Random Variable

Last Wednesday, as part of the Boris Watch team, I was invited to a Liberal Conspiracy event at the Guardian on how liberal-left bloggers can affect national politics.

LSE’s Polis director Charlie Beckett was not impressed, saying that right-wing bloggers like Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale were far more entertaining than their left-wing counterparts.

Mark Hanson said the m-word, and then immediately withdrew it saying we are a “family” instead. Patriarchy aside, what is a successful political programme other than the representation of a popular…umm….movement? The network metaphor was overused, particularly by Sunny. It’s always good to step back and look at what work the word “network” is performing. There was more concern about getting into the mainstream media than convincing the public of the superiority of a leftist programme over the right. In fact, I counted the word public being used about three times. We need some conception of the public sphere and its relation to party politics. The goal of blogging to be the recruitment of activists to do door-to-door-knocking is a bit weak.

Georgina Henry said that the UK blogosphere is the opposite to that of the US, and this might have something to do with who is in opposition. There was a suggestion that perhaps the left blogosphere would flourish once the general election was conceded to the Conservatives.

Dan Hardie, perhaps gave the most enlightening talk of the evening. Giving a detailed analysis of the partially successful campaign to save the Iraqi interpreters, his main point is that blogging campaigns give mediocre results. The real gains are to be had from the traditional methods of attracting media attention and lobbying MPs, and even then, the government can lie to the media.

The second session sought to answer why feminist bloggers are, to use Sunny’s terms “insulated from the rest of the liberal blogosphere.” Many men felt that women had to do more to explain feminism to them. This is just an excuse. Much like asking Muslims to continually speak out violence committed by extremists, you can indefinitely tell feminists to make things simpler for men to understand, whilst justifying a position of continual non-engagement. The problem of feminist disembeddedness in the liberal left is a male problem. Besides, can my fellow men really not Google?

The liberal-left does not have enough to distinguish it from the right. Both sides now argue from a libertarian conception of rights, except the liberal left are perhaps the more conservative, in the sense of wanting to maintain existing creaky structures. Here, Philip Bobbit seems to be right in arguing that the social democratic contract has now expired, and that we live in the time of the ‘market state’, whose pact it makes with its citizen, is one that promises to maximise the free market opportunities of it citizens. In contrast, the earlier leftist social democratic programmes were founded on “pacts of security at the moment of a demand for war.”

In this understanding, Libertarianism, grounded in a theory of neoliberal state cooperation is easy to promote and adopt. Many Libertarian claims, however, can often be challenged on feminist or racial terms, for example, how libertarian feminism relies on an underclass of women’s labour or how many libertarians want to undermine neoliberal steps to a safer world by closing off borders and practising “libertarianism in one country.”

In its stead, the Left can therefore develop a pact for a generation without wartime memories, aimed at the old and unfinished goal of substantive social equality.