities as per the calculations in LOTO, what's at risk is its core support everywhere. Which is why the Greens' performance at the 2015 election is instructive. It did not capture huge votes in the big cities, but did do (relatively) well with a thousand votes here, a thousand votes there right across the country". In contrast, while Stephen Bush anticipates that the Greens might squeeze the Liberal Democrats into fourth place, he is not concerned about the potential threat: "Labour will probably be able to use the brutal reality of the electoral system as a pretty effective cudgel at a general election to get the Green vote down to its core where they need to". This strikes me as dangerously complacent, particularly when you consider Labour's performance in Scotland between 2010 and 2015, and also its brief rally in 2017 before crashing again in 2019. There's clearly a tipping-point in general elections (as the Conservatives also found in Scotland in 1997), even if it is often localised. 

In theory, Labour has litle to fear from the Greens because their vote isn't concentrated geographically in the way that the SNP's is, and nor do they appeal to a decisive subset of the party's traditional supporters in specific locales, as the Tories now do in the so-called Red Wall seats. But this is to ignore that their national diffusion means that a strong showing by the Greens could serve to stymie Labour's advances in precisely those same seats because of their marginal nature. This isn't simply a case of the protest vote moving from the Liberal Democrats to the Greens. The former will retain a core of supporters and will still offer an electoral home for the comfortable middle classes whose sense of self depends on being anti-Tory while believing that the coalition was generally on the right track. The latter will increasingly appeal to leftists dismayed by Labour's rightwards turn (the same bloc that boosted the Greens in first 2010 and then 2015). In other words, it's the combination of the Greens and the Liberal Democrats that poses a potentially greater threat to Labour's ability to win back these seats because it offers a broader alternative. Which comes third and which fourth is a minor consideration.

It would be a mistake to assume (as I suspect Bush does to a degree) that Labour-Tory marginals in the North and Midlands are stereotypically ageing and socially conservative. Many, like Bishop Auckland, have substantial middle-class populations and while some have seen many of their youth depart, we shouldn't assume that the environmentally-conscious vote is confined to the young. The Greens exhibit a contradictory ideological mix among their supporters, reflecting their social diversity, with virtue-signalling often being the pragmatic glue that holds them together. The traditional core of the party is a mix of anti-state libertarians, with an emphasis on alternative lifestyles and post-60s ecological angst, and small-state, bucolic conservatives with a tendency towards the misanthropic. But around this core is an outer layer that can accommodate various strains of more worldly progressive, from liberal to communist, many of whom see the state as the only realistic lever for environmental change. Though unstable, this party ecology allows for rapid expansions and contractions in their vote, as the last decade showed.

The Liberal Democrats' popularity during the 2000s was largely down to Labour alienating progressive voters over Iraq and civil liberties, not because of a popular interest in the Orange Book or a burgeoning desire for electoral reform (as the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum proved). With the party eviscerated in 2015 and 2017, and its efforts to monopolise the remainer vote in 2019 successful only in drawing off Labour voters in seats it couldn't win (Kensington, again), it now faces the possibility of political irrelevance as Labour very publicly shifts towards the political centre, albeit in a manner that suggests the party right's historic disregard for natural justice and support for conservative foreign policy has not been ameliorated by electing a "human rights lawyer" as leader. Those civil libertarians and internationalists put off during the first decade of this century may once more be looking for a new electoral home, but it seems that they are increasingly looking towards the Greens rather than the Liberal Democrats. 

Though we saw a return to two-party politics in the 2017 and 2019 elections, the ongoing collapse of the Liberal Democrats and corresponding rise of the Greens actually offers a broader alternative for voters disenchanted with both main parties, albeit one that is likely to produce even fewer MPs due to the first-past-the-post system. As ever, calls for electoral reform can be taken as a proxy for that disenchantment. Such calls may become deafening if the next general election produces a nightmare scenario for Labour: modest gains in target demographics that are more than offset by widespread losses elsewhere leading to the party actually losing even more marginals, resulting in the sort of landslide not seen since 1931 when Labour won 30% of the vote but was rewarded with only 52 seats because its vote was so diffuse. To put this in perspective, Labour won 232 seats on a 30% vote share in 2015 but that outcome was dependent on both holding the Red Wall marginals (it won only 202 seats on a 32% share in 2019) and its actual heartlands in the big cities.

That scenario might seem unlikely today when Labour is polling at around 38% nationally, but it's worth bearing two factors in mind. First, the complacent belief that Labour can afford to lose progressive votes in the cities can encourage those voters to switch, partly in irritation at that complacency and partly in the belief that a protest vote won't let the Tories in. Second, the expectation of a national loss can motivate some people to switch their vote to a protest party on the grounds that it would be less "wasted" by being expressive. This shift in attitude can easily develop a momentum of its own in an era of social media. In other words, there is a tipping-point. If Labour's national polling share drops back to under 35%, while the Tories remain at or above 40%, we may see the emergence of a popular belief that the Conservatives are bound to win the next general election and that there is no point treating Labour as the vehicle for an anti-Tory alliance (that the loudest voices arguing against this pessimism will be those who were calling for a government of national unity in 2019 premised on Jeremy Corbyn being defenestrated won't be the least of the ironies).

Labour's strategic mistake under Starmer may prove to be chasing their old (in both senses) demographic to the exclusion of all else. The complacency about cities also extends to the collapse of the Liberal Democrats. There is an assumption that this has freed-up a centrist voting bloc, which is currently keeping Labour in the high-30s in the polls. This ignores the many former Lib Dem voters who opted for the Tories in 2015 and after (which is why the Tories are at 40%) as well as the progressives who were attracted to the third party because it seemed more left (sic) than Labour in 2010. In neglecting its newer demographics, particularly the progressively-inclined young and the socially-conscious of all ages who find flags an irrelevance, Labour is risking its vote not just in the cities but nationwide. The Greens' core vote in Red Wall seats is small but their prospective vote could be decisive in marginal contests both there and in other parts of the country. Labour's anti-left strategy may work in attracting some in a subset of constituencies that voted Conservative in 2019, but it could equally drive away more of those who boosted the vote in 2017 right across the country. If the May council elections go ahead, the most interesting result might be the progress of the Greens.

Loose or Tight

Contrary to what you might think, the relative effectiveness of countries in handling the pandemic has little to do with government competence, political ideology or even geography (let alone their supposed preparedness). According to the social pyschologist Michele Gelfand, "It turns out Covid’s deadliness depends on something simpler and more profound: cultural differences in our willingness to follow rules." She's been pushing this dubious line since the publication of her 2018 book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. To date she has managed three Guardian puff-pieces. The first claimed that the Brexit vote and election of Trump could be attributed to a "tight culture" feeling under threat, the second that authoritarian leaders like Trump thrive on fear, while her latest claims that the high Covid-19 death-rate in the US is due to its loose culture and "rule-breaking spirit". She's careful not to claim that one type is superior to the other - America's "maverick spirit" also makes it more creative and innovative - but she's happy to talk of "tight nations" and "loose nations", despite the obvious inconsistency in her reading of the US and UK. 

Gelfand's position - indeed much of the discipline of social pyschology (as opposed to actual sociology) - is premised on stereotypes, both in the sense that the citizens of a particular nation tend to share some fundamental dispositions and that nations are distinct enough to be grouped. That this grouping invariably reduces to a simple dichotomy shows its commonality with theories of society that divide us into two antagonistic camps, from Jonathan Haidt's belief that liberal and conservative temperaments are hardwired rather than socially-determined, to David Goodhart's attempt to explain Brexit through the cultural differences of "somewheres and anywheres". As Gelfand put it in her first puff-piece: "My research across hundreds of communities suggests that the fundamental driver of difference is not ideological, financial or geographical – it’s cultural." While she isn't as overt as Haidt or Goodhart in privileging the conservative worldview, her "fundamental driver of difference" excludes any socioeconomic explanation. 

The Marxist perspective on sociology has long been criticised for reducing social phenomena to the binary of class, but this does at least have an objective reality: you either rely on your capital or your labour (or in a few cases both - homoploutia). The problem with Gelfand's approach is that it lends itself to an abstraction of social behaviour that ignores variation within society, i.e. not only normative differences between class fractions (e.g. middle class versus working class values) but eccentricity and sub-cultures. It also rules out the possibility that adherence to societal norms may exist on a spectrum, rather than being polarised into tight and loose. Consider the following: "All cultures have social norms, or unwritten rules for social behaviour. We adhere to standards of dress, discipline our kids, and don’t elbow our way through crowded subways not because these are legislative codes but because they help our society function. Psychologists have shown that some cultures abide by social norms quite strictly; they’re tight. Others are loose – with a more relaxed attitude toward rule-breakers." 

These are odd examples to pick. Standards of dress have dramatically relaxed in most Western and Asian societies over the last century. Does this mean that the world as a whole has become "looser", or is it down to increased living standards and commodity fashion? Perhaps it's also evidence that the boundary of the domain of norms changes over time. How many pedestrians today would stop walking and face the road to show respect if they saw a hearse go by, let alone doff their hat. But what has changed here: the norm or the fashion for headwear? Or did both change independent of each other? How we discipline our kids has long been a bone of social and political dispute, rather than an agreed norm, and is currently being legislated for in the UK. The reason why we don't barge through crowded subways is that it is counter-productive in a confined space and possibly dangerous. This is a norm, in the sense of a shared standard of behaviour, but it reflects rational calculation and environmental constraints rather than some intrinsic characteristic. 

It is for this reason that platform etiquette and how we behave on trains tends to be common across nations, or more accurately across those metropolitan light rail systems where over-crowding is routine. Breaches of etiquette, e.g. school trippers forming obstructive clumps near the platform entrance or people eating food in a packed carriage, tend to reflect differences in values and behaviours within society more than between nations (the self-absorption of teenagers, how over-work compresses eating and commuting etc). Ironically, the most obvious norm breaking you see on such systems is the behaviour of people who visit the big city only occasionally from elsewhere in the country: the old farmer who offers up his seat to the young female professional to her mild irritation, or the boisterous sports fan who loudly complains that nobody talks to each when they're just trying to block out his tedious singing. If you live in London and visit Tokyo or New York, you'll feel right at home on the subway. If you live in a former pit village in Wales and visit London for the first time, you won't. 

Many social norms are in fact specific to subsets of the nation, and those subsets are largely determined by age, geography and socioeconomic class. This makes obvious sense in that norms arise from the observation of the behaviours of others at key points in our development: they're fundamentally local and generational. The norms we are meant to share as a nation and across all age-groups are often either banal (i.e. we discover other nations share them too, such as saying please and thankyou or avoiding cannibalism) or myths embedded in an often nostalgic media narrative (e.g. the British love of an orderly queue, which was largely a learnt behaviour of the 1940s). In reality, we are all selective about which norms we observe, and the choices we make are often contingent. For example, as David Graeber pointed out in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, whether we return the favour when someone buys us lunch or a drink depends on how inferior or superior we feel to them. Norms not only change over time - new ones arise, old ones mutate or disappear - but they are socially dynamic.

In trying to provide a solid foundation for her claim, Gelfand appeals to both tradition and science: "This distinction, first noticed by Herodotus, is in modern times capable of being quantified by psychologists and anthropologists." In fact Herodotus makes no such distinction between tight and loose cultures, or anything remotely similar. His only collective distinction is between Greek and non-Greek speakers (barbaroi). He certainly compares nations in The Histories, such as the Egyptians and Scythians, but the purpose is to highlight variety not commonality. Herodotus is known both as the father of history and the father of lies, but the latter epithet isn't simply a critique of his honesty or credulity. It means he is the first writer to deal in what today we would call national stereotypes. Gelfand's second claim, that her distinction is quantifiable, is neither here nor there. Not everything that is measurable is meaningful. She needs to explain the mechanism: how social attitudes to rule-breaking have governed the pandemic response.

Her attempt to do so is little more than correlation: "Relative to the US, the UK, Israel, Spain and Italy, countries like Singapore, Japan, China and Austria have been shown to be much tighter. These differences aren’t random. Research in both nation-states and small-scale societies has shown that communities with histories of chronic threat – whether natural disasters, infectious diseases, famines or invasions – develop stricter rules that ensure order and cohesion. It makes good evolutionary sense: following rules helps us survive chaos and crisis. On the flipside, looser groups that have faced fewer threats can afford to be more permissive." This is obviously selective, hence the omission of the nominally "loose" but successful New Zealand. Then there's the claim that Israel isn't a "tight" society despite its conscription, bunkers and military occupation of the West Bank, not to mention the role that "chronic threat" plays in its national identity. The US is famously founded on a story of chronic threat - the slowly expanding frontier of the "Wild West" - but instead of leading to stricter rules to ensure order and cohesion it led to Civil War and loose gun control.

Though published by a liberal newspaper, Gelfand's theory is essentially conservative. It claims that the governments of "loose" countries were slow to act and unwilling to be frank about the dangers of the virus because they feared this would be difficult to sell to their "risk-taking", obstreperous populations (Plato's ship of fools). It also accentuates national stereotypes and so feeds into the growing chauvinist narrative around pandemic management and vaccination. The one suggests that the government was constrained, so it's essentially the fault of the people; the other that the success of Far Eastern countries reflects a more repressive and communal society, so we should be prepared to accept a higher death-toll as the price of our individual liberties. The more mundane truth is that the countries that have done best either already had a relatively well-funded public health infrastructure that had been tested in previous epidemics (not only in Asia but in parts of Africa too), or they took the decison to implement strict measures early in 2020 as a precaution. In other words, it was down to planning and experience or pre-emption. Both of these ultimately reflect political decisions, not broader cultural norms.