Politics 101

I wonder whether many people know what politics is. It is simple; but one has to be able to hold a subtlety in one’s mind. And the problem is severe, since simplicity usually goes with stupidity and repetition, whereas subtlety usually goes with sophistication, obfuscation and irrelevance – everywhere, but especially in politics.

Let me, therefore, announce Alexander’s Two Laws of Politics.

The first law is:

Politics is politics.

This means politics is a thing, an object, a phenomenon, something humans do. It is therefore something that we can understand, write about, and even study scientifically, in something called ‘political science’. There is, in other words, a thing called politics, and it is not any other thing. We know it when we see it. It concerns human order, collective formations, states, how they are ordered and ruled, and how these orders and rules form a framework for a miscellany of public and private acts of will in service of countless purposes. It has a vast baggage of concepts: government, constitution, power, law, justice, legislation, parliament, king, courts, tax, policy, liberty, democracy, ideologies, etc. This is the official definition of politics. It suffers from a weakness, however. It is insufficiently political.

The second law complicates the picture. It is:

Politics is not politics.

This means that almost everything that I’ve said under the heading of the first law is, though true, so infinitely flexible – because of the nature of politics – and so capable of being redescribed, so susceptible to the torments of human linguistic possibility, that there is no reality that cannot be inverted. Anything in politics which seems to be the case can also seem to be not the case. What is, therefore – in politics – is also not. Needless to say, this makes politics something which is not a science: or, let us say, it makes it a very paradoxical science, a very contradictory science: in short, a quantum science. Is politics a pair of human heads or a candlestick? Both. But only one at a time. Is politics a duck’s head or a rabbit’s? Both. But only one at a time.

Now, I am aware that the second law, unlike the first, demands justification. The justification is to be found in history. The inventor of politics in this advanced sense was not Solon, or Herodotus, or Plato. It was Augustus. After a hundred years of civil war in Rome, Augustus, in seeking to avoid the fate of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, did something absolutely remarkable. Caesar had not been a fool. He had taken power, and then tried to dignify his power in a way that would be acceptable in terms of the long established mores of Rome. Rome had once been a kingdom, but after seven kings had collapsed, following a rape and suicide so famous they were the subject of paintings and poetry for two thousand years afterwards, Rome became a republic. Romans were henceforth hostile to kings. Four or five centuries later on, Caesar was a king de facto but not a king de iure. Indeed, he was careful about this. When asked to become a king, he said he was not king, but Caesar. Caesarem se, non regem esse. But, in order to dignify his power he needed a role. He accepted the highly dubious, though admittedly constitutional, one of dictator. For this, he was assassinated. Augustus had to do something else after he defeated Antony. And he did something which rings down the ages. He declared that he was restoring power to the senate: that, in fact, he was restituting the republic. He declared that this is what he was doing. Yet he was not doing it. (Politics is politics.) And yet, because he said he was doing it, he was doing it. (Politics is not politics.)

The Victorian liberal statesman and writer John Morley wrote something astonishing in his Recollections, published over a century ago. It is a sentence which should be inscribed everywhere in Westminster and Whitehall, and set up on bronze tablets across the country. It is: “Most mistakes in politics arise from flat and invincible disregard of the plain maxim that it is possible for the same thing to be and not to be.” Morley said it in passing. But it is a fundamental observation. Across the world, countless political scientists continually confuse themselves by trying to make sense of political entities and events in one manner. They study democracy. But democracy is not democracy. Yet democracy is democracy. Both are true. Not at the same time – in politics. But to be understood – out of politics – we have to accept the truth of the thing that we cannot accept in politics. We have to accept that democracy both is and is not democracy. It is not democracy because it is ‘representative’, which means that it is, in fact, elective oligarchy; but it also is democracy because that is what we call it, and words are important.

The corollary of all this is that, in understanding politics, we are under the obligation of thinking politically and thinking unpolitically at the same time. By ‘unpolitically’ I mean thinking in terms of philosophy, history, psychology, literature, religion, even science. But an unpolitical understanding of politics is no more a complete understanding of politics than a political understanding of politics is.

This is, obviously, a great problem. For what it means, emphatically, is that no politician can adequately understand politics. Do not read politicians to understand politics. They only understand one half of it. Do not read Chris Patten, or Oliver Letwin, or Alistair Campbell, or Rory Stewart. Do not even read Owen Jones. But do not read political scientists either. They do not know the half of it – because they only know half of it. You should read only those who have a double sensibility: a sensibility which is both political and unpolitical. This is what Kant and Mill called an ‘enlarged sensibility’.

One of the great problems of our age is the fact that our habit of considering ourselves a democracy involves the making of much explanation to the masses. Politicians are involved in action, which is half meritorious, half not, and also involved in explanation, which is usually less than half meritorious. I say this because politicians realise that they have to engage in persuasion: and so employ the entire set of rhetorical arts – including the arts of exclusion, obfuscation, digression, displacement, distraction, forgetting, aspiration and inspiration – to get things done, and also not get things done. This is a problem for fundamental political order for the very simple reason that sometimes it is useful for a politician to deny that what is the case actually is the case. The Pope engages in a form of politics when he says that he is the servant of the servants of God, servus servorum Dei. The King uses the same language of service. He is a servant. Well, he is, but he is not. He is also a sovereign. Rulers rule as well as not rule. Consider. If we resist political claims like this one too much we will overthrow the system – and have to create another one, just as bad, or, Burke and Maistre would tell us, worse. But if we agree with political claims like this too much we will live in a half-lit, flickering world of falsity, where all truth is an inversion of the truth: as if each truth, though in a sense true, is the only truth. Sargon the Great was the prepolitical sort of king who could boast that he lay waste to his enemies by land and washed his weapons in the sea. But later kings, in early recognition of the power of politics, began to call themselves shepherds rather than the sons of dragons. Well. A king is a washer of his weapons in the sea, because that is what he is, but he is also a shepherd, because that is what he says he is.

This – these two laws, or Morley’s precept – can be applied to everything in politics. We speak of ‘ministerial responsibility’. Well, ministers are responsible. They also are not. We speak of ‘conservatism’. Well, conservatives are conservative. They also are not. Our collective inability to see this very clearly, as a fundamental fact of all politics, and all political subjects, is the reason why we return, again and again, to political stories in newspapers. In fact, there is a reason why politics was always on the front pages and sport on the back pages of the newspaper. Sport is unpolitical. A ball is a ball. A line is a line. A foul is a foul. Politics comes into it, a bit, as decoration, but not much. The back pages were always a relief from the confusions of the front pages. For in actual politics a ball is also not a ball. A foul is not a foul, even though it is. And there are no lines, even while the entire world is covered in lines.

Politics is what Aristotle called the master science. It rules. But it is also a servant science, a servile science: hence a tricky, subversive, duplicitous science. It is a cancerous science which takes over every attempt to state the truth of it. It is capable of subjugating religion, philosophy and science, all truth, to its imperatives, to turn them when necessary into something useful, something shameful, something expedient, something unwise: old, new, borrowed, blue (and red). Politics deserves the distrust which it has attracted in the last half century. But it also does not. It also deserves the respect which it inspired, say, between 1850 and 1950. The Victorians went too far in one direction: all frock coat, nonconformist conscience and empire exploited in a fit of absence of mind – but at least they believed in order; while the New Elizabethans went too far in the other direction: all Machiavellian misunderstandings, Private Eye prejudices, and worldly-wise trivialities which reverse-engineered the old stable liberal order to create something like, in our time, its Antichrist or Frankenstein.

Scepticism, I need hardly say, is the correct response to everything in politics.