Читать книгу This is Not Normal - William Davies - Страница 7

Introduction

In the spring of 2016, Britain was a nation still broadly convinced of its own normality. It provided a standard for how constitutional democracy should work. It possessed a media that, while far from perfect, seemed committed to giving a factual account of the key events in public life. Political power was ostensibly held to account by the scrutiny of opposition and a sceptical media. Despite the tremors of the 2008 financial crisis and the pain of austerity that followed, it appeared that economic policymaking still operated within the bounds of a technocratic consensus. When it came to political procedures, the conduct of the media and the governance of the economy, the liberal centre was still – just – in command.

The subsequent four years destroyed this self-image, rendering the ideology of liberal norm-keeping incredible. Over a period that witnessed one historic referendum, two general elections, three prime ministers, and one chaotically handled pandemic, one liberal convention after another was openly tossed aside. Gradually at first, then at an accelerating pace, basic assumptions and constraints that had governed public life and policy were discarded. The pursuit of Brexit destroyed the liberal assumption that the job of governments is to maximise economic welfare, and threw the primacy of international markets into question. Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament in September 2019 was declared unlawful by the Supreme Court, which provoked the Conservative Party to include a cryptic pledge in its subsequent manifesto to review ‘the relationship between the government, parliament and the courts’.

The Daily Mail declared high court judges to be ‘enemies of the people’, after they ruled that Parliament would need to consent to the triggering of Article 50, which initiated the Brexit process. After their disappointment with Theresa May, pro-Brexit newspapers repurposed themselves as propaganda sheets for the Johnson administration, relishing the fact that the government was now led by one of their own celebrity columnists. Favours were returned, and media outlets were soon designated either friends or enemies of the government. While one set of journalists was being granted spurious ‘exclusives’ with a character they dutifully referred to as ‘Boris’, another set – Channel 4 News, the Daily Mirror, the Huffington Post, Radio 4’s Today programme – was being denied access to government ministers and press briefings. Downing Street began issuing political threats to public service broadcasters whenever they appeared to be enjoying too much critical autonomy. One senior government source promised that they would ‘whack’ the BBC and radically reduce its power.

A new set of political arts was introduced into democracy along the way. In addition to the widely discussed threat of targeted online advertising and misinformation – which is alleged to have played such an important role in the 2016 referendum – political strategists grew increasingly accomplished at using comedy, confusion and distraction to undermine reasoned debate. The 2019 general election saw the Conservative Party go all out on troll tactics, such as rebranding their Twitter feed ‘factcheckUK’ and disseminating false rumours about Labour activists to broadcasters. The kind of political lying and propaganda that was considered shocking in June 2016 has since become viewed with weary familiarity, raising the prospect that the damage to fact-based political argument is now terminal.

Frightening evidence emerged about the attitudes and values of the newly triumphant political demographics. Brexit voters, the vast majority of whom were born before 1965, were likely to hold the kind of ‘authoritarian values’ associated with support for capital punishment, traditional gender hierarchies and tougher treatment of children.¹ Conservative Party members, who had the task of electing a new prime minister in summer 2019, were found to be 71 per cent male, 38 per cent over the age of sixty-six, and so obsessed with Brexit that they considered it worth sacrificing economic prosperity, the Union and even the Conservative Party for.² Among this primarily white, male, ageing section of English society, Islamophobia is simple common sense.

At the same time, this period witnessed the unprecedented exposure and recognition of political injustices, further contributing to the demolition of the liberal centre. The shock of Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral surge in the summer of 2017, which deprived May of her parliamentary majority and set the stage for the political gridlock of the following two years, represented an overdue public affirmation that austerity was socially and politically unsustainable. It was followed immediately afterwards by the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire, which offered the most harrowing demonstration of just how unequal individual lives had become. The Windrush scandal of 2018, which saw black British citizens being terrorised by government bureaucracy and threatened with deportation (an effect of the ‘Hostile Environment’ immigration policy introduced in 2014), revealed a disregard for judicial norms that few had imagined the British state was capable of, at least within its own borders.

Within two months of Britain’s departure from the European Union, the political establishment had been engulfed in the unprecedented chaos and horrors of the coronavirus pandemic. Johnson was forced to rein in his jocular nationalism, in an effort to look statesmanlike, serious and deferential to experts. But even then, the government couldn’t resist resorting to deceptive communications tactics, as the prime minister struggled to adopt the necessary gravitas. While the crisis emerged with little warning, ultimately to do far more economic damage to Britain than Brexit, it arrived at a time when trust in the media and politicians was already at a dangerously low ebb. The National Health Service was one of the last remaining unconditional commitments that the state made to society, on which all political parties agreed. While the symbolic reverence for the NHS was ratcheted up further thanks to coronavirus, the assumption that the state could and would protect lives – so fundamental to liberal philosophy – was unable to hold.

The health crisis also did unprecedented damage to the economic institution that is more important to liberalism than any other: the labour market. For centuries, labour markets have been integral to how liberal economies meet human needs and establish social peace. For decades, welfare reforms have sought to use work (and active job-seeking) as a way of inculcating independence and greater activity. The upheavals of 2020 rendered that project utterly impossible, offering the most public and undeniable demonstration that poverty and dependence are not simply a ‘choic’. This triggered the surreal spectacle of conservative politicians and newspapers debating the merits of unconditional cash transfers. In the context of rentier capitalism and what Jodi Dean terms ‘neo-feudalism’, the credibility of the labour market was already in decline, as the middle classes turned increasingly to assets in search of security and income.³ The coronavirus ensured that, however the crisis of liberalism was to be resolved, it would not be built upon the familiar bedrock of the wage relation.

This litany of crises and scandals spoke of a nation and a state that no longer trusted in the liberal ideals of procedural fairness and independent judgement, and was scarcely pretending to. And yet, the status quo was not abandoned all at once; there is no single date or event that can be pinpointed as a turning point. Rather, what we can witness over the course of 2016–20 (in particular, the forty-three months that elapsed between Britain’s vote to Leave and its leaving) is a series of increasingly desperate measures to harness and contain the forces of reactionary nationalism within mainstream political institutions.

In this book, I break this series down into three phases. Phase one, which lasted from the referendum through to the 2017 general election, set the template for what would follow: witnessing the populist groundswell of Brexit, Theresa May sought to hitch her leadership and party platform to it. Unable to represent (or perhaps even recognise) the full extent of the anti-political, anti-liberal anger that had fuelled Brexit in the first place, May failed to convert this into electoral success, despite her rhetorical attacks on the ‘citizens of nowhere’.

Phase two lasted until March 2019, when May was forced to request an extension of Britain’s membership of the European Union beyond the original two years stipulated in Article 50. In Westminster, this phase was characterised by a quagmire of government defeats in Parliament, and a steady trickle of ministerial resignations, producing an increasingly disruptive and vocal right-wing. What this phase eventually confirmed was that the centre could not hold: however the political crisis was going to be resolved, it would not be via normal representative democracy or normal political leadership. Something unusual and dangerous would be required instead, which is what the third phase witnessed. From the new Brexit Party’s stunning victory in the April 2019 European elections, through the proroguing of Parliament, the December general election and Britain’s successful departure from the EU in January 2020, it was clear that an abnormal type of politics had arrived.

The turmoil of phase three was eventually calmed by Johnson’s electoral victory, achieved on the back of the mesmerising anti-political mantra ‘Get Brexit Done’ and an absence of many clear intentions beyond this. It is scarcely surprising that the populist, court-baiting, demagogic madness of those months has not been sustained as a paradigm for government. But that does nothing to suggest that the crisis is over, or that liberal normality has been restored. What was revealed in the months and years leading up to Johnson’s electoral victory was that the ‘liberal elites’, against whom Brexit and nationalist movements are pitted, have been toppled. Or rather, more accurately, that in order for those elites to retain their power, they must be willing to sacrifice any residual commitment to liberalism, and to do so publicly.

Thus, in September 2019, the Johnson administration made the spectacular gesture of purging twenty-one anti-Brexit Conservative MPs from the party, including the ‘father’ of the House of Commons, Kenneth Clarke, and Sir Nicholas Soames, Winston Churchill’s grandson. Others resigned from the cabinet out of concern at the direction the government was taking, including Johnson’s own brother, Jo. What was revealed during these periods is something that remains true even when the turbulence has subsided; namely that, as occurred with the GOP and Donald Trump, most of the conservative establishment is willing to dump its principles for political advantage.

Meanwhile ostensibly centrist cabinet ministers, such as Matt Hancock and Nicky Morgan, turned out to be entirely comfortable with a reckless, even lawless, administration. The sometime establishment ‘paper of record’, The Times, backed Johnson in the 2019 general election, on the basis that he should be free to act however he pleased and without warning. Its leader enthused that ‘A Tory majority would free Mr Johnson to act boldly in other areas. For electoral reasons the manifesto steered clear of setting out policies on many issues that will need to be addressed in the next parliament.’⁴

The escalation of the crisis, from the referendum of 2016 through to the prorogation and propaganda of 2019, served as a useful X-ray of the once-liberal establishment. It revealed what figures such as Hancock and Morgan, and papers such as The Times, were prepared to stand for. The answer being: pretty much anything.

To the extent that it survives, liberalism exists now as an ethical persuasion or a cultural identity. To be sure, this makes it something that can be rallied around and identified with, as was seen with the impressive anti-Brexit marches, but liberalism loses its defining claim to universal legitimacy and consensus-formation in the process. Once institutions and norms are of only pragmatic, cosmetic, affective or instrumental value, they cease to function as institutions and norms, and become resources to be exploited. This being the case, we need to consider whether 2016 was indeed generative of such a crisis, or whether in fact it was a symptom – and a delayed one at that – of a much older crisis. How might we place 2016–20 in a longer and larger historical context? What were the underlying preconditions of this liberal collapse? How was the ground laid?

Accumulation by Distrust

The two inventions that have caused the greatest disruption within liberal democracies over the past half century are the credit derivative and the digital platform. Credit derivatives are financial instruments, first developed in the 1970s, which allow a stream of future debt repayments to be converted into an asset (that is, securitised), which can then be sold to a third party. This is supported by increasingly sophisticated credit ratings, based on surveillance and quantitative analysis of a potential borrower’s behaviour. Securitisation turns the relationship between a creditor and a debtor into a commodity that can be owned by someone else altogether, who can then bundle it up with other derivatives, sell it on again and so on.

Digital platforms, such as Facebook, Uber and YouTube, are a more recent and familiar invention. The defining feature of these platforms is that they provide a social utility, which connects users to one another, and then exploits these connections for profit in a range of ways.⁵ Either they exploit their users’ attention to sell advertising space (as Facebook does), or they control a whole marketplace and charge sellers for using it (as Uber does). But all platforms have two features in common. Firstly, they tend towards monopolisation, seeing as users have an interest in being where all the others are. Secondly, they have vast surveillance opportunities, which they exploit for further profit. Crucially, platforms have achieved a public status that is closer to telecom companies than to publishers, meaning that they hold minimal responsibility for how their technology is used.

The chaos unleashed by these inventions is legion, and central to the story recounted in this book. The securitisation of US mortgages, plus a lucrative underestimation of the risks attached to them, triggered the ‘credit crunch’ of summer 2007, leading up to the crisis of 2008, bank bailouts and nationalisations, then a decade of exceptional monetary policies, austerity and wage stagnation. In the UK, the national debt doubled as a result of the bailouts and economic shock. The political response, following the election of the Coalition Government in May 2010, was to pursue aggressive cuts to welfare, local government and higher education spending.

There is compelling evidence that the cuts hit hardest in those households and parts of the country which then became most supportive of Nigel Farage and Brexit.⁶ The state rescue of banks, and the abandoning of the vulnerable, made an undeniable contribution to the sense that the ‘elites’ look after one another, rather than acting on behalf of the public. The sentiment that society is ‘broken’ and that the guilty go unpunished, which is so eagerly encouraged and exploited by nationalists, received no greater endorsement than during 2008–9. Plenty of lines can be drawn between 2008 and the political upheavals of 2016.⁷ The financial crisis also played a decisive role in politicising a younger generation on the left, who made an important contribution to Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected electoral surge in 2017.⁸

The effect of tech platforms on liberal democracies has been feverishly discussed. Following Britain’s 2016 referendum and Trump’s election victory, liberals fixated on the malign power of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Russian ‘troll farms’ and Vladimir Putin to sway election outcomes by planting ‘fake news’ in front of the eyeballs of easily persuaded swing voters. The lack of any editorial bottlenecks or regulation meant that a kind of information anarchy had broken out, heralding a ‘post-truth’ world in which nobody could tell truth from lies any longer. The fine-grained psychographic profiling techniques facilitated by Facebook meant that democracy could now be ‘hacked’ by targeting critical voters with precisely the right message to influence their vote.

Others are more sceptical about this narrative, asking instead why so many voters were sufficiently angry and alienated from the liberal mainstream in the first place. But regardless of one’s explanation for the vote results, one thing is clearly true: the sheer quantity of content that now circulates publicly, combined with the greater difficulty of validating it, has produced new forms of political engagement and disengagement. Political passions – fandom, anti-fandom, rage, devotion – have risen, but so has a new political sensibility that treats all political and public discourse with scepticism, abandoning any effort to distinguish fact from lies. Political campaigns and the media have been sucked into this vortex.

The long-term outcome of the coronavirus crisis remains unclear. But one of the few certainties of this political and economic emergency is that digital platforms have been strengthened by it. At the same time that small businesses were disappearing at a terrifying speed, Amazon took on tens of thousands of new workers. Social life became even more dependent on the social infrastructure of platform capitalism. The same platforms that were destabilising social and political life prior to the appearance of COVID-19 became virtually preconditions of society, placing a kind of wide-ranging constitutional power in the hands of private corporations.

These are just some of the ways in which the credit derivative and the platform have transformed our political world in the twenty-first century. But there is more to it than this: they share a common logic, which eats away at integrity of public institutions. The function of both credit derivatives and of platforms is to take existing relationships built around mutuality and trust and then exploit them for profit. A loan, originally, was something that concerned two parties: the lender and the borrower. In its purest form, it depended on moral evaluations of character and honesty (judgements which were inevitably polluted by cultural, racial and gendered prejudice). Securitisation takes the debt relation that exists between two parties and turns it into an asset that yields a return. It turns a moral norm (in this case, a duty of repayment) into a commodity.

The underlying logic of a platform is the same. Facebook, YouTube and Uber take forms of mutual dependence that already exist in society, and find a way of extracting a revenue from them. These companies didn’t invent friendship, cultural creation or municipal transport, but found a way to intervene in existing networks of these things in pursuit of profit. As with mortgage securitisation, they take two-way relations and insert themselves as an unnecessary third party. Along the way, they introduce scoring and ranking systems, quantifying the quality of social activity in terms of ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and stars out of five. A relationship based around trust is disrupted, and turned into one of instrumentality, strategy and self-interest.

The effect of these technologies is to drive a wedge between the ‘front stage’ and the ‘back stage’ of social and public life. The view of the world available to the general public becomes separated from that available to elites of one kind or another, breeding a disconnect between the rules, rituals and culture of everyday life and the mentality of financiers and digital technocrats. In place of the ‘social contract’ that was liberalism’s founding article of faith, there is surveillance. The descent of the public into cynicism, mistrust and conspiracy theory, in a political system that does not make the logic and purpose of power visible, is inevitable.

This brings us face to face with the ideology and rationality of neoliberalism. Since the 1950s, American neoliberal thinkers have sought to expand the reach of economics into areas of human life that were otherwise governed by social and political norms.⁹ Gary Becker’s theory of ‘human capital’ represented education and child-rearing in terms of their future financial returns. The public choice theory of the Virginia School aimed to represent democracy and public office in terms of the calculated self-interest of those involved.¹⁰ The Chicago School did the same in relation to law and economics. This amounts to what I’ve termed the ‘disenchantment of politics by economics’.¹¹ It also generates an attitude in which the purpose of social relations is to provide data and revenue to some third party. Threaded through the technologies of the credit derivative and the platform is a neoliberal rationality which expands the reach of financial calculation into areas previously governed by social norms. The rise of so-called surveillance capital in the twenty-first century was preordained by an economic and political rationality that dates back to the mid-twentieth century.¹²

This is disastrous for political liberalism. Dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, and the work of Thomas Hobbes in particular, liberalism’s key concern has been how to artificially manufacture trust. Hobbes saw the sovereign state as an artificial entity, whose capacity to create and enforce laws was the precondition of all peaceful, prosperous and reasonable social life. Mercantile communities, together with the nascent financial sector of merchant banks and coffee houses, invented their own trust devices in the form of book-keeping techniques, on which insurance and bond markets were based. Liberalism was born in a state of fundamental ambivalence regarding the ultimate grounds of public trust: law or economics?¹³ Its legitimacy rested on establishing relatively clear boundaries between the two, separating the terrain of finance from that of politics, with central banks serving as the mediators between the two.

The Keynesian model of the state, which prospered for nearly thirty years after the Second World War, was developed with the explicit aim of reining in finance and bringing it under the authority of national sovereign law. With this established, the liberal state had the autonomy to manufacture the conditions of social cohesion, which it did through the provision of an expanding welfare state, free education and progressive taxation. From the 1970s onwards, however, the neoliberal project has been to aggressively reverse this hierarchy, so that states are brought instead under the ‘disciplining’ authority of financial markets. Law-makers must increasingly consider their actions, not in terms of their commitment to voters or social cohesion, but in terms of how they will be judged by bond traders and currency speculators.¹⁴ The crisis that began in 2008 represented not the end of this principle, but its most shocking affirmation.

Neoliberal reforms involved privatising, marketising and outsourcing services that had originally been created and provided by the Keynesian state on a civic basis, rather than as a matter of economic efficiency. David Harvey has referred to this as ‘accumulation by dispossession’, seeing as it exploits an inheritance of public and civic goods.¹⁵ However, we might also view it as a type of ‘accumulation by distrust’, in that new opportunities for profit are created by casting doubt on the vocation and judgement of public service professionals. Lucrative opportunities open up for auditors and consultants, to evaluate, rate and rank schools, hospitals, councils, and even nations, according to how well they deliver ‘value for money’.

Distrust and audit culture work in a vicious circle, generating a spiral of surveillance and paranoia. Once suspicions are cast on others – be they public officials, teachers or other members of our community – no amount of data will be sufficient to alleviate them. The platform economy drives this into everyday life. Reputation and recommendations systems were originally unveiled with the promise of establishing trust between strangers, for instance on eBay. But Airbnb is now increasingly plagued by the phenomenon of sellers installing secret cameras around their homes, to seek additional proof of a buyer’s honesty.

The authority of language is downgraded in the process. Throughout its history, liberalism has relied on public institutions and procedures to bolster the credibility of public speech. The ideal of ‘the public record’, a central pillar of how facts are established and shared, assumes that public figures will be held to account and constrained by their own words. Modern science has developed exact procedures through which to measure, record and share evidence. But as neoliberalism has unleashed wave upon wave of rating, ranking, evaluation and audit processes (often conducted without transparency), publicly established facts are no longer in a position of authority. Science itself becomes judged according to calculations of financial return. It was precisely the threat that money posed to truth (and not some philosophical deconstruction) that prompted the diagnosis of ‘postmodernism’ in the 1970s.¹⁶

Much of what is labelled ‘populism’ is really a longing for some version of the state that predated neoliberal reforms. The Brexit mantra of ‘take back control’ may have been a dog-whistle about border control and immigration, but the appeal to national sovereignty, which clearly strikes such a chord with the baby-boomer generation, works partly because this age group can remember a time when the state was in command of its own economy and able to deliver social security to its own citizens. This gets refracted via the ugly nostalgia for cultural and ethnic homogeneity, and is exploited for political gain by politicians willing to toy with this nostalgia.

Liberal democracies have continued to hold elections, fought mostly by political parties that long predate neoliberalism. But they have witnessed declining levels of participation, particularly from around 1990 onwards, and especially among the working class and the young.¹⁷ In Britain, voter turn-out was over 77 per cent in the 1992 general election, but was under 60 per cent in 2005 (and under 40 per cent among under-twenty-fives). The rising autonomy – nay, sovereignty – of finance since the 1970s has been accompanied by a not unreasonable feeling that democratic institutions aren’t really where power lies, and that politicians must therefore be in it for money or fame. A vicious circle ensues, in which voters become ever more cynical about politics and public service, and therefore ever more reliant on markets, debt and audit to undergird social life.

Neoliberalism is a system that progressively devours the conditions of social trust and converts it into revenue streams. The common attribute of credit derivatives, digital platforms and contemporary democracy is that, behind the publicly visible institutional face and the various promises and commitments on offer, there lies a hidden logic of calculation, which is ultimately in command. Institutions become a kind of cosmetic veneer, mere ritual, behind which sit financial and algorithmic machinations. Political cynicism is the logical outcome of a system that views public life as a resource to be extracted from, rather than as the stage on which justice and truth will be established. The sense that public life is now a sham, and the yearning for this to be called out (if necessary by a maniac), lie at the heart of the political movements that shook the world in 2016.

After Liberalism

The events of 2016–20, recounted in this book, are evidence of what happens as neoliberal rationality penetrates the most cherished institutions of liberalism, in particular, parliamentary democracy, party politics and the public sphere of newspapers and broadcasters. The effects are unpredictable and unstable, indeed not always recognisable as ‘neoliberal’ at all. Alienation from representative democracy, and distrust in the media, had been brewing for many years, as multiple surveys have confirmed. Nationalists certainly exploit these feelings of powerlessness and resentment. But as the institutions and credibility of liberalism crumble, something new fills the void. Evidence and examples of this ‘something’ are scattered throughout the essays contained here.

Under the neoliberal conditions I’ve described, all action becomes dictated by a single question; the same question, incidentally, that Donald Trump fixates on: what will this do for my ratings? How many clicks, views and likes will it provoke? How much attention will it command? How much approval will it win? As Michel Feher has persuasively argued, neoliberals might have promised a society built around entrepreneurship and self-invention, but in practice they authorised a society of perpetual audit and rating.¹⁸ Whether it be the social media platform or the credit scoring technology (and the two are now converging), individuals constantly feel the force of rating in their everyday lives. Everything becomes about PR, a kind of perpetual performance of the kind of personality that is like-able and creditable.

We can now see the consequences of this all around us. Political leadership becomes a matter of celebrity and audience ‘engagement’. Figures such as Johnson and Trump, who can draw attention towards them, driving up clicks and ratings, become a crucial asset to political parties. They also become a valued piece of ‘content’ for platforms and media agencies, producing new alliances between the media, political parties and ultimately the state. The business ‘synergies’ between the Trump White House and Fox News, co-producing a constant stream of political reality television, are palpable.¹⁹ Johnson’s relationship with the media, especially the newspapers that are read by the same ageing demographic that votes Conservative, has a similar dynamic. Despite their very different demeanours, Johnson and Trump both have a public status as reality television stars or stand-up comedians: they offer a genre of content that fuses entertainment with news.

Britain’s media, and especially its newspapers, have played an active political role for many years in cultivating hostility towards immigrants, the European Union and the welfare state. Its biases are not news. But in the wake of Brexit, and imbued with the logic of the news ‘feed’ or ‘stream’, news outlets became permanent campaigns, working primarily towards ‘up rating’ one set of politicians and political content, and ‘down rating’ another. Strategic misrepresentation of others (both favourable and unfavourable) is how politics is conducted, not just by professional spin doctors, but by politicians, journalists and ordinary social media users. Far from seeking to report events, or hold power ‘to account’, news media (including celebrity interviewers and journalists) increasingly become part of a steady stream of unfolding events. The distinction between the reporter and the reported is muddied.

Herd-like behaviour and thinking is one effect of this. Just as financial markets are subject to irrational bubbles of sentiment (where it makes sense to buy something because everyone else is buying it), news and opinion become subject to virality and collective surges of sentiment that rise and fall like the prices of stocks. The critic (who plays such a pivotal role in the liberal vision of the public sphere, as seen by Kant and Habermas) risks being ignored or unfollowed, and is therefore replaced by the troll, who denounces and attacks for spectacular effect. This means the rise of a new type of celebrity evaluator – Piers Morgan, Brendan O’Neill, Simon Cowell – who commands clicks and views by issuing judgements crafted for maximum controversy. Similarly, a new type of celebrity rationalist – Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Toby Young – emerges, to perform a pastiche of enlightenment for the benefit of fans and anti-fans.

The quest to be rated, liked and clicked is unrelenting, in what Gilles Deleuze perceptively identified in 1992 as the new ‘societies of control’. The value of a given statement is in how appealing (or shocking or funny …) it seems right now, and not how successfully it serves as a description of the past or as a promise for the future. In this post-liberal scenario, the data archive and the algorithm are what knit together society’s past, present and future, and not public speech or writing. This is what I mean when I refer in a number of essays to the switch from a society of ‘facts’ to one of ‘data’. Whether Johnson speaks the ‘truth’ or not becomes an irrelevance, and the ‘public record’ becomes outmoded.

Leaders such as Johnson are not trusted by the public. They are not expected to keep their word. Such politicians prosper under conditions in which words are no longer expected to be kept. The experience of neoliberal reforms, and of austerity in particular, demonstrated that finance – and not democracy – now determines which promises will be kept. Johnson and Brexit appeal specifically to those who believe public institutions are riddled with self-interested elites and need to be ripped up. The autumn of 2019, when liberals enjoyed a wave of apparent victories via the Supreme Court and vigorous parliamentary autonomy, was a mirage. The popular fury at this assertion of constitutional norms and regulations ensured that Johnson’s victory the following December was all the greater.

The impossible task confronting liberals over recent years, not just in Britain but around the world, has been to make the case for analogue techniques of record-keeping and norm-keeping, against the torrent of digital media and the outrageous, unruly, hilarious practices that it facilitates. Not only does the liberal come to appear humourless, puritanical and conservative in their commitment to public procedure and facts; they also appear slow. While the demagogic leader-entertainer is constantly changing the subject and shaping the mood, the liberal is still talking about something that happened yesterday or last year. The resentment aimed towards the ‘mainstream media’ and ‘liberal elites’ rests on the idea that their commitment to rules and facts is a cultural quirk (a symptom of over-education), and that society no longer relies on such things to cohere.

Once public institutions and norms lose credibility, so do the divisions that separate them. Liberalism was built on a series of separations: between public and private, between state and market, politics and media, and between the three branches of government (executive, legislative, judiciary). These separations have been declared a deceitful sham by feminist and Marxist critics among others, on the basis that they work in the interests of patriarchy and/or capital. But they are also undone by neoliberal policy reforms, which seek to bring all of social and political life under the gaze of a blanket financial audit. In the context of the ‘internet of things’, and the fusing of credit rating with platforms, neoliberalism could yet issue in an infrastructure not unlike that of the Chinese ‘social credit’ scoring system, where all behaviour – public or private, social or economic – can be captured as proof of character.

As these structural shifts are underway below the surface, so once-separate public institutions and jurisdictions begin to blur into one. Just as the separation of business and state was dissolved under the reforms of the 1980s and ’90s, and as the distinction between journalism and political campaigning fades, the very idea of power being ‘held to account’ by an independent, separate judge or critic of some kind becomes less plausible and then suspicious. What does the judge want? What is their agenda? Whose side are they on? Deteriorating trust in public institutions breeds animosity towards outsiders and those perceived as disloyal. This is how the collapse of liberalism produces the conditions of nationalism, and even of fascism. The assertion of a single national (or ethno-national) ‘people’, which unites government, media, business and public around a common destiny, is the ultimate PR victory. Who gets eliminated or discarded, in order for this bubble of mutual rating and liking to be achieved, is another question.²⁰

Real-time Sociology

The essays collected in this book, which are grouped together in three chapters, were all written during the interregnum between Britain’s 2016 referendum and its 2020 departure from the European Union. This was a disorientating and fast-moving period in the nation’s politics, when many of the most dependable building blocks of liberal democracy seemed to be disintegrating. From the first piece, a blogpost written the morning after the referendum, through to the last, a column written after Johnson’s 2019 election victory, they are all efforts to make sense of what is unfolding, in something close to real-time. What they inevitably lack in quantity of hindsight, I hope they make up for in their immediacy, which grants a sense of how things appeared at the time.

There are various preoccupations throughout, that have already been highlighted: the abandoning of liberal economic rationality, the declining authority of empirical facts, the mainstreaming of nationalism, the hatred of ‘liberal elites’, the effect of big data and real-time media on our politics, the new mould of celebrity leaders, the crisis of democratic representation. These are all linked in ways that I’ve endeavoured to show. The over-arching theme is of a shift from a liberal polity based around norms, laws, expertise and institutions to a neoliberal one based around algorithmic surveillance and financial calculation.

The task for the kind of ‘real-time sociology’ that I was engaged in with these essays is to straddle the fast-moving world of the news cycle (which has grown significantly faster in the twenty-first century) with the search for underlying structures and conditions.²¹ This is not unlike the kind of ‘conjunctural analysis’ that Gramscians have long aimed at, and for which Stuart Hall’s work has been the model. Hall always encouraged us to pay attention to the new and unprecedented, and not simply view history as a predictable unfolding of underlying mechanics. Many of the essays in this volume perform a kind of brokerage service, moving between unfamiliar and shocking political events and familiar social and political theories, including many of the classics – Marx, Hirschman, Arendt, Foucault, Weber. In scurrying back and forth between my Twitter feed and my bookshelves, the hope is that we can understand what’s going on, without either wishful thinking or denial of the genuine conjunctural novelty.

There are obvious risks attached to theorising events like this. You can make a bad call, miss the wood for the trees, be duped by hype or by paranoia. I’ve never pretended to be much good at predictions, which I leave to the quantitative political scientists (my estimations of Theresa May’s electoral prowess were as wrong as anyone’s). But I think it’s important that we at least try to relate the flux of the present to the underlying conditions, which are more durable. When everything appears to be changing and unprecedented, it’s all the more important to find the continuities and precedents, without downplaying the shock of the new. One of the most dramatic transformations to have taken hold of public life in Western democracies in the twenty-first century is the way it potentially becomes ‘consumed’ as a constant ‘stream’ of content, relying on a combination of outrage and humour to hold and sway its audience. All academic disciplines offer a pause button of sorts, because they necessarily require slow and careful consideration of a moment in time, and can’t dwell in perpetual flow. But only sociology helps to explain where the acceleration arose from in the first place, on the assumption that something must be driving and structuring an apparently chaotic and reckless process.