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Monday, August 24, 2009
IN THE 1920s, the Irish Free State was, if not wholly independent, then at least democratic.
It was a rare beast. In the decades since, that club has expanded enormously. Yes, many of the new democracies have their flaws, but wherever I have travelled, whether it’s in Mozambique or the Caucasus, in Taiwan or Albania, there’s still a feel-good factor to being able to chuck the devils out.
In advanced European democracies like Ireland, cynicism abounds: too many politicians on the take, too little idealism, too much money in politics, and far too much pandering to the swing voters. How indulgent our complaints must sound to the billions of people in the world who don’t know what a polling station is, or what it’s like to have more than one party on the ballot paper.
Timothy Garton Ash has been an eye witness to the turning points in many countries’ histories, when the rotten anciens régimes collapse. Facts Are Subversive brings together a collection of his essays with some of his best weekly columns for The Guardian. Garton Ash is an outstanding writer; by his own description a historian of the global present, who ranges from the colour-coded revolutions of eastern Europe, through the ongoing troubles of the EU and the US, to the Middle East and beyond. A professor of European Studies at Oxford and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, he is the liberal intelligentsia’s darling and his work is syndicated around Europe and the US.
His book’s title is a quote from the American journalist, IF Stone, who likewise attempted to retain his professional integrity, albeit in a gentler age, when we weren’t quite so bombarded by commentary. Garton Ash’s talent, even if one doesn’t always share his conclusions, is to elucidate the complex interplay of fact, fiction, and good old-fashioned manipulation.
Unlike some on the Left, however, Garton Ash remains a determined optimist. His is a reminder that global political progress is possible. And for all our weariness with our own political systems, he insists Europe and the United States must still have as a primary foreign policy goal the promotion of democracy to countries that don’t yet enjoy it.
Disagreement about how that is to be achieved is inevitable, but no excuse for abandoning the field, he argues. Do we try and reason with despots, or encourage (or even assist in) their overthrow? As Garton Ash understands, sometimes there is no black-and-white answer.
It’s what happens next, though – once the shackles of the secret police have been thrown off – that is the focus of James Harding’s Alpha Dogs. The young editor of The Times frets that "politics in country after country has become as similar as Starbucks." And the people to blame? Spindoctors, naturally.
At this point, I have to declare an interest. I have helped, in my own small way, numerous parties and governments – sometimes out of idealism, sometimes on a commercial basis – to resolve their internal tensions, to strengthen their democratic infrastructure, and sometimes simply to win elections.
That inevitably poses moral questions: would you do it for someone you didn’t agree with? The answer has to be ‘yes and no’. Would you help someone whose tax policy you didn’t think much of? Yes. Would you advise a terrorist group how to move into politics? Yes. Would you assist a politician who wanted to extinguish democracy? No. And do you lose sight of your own values? Never.
Actually, the issues have never required that much soul-searching. Kim Jong-Il and the ayatollahs have never lifted the phone. The subjects of Harding’s book, the Sawyer Miller Group, a short-lived American political consultancy, occasionally did stretch their principles. Originally created by committed Democrats, David Sawyer and Scott Miller, they formed a small battalion that would fly around the States and the world with their template to electoral success. Right, left, it didn’t matter.
The question is not so much, though, did they help the wrong guys, but did they export the very techniques which some see as the reason for our cynicism in the West – negative campaigning, focus groups, message targeting and the rest?
It’s an interesting question, but was Sawyer Miller really so revolutionary? Centuries ago, Cicero urged electioneers to stir up "scandalous talk... about the crimes, lusts and briberies of your competitors." So-called "going negative" didn’t start with George Bush Snr’s attacks on Michael Dukakis. Thomas Jefferson was at it, too, against George Washington. Gladstone and Disraeli understood the importance of image. And all the money in the world can’t turn political tin into gold.
One of the best chapters in Alpha Dogs concerns Sawyer Miller’s attempts to shepherd the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to the presidency of Peru. Having staffed the campaign with his own relatives and displayed a disdainful attitude towards the poor and non-white, Vargas Llosa’s huge lead in the polls disappeared nevertheless.
So, Sawyer Miller couldn’t wave a magic wand even if they did bring a new degree of professionalism to the art of electioneering. But it was only a matter of degree.
And the reason politicians love the more scientific approach is precisely because we are not apples and oranges, sheep and goats, anymore. Tribal loyalties have broken down all over the world. It can sometimes appear as though only a few hundred, or a few thousand people, decide elections, but the actual number of people switching around is huge, even if most of these switches cancel each other out.
Harding’s conclusion is a fairly balanced one: democrats "cannot live out of time...the politician who eschews spin is as self-denying as the farmer who shuns fertiliser." Sawyer Miller "understood that the flip side of freedom is the business of politics."
Still, more on their techniques and less on the sex lives of the political gurus themselves would have made it a better book.
And after Barack Obama’s sensational win, how true can it really be that spindoctors have ushered in "a political culture that has turned off ordinary people in droves"?
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