Political Music

Clichés have an uncomfortable tendency to be true. One such is that history repeats itself first as comedy then as tragedy, modified – as by a progression through musical keys – according to the evolved conditions of the time. The way that the 1930s are recurring in the 2020s exemplifies the tragic version.

Hannah Arnedt, in her study of the phenomenon of totalitarianism, observed that ‘It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives’ (Preface to 1^st ed, Origins of Totalitariansm 1951). The dark key into which the atmosphere of our time has modulated owes itself, in significant part, to what the new technologies of communication make possible: more powerful tools to put people of an authoritarian disposition into a position to ‘organise the masses’ – this time by controlling them through distraction and misinformation, aggregating some into silos and sowing division among others – reducing everything to algorithmic simplisticism, to black and white, to Us and Them.

The tools are applied to material always available in most societies: the disaffection of a permanent pool of people who are at the tail of the queue, the length of the tail proportional to the rapidity with which the queue’s head is moving forward. The folks at the head progress because changing economic conditions favour them – not untypically because they are in a position to influence how those conditions do it: the ‘rich and powerful’ (powerful because rich) exert pressure on political processes to adjust tax and law in the direction of their advantage. They become rich and powerful because they profit from change – mastery of new technologies, antecedent positioning that offers them the chance to control the technologies’ application – while those without the same chance fall behind, or further behind. A familiar example is the worker in a rust-belt industry: think Detroit and the motor industry, miners in the British coalfields, anyone unable to move from workbench to computer screen.

The ‘economic death’ of whole regions, and correlatively of the communities in them, is repeated in different guises from the cottage weavers of industrialising England at the turn of the nineteenth century through the typewriter (which originally meant a person who typed and then came to mean the machine on which one types) to the computer (originally a person who did arithmetic to the thing on which I write these words) … and so familiarly forth. AI and Chat have already long been moving the facts behind language-change thus. For just one example, your insurance premium was once calculated by a human being; no more. Marketers and advertisers no longer rely on human observation of trends and interests, and intuitions about what might catch consumer fancy; big data is vastly superior at that work. And so familiarly forth again.

This would not be a problem – after all, many benefits accrue – if real investment were made into keeping the tail of the queue far closer to the head. Instead of sending in the police on horseback to beat the heads of unemployed protesters (anyone here remember the television images of miners’ strikes in the British 80s?), send in the money to retrain, build new business, support the community, give hope, say ‘You are family’. Instead the word from plush offices in capitals of commerce and politics is too often, ‘Suck it up’.

And that’s a gift to the populist politician. The populist politician does two principal things with this gift. The first is to identify someone to blame (the immigrant, the ‘elite’, the person of colour, the Jew), and the second is to promise solutions, if not indeed utopia. The dark music of both is sweet music to the disaffected ear. There is nothing to say about the blame game beyond that it is disgusting and vile. There is much to say about promising solutions.

Of course solutions have to be found. The trouble is the populist promise that the solution is on offer, in the form a fix to bring about perfection. In diverse, moving, pluralistic conditions, promises of perfection are lies. We have to learn that government, like life, is a continual process of ‘mending and making do’ with things that are liable to break. We make incremental progress, then meet setbacks. Frustration is an inevitable part of the condition. But when we find methods and structures that do a good job, we do will to cling to them. That is not conservatism but conservationism. The liberal achievement of human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law are luminous examples. If these principles were fully applied, and our money accordingly put where are mouths are in championing them, the tails of queues would be much shorter and much closer to their heads.

The other day I took down from the shelf Lyndsey Stonebridge’s excellent We Are Free to Change the World (January 2024; note the date – pre-Trump 2) on Hannah Arendt, because I remembered her remarks on Trump 1 and saw how right they were, and even more so how incredibly deaf people are to the past, how blind to the signs of impending trouble. Consider what most people were thinking and doing in June and July of 1914, ignoring everything that might disturb them, unbelieving in the idea of catastrophe on the grounds that ‘No, no, such things don’t, can’t, happen’ – as if they had never happened with dire regularity from the age of Sumer to that hot summer.

Stonebridge on Arendt: ‘Totalitarianism thrived in desert conditions, she warned them. There is nothing like a political and existential void for making an atrocious idea welcome. If nothing makes sense, then anything is possible. As populists and propagandists know, whipping up fake storms in the wastelands gives the appearance of action, meaning, purpose, salvation. This is pseudo-action only (as today’s social media storms again illustrate), yet with each passing tempest people become less not more sensitive to suffering, and less able to judge. Life, politics and suffering itself become tedious. Then the big men with the big ‘impossible’ ideas move in and suddenly the world is at war with itself again.’

Yes indeed. The world is at war with itself again right now.