Jeremy Corbyn
thinks the political mainstream has shifted to the left of centre, and that his
brand of politics is going to be the barometer for many more disaffected voters
in years to come. It's hard to say how accurate Corbyn's hypothesis is because
there hasn't ever really been a political centre. At best, the mythical centre
ground has been a kind of weighted average of a diverse range of
socio-political views that encapsulate both left and right wing beliefs in both
the social discourse and the economic discourse.
Here's how the
myth of the centre gathered intellectual traction over the years. Because of
all the left vs. right wing squabbling, many people have tried to claim
themselves to be the more reasonable moderates that sit somewhere in between two
extremes - in the proudly occupied 'centre ground' of politics. But it's just
not true that the best position on most
social and political issues lies somewhere in the middle - life is just not
like that in most other areas of objective truth and empirical facts, and it's
not like that in politics either (see here
for further reading).
One doesn't adopt a middle
position about whether it's fine to drop litter, or whether it's good to put diesel in a petrol
engine, or whether it's wise to accept astrology as true, so why should anyone expect a middle
position on subjects like abortion, same-sex marriage, price controls, assisted dying,
environmental issues, the qualities of trade and the harms of retarding it?
People have convicted opinions one way or the other - and the judgement about
who is right and who is wrong is one for the intellect and the emotional
intelligence.
There is not some kind of
central ground comprising a reservoir of middle positions. The weighted average
of socio-political views that make up our society is not like mixing blue, red,
yellow, purple and green paint, it is more like a deep pool of blue, red,
yellow, purple and green coloured balls. Consequently, when political parties
try to win elections by appealing to the so-called centre ground, you know what they are really doing: they are trying to win a popularity contest a la
carte by selling themselves as a weighted average of society's preferences,
which is as illusory as it is empty (see here
and here
and here
for further reading)
Given the
foregoing, to what extent, then, is there a genuine appetite for hard socialism,
and to what extent is Corbynmania merely an extreme cult of personality
movement that has been allowed to get out of hand by a mob of credulous
individuals?
I think it's
pretty evident that under this scenario, without Corbyn, this mass
proliferation of hardline socialism, the putrid sense of envy and entitlement
from the young, and the vulgar and aggressive intolerance for people that
disagree with them would not have become as mainstream as it has - it would have
remained within the remit of the fringe lunatics who stand on street corners
with sandwich boards declaring that "Capitalism is Dead".
The other main
reason I suspect that the rise of hard socialism is really about a cult of
personality is that this generation more than any other is a generation in
which the anachronisms of Thomas Carlyle's Great Man theory - that history is written by the impact of a minority of
charismatic and powerful men - have been well and
truly put to bed.
If Corbynmania
is an attempt to blow the dust off the outmoded idea that individual humans are
good candidates for being put on pedestals - an idea that was already beginning to die alongside the likes of Saul
Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Kingsley Amis and Harold Pinter - then the
intellectual vacuity of the man and his ideas suggest very much that
Corbynmania amounts to a personality cult where the leader's proclamations are
uncritically and gullibly swallowed whole by a large group of people that are
easily led and easily manipulated into some kind of mass hysteria of nonsense.
