Cullingworth nestles in Yorkshire's wonderful South Pennines and I have the pleasure and delight to be the village's Conservative Councillor. But these are my views - on politics, food, beer and the stupidity of those who want to tell me what to think or do. And a little on mushrooms.
I've talked before about how the big cities that, at present, drive economic growth, act to exclude people. Or, to put it another way, prevent people from being anything other than 21st century peons trapped in small, crowded apartments that eat up £4 in every £10 they're paid. And worse, unlike the past's rural peons, these new urban serfs cannot settle, opt out of having a family and live a sort of 'kidult' existence that is filled with ultimately unfulfilling fun.
The problem is that, when people travel away from the city so as to have a stake in the nation, settle down and raise a family, they find is difficult to maintain the work they had before and quickly discover that (outside the specially privileged world of public sector professionals) the opportunities in affordable places aren't there. This brings me to this quotation from French geographer, Christopher Guilluy:
All the growth and dynamism is in the major cities, but people cannot just move there. The cities are inaccessible, particularly thanks to mounting housing costs. The big cities today are like medieval citadels. It is like we are going back to the city-states of the Middle Ages. Funnily enough, Paris is going to start charging people for entry, just like the excise duties you used to have to pay to enter a town in the Middle Ages.
Guilluy uses this, in part, to explain the "gilets jaunes" protests in France but also transfers the effect elsewhere - to the UK's Brexit vote, to the election of Donald Trump, and to the new Italian government. While, Guilluy speaks most commonly of the working class, it's clear that the protest movements (whether on the streets as in France or in the voting booth as in Italy) extend to a wider group of those excluded from what I once called "The Great City of the West":
There's no actual reason, other than our sociable nature, for us to live in those 'Great Cities of the West'. Indeed, they're filled with untypical humans. There are the brave few who upped sticks and travelled thousands of miles to live poor quality lives on the fringes of the gleaming, sparkly city hoping for a lucky chance. We've the fortunate beneficiaries of inheritance or beauty who can skim across the surface of the city enjoying its lights and pleasures while affording the means to avoid its darkness. And there's a vast mass of clever, skilled, hard-working people who turn the wheels of the city's economy but can't get a stake in the city, can't find the means to settle and have a family, and who justify this on the basis that they can get to see the beauties in their plays, galleries and stadiums.
Out in the provinces - sneered at by the grand city folk - there's a different culture emerging. In part this is fuelled by anger at the denial of opportunities but it is also about the reforming of community and of a hope that politics will bring the cities to their senses and allow the idea of an inclusive democracy back into our culture. Meanwhile the wealthy elite call for the over 75s to have their vote removed or for people to have to take a test to earn the right to vote - the desire is to exclude the less educated, the old, the working class from power, to return us - in the name of progressive politics - to a world before the extension of the franchise to workers in 1918.
Just as, before the trade unions and their socialist and social democrat party offspring, workers lacked a voice, today people in small town England, in la France périphérique, rust belt USA and Italy's crumbling industrial cities lack a voice. Yes they are working class but it is broader than this, as Guilluy describes:
They tend to be people in work, but who don’t earn very much, between 1000€ and 2000€ per month. Some of them are very poor if they are unemployed. Others were once middle-class. What they all have in common is that they live in areas where there is hardly any work left. They know that even if they have a job today, they could lose it tomorrow and they won’t find anything else.
If the establishments of the west want to avoid upheaval, they need to find a way to respect - listen to, heed - the voice of these people. Above all we need to stop patronising them as the "left behind" or worse and to realise that the great cities of the west will need them. The great and good must stop making the city such a barrier to having a real, cash stake in society.
I'm guessing most of you aren't geeky or obsessed enough to have stayed up most of last night watching the US midterm election results roll in. I did and mighty good fun it was too. I chose to watch CNN for the simple reason that their presentation of the data (and the chap who talks to it) is really good. I'm not going to comment on the outcome and what it means because, like most of us over here my knowledge of US politics is paper thin. We know now that the result was the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives while the Republicans consolidated their hold on the Senate. It seems obvious to me that this reflects the same pattern as for Trump's election in 2016 with the Democrats piling up votes in places the already won while Republicans sneak back in or win by narrow margins in places - Florida, Ohio, Texas - where they target.
In the short term* the results seem good for Republicans and suggest that the Democrats will have an uphill struggle to unseat Trump in 2020 especially if they make the mistake of this campaign (and 2016) of targeting the wrong places (all that money and attention on a skateboarding chap in a Texas senate race and a couple of rock solid blue seats in the North East because they had strong female candidates). I also wonder whether the Democrats will revisit the mistake the Republicans made in 1994 and spend all their time trying to bring down the President.
The reason I feel the Democrats will again get both strategy and tactics wrong was illustrated by the conversation, once the change in the House was clear, between the CNN presenters. I don't recall the precise details of the interaction between the main anchor and two presenters but, in summary, it asked what the new Democratic House majority should (could? would?) do and concluded that the focus would be on Trump - "maybe they'll get Trump's tax returns" said one, "the i-word - impeachment" said another, "the Mueller business" - you get the gist. The entire focus, or so these pundits suggested, is going to be the continued programme of trying to prove that Trump (or the Russians or a secret cabal under the direction of Steve Bannon) stole the 2016 election, a sort of post hoc vindication of Hilary Clinton.
Maybe this stuff matters but I can't help but think that the people who just elected Democrats to congress did so to get better healthcare, funding for schools, childcare and welfare support. And if their shiny new representatives, having promised all this, then spend all their time shovelling through the arcana of the previous presidential election, this simply plays into Trumps hands. And with the great hopes for Democratic ambitions - bouncy, dynamic modern folk like Beto O'Rourke and Andrew Gillum - falling at the first hurdle it's hard to see where the person to challenge Trump will come from. What Trump wants, because it's what he's best at, is a long, vulgar shouting match over things that really don't matter a jot to the ordinary American.
The problem, however, is that the media - as those pundits on CNN last night showed - wants that long, loud scrap with Trump. Not because it's important but because, in these days of politics as entertainment, it's box office in a way that boring stuff about medicare or housing policy simply isn't. Those latter things really are the things that matter to Americans but the media, just as is the case in Britain, would rather focus on gossip and the shallow and snide world of Twitter than on the big issues facing real people.
*In the long term Republicans have a problem with cities and especially the growing sun belt suburbs that tells me, without some changes in focus and strategy, places like Texas and Tennessee will start electing statewide democrats again. ....
To be sure there is much to lament about Trump, and his European counterparts, but it’s ironic that many of those who charge him with autocracy are often themselves not great fans of democratic control. For the most part the anti-populists favor not a more vibrant democracy but, in the words of Harvard’s Yascha Mounk “rights without democracy,” dominated by bureaucracies like the EU or the EPA. Some are even open admirers of China’s authoritarian dictatorship; others swoon at French President Emmanuel Macron’s almost laughable yearning to reinvent himself as a modern day Louis XIV.
Indeed it is striking that so much sound and fury is vented at the prospect of the not-very-authoritarian Donald Trump visiting the UK while the Prime Minister can cosy up to China's definitely-authoritarian leadership without any criticism at all (even to the point of a Times cartoonist hinting human rights abuses in the UK are in some way equivalent to China's!
I appreciate that today's newspapers need clickbait to get enough visitors to satisfy their advertisers. And I also understand that The Guardian would never admit to this, which means I'm going to take their editorial laying into Taylor Swift at face value:
Mr Trump realised it was more effective to target a core group than attempt blanket appeal in his campaign – but Swift worked it out first. For years, she has directed her extraordinary self-promotional skills towards cultivating a dedicated and emotional army of followers, handpicking particularly loyal fans for private listening parties and, on her latest tour, allowing members of the public to buy tickets only once they have proved their allegiance through their purchasing history. Her new album, Reputation, is not available on Spotify – anyone wishing to hear it must buy it.
The reason Ms Swift has attracted the ire of the UK's leading journal of self-righteous left-wing tripe is that she has been insufficiently strident in her criticism of Donald Trump.
Her silence seems to be more wilful: a product of her inward gaze, perhaps, or her pettiness and refusal to concede to critics. Swift seems not simply a product of the age of Trump, but a musical envoy for the president’s values.
So let's look at Ms Swift's failings (as insinuated by The Guardian): having alt-right fans, too few friends who aren't "thin, white and wealthy", being good at marketing, and not releasing her new album free to air from day one. Oh, she also challenged structural racism (the lefty idea that the oppressed can't be racist) as incomprehensible.
Until I'd read this pretty egregious editorial I'd not knowingly listened to anything by Taylor Swift - unsurprisingly I'm not target market and she is (as The Guardian notice) rather good at marketing. So, prompted by the Guardian's ire, I spent an hour listening to Ms Swift's catalogue on Spotify (except for the latest release, of course, as that's not there yet). I can see the appeal - even the bit The Guardian snarks at, saying:
Swift’s songs echo Mr Trump’s obsession with petty score-settling in their repeated references to her celebrity feuds, or report in painstaking detail on her failed romantic relationships (often, there is crossover). The message is quintessentially Trumpian: everyone is out to get me – but I win anyway.
Seems to me that, celebrity references aside, Ms Taylor's music sits right with the interests of her core audience of younger women - tales of unrequited love, snarky stuff about other girls, you really love me don't you. All this is done in a slightly country, upbeat and catchy manner - nothing too hard to listen too, simple tunes and storied lyrics. And I guess it's the stuff Ms Swift likes to sing and that her marketing team knows the audience wants to hear.
And this is great, Taylor Swift seems to be a woman on top of her business. The bit that isn't so great here is that The Guardian cannot comprehend a celebrated singer not wanting to 'do politics', despite the undoubted fact that Ms Swift's fans probably don't pay a great deal of attention to that politics. What's even odder is that The Guardian takes the view that Ms Swift's silence is, in some way, an endorsement of Donald trump - presumably on the 'if you're against him, you're for him' principle. This is really rather unpleasant - going as it does from reporting on Ms Swift saying nothing to inferring that she's only a breath away from joining far right marches. It all suggests that the newly-unpleasant left simply cannot countenance an artist that refuses to join their mob and prefers to just get on with being a rich and successful performer. And god forbid that any writer, singer or actor is conservative.
Since the Brexit vote in Britain and Trump's election in the USA, there has developed a genre of journalism that involves the writer departing from their comfortable, elite environs (London, New York, San Francisco) and venturing out into the badlands where people voted either the leave the EU or else for Donald Trump. On safari with their patronising pencils:
Hale, who is 65 and lives in San Francisco, is a career activist who got her start protesting nuclear plants and nuclear testing in the 1970s. In 2005, she was one of the founders of Third Way, a center-left think tank, and it was in that capacity that she and four colleagues had journeyed from both coasts to the town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, as part of a post-election listening tour. They had come on a well-meaning mission: to better understand their fellow Americans, whose political behavior in the last election had left them confused and distressed.
The elephants that lumbered up and down Blackpool’s beach have long gone. Britain’s political parties have stopped decamping to the town for their annual jamborees. Even the deckchairs have left: the local government sold all 6,000 of them three years ago to a company in the affluent county of Cheshire. The one thing that hasn’t disappeared is the people.
This sort of poverty tourism feeds a set of consumers eager for the latest instalment of voyeurism, the next explanation as to why these stupid people voted for Brexit or plumped for Trump. We get depressing descriptions of people's lives interspersed by showing how they're all bigoted, racist, misogynist, overweight and unhealthy. What there isn't is any attempt at all to understand why, at least not beyond glib, smug quips about "shit life syndrome" or lurid reporting on illiberal attitudes towards druggies, welfare queens and high school drop-outs.
The whole approach - whether it's a Financial Times journalist going to Blackpool, a Guardian writer venturing to Stoke, or some San Francisco researchers driving through rural Wisconsin - reeks of 19th century anthropology where intrepid researchers ventured into the dark jungle in search of lost tribes to write up in their next book - published to great acclaim and talk of how brave, how brilliant. What we don't get is any real sense of understanding as journalists turn for insight to the public sector elites that dominate many of these places - to the very people who are failing to turn them round.
It's no surprise then, that the descriptions focus on the dysfunctional lives of people who live in these places, on the drugs and alcohol, the depression and the sense of hopelessness. What's lacking from this poverty tourism is any sense of empathy, any appreciation of what having a shit life is really like. And why so many people with those shit lives are in Blackpool, Stoke and rural Wisconsin. It struck me as telling that the UK edition of J D Vance's gripping 'Hillbilly Elegy' describes it as "a great insight into Trump and Brexit" - it may be that but more importantly it's a revealing story of the struggles faced by the white working class in the deindustrialised Mid West. That Trump and Brexit were stuck on the book's front cover tells you everything you need to know about the interests and priorities of bien pensant bookshop browsers in London or New York.
What's missing is any suggestion as to what - other than familiar cries for more government cash - should be done to change shit lives into lives that are all right. We get little criticisms of government like this:
For Jonathan Portes, chief economist at the DWP between 2002 and 2008, the lack of a plan was, in retrospect, part of the problem. “There’s an argument for saying you can’t do [welfare reform] separately from having some sort of place-based economic strategy as well — and we never really had that,” he says. “Just telling them, ‘Well there’s 5,000 new jobs in London every week, and people seem to find it perfectly easy to move 600 miles from rural Romania to take one of these jobs, so why can’t you move 200 miles from Blackpool?’ — it’s true but it sort of ignores the social context.”
The truth, of course, is that we had decades of place-based economic strategies some funded through ERDF Objective One and Two, others by UK government funding (City Challenge, SRB, Estate Action - a potpourri of place-based regeneration) but, in the main, the places that were poorest in 1968 are more likely to be poor in 2018. And, while all this money helped, the economic fundamentals for places like Blackpool, Barnsley or Stoke haven't changed all that much.
When you read Vance's book, you get a little sense of the irritation many like him (hillbillies, rednecks, chavs, pikies - the white working classes of Britain and America) feel at the way they're portrayed in these poverty tourism pieces. We're given the idea that such folk are dull, listless, ignorant and essentially helpless, that only the intervention of bright, engaged, educated and empowered people from outside can resolve the problem. We're to say "there, there" and provide a big middle-class hug to all these sad, incapable poor people out there in the sticks.
Perhaps instead of that hug, we should try a little bit of understanding? Get underneath why their lives are shit? Maybe we can stop hassling them about lifestyle too and focus instead on the things that could help? But then, I've a suspicion, the journalists, academics and think-tankers believe they're done their job by pointing at Blackpool as saying "ewww, isn't it horrid" (albeit taking 5000 words to do so). After all their readers will now be armed with all they need to hold forth about the evils of capitalism, the failures of Tory welfare policies and the noble work being done by the public sector elites in these towns, people who are sacrificing the comforts of civilisation to do good work in these sad, broken places.
Several people who worked directly with Cambridge Analytica told BuzzFeed News that despite its sales pitch and public statements, it never provided any proof that the technique was effective or that the company had the ability to execute it on a large scale. “Anytime we ever wanted to test anything as far as psychographic was concerned, they would get very hesitant,” said one former campaign staffer. “At no point did they provide us any documentation that it would work.”
Now I suppose that, if you're a conspiracy theorist, this can be dismissed as the campaign people throwing chaff out the back of the plane but it reinforces for me the weaknesses of the Cambridge Analytica claims. The article sets out some of these claims - or at least the ones that the company has broadcast proudly - including the use of 'psychographics'.
We know (because Cambridge Analytical tell us so) that the company has a 'psychographic profile' derived either from, questionably-sourced, Facebook data or else the company's own surveys. For this to be usable it has to be translated into a system that can be applied to the whole population (or at least that population in very small units). It seems that the Cambridge Analytica CEO is saying they have such a system because he claims the company had “profiled the personality of every adult in the United States of America — 220 million people.”
The real question here isn't whether or not such a profile exists (and if it is based solely on Facebook it doesn't since over 40% of Americans aren't using Facebook and a large part of those who are are irregular or infrequent users even before privacy choices are considered) but whether it is in any way either meaningful or effective as a marketing tool. I've a feeling that it is little better than standard geodemographics built on Richard Webber's 'birds of a feather flock together' principle. The observations of people involved in the Trump campaign seem to bear this out - Cambridge Analytica's work perhaps did provide useful targeting insights but didn't then provide any useable means of directly reaching these new targets.
In marketing pitches, two GOP operatives recalled, Nix has claimed his company has access to proprietary information that includes Facebook data. One of the operatives said the data was too old to be helpful and couldn’t be updated. Others said they’d received a similar pitch, but Nix was too vague about the details for them to evaluate what the data really was. None of the campaign staffers BuzzFeed News spoke with said Cambridge Analytica’s proprietary data had played a key role in any decision-making.
There may indeed be some strategic value in extensive data analysis but it is not the salvation. Indeed, there's some suggestion that Hillary Clinton's campaign was even more driven by data analytics than Trump's campaign:
What Ada did, based on all that data, aides said, was run 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like. A report that was spit out would give campaign manager Robby Mook and others a detailed picture of which battleground states were most likely to tip the race in one direction or another — and guide decisions about where to spend time and deploy resources.
The use of analytics by campaigns was hardly unprecedented. But Clinton aides were convinced their work, which was far more sophisticated than anything employed by President Obama or GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, gave them a big strategic advantage over Trump.
And we know what happened here - Clinton targeted either places she was winning easily or places where chaotic information led the campaign to believe it was doing better than it was. There seems to have been a deal more art in the Trump campaign than the conspiracy theorists want, with those involved using data more cautiously than was the case for the Democrats. Just as with the EU referendum, we see people wanting to deny the failings of their own campaign by suggesting the matter was determined by devious, sinister, billionaire-funded legerdemain. This problem continues today and, if anything, is expanding as Russian bots, Macedonian fake news and manipulative 'right wing' media are added to the things blamed for the 'wrong' result.
The same message needs to go to Democrats as I sent to Remain supporters in the UK:
At some point the rump of disappointed remain voters will stop trying to find some sinister external force - Russians, American data companies, Facebook - that explains why we voted to leave and recognise that, in truth, we voted to leave because the EU is a distant, anonymous, unapproachable, corrupt and interfering undemocratic institution. That's it - all of it. And if you ask people a slightly different question, they'll tell you that London is also a distant, anonymous, unapproachable, corrupt and interfering undemocratic place too. One run by and for people with more connection to New York or Paris than Barnsley or Stoke. Perhaps those still angst-ridden by us leaving can begin to learn this?
I guess I represent all the axes of evil on this subject – I’m a qualified Conservative Party Agent, a professional marketer specialising in direct marketing and a politician.
I’m going to tell you that big data didn’t win it. That Cambridge Analytica is selling a bog-standard set of analysis tools rebadged as ‘political’.
Database marketing is brilliant. We can analyse large data sets and apply them to useable population geography – in the UK postcode sectors contain about 2,500 to 3,000 people.
When Cambridge Analytica tells you they have a profile for every community in the USA, they are simply describing the use of these well-established and widely used geodemographics.
It’s what they sell – it’s what we were selling to UK financial services companies, mail order business and retailers back in 1990.
Better still, we can then match this profiling information to our own data – in the case of a political campaign this is likely to be voting intention information: VI Data.
What this match will tell us is where our voters live and, more importantly, where voters with similar characteristics to our voters live. We might have lots of VI Data for Tory voters across the country but none in Walsall – what the profile does is tell us, at a very localised geography, where we’re most likely to find those voters in Walsall.
This is pretty much all that Cambridge Analytica do.
The big change Cambridge Analytica offer from base geodemographics is the use of social media information.
Overlaying this data onto that geodemographics perhaps (I’m not convinced) makes that granular geographical targeting more effective.
The bit of software Cambridge Analytica uses claims to be able to draw a phychographic profile from facebook likes and text – I’m not convinced (especially since most folks activity on face book involves saying LOL a lot, going aww at cat pictures and liking your friends baby photos).
A version of this test is online here, with another that analyses language. The first 1,000 words of Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit speech from January generates a 67 per cent openness rating, making her "liberal and artistic" rather than "conservative and traditional", and a 99 per cent score for her being a man.
The truth is that the data from social media is very dirty – what these clever techie folk claim is a long way from the reality. And, regardless of quantity, having rubbish data will always give you rubbish outcomes.
What Facebook does, however, is allow us to target advertising at that same granular level – I only need to buy advertising within a few miles of high profile score communities in target areas making the advertising more efficient and perhaps more effective. It also means that if you are outside my profile you won’t see much of my advertising.
What we have here isn’t a sinister conspiracy but just a set of marketing tools applied to politics. Does it work? Yes – but it’s not a silver bullet. We’d reckon on uplift in response of around 2X or maybe 3X compared to a random selection. Great until you realise that the response to random was around 0.2% - all that clever technology means that, instead of getting ignored by 998 out of 1000 people, you only get ignored by 994.
In every other respect this is little different from what we were doing nearly thirty years ago – digging into data to make our marketing better.
And it was not the main reason that Vote Leave and Donald Trump won. I see five things as mattering in effective political campaigns, only one of which is targeting.
1. Brand. Vote Leave got lucky because some journalist coined the term ‘Brexit’ giving a simple and memorable brand for the campaign. One that opponents of leaving repeated again and again. The same goes for Hillary Clinton – almost all Democrat campaign material talked about Trump – and Theresa May where the Conservatives pumped out millions of messages saying ‘May or Corbyn’
2. Call to Action. Again Vote Leave got lucky – “take back control” they said, giving people a simple action, voting to leave, that would make that possible. “Drain the swamp” said Trump. And the same goes for Corbyn (find quote)
3. Enhanced Word-of-Mouth – or ‘going viral’. Thousands of little green frogs – with all the memes and comments that went with those frogs - were probably more important to Trump’s campaign than the money he spent with Cambridge Analytica. And the same was true of Vote Leave and Corbyn – thousands of people creating and sharing memes, doing things unasked and without the campaign’s say so
4. Good targeting – yes it matters and using geography is a great way to do it in a system based on people voting locally. But, as Corbyn showed, targeting a demographic – young people – can also be pretty effective.
5. Finally Brexit and Trump won because their opponents ran dreadfulcampaigns. Theresa May did too but started too far ahead for Corbyn to catch her.
Yes targeting matters. Absolutely the generation of ‘fake news’ matters. But no, ‘Big Data’ didn’t win these elections. There is no sinister conspiracy, just a set of circumstances – good branding, viral social media, strong calls to action and awful opposing campaigns – that allowed the results we got. Targeting helps but, if we’d not seen the brand, message and memes – and the useless campaigns from Stronger In and Hillary Clinton, the results would have been different.
Politics is about the economy. This truth has, for most of recent history, dominated the manner in which elections have been fought and to a large degree the outcomes of those elections have been determined by the economy. When James Carville hung that sign - "it's the economy, stupid" - on the wall of Bill Clinton's campaign office, he summed up this political certainty.
Because of this certainty, politicians and, perhaps more significantly, political campaign managers began to focus their attention on economics rather than marketing strategy. These folk assumed that if you got your message right on the economy and economic management and won the argument by undermining the other side's economic credibility then you win. Every time.
And is certainly seemed that way. Bill Clinton won in 1992 by remorselessly talking up recession (a recession caused by his predecessor, of course). John Major delivered a Conservative majority in that same year by positioning his government as trustworthy on economic policy and Kinnock's Labour as risky. The same goes in Germany, Japan and Canada - everywhere you looked the secret was to be boringly reliable and trustworthy on the economy. Do that and the mantle of office falls onto your shoulders.
You don’t intend to read over the shoulder of the person next to you on the tube, do you, but it’s unavoidable. The well-dressed young woman on the Northern Line on Wednesday was scratching away in a very expensive notebook. The novel in my hands turned to dust, and I swivelled my eyes at her writing.
Top of the page: “Objective: financial security.” Then a new line: “Need: £20,000 to be debt free.”
I didn’t read any more. The thought of twenty grand’s worth of (I’d guess) credit card and student loan debt makes me feel sick, even experienced second-hand.
The economy isn't a thing separate from the real lives of ordinary people, yet this is precisely the manner in which we speak of it. The newspapers and self-important parts of broadcast media are filled with earnest people talking about 'charts' and 'models' and 'forecasts' as if these grand aggregations of ordinary decisions mean anything to the real lives of ordinary people.
In 2008 all this changed although we didn't notice at the time. We assumed that the election of Barak Obama was, like elections always are, determined by the US economy crashing into the wall under a Republican president. Here's a bit of a clue:
"I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday."
Confirming that Obama was trained in Chicago by the Alinsky apparatus, David Alinsky wrote: "It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well."
Describing how the Democratic National Convention was a "perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style," David Alinsky wrote: "All the elements were present: the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd's chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people."
America had elected a 'community organiser', a campaigner. For sure, Obama was less of an outsider than some claimed but his election represented a change from the 'it's the economy, stupid' approach to campaigning. And remember, given the circumstances in the USA back then, the core victory for Obama wasn't the actual presidential election but was his win, from behind against a dominant and well-branded opponent, in the Democratic primaries.
Scroll forward a few years to 2016 and we witness two shocks - the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. In both cases that community organiser approach delivered - in the UK the Remain campaign was entirely old school: 'it's the economy, stupid' while those campaigning for Leave shifted the focus to that Alinsky-style human interest. There were rallies, debates, the use of social media and that on-the-ground spread of a message that made people believe they really could vote their lives better. And they did - Brexit won.
Now put aside your distaste and ignore what the BBC has told you. Donald Trump's campaign took all the lessons from Obama's 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination and applied them for a social media age. Read that letter from Alinsky's son again:
"...the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd's chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people."
This describes Trump's campaign to the letter - add in social media which was in its infancy in 2008 and you have the recipe for his election. Despite him being a really weak candidate without an obvious base for support and without the financial resources available to the Clinton campaign.
All this brings us to 2017. A UK general election with the Conservatives out of sight in the polls and Labour led by Jeremy Corbyn, a leader who three-quarters of his MPs had no confidence in. The result was another shock as Labour climbed and the Conservative's lost their majority. Had it not been for the successful and different campaign by Scottish Conservtives the results would have been worse still.
Why? Right now we're talking about how bad the Conservative campaign was (just as we've done when we talk about the 2016 US elections) - over-centralised, too leader-focused, a dreadful manifesto and a campaign seemingly without bite or passion. And all this may be true but it doesn't really explain - after all the Conservative vote and share of the vote went up. Most of us would have been chuffed to bits getting over 42% of the vote in a general election.
The big story isn't the Conservatives but Labour. The Corbyn phenomenon, just like Obama and just like Trump, leaps straight from the pages of Alinsky - it is the victory of a community organiser against the established 'it's the economy, stupid' strategy. The story is no longer who sounds most credible talking about those macroeconomic charts and models but rather who can offer hope and change to that woman on Graeme Archer's train. Plus a million other stories - about people's health, jobs, education, pension and benefits - that fit into an organiser's narrative and motivate women on trains to become women at rallies.
Obama, Trump, Brexit, Corbyn - Melenchon in France, Bernie Sanders in the US, even the sainted Juston Trudeau in Canada - all changed how we campaign whether from left, right or centre. The old certainties - 'it's the economy, stupid' - are broken down by it being millions of different and personal economies that matter. Yours, mine and that woman on the train.
The Conservative Party remains trapped in the model of campaigning that didn't work for Clinton, didn't work for Remain, and didn't work a few weeks ago for May. It's not about how many Facebook ads you buy - that's just astroturf - but about an actual campaign run by committed campaigners. One irony is that the bussing of campaigners around in the 2015 election that caused so much hoo-hah, is much closer to the sort of campaigning we need.
In the end though, I'm struck by two things. Firstly that typically conservative folk aren't all that interested in politics - which is why Leave and Trump looked to a very different demographic for their shock troops. And secondly that, despite the apparant triumph of these populist campaigns, just as many voters are not taken in by the 'hope' and 'change' message when it doesn't come with a coherent policy message.
"There is being circulated everywhere a story that an immense force of Russian soldiers – a little short of a million, it is said – have passed, or are still passing, through England on their way to France."
The rumour began on 27th August 1914, because of a 17-hour delay on the London to Liverpool train service. The reason for the hold-up was said to have been caused by the transportation by rail of Russian troops, who had landed in Scotland and, under conditions of the utmost secrecy were being moved by train to the Channel ports. From there they were destined to cross to France and fight alongside the Allies.
As the tale spread, more and more people ‘knew’ someone who had seen Russian troops in transit. For instance, someone knew a railway porter in Edinburgh who had swept snow from the railway carriages there, at several stations there were reports of strange-looking men seen with snow on their boots. In Perthshire, Lady Baden-Powell heard that the Russians were coming and promptly rushed to the station to catch a glimpse of them.
It seems not much has changed. Except the Russians in question today don't have snow on their boots preferring the relative warmth of a swivel chair in front of a computer screen. And this time they're sinister baddies not saving troops.
Hours after Michael Flynn, Mr Trump's national security adviser, resigned after misleading the White House over conversations with the Russian ambassador to the US, reports emerged that key campaign aides had also been communicating with Russian officials.
That scandal began after US officials leaked the fact that Mr Flynn had discussed sanctions with the ambassador. Leaks also prompted the controversy over the "dirty dossier" prepared by a former MI6 operative, and have plagued the first weeks of the Trump administration.
From anonymous briefings, leaks and oblique references comes a line that results in the widespread belief that somehow Russian espionage was responsible for Trump's election (and for more febrile minds Brexit too). The most creative and complex of those conspiracy theories can be read here - it's very good, John Le Carré would love it.
Now I'm absolutely sure that Russian intelligence agents did endeavour to interfere in the US Presidential election. I'm also pretty sure that those agents and their predecessors tried to influence the outcomes of every US election. This is pretty much part of the job description for a spy - get favourable outcomes for your country. And it's why countries have laws preventing foreign funding of election campaigns.
I'm also pretty much sure that the impact of Russian intelligence on the election is somewhere between 'none at all' and 'a little but but insignificant'. It suits a particular agenda to adopt the view that the Democrat's comprehensive defeat last November was down to sinister external forces rather than them simply not being popular enough even to beat a candidate as weak and unpopular as Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, as Tim Newman observes, liberal media such as the BBC persists with the suggestion that "one controversy has clung to the Trump train like glue: Russia". Tim also points out that there's not much truth to this:
Russia only became the albatross of choice with which to hang around Trump’s neck when all others were laughed off: misogyny, racism, fake news, etc.
Speaking from a cynical perspective, such argument - effectively exonerating left of centre political campaigning from failure and blaming a foreign government - continues to give the right, whether conservative or reactionary, a free run at politics. The public love a good spy story but, in the main, consider those stories to be just that - tall tales. Tim Newman's conclusion here is apt:
...if Trump had a tower with his name on in Moscow or a casino in
Vladivostok then one could raise legitimate questions over his
connections to Putin. But he doesn’t, and nothing I have seen suggests
Trump ever had any business or other interests in Russia aside from him
having a quick look-see back in the 1990s or early ’00s and deciding,
quite sensibly, that it wasn’t worth the hassle. Has Trump actually ever
been to Russia in person? Has he met Putin? I’ve not seen any evidence
he’s done either, and if it existed surely we’d have seen it by now.
This whole obsession with Russia is nothing more than the latest in a
line of pathetic attempts to cast doubts on the legitimacy of Trump’s
Presidency and shore up the narrative that he is not acting in the
interests of America.
Strange conspiracy theories about Jews, communists, banks and big business used to be the stock-in-trade of the loonier parts of the far right. The continuing failure of decent patriots, working people and nationalism wasn't down to its lack of appeal but rather to the efforts of sinister folk meeting in Swiss mountain resorts or nice Caribbean hotels. It seems that, faced with a similar scale of defeat - especially in the USA - the centre-left has fallen hook, line and sinker for a new generation of conspiracies: tall tales with Russian snow on their boots.
From Chicago through Dublin, Glasgow and Manchester to Lyons, Barcelona and Vienna, the Inner City is urbanists' dirty secret. We've spent decades bashing away at solutions and nowhere are we any closer to what the right policies might be.
Take, for example, McElderry Park, a 103-acre area just east of Johns Hopkins University's centrally-located medical center. The neighborhood, which was once middle-class, is now a severe version of the city's downward spiral. About one-third of families there live in poverty, and workforce participation levels are 54%. Nearly three-quarters of residents don't have any college education, meaning they are generally supported either by the government, or low-wage service jobs—which make up an increasingly high percentage of jobs in the city. The neighborhood's physical emptiness symbolizes another discouraging trend, population loss, which is at the heart of Baltimore’s problems.
As Scott Meyer who painted this picture observes, this isn't an anomaly in Baltimore or indeed any large city in the USA. And we know - we see the riots, despair and dislocation in our own cities - that it's not an anomaly in Europe. In the USA, Donald Trump made much of the inner cities in his campaign - in that blunt and divisive style of his, he said stuff like:
“Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever...You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.”
Set the rhetoric aside for a second, hold back your distaste for Trump - doesn't he have a point? If that sad, declining picture of Baltimore is any guide then these seemingly intractable problems of the inner city are genuine. And Trump is right - if you're a decent parent how are you going to raise your children, keep them out of trouble, keep them alive and off drugs when the only thriving industries are crime and welfare?
Mott Haven was once a district of substantial apartment houses, comfortable if not luxurious, the tract homes of their day. These sheltered the Jewish middle classes on their way from the Lower East Side to White Plains. Now the buildings are in various stages of decomposition, ranging from neglected paint to flattened rubble. Abandoned buildings are office space for the local criminals, who deal almost entirely in drugs. (There's not much felonious creativity in a modern slum.) Scattered among the remaining turn-of-the-century structures and the empty lots piled with trash are various housing projects with large, ill-lighted areas of "public" space, dead to all traffic and commercial activity. Squalor and overcrowding are often spoken of as almost a single phenomenon, but in New York's poor neighborhoods the lower the population density, the greater the filth and crime.
Or, to make clear this isn't a problem merely of US inner cities, here's The Economist in Paris:
For all the schemes and money, the banlieues are a world apart. From 2008 to 2011 the gap widened between unemployment rates in “sensitive urban zones” and in surrounding areas. Schools have a high turnover of often-inexperienced teachers, gaining merit by doing time in the banlieues. Job centres are understaffed. The unemployed say their postcode stigmatises them. Drug dealers compete with careers advisers to recruit teenagers. “Here, drug trafficking has always helped circulate money,” says Stéphane Gatignon, Sevran’s Green mayor. “It’s how people scrape by, despite the crisis.”
Every city has its dark side, the place where the crime, drugs, squalor, poverty and despair lives. We've spent millions - we're still spending millions - on these places. We do up the houses, Smarten up the schools. Put in neat pocket parks. We even try to do up the people - schemes of training, child care, job support. And yet if we take a map of England's poorest places from 1968 and a map from today, there's a frightening correlation. For sure some bits of inner London and a few streets of Salford and Manchester are now swish and gentrified. And in the seaside towns and mining villages the collapse of their industry created new places of poverty - Blackpool, half the size of Bradford, has twice as many children in care. But not much else has changed.
We sort of know what needs to be done. That old line about escaping the ghetto - finish school, get a job and keep it, get married and stay married - is still true. But the problem is that not only does this not happen enough, there are young people on the edges of these places - people who start out OK - whose lives collapse them into the slums. Immigration helps, especially immigration from even poorer places, but only when you've an economy that generates the jobs those people need. That's France's crisis - in a country where one-in-ten of working age is out of work, the banlieues have double that rate and even higher rates of youth unemployment. It's no damn use having employment protection, mandated working hours, minimum wages and child care if the result is there aren't any jobs - especially if you're black or an Arab.
Britain's most dysfunctional places are different - mostly filled with native white communities (often mixed with long resident afro-caribbean communities) rather than immigrants. In an economy, even in the North's big cities, that creates jobs, not great jobs but a step on that ladder, too many decide to step aside from that world. A community settling for a half-life on benefits topped up with bits of crime and casual, cash-in-hand work. What's gone is the thing - whatever it was, church, club, union, workplace - that showed those growing up how it worked. There's no-one saying "learn something at school, get a skill if you can, get a job - any job - and keep it, try to make your relationships work".
Instead we get the well-meaning and the bothersome. The former do a lot of good by stopping the whole place falling into utter chaos and letting some few young folk escape the life of the slum. These social workers, policemen, housing officers and folk delivering job programmes are, however, mostly a sticking plaster, more about giving a broken community a hug than fixing the break.
The bothersome on the other hand are different - these are the folk who know better - they want people to change their lifestyle, to conform and are more worried about delivering stop smoking clinics and fat clubs than seeing behind the eyes of their 'clients'. There they'll see someone who wants to know why they should bother being 'healthy' when booze, fags, easy sex and crap telly are the only things that take the edge of pain away from a shit life.
It's no surprise that, in this world, the people most likely to escape are those who've found god. Church, mosque and temple provide a place of calm and the faith a direction - all those beliefs will point to the very things that allow people a road to a better life. Educate yourself. Work hard. Respect others. Do the right thing. In times past we also had secular institutions embedded in these working class places that did the same - trade unions, clubs and pubs (often with sports attached), friendly societies, allotment clubs. A host of activity done by the community not to the community.
These places weren't perfect but, in dealing with the imperfections - sexism, cliqueiness, casual racism - we've lost sight of the good things like community, shared experience and decent role-models. What we have left, with the death of these institutions, are the institutions that are least wanted and most exploiting - crime, landlordism and the external state.
I've often suspected that, in part, we don't want the responsibility of trying to fix these broken places. We've been happy to manage their problems rather than invest in the intensity needed to provide a new hope. For sure, it's easy to say to people "your life, your responsibility" and then make sure they don't starve (while locking up their sons and taking the children off their daughters). But is that really what we should be doing? Or should we be looking for the skeletons of past institutions are trying to breathe new life into them?
It's easy to point at the city as the problem with its lack of personal scale, its busy-ness and its tolerance of wealth and poverty in the same place. But rebuilding the bones of an old community, helping shape strong people - that to me seems worth doing. To do this we need to set aside fifty years of sociological presumption, to lift the stone and see glorious life not nasty bugs. Instead of make people's habits the problem, we should be asking how we build back the social infrastructure that once held places together and pointed people to a better life - even when sometimes those things involve booze, fags, burgers and cake.
I'm probably not alone in being slightly taken aback by the extent to which the election of Donald Trump as US President has brought forth agitation and protest, not just in the USA but elsewhere across the world. I've also been struck by the manner in which events such as Trump's election, the UK's vote to leave the EU, and a reinvigorated cultural right in universities have resulted in the radicalising of people who we previously characterised as 'soft left'.
It remains to be seen whether this radicalisation persists in the way that similar forces in the 1960s did in response to civil rights and the Vietnam war - Jeremy Corbyn's generation. What strikes me, however, about the current situation is the extent to which a youthful centre left has taken to the streets in response to their failure at the established game of democracy. Above all else this is the lesson we should take from Brexit and Trump - the established left has little to offer the public beyond that tired, familiar 'we know better' rhetoric wedded to a desire to close down debate, cut off argument and, using the left's word, demonise other opinions.
Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president. Their credulity ensures that the propaganda of half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the power to change the world.
How you see the believers determines how you fight them and seek to protect liberal society from its enemies.
To understand what we mean by unawareness, we should ask two things: who are the liars and what we mean by liberal society. And when we've done this we will realise that it isn't the false bogeyman of a new fascism but the lies of the left about liberalism that are the problem. First though let's agree with Cohen about Trump and Brexit not being about Fascism:
The temptation to think it a new totalitarianism is too strong for many to resist. Despite readers reaching for Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, strictly speaking, the comparison with fascism and communism isn’t true. When I floated it with the great historian of Nazism, Sir Richard Evans, he almost sighed. It’s not just that there aren’t the death camps and torture chambers, he said. The street violence that brought fascists to power in Italy and Germany and the communists to power in Russia is absent today.
Dwell on that final sentence for a minute. And then consider what this might mean:
Fires that were deliberately set, one outside the campus Amazon outlet; Molotov cocktails that caused generator-powered spotlights to catch fire; commercial-grade fireworks thrown at police officers; barricades pushed into windows and skirmishes within the crowd were among the evening’s violent acts.
The masked agitators came to campus eastbound on Bancroft Way, and fire damage and other destruction to the Stiles Hall construction site, where a new residence hall is planned, was reported. The group entered campus and immediately began throwing rocks at officers. In an effort to avoid injuries to innocent members of the surrounding crowd who might have been caught in the middle, police officers exercised restraint and did not respond with force.
An organised group using street violence to secure a political end (in this case preventing someone from speaking). And we saw plenty more of this violence following the election of Donald Trump and after his inauguration. Is this not something akin to "street violence" that brought fascists and communists to power in Europe? And what about giving yourself permission to punch anyone who you and your friends decide is a Nazi?
The problem for the left is that it is at best targeting a pretty small group or, and this is more concerning, seeking to define anyone who challenges its definition of liberal society as 'alt-right', Fascist or Nazi. As Nick Cohen discovered from a peek at history there are no National Socialist marches, there aren't Fascist gangs forcing opponents to drink cod liver oil and there isn't a rising new politics that seeks to destroy that liberal society. The new fascism or whatever you want to call it is something summoned from the left's mind, they are fighting an illusion.
That lie of a new fascism brings us back to the first of our two questions: who are the liars? Nick Cohen is clear about this - Donald Trump, Brexit campaigners, conservative columnists and business leaders. The alt-right. But is he right? Or rather are there not a whole load of other liars out there? Liars like the ones who predicted inevitable economic doom following a vote to leave the EU. And the liars who continue to promote a thing called socialism despite it repeatedly cause suffering, sorrow and even death.
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
You want to know what Trump's biggest lie is? It's the lie that he can bring those jobs back, can by stamping and shouting do what Canute showed couldn't be done, turn back the tide of the world. But when the newly radicalised centre left agree that Trump's protectionism is a lie, they compound it with another lie. The left pretends that somehow globalisation had no role in the steelworker losing his job, the textile worker losing her job, or the miners looking at reserves of energy untapped because of decisions made in Washington, Rome, London or Paris.
Instead the left talks about inequality when what the listener wants is a job. The left talks of rights when what those hearing this cant desire is a better roof over their head and clean water. And the left points at wealthy business people crying another lie: that somehow their lack of a job and their crappy house is down to those business people. "Vote for us and we'll sort it" the left said all those years and delivered nothing. So what remains for the voter: carrying on electing wealthy left wing politicians - Elizabeth Warren, Ed Miliband, Francois Hollande, Yanis Varoufakis, Hillary Clinton - and getting no change or buying a different lie from someone like Trump or Le Pen?
What makes all this worse is that the left then tell people who want a better job, a nicer house, a happier future for their children that it's about defending something called the liberal society. But what exactly is this liberal society we're defending? Is it getting people arrested for saying stuff on Twitter? Is it privileging group characteristics and in doing so creating a sort of equalities tops trumps? Or maybe it's telling folk that black people can't be racists and women can't be violent?
A liberal society isn't one that smashes and bullies to stop Milo Yiannopoulos speaking. A liberal society is one that listens politely to Milo, tells him he's a preening dickhead and then moves on, smiling. A liberal society doesn't stop people going to an event by blocking the streets, it's one that argues and engages with folk we disagree with. A liberal society is one that rejects the bullying of the mob even if it does get John Wilkes into parliament.
My two questions perhaps aren't answered in full but it does seem that the left should consider whether it has a beam in its eye that results in that frightening degree of unawareness. Yes Trump and the alt-right are liars but so is the radical left. Now, as the soft left makes common cause with the anti-democrats of street anarchy and communism, we see that the left as a whole is tearing down the principles of liberal society because it fears an illusory monster will do that if they don't.
The left's biggest lie is that they now own the word liberal, that their state-directed dystopia is that liberal society we should defend. For me a liberal society is one that doesn't make ill smokers stand in the street because you don't like them. A liberal society is one that does tax people to change their behaviour. A liberal society is one that thinks politeness is important but doesn't lock people up for being rude, dumb or offensive. A liberal society is one that values enterprise and encourages it in everyone. A liberal society is a place where people can speak freely, do business, succeed and fail without that society's opprobrium. And a liberal society is, above all, one that doesn't place one set of people - experts, aristocrats or celebrities - above others.
We do not live in a liberal society. The left do not and never have believed in a liberal society. Why the hell should I believe that their marching to defend that liberal society against Trump, Brexit and other demons is anything other than a big, fat stinking lie?
During the presidential election campaign Trump was clear he wanted to 'ban' Muslims from coming to America. So it should not be a surprise to anyone that, early in his presidency, Trump has enacted tighter controls on immigrants coming to the USA from a specified list of countries that just happen to be overwhelmingly Muslim. It's not a 'ban' but extreme vetting and it's not a Muslim ban because not everyone from the countries in question if a Muslim.
Having got that out of the way, we need to appreciate that the intention - pretty much a stated intention - of the Executive Order is to prevent Muslims entering the USA. Now it's true that lots of big Muslim countries aren't included in the list, either because of Donald Trump's historic business interests or else because the seven selected countries were those excluded from the US 'visa waiver programme' in 2015 (or maybe some other reason nobody has thought of yet). For what it's worth, I suspect these were the Muslim countries where the law allowed Trump to enact an executive order in the manner he did.
This, of course, suggests that we will see further attempts to control the entry of Muslims into the USA - although it is likely that this will be couched in terms of terrorism rather than religion. There are over 3 million Muslims in the UK so, regardless of the stuff about terror, trying to ban Muslims places potential limits on the freedoms of UK citizens. We are right to criticise Trump's Executive Order but equally right to do so in a measured, directed manner that does not compromise other UK interests - not least the significant trading relationship with the USA.
Lastly, we should avoid the appeal of seeing Trump's purpose in terms of some sort of sinister anti-democracy conspiracy. The evidence so far is that, horrible though it might be, what you see with Donald Trump is what you get. It will be painful but it does seem that Trump's campaign rhetoric wasn't, as we've complained about all these years, mere rhetoric but was him actually saying what he intended to do in government. There is no coup.
So those folk complaining about the description of this action as a 'Muslim ban' - 'it's not a ban and it doesn't mention Muslims' they shout - are wrong. Trump's intention is absolutely that of banning Muslims. We know this because he said so. And all that's happened is the US law and constitution are making it hard for Trump to do what he said he wanted to do - ban Muslims. It may not be a ban but that is its intention. It may not mention Muslims but they are its target. It is, de facto, a Muslim Ban or at least an attempt at one.
A couple of days ago The Times splashed its front page with a story about a leaked 'Cabinet Office Memo'. You all saw the story, either in its original Times incarnation or else the retread from The Guardian, The Telegraph, Sky News or the BBC. The content of the memo and the argument it informs is not relevent to what I'm going to say but rather the provenance of the memo. The argument is merely the victim of the news story.
Within a few hours of The Times splashing its story, there were doubts about its veracity. Was there really a government memo or has there been some sort of creative interpretation of something else. The government helpfully told us there was no such memo but then whoever believes anything a government tells us?
In the end the story was shown as a more-or-less complete fiction. Rather than a memo produced by a government department to advise the Cabinet, we had instead a polemic created on the authors' initiative as a pitch for consultancy business. The 'truth' presented in that Times story turned out to be quite a lot less than actual truth. Fleetingly one wonders how a great newspaper can make such a cock-up even to the point of asking whether it's not a cock-up but essentially a commissioned leak designed to embarrass the government - a sort of Brexit version of the Zinoviev letter?
Oddly - or maybe not oddly at all - alongside this example of misleading news reporting there has been a story about how 'fake news' was responsible (I exaggerate but only slightly) for Donald Trump winning the US Presidential election:
In particular, there are those who argue that Facebook fueled Trump’s rise by circulating a host of fake news stories about political topics, and these stories helped tip the scale in his favor.
Coupled with the filtering algorithm used by Facebook all this fake news resulted in a 'post-truth' election result. Others, including Facebook itself, have kicked back at this argument by pointing out that most (like 99%) of the content on Facebook isn't fake news. What's odd - to me at least - is that very few people have pointed out that Facebook isn't a newspaper, it's content is user-generated, unmoderated, unedited and therefore essentially untrustworthy. But bluntly the problem isn't fake news on Facebook it's the selective presentation of news, even false news, by trustworthy media.
And this problem - what I might call the "mainstream media filter" if that didn't sound too much like the wilder fringes of left and right wing blogging - is why here in the UK, we were all so utterly shocked and surprised at Donald Trump's election. Every news story on every channel told us that there was absolutely no chance at all of Donald Trump winning. When I went to the excellent Bradford Politics in the Pub everyone, panel and audience, believed that Donald trump was toast.
Why is this? Partly it's about the failure of opinion polling - US polling has hit the same wall as polls in the UK, but I don't think this explains all that failure. It's easy for us to lean back, smile and say. "I know I was wrong but so was everyone else - look at the polls". You'd have thought that, after the 2015 election and the EU referendum, us Brits would have developed a healthy scepticism about predictions based on opinion polling?
No, the reason for us getting it so comprehensively wrong (and looking at the US popular vote, those national polls weren't so wrong any way) is that the media we trust - BBC and other broadcasters, broadsheets newspapers - created a narrative that failed entirely to reflect the actual debate in the US election. We got an easy-to-swallow caricature of Donald Trump - racist, sexist, homophobic, bonkers - set against an equally shallow picture of Hillary Clinton. The election was light and dark, good and evil, saint versus sinner - there was no way Americans would vote for a man as bad as Trump especially as it would mean we wouldn't have the first female US president.
Watching events before and after the election - especially on the BBC - we can see the shift from smug certainty to incredulity and incomprehension. The BBC's narrative - indeed the narrative of almost the entire UK press corps - collapsed under the shallowness of its analysis, the prejudice of its presumptions and the degree of its ignorance about the USA and its demographics. It's not just that some of the anti-Trump stuff might just be crying wolf but that we'd not spotted that a whole lot of people in the USA actually looked at Trump's agenda and concluded they'd have a go with that.
After all, Trump's message out there was about jobs, immigration, patriotism, ending corruption and giving a voice to the voiceless. It's true this is a deceptive agenda - the economic policies will make America poorer not greater and in a land of immigrants attacking immigration seems dumb and just a bit racist - but when the counter is shrill attacks on the candidate's character rather than a debate about the issues, should we be so surprised when a whole bunch of people gave Hillary the proverbial finger?
So when the BBC and others point at Facebook, accusing the social medium of spreading fake news and creating filter bubbles, perhaps they need to examine the massive beam in their own eye - after all Facebook doesn't pretend to be a news medium, the BBC does. And, if we've learned anything over the last two years it's that the voting behaviour (and, I don't doubt, the opinions and attitudes) of a lot of folk simply doesn't fit the liberal* narrative that our national media promotes. Whether there's anything that can be (or indeed should be) done is a matter for debate but one thing is certain, the search for different news sources on-line suggests that a lot of people out there have rejected that liberal world view and are seeking alternative news sources.
The growth of fake news - as well as polemical sites like Vox or Breitbart and conspiracy sites like Infowars or the UK's own Canary - reflects the utter failure of the main news organisations and, in the UK, especially the BBC. I watched an interview by a BBC reporter of a man from 'Gays for Trump' (this might not have been the exact name of the group but it describes it precisely). The reporter may have been tired - it was the morning after Trump's election - but what came across was utter contempt for the young man being interviewed: how dare he challenge the narrative of trump as gay-hating (he isn't) and appear as a pleasant, personable bloke rather than the cartoon version of the Trump supporter as a one-toothed, baseball-capped, wall-eyed, racist redneck!
Next year, we have elections in France. They're pretty important, not least because Marine Le Pen leads in the polls and the BBC and others will be building themselves up into a funk at the possibility of her election. What we might hope for is a slightly better narrative from the BBC and other national media, one that actually reflects the debate rather than "oh my god, no, please, not Le Pen, not a fascist, fascists are bad" repeated over and over again. It may be true that the French run-off system makes it very difficult for Le Pen to win (we saw this in Austria where they very nearly elected an old Green communist in preference to the Freedom Party candidate for president) but we deserve something of a better analysis that we've had in the last three campaigns the BBC has covered.
The selective nature of BBC news-making, the prejudice of mainstream sources and the inability of London-based reporters to appreciate a fundamental cultural difference between city and country, capital and provinces - these things have created a filter bubble around the BBC, other broadcasters and the main broadsheet newspapers that is far more damaging than 'fake news' sites on Facebook. Just as social science academia needs to actively recruit conservatives, so do the main media outlets, newspapers and broadcasters - not as superstar columnists or presenters but in the bones of the organisation as programme planners, producers, directors and researchers.
Right now a growing part of the population - radicalised by Brexit (to use the sort of divisive language the BBC valorises) - is more and more distrustful of our national news media and especially the one they pay for, the BBC. We know The Guardian and its ilk are biased but we now know that this increasingly applies to the BBC - the liberal media filter bubble just means that people at the BBC haven't recognised just how they're no longer meeting the public service remit given them in their charter. The incomprehension we saw in May 2015 became wilder in June 2016 and frantic in November 2016 - the UK's national media didn't see any of this coming because it was looking in the wrong places. Mostly its own navel. This is the problem not fake news stories on Facebook.
*Please note that where used the word 'liberal' is meant in its perjorative American meaning not its sane, noble and decent English meaning
....
The election of Donald Trump has led to a veritable stampede of chicken lickens rushing wildly about crying that the sky has fallen in. I'm pretty sure they're wrong and that, for all Trump's manifest failings, we aren't heading towards nuclear war, chaos and depression. What's interesting is why, faced with the election of Trump, we are getting this reaction. Partly it's not a new phenomenon - my sister reminded me that in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president they (Frances was a student at the Royal College of Music back then) held an 'End of the World Party'. But mostly it's quite simply a fear of 'them', of 'others' - just the same fear as we point to in people supporting Trump.
“You know, you’re the first professor from Madison I’ve ever met, and you’re actually kind of normal.”
The comment comes from Kathy Cramer, who is a professor from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and reports her meeting people in rural Wisconsin as part of a long term study leading to her book "The Politics of Resentment". Just before this comment, Cramer had said:
Thank God I was as naive as I was when I started. If I knew then what I know now about the level of resentment people have toward urban, professional elite women, would I walk into a gas station at 5:30 in the morning and say, “Hi! I’m Kathy from the University of Madison”?
And here we have the first glimpse of our problem - not just the resentment of rural communities towards urban elites but the belief among urban professionals that such resentment will play out like the less savoury scenes from 'Deliverance' complete with a sinister banjo soundtrack. Here's David Wong from Cracked talking about how half of America lost its mind:
Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes -- either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.
Many Americans only ever fly over or drive through rural America and their image of the communities out there come from books, from films and above all from TV. The image of the thick redneck, the hypocritical preacher and the associated sneering put down of Christianity all play to a belief that the values of folk out there in the backwoods just ain't the same as good progressive folk in the cities. But what are those values? Here's David Wong again:
Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down -- the fact that hard work is better than dependence on government, that children do better with both parents in the picture, that peace is better than rioting, that a strict moral code is better than blithe hedonism, that humans tend to value things they've earned more than what they get for free, that not getting exploded by a bomb is better than getting exploded by a bomb.
Or as they say out in the country, "Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."
The foundation upon which America was undeniably built -- family, faith, and hard work -- had been deemed unfashionable and small-minded. Those snooty elites up in their ivory tower laughed as they kicked away that foundation, and then wrote 10,000-word thinkpieces blaming the builders for the ensuing collapse.
And the sad truth is that, as Kathy Cramer found out when she talked to them, people in rural America aren't so very different from those living in the cities. Cramer also talks about the nature of that resentment - things like:
All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody’s listening to us. Nobody’s paying attention, nobody’s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them.
This still makes sense to me if I switch the words Madison and Milwaukee to Bradford and Leeds. As a local councillor serving a ward called Bingley Rural for 21 years, I've heard this sentiment time and time again especially in the most rural, most working class parts of my ward. A sense of 'being done to', a belief that other people (and, yes, there's a racial element to this in Bradford just as there is in Wisconsin) are getting the benefits of decisions, spending and attention. Some of this is true - always and everywhere, governments are most fearful about how people living in cities will respond so give them more attention - but much of it is either a function of isolation or the cost of service delivery in remote rural areas.
The problem is compounded by the economic decline of those rural areas. Some, and we see this in the UK, become places of rural retreat and second homes for that urban elite (creating a whole new set of resentments) but the places that aren't pretty enough or accessible enough simply decline. The best and brightest depart of the city leaving behind the old, poor and ill. And, as Aaron Renn - one of the best and brightest who left rural Indiana - describes, the result isn't pretty:
In Medora we see not only poverty, but nearly complete social breakdown. I don’t recall a single player on the team raised in an intact family. Many of them lived in trailer parks. One kid had never even met his father. Others had mothers who themselves were alcoholics or barely functional individuals. They sometimes bounced around from home to home (grandmother, etc.) or dropped out of school to take care of a problematic mother.
This is the stark picture of rural America's failures but we also see - reported by Kathy Cramer and described by many others - a bunch of rural folk doing what Americans always felt was the right thing: working hard, looking out for the neighbour, sticking by the family. Problem is that, for too many such folk, this doesn't seem to be working quite so well these days:
28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.
Again, any English politician with ears will have heard the same resentment. I remember a colleague - and I worked for a charity helping people into work at the time - angrily condemning some of her relatives because they'd a car that worked and a foreign holiday but were "on welfare" whereas her and her husband, both working, felt they were barely scraping by.
There's nothing new in all this, it has been gently simmering away in places too many commentators choose to patronise as "left behind" but what has happened over the last ten years or so is an accentuation of the difference and the 'othering' of those communities as, well, just a bit backward. Worse urban-driven, progressive policies actively damage the economy of 'fly over ' USA.
Geographer, Joel Kotkin, describes two Americas - urban 'Ephemerals' in the Democrat-voting coastal states dependent on new media, software and moving money about, and a 'New Heartland' that depends on tangible goods production. Assertive climate change policies, for example, directly impact the economy of this 'New Heartland':
Climate change increasingly marks a distinct dividing line. Manufacturing, moving goods, industrial scale agriculture, fossil fuel energy all consume resources in ways many progressives see as harming the planet. Progressives threaten these industries with increasingly draconian schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gone are the days of supporting moderate shifts -- which could work with some Heartland economies -- from coal to gas and improving mileage efficiency.
Instead the demand from the left is for a radically rapid de-carbonization, which will reduce jobs in the Heartland and lower living standards everywhere. In California, Jerry Brown is fretting about ways to curb cow flatulence, an obsession that is unlikely to be popular in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa.
The result of this is that more small towns lose their reason for existence more quickly - it all feels a bit like 'Other People's Money', the 1991 Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck film about a declining business in small town American. Back then it was an attack on heartless, uncaring capitalism but looking at the film now, it has the same concerns as Trump has hit on in rural America - loss of community, unemployment, off-shoring and wealthy untouchables swishing out from the cities to dump on struggling communities.
But it's no so simple as looking back to a golden age through rose-tinted glasses however much the progressive want to believe. People living in the rural and small town places are looking to a troubled future:
Economic anxiety is about the future, not just the present. Trump beat Clinton in counties where more jobs are at risk because of technology or globalization. Specifically, counties with the most “routine” jobs — those in manufacturing, sales, clerical work and related occupations that are easier to automate or send offshore — were far more likely to vote for Trump.
This reminds me of a recent post of mine asking what we'd do about 'proper jobs for proper blokes' - those routine jobs that are crucial to places like Bradford but which will be the ones our digital, robot-run age will kill off first. But in the city we've the chance to catch up with ourselves - as David Wong points out, this is pretty tricky in a small place:
See, rural jobs used to be based around one big local business -- a factory, a coal mine, etc. When it dies, the town dies. Where I grew up, it was an oil refinery closing that did us in. I was raised in the hollowed-out shell of what the town had once been. The roof of our high school leaked when it rained. Cities can make up for the loss of manufacturing jobs with service jobs -- small towns cannot. That model doesn't work below a certain population density.
The thing is that, while there's plenty of displacement, poverty and loss of work in urban areas, it feels like we can fix that problem, indeed that the government is trying to do just that. Up in the hills away from those big cities is doesn't look that way. Tatty boarded up places linger on and the only change seems to be the buddleia colonising every untended nook and cranny. For some places there's a roll of sticking plaster - the UK's coalfield communities (unlike America's - another argument in the Trump camp) got a load of regeneration cash and this has smartened such places up. But the problem's still there - just as Aaron Renn described above, anyone with any get up and go, got up and went, leaving behind a community in a place with no purpose.
None of this represents the whole reason for Trump's election (any more than does accusations of racism, xenophobia and general horridness) but it has thrown a light on a challenge facing every developed nation - in a time of economic change how do we protect the idea of community and can we create purpose for places that, right now, are losing their reason for existing. And, even if we recognise that places must die if they have no purpose, are we doing enough to ease the transition for the people who're from those places:
The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called "Cost of Living."
I have a new explanation for Trump's win that does not involve Weiner or talking about Deplorables or emails. California's zoning codes caused the win. If California had Texas style housing regulations, then 80 million people would live in California and the state would have 100 electoral votes. The state would still vote Democrat (because of the composition of these new voters) and Clinton would have won.
There's some truth in this. Planners - of all stripes - helped created the sort of divided world that made Donald Trump's election possible. And if you think this is a problem, ask how you bring on side those who are victims of those planners, folk patronised by left-wing academics, sacked by climate change policies, and insulted as racists or xenophobes day in and day out by the punditry. What I fear is that you won't do this, you'll call them 'morlocks' and punish them for having an opinion you didn't like.
