Are We All Controlled Opposition?

This is a thought piece. Empiricism, or ‘evidence’, is completely out of place here. We are in the sweet country of the a priori: in the land where Thomas Hobbes used to live, next to a copy of Euclid’s Elements.

You must have heard of the phrase ‘controlled opposition’. It is a very interesting phrase, in that it compresses a great amount into two words. And it is a very relevant phrase, at a time when new coalitions on both Left and Right are forming and fracturing. All the Reform-Restore-Advance business on the one hand, and the Green-Your business on the other. Both sides say that the Tories are controlled opposition, and that Labour was the same prior to 2024. But the charge can be levelled at whomever makes it.

In order to explain the meaning of controlled opposition, I have to tell the entire history of the world – again.

This is a history in two stages with two logics.

First stage, first logic. In the beginning there were cities, orders, cults: many of them, but each with its own mountain, axis mundi or ziggurat: some sacred centre where the king was crowned or where the prophet received God’s law or where the scholars clustered. And each city-order-cult had its own habits, conventions, convictions. And it wanted to preserve them. It wanted mantenere lo stato, as Machiavelli put it: hold on to the sweet things of the world, as manifested in their particular order: maintain this state.

How to maintain this state? Well, the great imperative was to avoid stasis – that grave Greek word which means both ‘faction’ and ‘civil discord’, even ‘war’ (the thing Betz and Rainsborough tell us we are entering) – and other great words like sedition, subversion, treachery, treason. Every state had its word, and any other word was a threat. In order to avoid this discord one had to proscribe heterodoxy: forbid alternative words. One had to suppress sects. At its darkest, this meant that any good king had to kill his enemies: and here the words are all dark: execution, elimination, exile. Exile: this was the last resource of the king attempting to maintain the purity of the city-order-cult. Find the sayer-of-other-words, the heterodox priest, and send them away: scapegoat them. Everyone knows the story of Socrates: eliminated. Or of Jesus: executed.

In some of my more pretentious writings I have called this, believe it or not, the fundamental principle of antiquity. The fundamental principle of antiquity is that one achieves order by eliminating disorder. We are at war, and it is a war to the death. False beliefs should be destroyed.

Now, this principle is fundamental to almost everything before the 18th century. Not necessarily in practice, but certainly in theory. In theory almost every city-order-cult insisted on strict propriety of belief. Every city-order-cult hated disagreement. This was true of Athens, also Rome, and every Christian, Islamic or even Buddhist order. It was true of the Mayans, Aztecs, the Incas, and probably every Aboriginal dream community. It was true in Kyoto, in Timbuctoo, in Avignon, in Zanzibar, in Tenochtitlan, in Kiev, in Bombay, in Falkirk and in Westminster. Hobbes in the famous Leviathan of 1651, although he was modern in much, was ancient in this. He said: avow what the sovereign asks you to avow, and otherwise keep your beliefs to yourself. Opposition is not wanted.

Second stage, second logic. At some point in the 18th century men began to glimpse a different possibility. It had been intimated in much before: in philosophical debate (the Greek philosophers loved doubt, division, dialogue), in the Ottoman millet system, in the good sense of Halifax of The Trimmer, in sheer Shakespearian multipolarity of utterance: but it was never theorised. Theory, as I said, was exclusive, unitarian. But now the theorists began to say that there was some advantage in taking notice of the views of others. We find this, for instance, in Chladenius (1710-1759) who in his Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft of 1752, sometimes called the first systematic treatise on history, said that everyone, including the historian, no matter how philosophical, had a point of view, a partiality. But we find this thought everywhere. Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759 wrote about the importance of sympathy. And Kant in his Critique of Judgement of 1790 advocated putting ourselves in the position of others: in fact it was one of his three great laws of how to think well.

Most of us learnt this not from historians or philosophers but from novelists. They put it into practice. But they also understood it. Henry James somewhere wrote: “To project yourself into a consciousness of a person essentially your opposite requires the audacity of a great genius; and even men of genius are cautious in approaching the problem.” And it is the central principle of liberalism. At best, we should put ourselves into the position of others: other individuals, other societies, other civilisations. Lower down the scale, we should listen to them. And, at the very least, we should tolerate them. Our forefathers like John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell made this the centre of all good thought. The idea was that by opening ourselves to criticism, objection, opposition, we would strengthen our ideas, hear the worst that could be said. This would admittedly increase the amount of noise heard in society, and unfortunately mean we would have to listen to many blistering barnacles and thundering typhoons, but it had the advantage that our ideas would be the best they could possibly be.

This is the fundamental principle of modernity, which is that order does not come from eliminating disorder, but, by contrast, comes from harnessing disorder, working with it, allowing it to ferment. And here we are in the world of adversarial politics, parliamentary debate, political parties, enlightened and enlarged views, plus the whole motley of consensus and compromise. We have a public sphere, with its rackety world of headlines and distractions. And, above all, we do not eliminate sects: we tolerate them. We encourage sectarianism. We judge that the established order only becomes stronger the more it liberalises: and by liberalisation we mean the toleration of opposition, sectarians and even, strangest of all, sedition.

In sum, the ancient politics distinguished, as the Greeks did, politics = good and stasis = bad. But modern politics, our politics, refuses this. Our politics = stasis. Our politics is not pure. It is not Platonic. It is not Hobbesian. It is diverse, disarranged, disputatious. It includes within itself the entire set of possible objections to itself. Hence, for instance, all the radicals in the universities.

Now, without all this history, I do not think we can understand controlled opposition. But one more explanation before I come to that. I have distinguished a fundamental principle of antiquity and a fundamental principle of modernity. They are different. They contradict. But they exist together. The second did not eliminate the first. (Of course not! It does not believe in elimination!) Rather, it overlaid the first. At an atavistic level, as a primitive survival, we still have, we still live by, the fundamental principle of antiquity, the idea that order comes by eliminating disorder. At a root level, this is what we all want. This is why, even if we deny it, at some level we are all Iranian theocrats. But overlaying this is the sophisticated two-step dance of the liberal: the fundamental principle of modernity and its Hegelian dialectic or Government-and-Opposition supposition that order comes by embracing disorder, by yoking disputatious orders together and calling the result good, by allowing everyone to kick against the pricks.

Opposition is old, and we had it early in England, with our Whigs and Tories. But it was not exactly clarified until that wit John Cam Hobhouse in 1826 – yes, it is the 200^th anniversary of this magnificent phrase – spoke of His Majesty’s Opposition. The idea was that England would be better if we batted the ball across the net, instead of trampling on the net, breaking rackets on the heads of our opponents, thrusting spectators out of the court.

Finally, controlled opposition. What is it? Now you may see why I have gone through my short history. For ‘controlled opposition’ is a consequence of the overlaying of the two principles.

An antique figure says: ‘Exile the opposition!’

A modern figure says: ‘No, exult in the opposition!’

And then the conspiracy theorist, that three-dimensional thinker, says: ‘Ah, but the opposition is only apparent, not real.’

‘Controlled opposition’ = something that is presented as opposition is not really opposition at all but part of a trick.

In other words, what the words ‘controlled opposition’ are implying is that the fundamental principle of modernity is a bit of ideology designed to make us believe that our societies are tolerant, adversarial, etc. when in fact they are not. So if we are shown Badenoch, we say ‘controlled opposition’ and turn to Farage. And if we are shown Farage we say ‘controlled opposition’ and turn to Lowe. And if we are shown Lowe we say ‘controlled opposition’ and turn to, I don’t know, the People’s Front of Islamophobia or the Islamophobic People’s Front. And we are in that strange land of ‘purity tests’ – the land which James Delingpole is mastering, where he judges others for their impurity, and then notices that he is being judged by yet others for his impurity. And this is on the edges of reality where there is an infinitesimalisation of partiality, as the sects fragment into smaller and smaller sects, eventually into sects of one. 

The problem with the allegation that opposition is controlled is not that it is wrong. It is not wrong. It is right. But it is also wrong. And the only way to make sense of this is to recognise that there are two logics operating at once: one ancient, one modern. Yes, according to the modern logic, we do, by and large, admit opposition, encourage minorities, accept sects. But according to the antique logic, we also dislike this, or resent it, and strain against it on behalf of our own sect, hoping that our own sect could become the church, that our subculture could become an establishment. I don’t know about you, but I suffer from almost permanent enthusiasm for turning my sectarianism of one into an entire order. And why not? I am a political theorist.

The riddle of modern oppositional politics is that it claims to include everyone (according to its own modern logic) but (as only becomes clear if we use the ancient logic) it actually excludes many. So, for a long time, we accepted the world of Whigs and Tories (but with Jacobites and Jacobins sternly excluded). We accepted the world of Liberals and then Labour contra Conservatives: with Anarchists, Homosexuals and whoever firmly cast to the side. David Starkey reminds us that the ‘uniparty’ of 1997-2024, that public-private sneakily-spending bullshit-austerity party of Blair-to-Sunak, was prefigured by the ‘uniparty’ of 1945-1979, the uniparty of Butskellism. I agree. But on the other hand every party seeks to remake the entire political order in its image and become the basis of a single-party state. And even when this does not happen, there is a grand accord of sorts between and across parties, in such a way that coalition formation in England is actually as subtle and contorted and secret as anything of which the Dutch or Germans are capable. And this always excludes some of us.

And we, the excluded, can exult in our purity. The purity of the exiled. Jesus saying the prophet is without honour in his own town. My purity in my exile. Just as perpetual peace is found only in the graveyard, so purity is only found in exile. But exile is the exit: it means we no longer belong. And one way or another we want to belong to this city-order-cult, and I think we oscillate between believing in the modern system of opposition and in the ancient system of usurpation. The cry of ‘controlled opposition’ is the sound made by one of the exiled who resentfully notices that the system that claims to include everyone does not actually include everyone, and that the modern system of diversity is, in fact, a double system whereby a system of exclusion, exile and elimination exists subtly and slyly beneath the welcoming green leather chairs of the Commons.

As with much, I think this has become clear to most of us since 2020.

The truth of our politics is that we are all controlled opposition. If we care about the regime, if we care about the city-order-cult, if we want to exert ourselves over the establishment, then we are controlled by our very involvement in a system of opposition. There is no escape from this, besides the escape of Socrates or Jesus.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.