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Saturday, Jan 07, 2006

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Why are they running scared of ideology?

Hasan Suroor

Increasingly, ideology is portrayed as something to be despaired of — a hang-up, and a hindrance to progress in a world in search of quick fixes. But pragmatism without a political vision seldom works in the long run.

SOON AFTER taking over as the newest leader of Britain's demoralised and divided Conservative Party, David Cameron declared with a touch of pride that he was a "practical" and "pragmatic" politician and "not deeply ideological."

His remarks reinforce the current fashion among the new breed of political leaders to debunk ideology and constantly protest their ideological innocence in what seems like a race to prove who is more "pragmatic." Laissez-faire politics has come to be portrayed as an end in itself. "Be pragmatic and the rest will take care of itself," is the new mantra.

There is no point blaming Mr. Cameron. He is simply echoing his more successful peers, not the least the man he regards as his role model — British Prime Minister Tony Blair, seemingly the most pragmatic of modern western leaders. Like the rest of the country, Mr. Cameron believes that it was Mr. Blair's "bold pragmatism" that rescued the Labour Party from its 17-year-long political exile and made it electable again. And he wants to use the same approach to revive his own party before it disappears into oblivion altogether.

Mr. Blair has sought to give the impression that he has nothing but contempt for ideology. I am saying "sought to give the impression" because the reality is rather different. The fact is that Mr. Blair is far from "un-ideological." But we will come back to Mr. Blair and Mr. Cameron later. First, a look at this new phenomenon which, for want of a better word, let's call "ideology denial" — the insistence that ideology is irrelevant and what matters is a healthy dose of practical commonsense.

Premature obituaries of competing ideologies are not uncommon. The tendency to write off inconvenient ideas and rival political or intellectual trends is old hat, but pronouncing the death of ideology itself is a uniquely post-modernist phenomenon as bizarre as theories about "ahistorical" past and "apolitical" history.

Increasingly, ideology is portrayed as something to be despaired of — a "hang-up," and a "hindrance" to progress in a world in search of quick fixes. Even ordinary people with strong political views prefer not to align themselves with particular ideologies — principally because of some of the things that have been done in the name of ideology both on the Right and the Left. In any case, the vast majority of people have never been overtly ideological. They want their problems solved and — in the words of a certain Chinese leader — are not interested in the colour of the cat so long as it catches the mice. But politicians are, no matter how much they might protest that they are colour-blind. So, why do they pretend that they have no ideology?

The end-of-ideology debate got a fillip after Francis Fukuyama published his The End of History thesis arguing that the political upheaval in the Communist world in the late 1980s signalled an end to the era of competing ideologies. Henceforth, he suggested there would be only one ideology: the western-style liberal democracy, something pitched between the Left and the Right. It was a time of loss of faith in ideological certainties and Mr. Fukuyama's thesis (a cleverly dressed-up hatchet job for the American Right) played on it. But the real harm that it did — and that was very pretty much its aim — was to lend academic legitimacy to the idea of a world essentially without ideology except of the kind practised by the only superpower left after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Suddenly, everyone was talking about an "ideology-free" politics even though conceptually the notion of politics not rooted in ideology, however misguided or phoney, is a contradictions in terms. Pragmatism became the buzzword and in many countries mainstream politics started gravitating towards the centre — or so it seemed at the time. In Britain, the deeply ideological right-wing Margaret Thatcher era came to a close, giving way to the more moderate John Major Government which was overthrown when the Old Labour Party abandoned its traditional left-wing agenda to emerge as New Labour under the leadership of a charismatic and dynamic Mr. Blair extolling the virtues of pragmatism.

But was it really as it seemed then? Is Mr. Blair actually as "un-ideological" as he pretends to be? Is he not the same man who famously described himself as Mrs. Thatcher's heir? Look at his policies: covert privatisation of public services; attempts to bring back selection in schools prompting fears that it could re-ignite the class war reminiscent of the worst of the Thatcher years; support for the Iraq invasion; contempt for trade unions; and an extreme degree of impatience with things like individual rights which he thinks have become obsolete now that the "rules of the games have changed," post 9/11 and 7/7.

Can someone with a set of policies such as these be "un-ideological"? Here, we are not debating the merits of these policies — in fact, on some issues Mr. Blair is, often, unfairly pilloried by his critics — but whether these are simply the result of pragmatism or the product of a deeper ideological conviction about the kind of society he wants to create?

The very act of ditching the Old Labour agenda reflected an ideological shift towards the centre-right. New Labour was not so much a product of pragmatism as of a deliberate political act of stealing the Tories' ideological clothes and re-branding them in softer colours. Moreover, pragmatism suggests a tendency to go with the flow and the tide of public opinion, whereas Mr. Blair has consistently defied public opinion and his own party colleagues even at the risk of putting his job on the line to push through his policies.

If this is not ideological conviction by another name, what is it then? After all, ideology is nothing but a system of ideas and anyone who thinks and believes in the power of ideas is ideological. One does not necessarily need to carry a "card" to be Left, Right or Centrist.

Mr. Cameron's claim that he is not tainted by ideology sounds even more hollow considering that he was the author of one of the most right-wing Tory Party election manifestoes in recent memory. And that was barely seven months ago. It dripped with classic Tory ideology: tax cuts; reduced public expenditure; individual choice as against universal free health service; anti-immigration; nationalistic jingoism. Seven months on, its author is saying that he is not ideological! And why? Not because he has stopped believing in ideology but because the ideological positions he tried to sell to the voters bombed at the electoral box office as the 2005 general election results showed.

Across the Atlantic, Americans are enduring one of the most ideological administrations in recent memory and it came to power just about the time when, in the wake of Mr. Fukuyama's thesis, it was being said that the ideologies had had their day.

Come to think of it, Mr. Fukuyama's theory did not really take off. Ideology was very much bubbling under the surface even as his book was topping the charts. Remember the resurgence of the ultra-right in Europe with Austria, Spain, and Italy turning to the Right and France just about managing to escape a close call? Since then, the pendulum has moved to the Left. Spain has already abandoned the Right, in Italy it is struggling. In Latin America, there is almost a Left-wing wave sweeping the continent.

So, who says ideology is dead? A certain amount of ideological confusion is understandable after the collapse of the East European communist model, but political beliefs remain and it is disingenuous to deny them. Yes, as a tactic, pragmatism might be preferable to overtly rigid dogmatism, but pragmatism not backed by a political vision seldom works in the long run.

In any event, pragmatism and a belief in ideology need not necessarily be contradictory. You can be both, as the Left in many countries, including India, has shown without being apologetic either about its ideology or pragmatism.

Meanwhile, new research by two British academics — Andrew Oswald of Warwick University and Nattavudh Powdthavee of London University — indicates that families where daughters outnumber sons are more likely to be left-wing while those with more sons tend to support the Right. There is no comparable data for the so-called "pragmatic" tendency!

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