Questioning political leadership -04/05/05

Although elections are primarily about choosing between political parties, one of the curious features of modern democracy is the radically diminished extent to which the party itself denotes any significant difference in our understanding of the world and how we see it.

Take the UK general election campaign. In the run up to 5 May 2005 the main protagonists sought to distinguish themselves in the public eye more by squabbling over a rather small portion of public finance than by offering distinctive visions of ‘the good society’.

In competing to be tough on unpopular groups (like migrants) they shared identical assumptions about the rigidity of nation states against vulnerable people. And in spinning meagre policy differences for minimum cost and maximum glamour, they signalled the supremacy of management over politics.

Noticeably, no-one with any genuine hope of electoral success talked about a sizeable shift in power and wealth. The media-fuelled culture of instant adversarialism has deepened this trend. Elections are not about coherent convictions any more.

They have become instead a composite series of mini-referenda on individual policy initiatives, a beauty contest for candidates, and a broadcasting ritual involving the slick evasion of questions designed more to entrap than to understand.

What has got us into this impoverished political situation is partly the evacuation of meaning through endless trivialization, and partly the demise of ideology.

The twentieth century presented itself as an era of big choices – capitalism or communism, command or market systems, corporatism or individualism, religion or secularism, Bolshevism or Nazism, nationalism or globalism. But in practice most of these ‘choices’ turned out to be either fatal or downright misleading.

The absolute power of any one idealised force – capital, the proletariat, the state, the market, the corporation, the individual, the Party, the faith, the anti-faith, the race, the nation or the ‘world order’ rapidly sacrifices people-in-community on the altar of sectional interests.

For this reason, ridding ourselves of authoritarian, exclusive thought systems is a good thing. But replacing their totalising claims with a public square preoccupied by little more than its own celebrity image offers no viable alternative. The vacuum created by such a shallow exorcism is rapidly re-filled.

That is especially the case when what lies behind the shift is not an absence of ideology, but its covert re-emergence through a global economy dominated by large corporate interests – ones that routinely engulf localised attempts to promote sustainability and moral community.

The shadowy meta-narrative of unfettered markets and bottomless consumption is at the core of our allegedly ‘post-ideological’ condition. In a brave new world programmed for the survival of the fastest, life becomes a race to spend ever more time producing things people either do not need or cannot afford.

Absorbed by products that leave them hollow inside through their inability to connect one another, even the “market enfranchised” find themselves “amused to death” (to echo Neil Postgate’s chilling verdict on the hedonistic fix).

So what happens next? No-one really knows. And in the absence of substantial ideas that would make a real difference to the way we live, democratic politics – the attempt to mediate power through popular choice – resolves itself around “the question of leadership”.

That theme dominated the UK election debate. It also overshadowed the US Presidential ballot last year. And it prefigured the unexpected global media circus over the College of Cardinals as they voted for the new Pope.

When people are not sure what or who to trust any more, they search instead for someone who looks like they know, for a “strong leader” – a term of both praise and approbation thrown regularly at Blair, Bush and Benedict in recent weeks.

According to the popular cliché, we get the leaders we deserve. Given that ‘we’ embraces a multitude of contradictory tendencies, this is fitfully true. What may be nearer the case is that our elected leaders tell us something about who and where we are (politically, culturally, socially and even religiously).

When we probe behind the surface of the robust rhetoric that surrounds the mystique of “the born leader”, what we often find is deep vulnerability; one cleverly masked by the use of force against things and people that appear a threat.

So it is that Tony Blair personifies the confusion about war versus law. George Bush uses military might to assert his country’s ethically fragile global role. And Benedict XIV is expected to secure his wobbling religious hegemony through a buttressed hierarchy.

Strong-arm politics may work for a time. But its lack of moral authority undermines any long term claims to legitimacy. Rule by force breeds counter-forces ranging from benign protest movements (against war and injustice) right through to malignant messianisms (terrorism and militarism).

Even so, the deepest crack in the democratic system today is arguably not politicians who, while a convenient target, are at least partially circumscribed by what we permit. It is, rather, the growing weakness of our own civic imagination that inflicts most damage.

Deep down people want to leave the mess of politics to someone else. They are unable or unwilling to commit to a future where the flourishing of planet and people might take priority over the womb-like desire for comfort at all costs.

In the Monty Python film ‘Life of Brian’, there is a deliciously ironic moment when the anti-hero, an ordinary bloke caught like a rabbit in the headlights, tries to stop the rootless rabble from turning him into the imagined strongman they can never be.

“Look”, he pleads, “you don’t have to follow me. You’re all individuals.” There is a moment of quiet. Then they shout back in shattering unanimity, “Yes! We’re all individuals!” All except a solitary man, who lamely protests, “I’m not!”

This comedy of errors softens its sting with laughter. But back on the high street we go on perpetuating the same illusions. We protest our individuality even as we follow the crowd.

“All we want is honest politicians who tell us the truth”, we say, bridling with indignation at the least Whitehall cover-up. Except we don’t.

Only recently one of the smaller party leaders was castigated as ‘weak’ by a focus group because he was “not confrontational enough.” The same group had earlier said they were fed up with “yah-boo politics”.

As opinion polls regularly indicate, political leaders would instantly lose ‘credibility’ if they told us that migrants were no threat, that growing inequality diminishes us, that the war on drugs has failed, that the environment is not be tax-free, that choice in public services may be illusory, that crime is conditioned by consumption, and that global poverty matters more than stockpiling riches.

We often claim we want a better world, but we are not formed in such a way as to be able to distinguish between price and value, wealth and worth. We are looking for a new politics without being willing to confront the cost of a new people-hood.

A worthy leader would perhaps be someone honest and humane enough to face us with these awkward truths and to offer us a school for regeneration.

But it is certain that we would not elect such a person, given the option. We might even kill them. That is what the religious and ruling elites did with Jesus. And on their own terms they were right to do so.

The threat the Jesus movement posed to the leaders of its day was real, in spite of its initial obscurity. In Acts of the Apostles, the record of the emergent church, Christians are accused by the Emperor’s friends of “saying there is another king, Jesus”.

The political alternative embodied by Jesus is not that of tyranny, self-interest, vengeance and propaganda, however. It is much more dangerous than that.

Its agenda is contagious with communion. It questions received answers. It says that the marginal, not the powerful, are close to God. It stands up to Temple and Imperial Court alike. It disarms those who seek governance by violence.

As part of his own trial, Jesus was faced with a snap election called by a Roman delegate. He overwhelmingly lost the vote. Populism and the politics of fear dictated that leaders who reserved the right to kill won out, and that the one who signalled an end to rule by death went to the gallows.

The options we face at the ballot box and beyond are not often as stark as this. But what lies beneath even mundane politics is the continual struggle about who we are. Are we defined by the power strategies of ‘strong leaders’, or by Jesus’ refusal of delusional dominion?

It is this basic choice that begins to constitute a different kind of politics: one marked by hope rather than resignation, the promise of resurrection instead of our deadly quest for control or oblivion.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) works for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, but is writing in a personal capacity. His background is in journalism, adult learning, politics and theology.