I have seen the future, brother, it is murder
NEWS FROM UNCIBAL
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
-Cormac McCarthy
If you listen carefully you can hear it: the drum beats in the distance heralding a coming conflict. The two sides are getting their supply lines in order, determining their respective orders of battle, performing their practice maneouvres, arguing over strategy. The time of political compromise is coming to an end; soon there will be what I have previously referred to as a ‘forcing’ – a War is coming which will determine, at least for a time, not just the direction of policy but the constitution of a regime.
The people, sensing this, have already cleared the way for it. Labour and the Conservatives, two broad-tent parties representing coalitions of rivalrous interest groups, are finished. The Tories have already been unceremoniously kicked downstairs, and Labour will follow; neither, representative of an old defunct consensus, is capable of responding to a zeitgeist characterised by the desire for a fight. What the population wants is a champion – a winner. Not compromise or coalition-building but victory. They each want a leader who will take part in the ‘forcing’, vanquish the enemy, and write a particular set of values, their values, into the structure of politics itself.
It plumbs the depths of bathos to suggest that one of these champions may be Ed Davey, the leader of Britain’s notional ‘third party’, the Liberal Democrats. Yet indeed it may. I say this because, in the grip of what can only be called psychosis – an episode of sheer masochistic insanity – I sat down the other day to watch the grand speech of Sir (Sir!) Ed at the Lib Dems’ annual conference for 2025.
Davey has long fascinated me. Last year, I wrote a post in which I described him as the perfect avatar for his party. As I argued then, the Liberal Democrats, as nihilistic and vacuous as they are, possess an important, predatory instinct. Like an amoeba floating this way and that in the thick oily scum on a pond’s surface, they lack direction, but when one of their tendrils detects food, they are quick to seize on the prize. In that post I described both Davey and his party as the modern day embodiment of Machiavelli’s Prince. They are the personification of the concept that politics is simply an exercise in self-perpetuation – government governs, and rulers rule, because it is necessary that they do so in order to have a plausible justification for carrying on.
The Lib Dems, that is, grasp for things to do, causes to believe in, ideas to hold, and goals to achieve, simply in order to gain enough votes to subsist as a going concern. And in so doing they provide strong evidence for Leo Strauss’s claim that a lowering of political horizons to mere transaction (‘vote for us because we will do nice things’) is best understood as the end state of political modernity as such – where all that is transcendental, or idealistic, or moral, has been stripped away to leave nothing but expediency behind. There is nowhere for political modernity to go, beyond the Liberal Democrats; they are a cul-de-sac of sheer political hedonism.
Yet something is afoot within the party, and in Ed Davey’s mind. Watch his speech, if you can bear to. The phoney nature of the entire display (I had the Breakfast at Tiffany’s conundrum of whether he is a ‘phoney or a real phoney’ continuously swirling through my mind while watching) is excruciating. But what you will notice about it is from the very beginning of the speech Davey is making one thing clear: he is training his guns on Nigel Farage and Reform. More or less the first thing out of his mouth is a bad joke at Nigel’s expense. But after that the position is staked out very clearly: Farage is going to transform the country into ‘Trump’s America’, Davey tells us, where the ‘forces of darkness’ connive to keep ‘everything in a constant state of chaos’ – unless, of course, the Liberal Democrats discover their ‘moral responsibility to aim high’ and win instead.
This can only mean two things, in political terms. The first is that Davey thinks that Reform are likely to form the next government, and that defining the Lib Dems as the anti-Reform party is the best way to differentiate them from Labour and the Tories (both of whom will be attempting to compete with Reform, particularly regarding matters concerning immigration). And the second is that he thinks that making a play for the rump anti-Reform vote in the country will provide a route for the Lib Dems to grow in size and perhaps even become the official Opposition. In his view, Labour and the Tories are dead in the water. It’s him and Nigel Farage who may very well be duking it out at the despatch boxes in the House of Commons after the next general election. To make this explicit, quoting from the speech itself:
And as every day goes by it gets clearer – the two old parties can’t deliver that change. Neither of those old parties can win back people’s trust. Neither of them will win the battle of ideas for the future of our country.
So it comes down to us. Or Nigel Farage.
This produced a Twitter spat between the two leaders which revealed a great deal about their respective characters. Farage, the deft pub-chat pugilist, deflating Davey with humour; Davey, the politics nerd, responding like Lt Commander Data making an essay into the world of banter:
But it is important here to focus on the bigger picture. Ed Davey is nobody’s idea of a potential Prime Minister. The emergence of Reform and the Liberal Democrats as the two main drivers of political conflict is, however, real enough. And it seems to relate to what people have for some time been lazily calling a ‘political realignment’, a subject which is poorly understood in respect of political philosophy. Generally, what is described is an unusual or unexpected shift away from old, traditional distinctions between left and right, with working class and ethnic minority voters moving rightwards while the professional, graduate classes move more and more to the left. The making of this observation is usually accompanied by a reflection about how terms like ‘left’ and ‘right’ have lost their meaning. But what remains unasked, and unexplored, is the reason for it. What is really going on, and why?
In various remarks towards the end of his career Michel Foucault described Western politics as being played out in the context of a ‘tricky’ negotiation between two ways of thinking about the nature of the relationship between State and population, which he labelled the games of ‘city-citizen’ and ‘shepherd-flock’. The former, which he described as being thematically Greek in origin, conceives the State as a territorial entity, crucially founded on the existence of a city wall (an observation also made by Hannah Arendt). Within the city walls live the citizens, who are governed by laws, or norms, which emerge as a kind of grammar or pattern through their leading a shared life together. And the job of the ruler within this ‘game’ is to preserve that unity of people, territory, and State.
The latter, the game of the ‘shepherd-flock’, Foucault described as ‘Hebraic’ or Biblical. Here, the State is pastoral. It puts into effect a ‘power of care’. It imagines the population as a flock, over which it stands as a shepherd, monitoring and managing the flock’s health, and leading it to safe and pleasant pastures. Here, the job of the ruler is to govern in the sense of improving the material and moral conditions of each and every sheep – such that its biological and spiritual health is bolstered and secured. The State is not chiefly territorial, as in the case of the city-citizen game, but is concerned rather with the population itself as its ‘field of action’.
These two distinct themes stood at arm’s length from one another through the medieval period, where the ‘city-citizen’ game was largely conceived as the purview of the king, while the pastorate oversaw the ‘care of souls’ and the wellbeing of the people. But the two were brought together in early modernity, Foucault tells us, through the figure of Machiavelli. Machiavelli, radically, describes politics in secular terms. And in doing so he entwines the Greek and Hebraic impulses within the figure of the Prince. The Prince must preserve the unity of people, territory, and State. But in order to do that better – in order to defend the principality against its enemies and secure his own status in the eyes of the populace – he must also improve the health and wellbeing of the people themselves, wielding the ‘power of care’ like a shepherd governing a flock, in order that they are both well-equipped to deal with foreign foes and able to offer him their love and support.
Modernity, then, Foucault tells us, is characterised by a certain tension between the city-citizen and shepherd-flock games, which are bound together and yet suggest very different priorities. The ‘tricky’ back-and-forth between them has powerfully shaped the way in which modern politics has developed. And we can understand our current moment, increasingly characterised as it is by a drive towards political conflict, as one in which the tension between them is coming close to rupture.
The chief reason for this is globalisation. Globalisation – not just the integration of national economies but also the universalisation of language (that is, the English language), culture, media, sport and the arts – is a phenomenon that clearly requires a political response. But the ‘city-citizen’ and ‘shepherd-flock’ models each suggest that this response should come in very different way. Where the State is conceived within the rubric of the city-citizen game, globalisation is a phenomenon which produces a situation of contingency. The unity of people, territory, and State is, potentially at least, threatened by it. And the priority of the ruler of a ‘city’ in this context therefore becomes to maintain that unity while negotiating the changing of circumstances – globalisation is an environmental factor, as it were, that must be weathered (and taken advantage of where possible).
Where the State is thought of as a shepherd, however, globalisation is an opportunity. It represents growth, both in terms of the size of the flock itself but also in terms of the resources available to feed it. And it also strengthens the hand of the shepherd, if he is cunning, because it assigns to him the task of managing integration into the ‘global economy’ and taking full advantage of what it offers. This cements his authority, because it casts him and his government as necessary. Through his power of care, he tells the populace, he will ‘grow’ the economy, successfully integrate immigrants, and merge existing legal and political structures into the emerging realm of global governance – leading the flock, as it were, to greener pastures – through organisations such as the EU, UN and WTO.
It will immediately be seen that this provides a rough and ready explanation for why it is that politics has bifurcated into two very distinct and oppositional models in recent decades, given that it is precisely the status of the metaphorical city wall that globalisation puts into question. Globalisation, with its solvent effects not just on national borders but on conceptual borders too (such as language, culture, currency, commerce, and so on) breaks down the city wall. And this to a very great extent explains our current fraught politics, as it produces a distinct division between the models of city-citizen and shepherd-flock, with the former considering globalisation a threat and the latter an opportunity, around which there cannot really be built a compromise.
This also explains why it is that immigration in particular has become the main territory over which the two emerging sides do battle. Within the city-citizen game, the immigrant is a presence that must be carefully managed, the passing of outsiders into the city walls something to be overseen with caution, and the distinction between citizen and non-citizen one needing to be strictly preserved. Within the shepherd-flock game, however, the more immigration the better, not merely because it grows the size of the flock for its own sake, but because it (ostensibly) makes it wealthier and healthier – and also because, by presenting the ruler with problems of integration to manage, it fosters the ruler’s presentation of himself as necessary.
And it will also immediately be seen why it is that first the Conservatives and now Labour have failed, and indeed flailed, in response to globalisation in general but immigration in particular. As broad churches, both of these parties have found themselves torn between an elite faction which, quintessentially managerial and technocratic, has embodied the pastoral virtues of the shepherd, and a rump faction which, while much weaker among Labour voters than Tory ones, has in both cases retained a commitment to the preservation and maintenance of a settled way of life – a unity of people, territory and State. This uneasy relationship between leadership and masses has resulted in mealy-mouthed, half-hearted attempts to square the circle of the incommensurability of the city-citizen and shepherd-flock games in respect of immigration, with the result that policy in this regard has been ineptly designed and simply cack-handed in its implementation. On the one hand there is bluster about stopping boats and ‘smashing’ gangs, while on the other there are net migration figures approaching a million a year. It is incoherent, and voters can see that.
But it is not of course only in respect of immigration that we see this type of failing; we see it also in the response, for instance, to ‘woke’ ideas (which threaten the unity of people, territory and State by dividing citizens into minority interest groups, but which provide a perfect, ready-made ideology to inform a conceptualisation of the State as shepherd over the flock’s spiritual health). And it appears too in our attitudes towards taxation (the citizens of a city are largely self-sufficient and autonomous; the members of a flock possess nothing that the shepherd cannot ultimately seize for the greater good), the environment (a city desires to be energy-secure within its territory; a shepherd directs the flock towards benign, moralised and globalised outcomes, such as net zero carbon emissions), and so on. Everywhere we look we see these divisions taking shape and the same patterns appearing.
It is impossible at this stage to avoid mouthing cliches about the centre being unable to hold, but in this case they are entirely apt. Politics is recalibrating rapidly. While normally the modern State’s bifurcation into the city-citizen and shepherd-flock games is a productive tension, what we are seeing emerge is rather the opposite – something that looks a lot less like a ‘tricky’ negotiation and much more like an immense, bitter and insurmountable rivalry that threatens to polarise into two very distinct and mutually antagonistic camps who can see no possibility of compromise and who are increasingly vociferously opposed.
It is entirely natural in this context that Labour and the Conservatives, wedded precisely to cobbling together coalitions across the city-citizen and shepherd-flock divides, should find themselves in a state of complete collapse. The latest opinion polls, at the time of writing, put the two ‘main’ parties on a vote share of 38% between them; their leaders, Kemi Badenoch and Sir Keir Starmer, have approval ratings of -26 and -44 respectively (Farage and Davey stand at -4 and -8). This is because neither party has shown itself remotely capable of credibly grasping where politics is heading, let alone taking control of it. They have been attempting for too long to behave on a business-as-usual basis when business is not usual; business is getting serious, and decisions about what to do about globalisation are going to be made – or forced.
Why it is Reform and the Liberal Democrats who appear poised to make the most of this mess is a more pertinent question but not in the end, complicated. In a straight more-or-less two-party system like that in the USA it is easy for the two poles of politics to coalesce around red vs blue. And, indeed, US politics, characterised by the same types of problems and conflicts as in the UK, has achieved that polarisation, if ‘achieved’ is the right word, fairly rapidly. It is impossible to fully understand the dispute between Trump and Blue State America without the conception of the city-citizen and shepherd-flock, and this is a completely understandable, even inevitable, outgrowth of divisions long pre-dating the end of the Cold War.
In the UK, a multi-party system, the picture that is emerging is different. Reform has been able to take advantage of Tory malaise with a clear orientation towards an ideal of unity between people, territory and State. And in this respect at least the comparison to the MAGA movement is entirely appropriate. On the other side of politics things have been more complicated, because Labour, while still a broad tent, was for a time much more fully captured than the Tories by a shepherd-flock dynamic. But the pressure of government has revealed the deep fissures at the heart of the Labour movement, particularly between the Parliamentary party and members on the one side and the traditional voters on the other. And that pressure will grow remorseless in the coming years – building until the Labour Party simply breaks.
The Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, embodying as they do the proclivities of political hedonism, entirely unburdened by anything bearing the remotest resemblance to a fixed home on the political spectrum, and long in the habit of sloughing-off different guises like snakeskin so as to reveal entirely new ones underneath, are ideally positioned to take advantage of the fact that a chasm now lies across the surface of British politics. If Reform stand on one side of that chasm then they can occupy the land on the other, while Labour and the Tories plummet to their doom down the middle. And as surely as eggs are eggs we can expect them to continue to reimagine themselves as the face of the shepherd-flock game, exhibiting total commitment to a managerial deployment of a pastoral ‘power of care’.
It is instructive in this regard that in his speech Ed Davey rattled off a list of achievements that the Liberal Democrats had already secured in this Parliament, which went as follows:
Stronger protections for survivors of domestic abuse. Better support for family carers. A Sunshine Bill, to put solar panels on every new home. Making sure every child living in poverty gets a healthy lunch at school – for free.
The Lib Dems are in other words going to become at the same time more cuddlecratic, exhibiting both cloying sentimentality and naked transactionalism. And this is going to increasingly be defined against what will be portrayed as Faragist meanness and coldness – with Farage himself taking on the guise of a Sheriff of Nottingham, a King Herod, a Mussolini, all rolled into one. Sir Davey gave us a taste of this later in his speech, asking us to imagine a Reform-governed Britain:
Where there’s no NHS, so patients are hit with crippling insurance bills. Or denied healthcare altogether. That is Trump’s America. Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.
Where we pay Putin for expensive fossil fuels and destroy our beautiful countryside with fracking – while climate change rages on. That is Trump’s America. Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.
Where gun laws are rolled back, so schools have to teach our children what to do in case of a mass shooting. Trump’s America. Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.
Where social media barons are free to poison young minds with impunity. Trump’s America. Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.
Where the government tramples on our basic rights and freedoms, unconstrained by the European Convention on Human Rights. Where Andrew Tate – Andrew Tate – is held up as an example to young men. Where racism and misogyny get the tacit support of people in power. Where everything is in a constant state of chaos.
That is Trump’s America. Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.
As ludicrous as all of this is, however, it hints at something very serious. This is the language not of political debate but of political war, where the opponent transmogrifies into an enemy. And to bring this discussion back to the start, it is suggestive of a zero-sum approach to politics in which everything is at stake and nothing less than total victory will satisfy. It is a conceptualisation of the election as a moment of battle in which one side will triumph and the other will be vanquished, with the winner not only getting the opportunity to make policy but to make a regime anew. To the victor, the task of shaping the foundations of the State itself: the city walls, or the globe; the citizen, or the sheep; the territory, or the population; the nomos or the telos? And to the loser banishment and disgrace.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we reach a point, then, of ‘forcing’ – a time of War. What is the foundation of politics? The unity of people, territory and State, or the government of the population? And in the end what is the individual himself – the bearer of rights and obligations deriving from his citizenship, or the object of rule, reliant on the State to meet his needs and desires as an obedient member of the flock? This all falls to be determined and the result will shape our constitutional settlement for a generation; there can be only one winner, and increasingly it seems that this is what the people really want. The only thing left to say is that the fact that a figure as absurd as Sir Ed Davey is involved in the outcome is a matter too appalling to fully contemplate.
This article (The Literal Nazi and the Cuddlecrat Prince) was created and published by News from Uncibal and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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