Ending the Politics of Illusion

One hell of a mess. Prepare for a long, rambling, provocative, plain-speaking piece about the impossibilities of politics at the moment, the way we talk ‘at’ rather than ‘to’ each other, the way that politics has been split into tribal identifications and sides, false dichotomies, the lack of dialogue, the lack of shared values and common language, politics as a zero sum game of winners and losers, the incommensurability of ideas and values meaning that people just talk past each other, the inability of politics to mediate deeper social divisions, the fact that these issues lack resolution until the conditions of politics are put right ... Winning and losing, divisions and sides, the fetishisation of political power above our heads to the neglect of the connections we need to make down below. That kind of thing. Political division and identification is an illusion which constructs the individual and makes them amenable for external control, politics as the management and manipulation of people through separation, not the resolution of conflict and mediation of difference. There's an aggressive tone to the piece, too, that is not usual for me, which may lead to a few careless phrases that stand in need of qualification ... but there's often a truth in plain speaking.

Just to be clear, I affirm the status and dignity of politics and the political, not as a condition of our freedom/happiness but as a dimension of it, the associative public space in which we come to together as social beings and determine the terms by which to order and organise our common affairs. My target is a politics based not on legitimate differences and their airing, with a view to reconciliation and unity, but a politics based on separations, winning and losing, and calculations and choices between lesser and greater evils. So excuse the image of Politics as Hell, my case is not against politics as such, but against that politics that creates Hell through separation and antagonism, keeping us divided between ourselves so as to prevent resolution of conflict for the greater good, blocking a genuine politics.

Those separations are constructions, they are illusions. I want a letting go of illusion, a recovery of the political through a process of ‘dis-illusionment.’ We have projected so many of our hopes and fears into this bifurcated sphere of politics that we may prefer to live out of the illusions, even though the pain and anguish we feel tells us that such a politics is toxic. It is, however, painful to give up illusions, especially the biggest illusion of all, the promise that one day final and complete victory will come our way, bringing the realisation of all our political hopes. That is not going to happen, that is not the way it is done.

I have been trying to stay out of the ‘debate’ taking place over Donald Trump. Assertion and counter-assertion, claim and counter-claim, with an ever-increasing nastiness based on caricature and exaggeration, and threats backed up by little more than wishful thinking and hot air. Advice to people in politics, ‘don’t make threats, just carry them out!’ If you had the wit and the will to do that, you wouldn’t be needing to be so vocal. There are a lot of words being thrown around, but it is all top-soil being thrown at each other, with nary a word on the roots of all that is happening. When I hear people complaining that Trump is the end of days and the worst of times and worse, I want to know where such folk have been in the previous decades of mass unemployment, widening inequality with the deliberate reversal of redistribution policies, the hollowing out of communities, deindustrialisation, war and state-sponsored, state-promoted terror in the name of security. It’s as if we have been living in a liberal paradise until, out of the swamp, Donald Trump rears his head and takes it all away. I just hope that those protesting against Trump are the same people who raised their voices against Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK. Where were they under Obama? Would things have been just fine and dandy under Hilary Clinton? What is it about politics being sold out to corporate economics that such folk don’t understand? Think long and hard on the words with which Alasdair Macintyre concludes After Virtue, where he says that, unlike the Fall of Rome, the barbarians are not at the gates threatening to come in, they are already on the inside and have been governing us for some time. It is our failure to understand that that constitutes our predicament. We reap the whirlwind of the politics of the lesser evil. The politics of the lesser evil would seem to justify a vote for Hilary Clinton and the Democrats, and another spell of neoliberal top-down technocratic politics that pushed the globalisation of economic relations down the throats of communities, ignored the voices of those falling by the wayside, letting liberal finance displace and disrupt peoples and bankrupt economies. Here’s the punch in the solar plexus that ‘left liberal’ critics really must find hard to bear – Donald Trump saw the writing on the wall of neoliberal globalization and had the nerve and the nous to lead a political assault against it, with a force and a vigour that leftist critics have singularly lacked in all the years they have been aware of its iniquitous consequences in terms of uneven development.

Many are expressing shock and horror, and seem to spend every day frightening and nauseating themselves even more with yet more news of what Trump has said and done next. Terrors for children, and very tedious. If you don’t like it, organise and act effectively, diagnose the problem at its roots rather than just keep asserting and repeating your pet positions as though they are self-evidently true and right by definition. They are not. Not in politics. Here is the problem. We live in a modern society that has lost its mooring within an overarching moral framework. Society is fragmented between particular groups and interests, a congeries of individual and sectional self-interest. In such a society, there is no cohering moral compass, only value-judgement, perspectives, positions and social interests. There is no objective reference point or moral ground by which we are able to check assertions and claims made, evaluate and judge them, and work towards agreement so as to resolve issues. The divisions in society are now running so deep that different sides are talking at rather than to each other. There is no dialogue possible because we lack the common terms that are shared by all sides. For me, this fatally undermines the claims of pragmatic political philosophers who argue that there are no pre-political truths, that we can dispense with first order arguments concerning value and truth, some ontology of the good, as incapable of ever being conceived clearly in a way that could command universal assent, and instead should concentrate on the interactions and exchanges between citizens in the public realm, checking and informing each other, forming a public will that is every bit as ‘objective’ as any substantive first order truth. Where is this objectivity inducing agreement? I see sides fundamentally split, convinced of the fundamental rightness of their own views and hence the subsequent illegitimacy of their opponents’ views. Or enemies. This is not the politics of dialogue and ultimate agreement, this is the politics of anger and war. And it stems from deep social divisions, the separations of individuals from each other, of groups and classes against each other, and of all from the common good as something implying a common moral standard. I note with bitter irony the hundreds of thousands of protestors who are very vocal in their assertion of rights against any threatened encroachments. I have argued for years now against those secular liberals who think that we can assert, defend and embed rights as a matter of political convention alone. I have tried to point out how unsupported and vulnerable such a case for rights is. The political arena that can so quickly confer rights can, by the same token, quickly take them away. The only secure basis of natural rights is natural law, a natural law that is grounded in an objective morality that is independent of time and place. Many consider that to be a traditional or a conservative position. I say firmly that it is the existence of such a morality that enables us always to hold government, politics and rulers to account when it comes to basic human dignity.

Is Trump really that much of a shock? We have been living through a long period in which politics has increasingly from realities. We are reaping the whirlwind of a long time of being out of tune with the harmony/symmetry/justice that forms the moral arc of the universe. It is precisely that being out of alignment that is feeding the so-called ‘populist’ revolt underway, a somewhat contemptuous in my view, as though there is no legitimate, reasonable content to the complaints of the revolting ‘masses’. And I am always deeply suspicious of bland talk of ‘elites’ and ‘masses’ too. A more precise social and institutional analysis would reveal precisely the political forces at play here.

Let me first of all deal with the shock. There have been testing times before in history. How do we come through it? We have to trust to the direction at the heart of the universe. I come back to this bedrock objective morality. It is the natural law tradition that Martin Luther King jr drew upon. And King’s famous quote about the moral arc of the universe is worthy of mention here. It derives from a quote by anti-slavery campaigner Theodore Parker:

"Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble."

So I say, remain true to your conscience, always be sure to inform that conscience, know what is true, bring it to others, listen and learn from others, hear what they are saying and see how it tallies, don't let the worst forces in the world steal your good heart or your capacity for joy, keep in tune with the direction of the moral universe, cleave to it, don't let go, and don't let the worst amongst us turn you cynical and hopeless. I studied history, I have seen all the tyrants - they are unimpressive figures, we can do better. But doing better means much more than taking sides according to one’s own prejudices and interests. Human beings are social beings. Understand what being social entails. It could just be you are blinded to the deficiencies of one side on account of being against the other side.

Trump is a symptom of problems going back decades, problems that governments and parties of both right and left have presided over, failed to resolve, caused. Trump is not the architect of the divisions and crises we face, he is the beneficiary of a reaction against long-standing political and institutional failure. This is where things get interesting. For decades we have been educated by politicians to lower expectations of government with respect to the economy. ‘You can’t buck the market’, we have been told. Despite the fact that the main players in world trade and finance have been active in doing precisely that all the time. Globalisation has meant liberalisation and financialisation, a displacement of economics, a symbolic economy detached from communities, a hyperreality, a focus on the short over the long term, stoking up imbalances that have led to periodic crashes of ever greater scale and intensity. We should have been protesting at all of this. More, we should have been organising a more effective politics, asserting the legitimacy of the public realm and social purpose, the primacy of politics over economic imperatives. There is no popular control or sovereignty in face of irresistible systemic imperatives. This economic determinism has been the true tyranny, the way that nations and communities have been subject to external uncontrollable forces subject to no democratic will.

And this is why Trump is interesting. He is rejecting neoliberalism and globalisation, he is promising a more proactive use of government in directing economic purposes, he is asserting the power of government to deliver on ‘jobs, growth and investment’. That’s the favourite mantra of politicians, of course. But here’s the difference, whereas they pay lip service to those things, then abandon responsibility to private forces in the global market, Trump is promising government intervention. The left should be clapping their hands, I have heard people say, even people on the left. Well, not really. Trump is not doing it for left wing reasons. I’m not even sure he’s doing it for right wing reasons. He’s a businessman, and so he will see it in practical business terms of getting things done. And, of course, he’ll think in business rather than political terms. The left should be wondering why they were never more insistent that the sides they have supported in politics have had the same guts and gumption. Instead, many have too easily accepted false claims of political impotence with respect to ‘the market’, i.e. powerful players in finance and business. Problems have mounted, haven’t been corrected, and issues of social concern have been deliberately evaded by an obsessive focus on economic growth as the one and only true goal of politics. ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and all the Prophets!’ wrote Marx. There’s the one moral and political law of modern society.

The problem is, economic growth is becoming harder and harder to deliver, its benefits are not being shared equally, and it is not even a goal we should be pursuing in any case given ecological constraints. Frankly, this is one hell of a mess. Here’s the interesting bit, though. Trump’s promises are going to be tested against economic realities. But it is not just Trump that is on trial – it is the whole notion of capitalism, liberal democracy, the notions of political leadership, the idea that government is able to intervene in the economy with an economic policy and industrial strategy specifically devised to increase jobs and incomes, rejuvenate communities … all the old social democratic/leftist ambitions that were shed by parties of the left in government long ago.

My view is that the problems that have been building up for decades are not going to go away. They are structural to the core. ‘The economy’ is not biddable to the hopes and speeches of any politician, not even one straight from the business world. And the problem is not merely one of an impotent political realm that is incapable of representing the will of the people anymore; it is a problem of the economic system. The crises of politics are the institutional expression of crises deep down in our economic system. It strikes me that the real objection to Trump is not merely what he is saying – or is purported to be saying, some seem deliberately to mishear the words in order to be shocked and outraged, whilst seemingly never having heard the very same things being said – and done – by previous Presidents. No, the real cause of the shock and the horror is the shattering of illusions. For once, we don’t have a leader well-rehearsed and well-versed in all the right words. It seems that people are happy with lip service. Fine. Hypocrisy is, after all, the homage that vice pays to virtue. But it’s still an hypocrisy that delivers words that are rarely, if ever, backed with actions. Problems mount, situations drift, people get ignored. I think Trump is wrong. But I think he is right in exposing the failures of neoliberal technocratic top-down globalisation. We have here a choice between a quick crisis and crash by delusion – and pragmatic businessmen learn quickly and change actions – and a continuation of the long crisis heading for crash by illusion. Time is up for those who gave us liberalisation and corporatisation under the auspices of globalisation and free trade. The illusion that this would work for the benefit of all has been shattered. Let's bring the problems out into the open, re-equip, clarify where we are, move well clear of the neo-liberal top down technocratism that has been hollowing out our societies for decades now, and start to create new forms of the common life, building the moral and social infrastructure for concerted and comprehensive politics restructuring power and resources for each and all.

Instead of obsessing over what you think Trump is going to do, focus instead on what you have the power to do, and remember you are not alone. But a word for protestors – know not merely what you are against, know most of all what you are for, and be prepared to associate, organise and work for that vision. We are more powerful than we think.

“Part of the mythology that they’ve been teaching you is that you have no power. Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.”

― Winona LaDuke

Pope Francis rests social justice on the moral bedrock of natural law: 'While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.'

That ‘new tyranny’ is not Trump, it refers to something much greater than any politician – it refers to the new idols of economics that have been governing our lives as external powers for a long, long time now. And it needs pointing out, too, that Pope Francis is also ahead of an awful lot of the left in climate change. Left and right aiming at government both remain wedded to ‘economic growth’, as indeed they must given the accumulative dynamic which is at the centre of the economic system they have to serve and facilitate as a condition of their own power and legitimacy. Both sides are trapped into a short-termism that, from the perspective of the long term health of the planet upon which we depend, is utterly delusional. Trump is a reaction to the long standing failure of progressive politics to mount anything more than a half-hearted challenge to a system that stands in need of social transformation.

I read one of Trump’s advisers calling the green movement the biggest threat to freedom on the planet. It stems from the view that freedom is based on individual liberty, which comes with the corollary that any supra-individual force is an infringement on freedom. Here, the target is environmental legislation and regulation, but it also embraces governmental intervention in general. The agitation over climate change is not really about climate science at all, that is a side-show that detracts our attention from the politics – it is ideological. Is the rejection of climate science wrong? Yes. Is there a climate problem? Yes. Some deny it. They are wrong. But we waste our time arguing at this level. Their real concern is with climate solutions and with what they imply with respect to government intervention and regulation. And so, the fairly tepid, voluntary global agreement at Paris is considered a monstrous infringement on liberty and a threat to the economy. Should we be outraged? Probably. But cool heads are better. For decades, such forces from business and industry have been denying climate science and delaying climate action from the outside of politics. Now they are on the inside. A few years ago I wrote an article called power without responsibility, taking such business interests to task for the veto they exercised on climate policy. Where once they were anonymous, now they are in office, with responsibility, visible and accountable. Power is best preserved by being concealed. Now, the deniers are revealed, and the business and industrial interests fuelling their denial will be subject to public scrutiny, controversy, intervention and alteration. This is a sign not of their strength, but of their weakness. No longer will the professional politicians be taking a hit for team capital (and why the hell have been allowed to do this for so long now?) Instead, the powers behind the throne are now on that throne, vulnerable, sitting targets. The political, social, economic and ecological consequences of the extractive expansionary economics we have been practising are now converging in one big crisis. This is a crisis of transformatory significance, denoting not a problem here and there in the system that is capable of reform, but a structural problem requiring system change. Issues are coming to a head. We have needed system change for a long time. Instead, politicians and governments have given us the same reformism from above, predicated upon an economic growth that is no longer up to the task. This may well be the last roar of the neoliberal lion. But remember this, the problem is not neoliberalism. Too many critics are focusing upon neoliberalism as the source of the problem. This sounds like a deliberate political evasion on the part of reformist liberals to me. What is overlooked here is that the neoliberal revolution in economics was itself a political response to the growing crisis of capitalism. I remember a Keynesian economist claiming that the monetarist barbarians have taken over the Temple. If the Temple was so strong, how come the barbarians took it over so easily?

We've been out of synch for a long while. Now, at long last, we can have a good long hard look at ourselves and our politics and put them in order. I'm not sure how many people have read Ralph Miliband’s books, those from a previous generation certainly. Towards the end of his life he wrote a book called Divided Societies (1989). And he argued cogently that there was no ideological conversion to neoliberalism and Thatcherism/Reaganomics. Instead there is a long-standing crisis in the agencies of labour, a crisis of socialisation, education and representation that divides and demoralises those forces in society working for its transformation in the interests of the people. That crisis has to be addressed now. Political events are bringing these institutional and political deficiencies into the open, in full public view. The age of illusion is surely over. I see Trump as a symptom of political illusions going back a long way. Now we have to face reality. Or worse will come. A slow driver is as big a menace as a speeding driver when the times call for change.

Part of the crisis in the agencies of the left that Miliband wrote of was the way that, not knowing how to keep their promises of moderate social reform on the back of economic growth when the crisis of capitalism came, they sold out to globalised economic relations in the shape of free trade (anarchy of the rich and powerful under the auspices of global finance and corporate power). The result is that left parties of government have been practising a neoliberal technocratic politics in hoc to corporate economics. It works only for the few and it won’t wash anymore. I've criticised it for as long as I can remember, only to see people continue to vote for it as somehow a lesser evil to the right wing alternative. No, like all lesser evils, it is an evil that doesn’t address the problems, the problems get worse, and the real architects of the crisis keep returning as saviours of the 'free market' from supposedly spendthrift, interventionist politicians wedded to 'big government'. I once thought the EU had the potential to reconstitute regulation on the supranational terrain to rein in powerful private forces and global players, only to see it succumb to a competition policy and the imposition of an austerian straightjacket upon Europe. We need a genuine globalisation, a cosmo-localisation to use an ugly term, one that institutes a supra-national regulatory framework that checks anarchic global players, but which keeps power as close to the base communities as much as possible. Instead, we seem to be lurching from one extreme to the other, finally addressing the problems of globalisation but not getting at its causes - finance and the corporate form, TNCs - thus renationalising the old problems of economic management, as though any nation can control its affairs in this way anymore. The problem has kept on getting misdiagnosed. And I’m afraid Hilary Clinton would have been the latest in the long line of leaders wedded to such misdirected politics. We are living is a 'slow 1929', not a massive crash but a long one. We are between a dying old system and a new one that exists in potential, but is being repressed by existing relations, certainly, but importantly by the failure of progressive forces to think and act strategically in politics and social organisation. The ideas are out there, the will also in large part, but the problem is that the political and social agencies that are dominant are still wedded to outmoded forms.

My hope is that having seen the manifest failures of 'soft liberalism', a mild impotent reformism that degenerates into neoliberal technocracy presiding over an iniquitous and ecologically destructive economic system, inviting a right wing reaction, we may now be more, and appropriately, ambitious in politics, stop supporting parties merely tinkering from above with the system, recognise the impossibilities of economic growth - that slippery euphemism for capital accumulation - a) on account of the contradictory dynamics of a capital economy that no longer generates value to the extent required, hence the constant need for state bailouts and subsidies; and b) on account of ecological constraints.

Even if we could guarantee economic growth - and we can't, and we shall see how Trump deals with the expectations he has raised here - we don't need it from an ecological perspective, it is uneconomic, unsocial and unecological expansion that is driving our biosphere over the cliff. On top of this, there is the fact that jobs are being wiped out by the thousands and thousands - the old is dying. Trump has raised expectations and promises that can't be delivered, 'jobs, growth and investment' of the old days are gone - let's adjust our politics accordingly.

As for the name-calling and abuse, this is an appalling advertisement for all those political philosophers who think themselves the pragmatists and folk like me idealists, who think their political truths emerging in citizen discourse and deliberation trump my attempts to set politics within truths and values which are independent of the institutions and conventions of time and place. I am seeing a 'debate' set to extremes, enflaming passions, drawing everyone into taking sides against spooks and spectres, entrenching positions. I am very interested in the straight and clear divisions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in all of this, it strikes me as the very worst kind of theological mentality, the bastard remnants of a theology that has lost its God, a religion gone bad in pursuit of false idols. No pre-political truths? This is what happens when we worship the products of our own hands and heads.

I'm waiting for the hot air to blow over. I know Trump’s politics. They are not mine. But, please, we can do without the moral outrage and end of days hysteria. Let's attack real positions. I did nearly weigh in on this claim that the green movement is the biggest threat to freedom. Outrage!! Except, cooling down, I put my philosophers’ head on and realised that the real issue here is one of different definitions of freedom. The libertarian one sees any regulation, law, government as an infringement on liberty, so the interventions that the green movement demand on climate change are, by that definition, a great threat to freedom. I think it better to clarify that point and reason it through rather join the shouting. That argument on freedom can be countered by presenting a richer, more rounded definition of freedom in which law and government and morality are not infringements on individual liberty, but expressions of that liberty in association with others. Human beings are social beings. Individual liberty is increased in association and cooperation. It is the separation of individuals from one another in an atomistic, competitive society that diminishes individual liberty. We need each other in order to be ourselves. Of course, that does not justify any law or government or regulation or moral code, these things are to be negotiated between ourselves. And in that sense, the public or political realm is involved in establishing truth and value, including freedom. That indicates the public realm as a dimension of freedom, not merely a condition of freedom. Making that argument, distinguishing between competing conceptions of freedom, is much more profitable than outrage and abuse. And here's my punchline - the green movement IS too focused on top down institutional concerted action, it DOES look like an elitist technocracy. And that approach has racked up decades of failure, all that activism with the full weight of science on its side to deliver a timid voluntary agreement at Paris. Is that all you’ve got? Hence my latest blast against "planetary engineers" who want to "take charge". So I don't have any sides here. I want some serious politics here, a politics that motivates people, involves them in a social self-transformation. Not philosopher-kings and rescue squads proceeding above through legislative intervention and regulation. Concerted action and a regulatory framework is needed. But a head needs a body. We badly need an embodiment in ecological politics.

Trump is a symptom of the failures of past politicians and the neoliberal technocracy in hoc to corporate economics they have practised. Sorry, but I always, always, always warned folk that the politics of the lesser evil always comes to this – the problems don't get addressed, they get worse, and then reaction comes. The hard political truth is this, the so-called left of centre parties have been no more – and usually a lot worse than – a tinkering liberals offering piecemeal social reforms at a time when the problems we face call for social transformation. The inadequacies of that approach are now manifest, progressive forces are split amongst themselves, some wedded to the system of growth, others rejecting it completely, many myriad directions forward proposed but a complete lack of unity.

I know the politics I favour is not on the agenda. All I can do is keep clear headed and keep outlining the contours of the right way forward. I have no sides to take in this fight, because it is a surface level fight that will resolve nothing. Politics at the institutional and ideological reflects and articulates the divisions that run deep in our society, they no longer mediate those divisions as they once did, achieving the semblance of unity, let alone resolve or have the potential to resolve those differences. For all of the anger and the passion, it is not politics at this level which matters but the conditions of politics – material, social and moral/metaphysical. These conditions determine the quality of the connections between people, whether the individuals composing the demos are capable of constituting themselves as a genuine public rather than a mere congeries of self-interested parties. Without those connections within a moral and associative space, politics will struggle to function as it ought, as a sphere concerned with reconciling conflicts peacefully and ensuring unity out of difference. Instead, without shared ground and values embedded in social space, politics will merely be a self-cancelling nullity of assertion and counter-assertion, the ever more angry and passionate assertion of one’s rights against the other’s wrongs, with diminishing respect and increasing loathing on all sides.

The destructive cycle of spiral of assertion and counter-assertion, aggression and reaction, will not cease the roots of this parlous situation are addressed in social, structural and moral terms. At the core of this political intensification and self-nullification is the fragmentation at the core of social relationships, separating individuals, groups and classes from each other, dissolving common ties and shared values, diminishing empathy, leaving only outright opposition that leaves politics speaking the vocabulary of war, no compromise, no surrender, a language in which differences of opinion come to be considered as declarations of war, so that political opponents become enemies to be abused, silenced and worse. At the heart of this political war is the social war that structures the divisions articulated at institutional and ideological level. Nothing will change until change at that structural level is effected, hence my statement that I have no dog in this fight, no side to take which expresses my politics. I can favour one side against others as a lesser evil, and an argument can be made that is something we all need to do. I can only repeat my consistent view, that if you choose a lesser evil, be clear that you are still opting for an evil, for a position that makes a bad situation worse, and that, as a result of failing to directly tackles problems positively with a politics of the good, the greater evil will make itself felt, in one form or another. We have lost the sense of the public realm as a dimension of freedom/happiness and the good life, and the problems we face are the direct consequence of that loss. We have been living through a depoliticisation and demoralisation, stripping us of the capacities for exercising practical reason, leaving us completely exposed to the collective social and economic forces that drive our common affairs, powerless to guide these collective forces according to ends we set ourselves. The great mystery is why it is taking radicals so long to wake up to the fact that we are facing twin evils of political centralisation and social atomism organised around the corporate form, politics as the management and manipulation of the people not in a public interest determined by the people but for the extension and entrenchment of corporate power, the unsocial socialisation of the business system that proceeds in the absence of a genuine socialisation undertaken by forms of the common life and popular organs of social self-mediation.

Where has the organised politics of ‘the liberal/left’ been in the decades since the neoliberal reaction was launched with the deliberate intent of engineering society from above via the state? Here is the origin of the political debacle we find ourselves in, the failures of a lame, statist social reformism parasitic upon economic growth, inviting neoliberal reaction, and the lamentable collapse of the liberal reformist tradition, refusing structural transformation in favour of an abject surrender to corporate economics, whatever the costs to the people it purports to represent.

Social Democracy was always something of a misnomer to describe this tradition in politics, dogmatically wedded as it has been and remains to parliamentary institutions, hostile to extra-parliamentary forms and actions. The entire tradition is predicated upon an utterly disabling split between public and private, politics and economics, and expresses the classic institutional separation that defines liberalism and its deficiencies. When the times demand structural transformation, such a politics will always be on the wrong side, degenerating into a pious moralism, all fine words and principles, but utterly lacking the means to back them with substantive action in practice. Is that all that there is to the politics of the left? Are people happy with the lip-service that their supposed representatives pay to their dearly held principles? Why are they more outraged when their political opponents reject their principles, as they would, than by the fact their own representatives say one thing but do precisely the opposite? Why are they more upset by the honesty of their political opponents than by the dishonesty of their own representatives? Is lip service enough? If you want real change, ask not that your political opponents agree with your principles, ensure that your own side live up to those principles!

It’s the mealy mouthed affirmation of right principles that turns my stomach, not that people and parties with alternative politics say and do things with which I disagree. Of course they do! I’m more concerned with the way that saying and doing have parted company a long time ago in liberal/left politics. The words – such as they are – are increasingly empty, detached from social practices. All that remains is a heavy legislative and regulative shell which more and more people are experiencing as an imposition from outside of their lived experience. People are demanding a genuine public order but the problem is that we are losing the capacity to constitute that order. There has been an overreliance upon state and legislative intervention, as if such things alone, apart from social practices, would suffice. It is a liberal legal fetishism that identifies progressive principles with a remote state form and governmental approach, which fails to touch the structural roots of the problems we face, does nothing to create and sustain the forms of the common life and communities of practice we need to constitute a genuine public, and thus issues in a continual drift away from progressive politics on the part of the people. This approach is discredited and has decades of failure to its name. The failures predate the neoliberal reaction, and explain why neoliberalism could be so successfully launched and sustained in the first place.

Better an honest enemy than a false friend, said John Stuart Mill. But that’s only really better if you root out the falsity amongst supposed friend to be better able to challenge enemies that say what the mean, and are prepared to back it with actions.

What has been called ‘globalisation’ has too often served as an attempt to neutralize a highly political process, making the extension and entrenchment of economic relations that favour specific interests seem a technical process. Globalisation has been a political process to the core, with jobs imported and exported on terms favourable to the transnationals, social services cut back or corporatized, pension and retirement funds looted, state-sponsored bailouts of the banks, irresponsible finance gambling with the futures of entire nations and economies – none of this was an expression of democratic will but were the product of policies imposed upon a recalcitrant public from above. The role of the liberal/left parties in this corporatisation of public business should not be obscured by the lip service they have paid to fine principles, for they are complicit in the whole process, keeping a lid on the opposition of the people they represent to this process, keeping them bound within institutional forms that are delivering shifts that are inimical to their interests. The promise of reform via an institutional and legislative intervention from above has been complicit in the expansion and entrenchment of the corporate form. The ‘liberal/left’ reformism of the parties of the conventional political sphere have been instrumental in building a corporate global order. In the process, there has been a sliding over from a reformist social (liberal parliamentary) democracy to a neoliberal technocracy, with the structural problems we face at the heart of society and its relations being reconceived as a legislative and administrative deficiency. Instead of social transformation addressed to the entire social metabolic order of control, there has been an emphasis on laws, procedures and rights, diffusing conflicts within a state-sanctioned apparatus of control. The result has been a sublimation rather than the transformation required to resolve problems, something which has brought the intensification of those problems as the corporate form came to be extended. The result has been a rationalisation of the process of corporate accumulation of public business through as a supposedly rights-based and rule-bound ordering, the ‘liberal/left’ forming a political/cultural wing of economic neoliberalism, both of them misdefining ideologically what really lies at the core of the entire transformation – not the extension of free markets and private property but corporatisation. So long as this proceeded in accordance with rights, laws, due process and administrative protocol, then everything was fine and dandy. The neoliberal technocratic approach of the ‘liberal/left’ put politics on ice and took the teeth out of the issues and conflicts surrounding the globalisation of economic relations, leaving those protesting the impacts without representations. ‘Globalisation’ was declared to be the only game in town, politicians making a virtue of their own impotence, diminishing public expectations of government and politics at the same time that they diminished the public realm.

But here is the horrible thought – maybe the ‘liberal/left’ are telling an unpalatable truth, that in a capitalist economy, the public power of the state/government is secondary and derivative, that the primacy of politics is a delusion and that politics can never be proactive given the structural and systemic constraints within which it operates under the capital system. That’s a truth that the reformist tradition dare not speak, lest it reveal its ideological function – that is, the point of reformism is not the reforms it promises and cannot deliver on, but to keep its mass constituency shackled to the system that works against its own interests. And yet the danger is this, you can only dash promises for so longer before that constituency loses faith and starts to look elsewhere. We are reaching that point, social/liberal/parliamentary democracy is facing a legitimation crisis. People want more than idle promises from politics, they want the problems they face properly addressed.

The mantra from the liberal/left parties is that we will only make promises which we can deliver. That hasn’t been promise enough. What if, within the parameters of the global capital economy, the representatives of these parties are right? This claim is about to be tested. Trump is making promises that the liberal/left parties once made, but bit by bit abandoned in favour of a globalisation that, they hoped, would expand trade and increase economic growth and buy off sufficient discontent to keep the boat afloat.

This is the issue that needs to be addressed – what is the relation of government and politics as the expression of the democratic will of the sovereign people to economics, powerful private interests, system-wide imperatives and contradictions, the corporate form. The professional political class, of which the liberal/left parties are firmly a part, have been guilty of naturalising precisely what needs to be historicised and politicised – the global shifts and transformations with respect to social power, how it is organised, instrumentalised and commodified. There has been nothing natural about the globalisation of economic relations and the assertions that such things are technical processes proceeding with natural inevitability are plainly ideological attempts to rationalise political impotence. I don’t need to switch on the news and need to read about the latest outrage about what Donald Trump has said and done. Donald Trump is a businessman who thinks little of politics and politicians, he is a busy-man who wants to get things done. Outrage that he talks past, talks down and talks over the most cherished notions of the ‘liberal/left’, wedded to rules and procedures and rights and … right words backed by legislative intervention and little else by way of social practice. I’m more outraged that progressive voices have been so ready to settle for lip service at the level of principle and impotence at the level of practice, have been so blinded by the assertion of rights at the legislative level that they cannot see such leftism as the cultural wing of economic liberalism. It’s that degeneration of reformism into neoliberal technocracy rationalising and codifying the corporate form that needs to be attacked. And we can do that with a clear institutional and structural analysis which reveals the relation of public to private, politics to economics …. and the fracturing of the social body into sides with no option but to fight their divisions out. The system is designed to fail, society is divided to fall, and no amount of institutional mediation via the conventional political sphere can overcome that. As for the promises of ‘jobs, growth and investment’, that is indeed a false prospectus for any number of reasons, but most of all because

a) the economic system is beset with structural contradictions which will see an increasing maldistribution of wealth, diminution of value and destruction of jobs;

b) the structural and systemic dependence of the state/government upon the process of accumulation and its contradictory dynamics, meaning that promises made lack the capacity to be delivered;

c) economic growth is transgressing planetary boundaries, destroying the conditions of civilised life on earth.

In short, left or right, the economy is bust, is destroying the planet, and beyond political control. This is the point that needs to be made. Trump is dismantling environmental protections, rescinding environmental laws and threatening to pull out of the Paris agreement. There’s a hard question to be faced by environmentalists here – how effective and appropriate was any of this any way? Has environmental politics been up to the task before it? I say no, not by a long way. And rather than get involved in trench warfare in defence of pitifully inadequate provisions (which have us on course for going well beyond the 2C threshold of temperature increase), I’d revise the entire approach, go much further than the legislative and regulatory intervention from above and try to attach climate politics and justice to an ecological self-socialisation on the part of global civil society and its networks – globalisation as a genuine socialisation, a cosmo-localisation buttressing, empowering and legitimising the concerted and comprehensive action we certainly do require from above. The head can’t do it without a body.

The outrage and the abuse is indulgent, a waste of energies that could be better spent more creatively, it just clouds the issues that stand in need of clarifying, fixing the protagonists into predetermined positions that ensure paralysis. We need clear institutional and structural analysis allied to political honesty and guts. I am reading this headline by Deirdre Fulton ‘Spectacular Betrayal as Trump Hands Economy Back over to Wall Street.’ Excuse me, but the Democrats have been in hoc to corporate economics and Wall Street since Bill Clinton, it was the central plank of their politics. They gambled all on globalisation and they are now a busted flush. The betrayal is that of the left of centre parties of their supporters. Spare me such headlines, please!

I am seeing friends taking big stands in defence of the free movement of labour, defending immigrant labour as doing the jobs that the indigenous working class won't/can't do. They don't seem to see such issues as a whole package that includes free trade, free markets, the free movement of capital, free finance – economic liberalisation as the anarchy of the rich and powerful, the gobbling up on the world by the corporate form in the name of freedom. And they don’t seem to realise how such assertions play to people in communities who have been left to rot by economic globalisation. I am afraid they are coming across like urban professional elites who have done well out of globalisation and hold uneducated working class folk in contempt. That won’t end well politically. Free movement of people is all part of a pack of free markets, trade and free movement of capital and liberalised finance. It’s impossible on the liberal/left to argue for the management of trade without being drowned out by howls of protest. So let’s make one point clear and then try to go further – there is no political future in following right wing prejudices on immigration, it’s a dutch auction and no matter how far you are prepared to go for populist reasons, the other side can and will always go further. The way to respond to Trump, UKIP, NF etc is not to join their pandering to fear and prejudice from outside, but to get inside these disgruntled and disenfranched communities with a political strategy that lest they all start howling racism at me. Sorry, but this supposed left have sold out to free trade globalisation. If the left won't pick this up, Trump and UKIP and Le Pen etc certainly will. You can only defend against that ‘populist’ reaction by getting in deep in those communities and creating trust and solidarity from within – lectures from without concerning right principles and facts won’t cut it. We need to get out of this protectionism-free trade narrative, it is a false antithesis that is utterly incapable of expressing principles and practices of a self-constituting social and ecological order. We need to come out of these bogus notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘control’ and recast the whole debate in terms of the requirements of a biospheric politics and practices of sustainable living. Are we capable of constituting political order that is respectful of planetary boundaries? Alternatives of freedom and protection, whatever these mean, don’t capture it.

Beyond the surface level need to take sides and oppose Trump in everything he says and does … there is something much more interesting going on, a deeper issue being addressed in the open. Trump is actually going to try and practice what the left has been preaching for decades with the mantra 'jobs, growth, and investment’ - the proactive use of government to reflate the economy and rejuvenate communities. It even crops up in notions of the Green New Deal, an interventionist industrial strategy predicated on the notion that government and politics is capable of directing ‘the economy’ towards the attainment of certain politically and socially desirable goals. Of course, he's doing it in a pro-business way, but what's news about that? There’s no ‘betrayal’ there, only the question as to whether politics is capable of delivering on those promises. The liberal/left answered that question in the negative decades ago, transferring responsibility for the attainment of its goals and values to ‘economic growth’. It was plain political evasion, and its costs in terms of a divided and demoralised movement not knowing how to proceed is now evident. Trump didn’t defeat this movement, it defeated itself. But here's the rub, the reformist liberal/left have been living in la la land on this for years, at least that part of it that actually believed in its ability to deliver on promises of equality and justice. That part that just paid lip service to such things, focusing on the legislation of rights in the social and cultural sphere and economic growth and globalisation/corporatisation in the economic sphere, have had no such illusions, seeking not to deliver on such principles, only spread illusions that they have some kind of commitment to achieving them. Capitalism is bust, government is dependent structurally and systemically upon economics and finance with imperatives and priorities that are independent of government, jobs are being wiped out by their thousands and will be wiped out even more so. It’s the end of the road for such politics. A reformist politics is predicated upon the resources of a continually growing economy, it is a thoroughly parasitic form that has no independent existence. And it is now caught in a double or triple bound of an increasingly stagnant, crisis ridden economy in constant need of public bailout, uneven distribution of such gains as there are, and ever narrowing ecological constraints.

The left needs a proper political strategy relating to the degrowth economy, detailing how work and production is to be organised in a new era, a real circular economy that keeps within ecological boundaries and draws more and more people into its activities. Trump is forcing us to look political and economic illusions in the face, not merely his but most of all our own. Trump is not the architect of the problems we face, he is but an expression of one attempt to address them. And the fact that a large part of his appeal mirrors some of the key nostrums of reformist social/liberal democracy, particularly the commitment to economic growth and creating jobs through proactive government should be cause for focusing minds on why the established left abandoned such notions, whether than abandonment was less a betrayal of principle and more a recognition of the structural and institutional limitations of government in relation to ‘the economy’ and, in light of these questions, what we need to do in terms of the deep structural transformation of the social metabolic order to really address the problems we face. That would entail a new politics worthy of the name, a politics that is beyond the limitations of binary divisions between liberalisation and regulation, free trade and protection, individual liberty and collectivism, market and state.

We need the public realm more than ever. To successfully address the problems of climate change and global warming will require comprehensive, concerted action by states at global level. But the neoliberal assault upon the state has gone so deep, the deliberate attempt to incapacitate the state in governing common affairs has been so successful, the liberation of private forces from governmental regulation gone so far, that popular faith in the state has died. Where once people looked to government to protect and further their interests, they now see the government as an alien and hostile body, intrusive, treating them as clients, as potential shirkers and not workers, as clients and not citizens whose collective power is the government. And this view is based on hard experience, with the state being instrumental in taking the millions to the global market, stripped of their social protections and rights and flogged to the lowest bidder. Such experience is in direct contradiction of the social democratic view of the state as integral to visions of the good society. The public investment, provision of infrastructure, health, education and welfare, industrial strategy, commitment to full employment all depend upon the central role of the state. At least, they did. Three decades of neoliberal assault upon the state in favour of the ‘free market’ has wrought a destructive political and ideological impact. Privatisation – more accurately the corporatisation of public concerns – outsourcing of services and deregulation have not just diminished the size and role of the state in managing our common affairs, they have diminished public expectations with respect to government and the state. In a republican or citizen democratic conception, freedom is a common endeavour achieved through a pooling of sovereignty. Government is not an alien or external body but is the citizens’ own power in common. That conception has been deliberately subverted through the relocation of freedom from the public realm of associated citizens to the private sphere of egoistic individuals competing for scarce resources in an atomistic society. The result has been a social and political disempowerment, a social dislocation and destruction of social institutions, an incapacitation of political abilities and a diminution of the public imagination, of what people think politics is and is capable of doing.

The popular faith in public and collective action with respect to our common affairs has diminished just as the need for it in light of social and ecological problems has grown. The state is now considered an external and alien form, visible only in hostile forms. The consequences are drastic – we have lost the ability to constitute social order around public purposes and thereby to come together to govern ourselves. Instead, our fates are in the hands of external, and increasingly hostile, forces, playthings not so much of the gods as the new idols of the global economy.

It is for these reasons I have not added to the howls of protest that have greeted the election of Donald Trump. The old politics of growth and rights etc etc is not a solution to the problems we face, and with Hilary Clinton we faced the prospect of another dawdling away over two terms of office. We need to do now what we needed to do anyway, mobilise and organise for an effective politics aiming at social transformation. System change is the only solution to climate change, and what the conventional political sphere has been proposing has been falling far short for a long time.

Getting to the reasons underlying the failures of social/liberal reformism, and indicating what needs to be done so that principles are realised, is the serious business at hand, not the daily outrage at the latest thing Trump has said and done. Such outrage makes him and his politics look more powerful than they are. Looking for the worst, exaggerating wildly, multiplying by a factor of ten, inviting more hysteria, feeding the flames all the more – that’s easy, unedifying and unsatisfying. I’m hearing folk say these are the worst times ever and the end of days. They are not. But much more of that jellyfish whining they soon will be.

So I shall continue to focus on solutions. There are a wealth of them available, for all those with energy to spare, who are prepared to put their time and talent in. There are great commons transitions underway at the moment. People are welcome to join in at any point and at any time.

I really wouldn't want to have to choose between any of these options in politics at the moment. I'd love to get my Being and Place book out, because it will then be clear as to what I am getting at when I say all sides in politics are necessarily short of the solutions we need. We are merely rebounding back and forth from one failure to another. In a fractured, socially divided society of individual, group and class self-interest, we are split between an assertive particularism on the one hand and a false and empty and abstract universalism at state level on the other. In these diremptive conditions, 'debates' are not debates at all, they are ideological wars based upon a social war. There is no dialogue and reconciliation possible, because there is no common ground and shared value system capable of uniting people. Hence no common good possible, only the victory of one side at the expense of the other. Such a politics breeds enmity and grudge, an endless score-settling in which each side negates the other so that no one can actually get anything done. Arguments are incommensurable because social interests are incompatible, hence it's all different sides talking over each other, then shouting at each other, convinced of their own rightness and the other sides' fundamental wrongness. Then we get the bogus theology. The theological assumptions once attached to the long dead and departed God become unmoored and are reattached to new idols of politics and economics, so that one's side is righteous and just and the others are irredeemably evil. Then we get the demonisation, the hysteria and then we get murder made respectable. Maritain was spot on, down this road we drown in a universal hatred.

Trump sounds good, and I hear some say that the left should be cheering some of the things he is proposing to do. OK, but his reasoning is not one the left should cheer. He's called out the militarism and imperialism of the so called left. We had to suffer Clinton and Blair, the Democrats and Labour in the 1990s justifying "liberal interventionism", spreading peace, freedom and democracy at the point of a gun, in the interests of the invaded and attacked people. To their credit, a lot of people protested that at the time. But a lot didn't. And a lot voted for these politicians and their parties. Politics is a hard world. And bad actions and blind eyes have catastrophic consequences. Now we need to shed illusions, and quickly. Did people really think that such a supposed left politics could limp on indefinitely, flouting its own purported values and principles with the exact opposite in practice? This is how it ends. When times demand radical and effective action, a slow driver is a bigger menace than a speeding driver. The truth is, the game has been up on parliamentary socialism/social democracy for more decades than people care to admit. Those still wedded to that old politics need to face the hard truth. The rest of us just need to embrace the new political reality beyond old divisions of left and right.

Is it wrong to be protesting against Trump? Be careful what you wish for. If you promise a revolutionary politics, have the practices to back it up, and take people with you. Otherwise, you are just stirring up trouble in the streets against the legitimate forces of political order. People prefer order over chaos and don’t tolerate turmoil for long. Be careful that your actions don’t bring about the very repression you claim to be acting against. And be careful that your protests don’t backfire and make such repression that results instituted by popular demand. The student protests of the late sixties brought right wing leaders and parties to power and saw the left disappear into sectarianism and terrorism. Rather than say that people are wrong to protest against Trump, however, I’d prefer to emphasise that they were wrong not to protest to the same extent against what left of centre leaders from Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to Barack Obama actually did.

I said it from the very first, when people were celebrating Obama’s victory and the extent to which he mobilised previously uninvolved and apolitical people and got them to vote. I said he needed to keep the people he brought into politics mobilised and organised and appeal to them when the Republicans and business interests moved to check him - as indeed they proceeded to do. I am hearing Trump promising to take action against any such obstructionism that gets in his way. Outrage! The outrage is that Obama demobilised his popular support and sold out to Wall Street. So I have no time for cries of Trump’s ‘betrayal’ of the economy to Wall Street, it’s the fact that such critics blithely ignore decades of such betrayal from left of centre parties that really outrages me. Politics is a tough business, and it’s tougher still when you're own side keep selling you out.

And I have little time for outrage and protest that make Trump more powerful than he is – and protestors less powerful than they are. I’m all for serious and ongoing political engagement. Such a thing makes it clear that political controversies have not been settled for good with the victory of one side over another. There are still issues to be contested, questions to be raised and answered, and the choices we make and actions we take still make a difference. Yet, too often, the voice of protest sounds like a voice against something, something that has won, something so powerful that all you can do is shout against it. It is not enough to be against something, we need to be for something, and we need to be active and organised enough to bring that something about. That’s the problem with the ‘end of days’ talk, it spreads a feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness that makes it seem as though nothing that we can say or do can make a difference. Such a mentality is a self-disempowerment. It’s the greatest victory you can hand to your political opponents. It’s a can’t do mentality. It’s a product of decades of the passive radicalism of social/liberal democracy, vote for us, support us, and we will do good things for you. A false promise that deradicalised generations and turned them into political clients. To repeat, people are crying out for a genuine public community but have lost the ability to create and sustain it. Appeals to their leaders and protests to their opponents, demands made to others, not backed by practices.

And now we suffer analyses which portray Trump and his team as strategists of genius organising for a pro-business takeover of every government concern. We’ve seen this before, when intellectuals detached from politics came up with the notion of ‘Thatcherism’, rationalising a politics of opportunism and pragmatism and giving it a coherence that it lacked. It’s the same thing over and again, making opponents appear far more calculating and sophisticated and powerful than they actually are, failing to bring such coherence to one’s own political cause. Instead of fostering feelings of frustration and impotence, analysts would do better to target popular discontent upon a failed social democratic politics and, rather than seek to revive that corpse with a bout of pointless radicalism, concentrate forces and energies in building a new politics, one that breaks free of false antitheses at the institutional level and instead looks to build the new public realm through circles of association and connections from the ground up. A politics of permanent protest is merely exhausting and disempowering, endlessly preparing the mental and psychic ground for the next betrayal and the next defeat, the constant destruction of hopes and expectations. Many of the liberal left who are protesting are talking of an unmitigated catastrophe in the years to come. It is a large part of the predicament of radical politics that so many, still, cannot see that for very many people that catastrophe happened decades ago and that we have been living in the aftermath ever since. Or do they really think that globalisation and neoliberalism, for all of their faults, are overall pretty good things and that just a few more years of technocratic noodling from above would make everything fine and dandy?

I have a notion that what really irks the protesting left here most is not so much Trump as what his victory says about the illusions of their own politics. The obsession with Trump is remarkable. It’s as though people have no political identity independent of Trump. It shows that the man and what he stands for have some kind of deeply rooted attraction as well as loathing, a common ground, in however inverted or perverted form. In the very least, it must hurt that Trump is now determining to use politics and government proactively against free trade and globalising forces, after decades of being told by your own side you can’t do any such thing, government lacks the power. We shall see.

But I am interested in the idea that love and hate are closely associated. There is something about Trump which clearly attracts/repels critics. What is there about Trump that acts to draw people in? I am reminded of a quote from Shakespeare in Hamlet, ‘The lady doth protest too much.’ To go to extreme lengths to protest is to signal not just disdain for something but an attraction that induces feelings of guilt or shame, it is a negative expression of a deeply held passion or feeling, a denial of its existence. You don’t protest Trump so vociferously because he is different, you do so because he reminds you of something about yourself, which you approve or disapprove of, deny, want. So what could this be? Deep down, there could be a troubling realisation that the liberal/left have been engaging in a substitute politics of rights and legislative intervention and regulation and identities instead of going to the heart of power and material resources in the social and economic spheres. Identity politics isn’t political correctness, and protecting vulnerable and marginal groups is something to be proud of rather than ashamed of. But there is a clear sense in which this has formed the cultural wing of economic liberalism, a counterpart of the dissolution of society into a congeries of egos united only by legal ties. Trump comes along and calls it for what it is, and there is a feeling that one’s cover has been blown. You’ve known the inadequacies of this legislative, rights-centred politics all along. You’ve failed to take politics to the social heart of the people. And Trump has stolen in there. In contrast, you look like petty-fogging, nit-picking meddlers using the full force of law to change behaviour from above, rather than people who are rooted in communities of real folk, generating solidarities from within. I’m not saying Trump will do that. I am saying you loathe the man because he has rode a coach and horses through the legislative, administrative approach to politics, shown it to be thin and unable to command popular support. And you know and hate the fact it has been exposed this way.

You are looking at yourself. Really. How many of you have been voting for or engaging in a politics concerned with sustainable living? How many have supported the social/liberal democratic side on account of its promises to run the economy better, in the interests of social equality and justice, yet ignoring the fact that the parties and their leaders in government have abandoned such principles in practice in favour of economic growth? How many of you just see politics as the taking of sides, left and right, accepting these outmoded definitions, my side right, the other side wrong, false oppositions in which you invest all your hopes in one side, suppressing all evidence to the contrary, and all fears upon the other side, regardless of the fact that what is promised is often what your own side has done before many times? It’s all based on false antitheses that fail to locate political battles in deeper causes. Instead there are these illusory constructs and identities that divide issues in a black and white way, creating mentalities that inflate the marginal differences in principle and practice between the sides on offer. The one side defines the other and all have to take sides. You can only have the one if you have the other in this system of contrived identifications and oppositions, and you become so wedded to your own projections that you internalize them as necessary truths, so that politics degenerates into a myriad false notions that you support or attack out of tribal loyalty. People need to stop investing their hopes and fears in this way, inventing false friends and false foes and splitting accordingly. Instead, we need to take these hopes and fears back and address them to social realities, dissolve the socially and culturally constructed identifications that force us to take sides and look at the things that unite us across real society. If you bring power and energy back to source and bring it directly to others, you will find you won’t need to define your identity by reference to some other, you won’t need to keep being implicated in this bogus system of politics and political identification. Instead, you will see that genuine power and freedom is not about success and failure at the institutional level of politics, but is embedded in the everyday social and moral conditions of politics, there spheres of solidary exchange and reciprocity in the social lifeworld. It’s not about the parties and their leaders and about electoral victories and legislative programmes. Such things denote a disempowering search for external saviours and leaders, something which leave us divided, passive, and taking sides in political wars that can never have any positive resolution, only an endless war that keeps everyone lined up against each other. What we hate about Trump is that he has got what we want and, most of all, he intends to use it, really change things, really get things done, really boost the economy and create jobs. And that reality is hard to take. Because, when given the chance, our side really failed to take the opportunity.

Would it be better if the liberal left cause had really acted on its principles? My point goes much further than this. I say get out of these political constructions and divisions and reclaim identity at the level of social relations, get the social and moral conditions of political engagement and action right, and come out of this discourse of us and them, friend and foe, my side right, the other side wrong. It narrows possibilities, debilitates politics, and sees us trapped in false dualisms and narratives. Of course we hate Trump! He reminds us of our own political identity, of who we are in politics, and what we would like to be and do and have. He’s on the other side, but he’s talking the same language of power and division and conflict. And he’s making the same promises, of using government effectively to create jobs and grow the economy. We’ve heard it all before. But he really means it. He's going to do some of the things our side was always promising to do, but could never quite manage. He’s doing what your side should have been doing but was too weak to do so, only in reverse. Is any of it possible? We will see. The central themes around which we have organised politics - reforms paid for by economic growth, opportunities and jobs for all etc - are about to be tested. We are all going back to work, the proactive use of government power is going to get the economy moving again, Trump is positioning himself on a social democratic terrain here that the parties of the left of centre have long since abandoned. As Steve Bannon told writer Michael Wolff just after Trump was elected. “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he said. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy… With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up … It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution – conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

We are going to see. We are going to have to face up to the illusions of politics. Maybe it is indeed true that left of centre parties aiming to form governments abandoned such ideas precisely because they came to understand the truth of what has been the marxist critique all along - that the state is not determinant, it is determined, structurally and systemically dependent for its power and resources upon the capital system and having therefore to facilitate the process of private accumulation as a condition of its own legitimacy. Social/liberal democracy has effectively conceded this view for decades now, without actually honestly admitting to it, fostering the illusion that it can still deliver social democratic reforms for its constituency from above via government and legislative intervention.

Those illusions are now going to be tested by hard reality. “We are going to put a lot of people back to work. We are going to use common sense and we are going to do it the way it is supposed to be done”, says Trump. Which implies a pro-market, pro-business agenda. Bringing manufacturing jobs home, boosting trade by ending regulation, creating jobs - like we've never thought of these things before, like they are biddable to the daily speeches of political leaders. There is nothing new going on here, this is the old state vs market agenda, sterile and exhausted, and we are going to see this collision tested to death. Is anybody checking the politics against economic realities? Here is a difficult truth to absorb, manufacturing businesses are already coming home, but not manufacturing jobs. Automation makes wage costs less important than they were, a robot is much cheaper than the most poorly paid Chinese worker. But how are you going to deliver on the promise to increase manufacturing jobs when manufacturing businesses depend more on automation than they do on workers?

As a recent report in the Financial Times put it: “In places like Buffalo there is evidence that US manufacturing has a bright future. It just does not look like a future that will include millions of jobs.” This is the kind of hard economic truth that shatters the world of political illusions. Does anyone think that politicians like to be unpopular? There is a reason why they haven't been delivering.

If Trump succeeds, then he will be a political genius who will shape politics for decades to come. All the more galling, since his success will be down to realising goals that have been central to the social democratic cause. But if he fails, his failure will expose a truth that cuts the ground from under social/liberal democracy and parliamentary socialism - it will reveal reformist politics to be empty of meaning and content, all pious hopes but lacking the means to deliver. It will be the end of the view that politicians and governments can deliver on economic growth, full employment, good and secure jobs. That's the end of a political tradition. For a century or more, socialism has been split between reform and revolution. If reform is no longer an option, yet we retain our principles for a decent life for each and all, we have nowhere else to go but system change.

And that means moving beyond social democracy as the politics of an age that has now long gone. It has been dying a death for decades now. Paradoxically, Trump's gambling has put it all on the line for the reformist tradition. In shattering the illusions of reformist politics, he will open up space for something much more radical, a politics fitted to social-economic and, indeed, ecological realities, built around the reorganisation of work and production, building policy around new realities in a post-growth world that has broken the link between employment and income. At long last, we will move away from illusory goals of economic growth, factories returning to deliver full-time employment for all, a horizon of peace and prosperity that stretches out into an unlimited future. We will have a biospheric politics that is capable of recognising and living by social, moral and ecological boundaries.

Me? I say we need to get out of this politics of us and them, either/or, taking sides. We need to get real. We need a period of disillusionment. We need to go beyond shame and guilt, blame and projection, a reliance on external saviors and bring politics back home, to soil, soul and society. At least be consistent. Everyone supports democracy when they are winning. Lose, and we suddenly start to talk a different language, the language of right and wrong, good and bad, that is independent of political institutions and the counting of heads. Play this game, and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. The game of oppositions and identifications bound together in false dualism and phony way carries on, whichever side wins out. What is your real grievance? The fact that your side lost and the other side won? In which case, put aside your principles and admit that it’s your side right and wrong above all that motivates you. Admit that is why you so easily turn a blind eye when your own side acts contrary to its stated principles, despite being so outraged when the other side goes against them. Those are the only true fertile conditions of politics. The rest is illusion and false identification, a splitting into sides that, although opposed to each other, actually have the same character and cultivate the same mentality and produce the same outrage when the other wins. There is no ground for a genuine resolution of problems on that basis. The conditions are lacking. It’s all based on social fragmentation and internal bifurcation, divided selves in divided societies and the reconstruction of identities to fit the false dualisms of the political realm.

So here’s what I say, withdraw from these constructed political identities and divisions, seek unity at a deeper level, work to restore the connections between people in the associative space of civil society, build the conditions of political unity and common agreement in the relationships between individuals and groups, cultivate a shared morality in recognition of principles and values that are independent of time, place, political sides and institutions, work for those, embed them in your social practices, ensure that words and deeds, means and ends are in direct relation, owe allegiance to persons and persons in association, not to constructed systems independent of that interpersonal experience. And maybe, then, we will generate a phenomenology of political experience that enables us to express difference openly and honestly with the possibility of finding unity on the common ground we share, rather than projecting hopes and fears upwards and outwards, inveigling us in a shadow-boxing that dissipates our positive energies, resolving nothing because nothing can be resolved at this alien level detached from soil, soul and society – the conditions of a genuine politics capable of combining the one and the many, unity and difference.