When the maps run out
By: Dougald Hine
Tags: Politics, 2016 Election

I notice that there is a part of me that would like not to be serious, that would like it to be secretly a bluff, a puffing of the ego, when I say that it feels like there’s a new responsibility landing on the ragtag of thinkers and tinkers and storytellers at the edges, one edge of which I have been part of over these last years. And for sure, this is only one map I’ve been sketching, others will have their own that may or may not overlap.

But the way it looks from here tonight, the people who are meant to know how the world works are out of map, shown to be lost in a way that has not been seen in my lifetime, not in countries like these.

I am thinking of one of the smartest, most thoughtful commentators on the events of this year, whose analyses have helped many of us make sense of what Brexit might mean, the director of the Political Economy Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, Will Davies. In an article for the Washington Post, a week after the referendum, he drew the parallel to the Republican primaries. He too had picked up on the Case-Deaton white death study and the correlation between mortality rates and Trump support.

‘Could it be that, as with the British movement to leave the EU, Trump is channelling a more primal form of despair?’ he asks. But as the article approaches a conclusion, the despair seems to have spread to its author. ‘When a sizeable group of voters has given up on the future altogether… how does a reasonable politician present themselves?’

All of this represents an almost impossible challenge for campaign managers, pollsters and political scientists. The need for candidates to seem ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ is as old as television. Now it seems that they also need to give voice to the private despair of voters for whom collective progress appears a thing of the past. Where no politician is deemed ‘trustworthy,’ many voters are drawn toward the politician who makes no credible pledges in the first place. Of course government policy can continue to help people, and even to restore some sense of collective progress. But for large swaths of British and American society, it seems best not to state as much.

As I read them, these are the words of a person who is running out of map, though one who gets closer than many to seeing how deeply the future is broken, how far the sense of collective progress is gone.

While the victorious political centre of the Clinton and Blair era has gone on insisting that everything is getting better and better, some of the smartest thinkers on the left have recognised the breakdown of the future and responded by setting out to reboot it, to recover the kind of faith in collective progress that made possible the achievements of the better moments of the twentieth century.

If their attempts have struggled to gain traction, one reason may be that the left is better at recognising the economic aspects of what has gone wrong than the cultural aspects, which it tends to ignore or bracket under bigotry. There are great forces of bigotry at work in the world, they will have taken great encouragement from Trump’s election and they need to be fought, as they have been by anti-fascist organising in working class communities, again and again. As a teenager in the northeast of England, my first activism was going out on the streets against the British National Party with Youth Against Racism in Europe. Still, without pretending that they can be neatly disentangled, there are other aspects of what has gone wrong that belong under the heading of culture, besides racism and xenophobia.

In the places where it happens, economic crisis feeds a crisis of meaning, spiralling down into one another, and if we can only see the parts that can be measured, we will miss the depth of what is happening until it shows up as suicide and overdose figures.

Without a grip on this, the left has struggled to give voice to those for whom talk of progress today sounds like a bad joke. And yeah, maybe Bernie could have done it — he’d surely have been a wiser choice for the Democrats this year — but the thing is, we’ll never know. Meanwhile, across the western countries, too often, the only voices that sound like they get the anger, disillusionment and despair belong to those who seek to harness such feelings to a politics of hatred.

This is where I intend to put a good part of my energy in the next while, to the question of what it means if the future is not coming back. How do we disentangle our thinking and our hopes from the cultural logic of progress? For that logic does not have enough room for loss, nor for the kind of deep rethinking that is called for when a culture is in crisis. But that is another story, and a longer one even than this text has become, and I must get up in a few hours’ time to go talk about that story with a conference full of hackers.