The Levelling

by Michael O'sullivan

  The Heimat Party

  The Heimat Party is a pan-European party, popular in Alpine countries like Slovenia, Norway, and Denmark, with growing links in the United States on the East Coast and in the Northeast. There is now even a branch in St. Petersburg, Russia. The growing popularity of the party is based on its message that the only solution to a disordered world is a return to one anchored by tradition and heritage and a resetting of some of the aspects of globalization (e.g., immigration, excessively high pay in industries like banking and technology). The core value of the Heimat Party is a belief in the role of tradition and age-old customs in the equilibrium of daily life and as pillars of public life. It emphasizes cultural events, native European languages, and codes of behavior. In countries where the Heimat Party is in government, such codes are strictly observed, and those people who do not adhere to them are excluded or sanctioned. Immigrants are accepted to Heimat countries only on the condition that they assimilate quickly, using local languages and adhering to local customs, and Heimat countries provide stringent integration programs. The Heimat Party places a significant degree of emphasis on clear, detailed regulations and professional institutions. It disavows multilateral organizations like the European Union.

  The Digger Party

  The Digger Party is an active green, or environmental, party, with left-wing, redistributive economic policies. The aim of the Diggers in the context of the levelling is to reset environmental imbalances globally, and the party is cross-border in its reach and appeal, with candidates representing its manifesto in many countries. It favors a common international agreement between the significant cities of the world to undertake green policies, to drastically reduce automobile traffic, and to provide green city hinterlands. Economically it favors heavy carbon taxes and broad environmentally based taxes, such as emission taxes, and stiff penalties on pollution. Its philosophy is not simply a land-based one; it has equally serious aims on marine ecology and on the need to respect marine ecosystems. Another distinctive element of its policy range is that it advocates spending a relatively large proportion of health and social budgets on mental health. One interesting development in the rise of the Diggers is the party’s popularity in China, especially in urban and suburban areas and especially with Chinese women and younger generations, who have increasingly reacted to the crippling health toll of the environmental damage to China’s rivers, air, and land. The rise of the Diggers in China has been permitted by the Communist Party, on the strict provision that the party’s goals remain tightly defined: to undertake actions to limit damage to the environment (e.g., by electricity use or transport choices), to act as responsible consumers, and to use social media to report environmentally damaging actions by others.

  The contribution of the Diggers to the levelling globally is that the party provides a political vehicle and a reservoir of political capital for proenvironment policies across countries. It manages to join up political momentum on the environment across countries and in this way creates greater pressure for countries to act together and for countries to adhere to international environmental standards.

  The Pilgrim Party

  The Pilgrim Party started in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew quickly, drawing support from Christian voters in the United States and also from Muslim communities in Germany, the UK Midlands, and Spain. Its place in the new order is based on a belief that in a world turned upside down, order is best restored by incorporating religion into public life. This goes firmly against the idea of a classical republic, but in many countries, the party’s message has helped fill the political void. The Pilgrim Party argues for the inclusion of religion as a guide to policy making and for the open consideration of religion as a factor in public life. The Pilgrims’ underlying value is that the behavior of citizens and those who lead them should follow clear moral guidelines. In economic terms the party favors low taxes and low social benefits but encourages high levels of charitable giving. It is resolutely against the use of science in many aspects of human life and proposes to ban genetic engineering. Work is a virtue for the Pilgrims, and the party’s policies in the fields of justice and security involve harsh punishment for most forms of crime.

  The Governance Party

  The Governance Party started life as a virtual or online party, inspired by debates among academics, bloggers, and tech entrepreneurs on the role of technology, data use, and government. The budding use of blockchain in health-care and social welfare systems opened up a whole range of new possibilities for the ways in which countries might be run, and the early promotors of the Governance Party, primarily from universities and the technology sector, were responding to those possibilities. They found that incumbent political parties had little by way of response to their ideas on how to use technology and data to better run countries. The Governance Party preaches that technology should not be feared and should be actively used by government. The party’s early successes came in some European city councils, parts of India, and the West Coast of the United States and led to the formation of a fully fledged party. It believes in codes of conduct in public life, society, and business and that these can be overseen through technology. With this approach, corruption should be wiped out. Blockchain is the favorite technological modus operandi here. In addition, citizenry is closely tied to electronic-based identity systems so that nearly all forms of behavior—consumption, voting, contribution to pension plans, to name a few—can be monitored and optimized. In some countries a citizenship card (“Governance card”) is in issue, and in certain countries citizens are awarded a Governance score.

  The Governance Party believes strongly in equality and believes that it can be optimized through the use of technology in society and the co-option of large technology enterprises by the state. It has introduced two recent innovations: first, a proposal for a cybercurrency through which a central bank could optimize household and company balance sheets, and second, the use of artificial intelligence programs in the running of cities (e.g., in transport networks, police resource deployment, and environmental efforts).

  The Atlas Party

  The Atlas Party is popular in Chile, South Africa, Korea, Sweden, and parts of the United States, such as Missouri and Texas. Its manifesto enshrines the importance of individual freedom and responsibility for citizens, or “nationals.” It favors generally low tax rates and has a functional, economic-policy-led attitude to immigrants, seeing them as “nonnational guest workers.” The Atlas Party favors very low government spending (relative to GDP), preferring that individuals build up their own resources. It favors a muscular approach to foreign policy and has a penchant for military-based interventions, but only when absolutely necessary. The ethos of the Atlas Party is to favor individual responsibility over institutional obligation. One of its manifesto pledges is to work to close international institutions such as the United Nations, which it believes muddles world affairs. Nor does it favor bodies like the World Health Organization (WHO) or the IMF. It believes that science should be actively harnessed for social, economic, and technological betterment, and the Atlas Party aims to incentivize this through taxation policy.

  The Leviathan Party

  The Leviathan Party takes its name from Thomas Hobbes’s book Leviathan, which proposes a society in which an all-powerful ruling force promises men (and women) order in return for the surrender of some of their freedom. The Leviathan Party is a futuristic construct of this notion in which citizenship and the idea of “freeborn men and women” are forgone in exchange for an overarching bargain that encompasses personal safety, robust control of economic forces by a central economic authority, freedom in the area of consumption and entertainment choices provided those choices fall within a quota of nationally produced goods and services, access to genomic programs, and domestic robotic services. The aim of the Leviathan Party is to neutralize imbalances, especially those in human behavior and social order, and, in the light of history, to demonstrate that robust central control can produce p
rogress. The adherents to the Leviathan Party are mostly found in middle-sized Asian countries like Thailand and Malaysia. They invest heavily in state-owned enterprises in the areas of military and naval technology and in genetic engineering, in the hope that developments in these areas will help secure the future of their nations.

  New Blood

  With the familiar geometry of politics changing and with voters acting less loyally, this is a time of opportunity for new movements. One question is, Who will drive them? It is easy to have ideologues, extremists, and career politicians drive the political process. It seems to me much harder to get normal people involved.

  Changing the intake of human capital in politics is a difficult undertaking. In a democracy everyone has the opportunity to involve him- or herself in public life, but the barriers to doing so are high and multiple. On several occasions I have asked groups of businesspeople in countries such as Britain and Belgium whether they, as successful people and leaders of their own enterprises, would enter politics. In most cases, they have created businesses, nurtured them through the last recession, and seen them expand. These people are avidly interested in politics and, for business reasons, preoccupied with issues like Brexit and trade relations. Yet, with very few exceptions, people bow their heads and shyly avoid the question. They cite many reasons: the long hours away from their families (family life, child care, and sexism are often cited as obstacles), the intrusion and hostility of the media, the negativity of social media–based debate, their frustration with the fact that normal political avenues achieve little by way of policy in any case, and the attractions of the more dynamic world of business. I have put the same question to American businesspeople, a significant number of whom felt that they would get nothing done as a politician, would be subsumed by the system, and would not being able to innovate and react with the same speed and flexibility as they could in business. It cannot be healthy for public life that so many people who are accomplished in challenging walks of life feel put off by a career in politics.

  At the same time, extremely high ambition and a sense of personal importance very often drive the wrong people into politics while others who may be better qualified by their life experiences are put off by the tone of politics (a commencement speech at the Harvard Law School by former Arizona senator Jeff Flake underlined this when he spoke of a “poisonous politics” and the “base, cruel, transactional brand of politics”), the constant scrutiny by media, the tyranny of social media, and a sense that ultimately very little gets done in politics in any case.

  So to an extent, politics and policy have a labor market problem. Of course, one might disagree and say that politics is a grueling game of survival, that it attracts and keeps survivors. My own view is that given the many social, health, economic, and geopolitical issues that are emerging in the world, while the existing order is at the same time being battered away, it is essential to have talented and serious people in public service.

  The “Bio” Politician

  The United States provides some examples of how the political system can be entrenched and also of how “outsiders” are allowed to access the levers of power. On the one hand, there are parts of the US system where political influence is deeply entrenched in networks and families. Several studies show that name recognition, especially of well-known political families, gives incumbent politicians an advantage. Reflecting this, in recent years the dynastic element in US political leadership has been clear (Hillary Clinton, the Bushes, Al Gore, the Kennedys, the Daleys, and Mitt Romney, to name a few, are all part of dynasties).

  On the other hand, there is a notable trend of war veterans aiming to continue their service in politics and of academics and businesspeople being invited to serve in government. Robert Reich, the secretary of labor from 1993 to 1997 during the Clinton presidency, is an example, and he recounts the experience in his excellent Locked in the Cabinet. He gives several insights; one piece of advice that he received and employed in his Senate confirmation hearing was to answer every question with a phrase like “Thank you Senator, that’s an excellent question and I look forward to working with you.” Another more profound insight was his discovery of the way policy is really made. As an academic he had believed that policy stemmed from theory and research and that this could be translated directly into government action. As he begins to understand how power works, Reich is desperate to be “in the loop” but is ultimately not as successful at this as more seasoned Washington insiders.15

  A further contrast in political types might help illustrate this point further. In July 2018, Boris Johnson resigned as British foreign secretary. Britain no longer has an empire, but the office of foreign secretary is still respected. During his tenure, however, Johnson made a number of gaffes and was generally seen to have damaged rather than advanced Britain’s interests. Similarly, in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, he was also seen as a natural leader of the Tory Party, but the way he has conducted himself since then has led many party colleagues to the view that, even by the standards of politicians, he is too self-serving, and he has lost support within his party.

  The day after Johnson resigned as foreign secretary, the death of Lord Carrington (at the age of ninety-nine) was announced. Carrington had been British foreign secretary from 1979 to 1982. He was generally recognized as an exemplar of integrity in public life. Early in his political life, he had served in Winston Churchill’s cabinet of the early 1950s; later he was defense secretary for Edward Heath and then foreign secretary to Margaret Thatcher. To cut a long and good story (of his life) short, he resigned as foreign secretary three days after the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands on the grounds that the invasion happened on his watch and was therefore his fault. As political resignations go, this one was seen to be selfless and principled and stands in contrast to the tactical maneuvering of some politicians today. Carrington, along with many contemporary central bankers (Paul Volcker, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Mario Draghi, for instance), is a good example of sincere public service, and his behavior stands in contrast to that of successors like Boris Johnson.

  The problem, then, is to attract more outsiders into public life and also to have them discover how politics works. The distinction I wish to draw is to have policy makers who are more responsible for and focused on policy making than on their own personal advancement. Advancing oneself is, of course, prevalent across all organizations and institutions, but the difference with politics is that people’s lives are affected by bad policy making.

  A new response to the apparent degradation in the standard of politics and the entrenchment of career politicians is to identify politicians in the same way we label foods and raw materials as “natural” or as “free” of potentially harmful ingredients. I am not quite proposing “sugar-free” or “lead-free” politics but, rather, a labeling that is more akin to that on “natural” foods. It would help distinguish between career politicians and those who are entering politics from a position of little experience of the “dark arts” of politics. One attraction of this approach is that it could be applied across countries, so that there might be a commonly understood benchmark as to what constitutes a “modern” politician and some accepted standards as to how he or she might conduct politics.

  There is already some evidence of an influx of non–career politicians in the candidates who ran in the 2018 primaries in the United States, largely on the Democratic side. Independent candidate Evan McMullin’s decision to stand in the 2016 presidential election is another example. His aim was to win Utah’s Electoral College votes and thereby block Donald Trump’s candidacy. A few other original politicians in the US races are worth noting: on the right there is Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, and on the left, Alyse Galvin, a Democratic congressional candidate in Alaska, and now-Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger of Virginia caught my eye as examples of “biopoliticians.” Another popular new entrant to the political stage is Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, who unsuccessfully took on Ted
Cruz in the Texas Senate race, who managed to conduct himself in a dignified and constructive manner during the 2018 midterm campaign, and who supports the Pro-Truth Pledge, a project set up to promote fact-based discourse and civility in public life. A new, welcome trend is the growth in political entrepreneurship with a focus on special causes, such as the Rise of the Rest, which is a social-impact-oriented investment fund set up by Steve Case, the founder of America Online (AOL), to invest in start-ups in American cities beyond dominant regions such as Silicon Valley or cities such as New York and Boston.

  The “biopolitics” idea is to attract people into politics who are not career politicians, people who have not so actively participated in established parties over time that they can be considered apparatchiks, who believe in certain standards of behavior, and who can demonstrate some accomplishment in nonpolitical walks of life. It may sound strange to want to reward those who have not spent time in political parties, where they may well have learned how democratic systems work and what issues concern people. My own rather cynical response is that immersion in political party life conditions them in a way that is not conducive to good problem solving and decision making, because of a lack of accountability and a culture where people are permitted to park policy problems for political reasons.