Decoding Rafael Behr

Rafael Behr will shortly be away. I have no idea where spends his holidays, but there is a distinct whiff of a retreat to the country about the introductory paragraph to his latest column in the Guardian: "August is the month when those of us who spend most of the year fixated on Westminster let politics drift into our peripheral vision, which is how most people see it the rest of the time. It is the benefit I have come to appreciate most from a summer holiday – the shift in perspective that accompanies a more abstemious news diet.Constant grazing on the minutiae of ministerial statements is not normal." Assuming that politics, or at least politics of the sort analysed by Behr and his ilk, is about the minutiae of ministerial statements is obviously a deliberately limiting frame. It's also worth noting his choice of word there, "minutiae", when something like "chaff" would better suit the grazing analogy. The term is not merely archaic, it points to a particular political tradition that becomes more evident as he explains what he means by normal.

"Normal is politics as it appears to people who are busy doing something else." The implication is that there is a divide between authentic democratic politics, which is mild and unobtrusive, and the sort practised at the "ideological extremes", which is passionate and lacking reason. The idea that political participation varies in not a product of modern sociology but a longstanding premise rooted in the Classical Greek idea of an anti-democratic social hierarchy. The most famous example of this was Plato's myth of the metals, in brief: the citizens of a polis owe loyalty to their city because they were born of its earth, but each has an admixture of metal in their soul. Those with gold are born to rule, those with silver are born to support the rulers (soldiers, police), and those with bronze or iron are born to serve (peasants, artisans). Behr accepts this fundamental division: politics is a matter for an educated minority and the tedious necessity of democratic legitimacy requires minimal engagement. What it doesn't require is for the people to be stirred up by demagogues insisting they take a closer interest in it.

The scene has been set in this way not to argue for a restriction of the franchise, so that cultured types like Behr can devote their full attention to chastising errant politicians without hoi polloi troubling their vision, but to convince you that your interests are best served by a political class that eschews anything beyond the most bland politics: "The winner in British elections tends to be the side that most appeals to that vast, amorphous constituency whose preferences are, by definition, ill-defined. There is an art in coming across as less intrusively political than the other side. The unspoken pitch is not to use up all the mental bandwidth that voters would rather spare for things other than politics." This isn't moderation in all things but quietism: leave the politics to others and hope that they rarely bother you. Despite the evidence that voters' preferences are often well-defined, Behr insists that a lack of interest is the norm, even going so far as to claim that the 2019 general election result was in part attributable to "remainers who hadn’t felt all that strongly about Europe in 2016 and wished the whole damned business would just go away", which is some climbdown after his own vociferous campaigning on the subject.

The suggestion is that politics should be restrained in manner, but there is a clear subtext: that society should cordon it off lest it infects "normality". Politics is destabilising, even bad for your health. Inevitably with Behr, Corbyn must make an appearance: "He was seen as a fanatic, the ringleader of lapel-grabbing, finger-jabbing cranks who think politics should be more in-your-face." The purpose on this occasion is to draw a parallel across the gulf of normality with the political right: "That stance, culturally rebarbative to many British voters, has now been adopted by the Conservative party. It stands out more grotesquely when you let politics drift past in the background. It is the face that leers from the crowd, eyes bulging, veins throbbing, fizzing with idiosyncratic fury: the Lee Anderson look." Corbyn and Anderson are clearly not remotely alike in manner, but the link is rhetorically established (note the repetition of "face"), allowing the aims of mild social democracy to be dismissed as fanaticism and bracketed with a reactionary bigotry that is only too culturally congenial to many British voters. Anderson may be a clown, but he is not unrepresentative, any more than Corbyn is.

Being a Guardian writer with little in the way of original insight, Behr also shoehorns in the concerns of the moment. Thus: "The internet has obviously had a radicalising effect on politics around the world. The mechanism is well documented: people dwell in information silos, have their prejudices amplified and insulate themselves from discomfiting truths." There is nothing obvious about this and it isn't "well-documented". Indeed, pretty much all the serious academic studies on the subject (the ones that don't get any press coverage, naturally) suggest either that the effect is neutral or that it is mildly positive - i.e. people are exposed to more diverse views and the ones that opt to exist in "information silos" are the same ones who actively chose to do so with older media, such as newspapers and TV. It also takes only a little historical awareness to realise that we are living in an age of weak radicalism. Contrast the political polarisation of today with the 1920s and 30s, or even the 1970s and early-80s. The prominence of the "culture wars" isn't evidence of greater radicalisation but of a willing distraction from substantive politics such as economic justice and climate change.

Inevitably, the purpose of Behr's condescending and illiterate column is to write-off the current Conservative government (characterised by Sunak's "pleading sterility", whatever that means, as much as Lee Anderson's boorishness) while managing expectations for the inevitable disappointments of its successor: "the opposition frontbench, under Starmer’s guidance, has successfully cornered the market in unthreatening banality. That might not sound like much of an achievement, but it counts for a lot when the Tory tone is hysterical menace." Who does it count for a lot with? That such banality elicits Behr's faint praise does not mean that it is widely admired. And exactly who considers a future Labour goverment to be less threatening? Is it families on benefits with more than two children, or graduates facing crippling tuition fee loans? Or is it perhaps the shareholders of water companies and private healthcare firms? What's odd in this is that Behr appears not to realise that Labour's "banality" is aimed squarely at the sort of voters who think the "plain-spoken" Anderson has a point.

The conclusion is predictably daft. "People who don’t follow politics closely might not be able to put their finger on why Labour should be given a go at government, but the idea that Britain needs another term under the Tories feels palpably weirder." Does it feel any weirder than it did in 2019 when Behr and his colleagues at the Guardian did their best to undermine the opposition and so guarantee an election victory for the Conservatives? A clue to the true weirdness of the times was provided in an earlier swipe at the previous Labour leader: "Theresa May’s net approval rating was higher going into the 2017 election – in which she was humiliated – than Johnson’s was on the eve of his triumph. The differentiating factor was the increase in determination to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of Downing Street." And how exactly did that change of opinion between 2017 and 2019 come about among "people who don't follow politics closely"? What led an electorate that Behr assures us would rather not think about politics, and whose preferences are ill-defined, to such determination?

Behr's schtick is that politics is something that must be endured. His only book is Politics: A Survivor's Guide, which employs his heart-attack as the launchpad for an assault on "extremism", despite not offering any independent evidence that the "stress" of his job (lunch with politicians, 1,000 words a week) was a factor and while admitting a history of heart disease on both sides of his family. But the reason why politics must be endured is not in the nature of politics itself. Between the lines he is conventional enough in believing it to be a potentially noble profession. The problem is the frankly awful people it attracts at the edges and the deviation from centrist moderation that he and his peers casually label "populism". What Behr found offensive about Corbyn once he gave him his attention after 2015 was not his politics, which he would simply dismiss as naive, but that he should be popular. In other words, his is a judgement on the people not the politician. Likewise, what seems to offend him about Anderson is not the clownishness but the fear that his working class style (however artificial) might be popular. It is the threat of an intrusion by the dull bronze and iron souls into politics that worries him.