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Disinherited and Dispossessed: Relative Deprivation and the Rise of the Far-Right in the U.S.A

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By Gideon Jones

Pixabay/Geralt, 2021.

The unforgettable images of a mob of Trump supporters invading the United States Capitol in January 2021 caused widespread horror and repulsion. Since then, there has been a scramble to explain the sieges’ immediate causes and its participants motivations. Undeniably behind each of these is the rise of the Far-Right in the United States.

So, who do we mean when we talk about the Far-Right? To define the Far-Right is no small feat, but at its most basic it can be thought of as an umbrella term for the Radical and extremist Right. Though the two are related, they are by no means the same.

For our purposes, it will be most useful to think about the Radical-Right as being defined by ‘ethno-nationalist xenophobia and anti-establishment populism’, as well as nativism, extreme-nationalism and authoritarianism. What differentiates the Extremist-right from the Radical-Right are their attitudes towards democracy and violence: generally speaking, we can view the radical-right as being willing to operate within the democratic system, whilst the Extreme-Right reject the democratic process and are more likely to undertake violence as a means of achieving their political aims. The great fear about the Capitol Siege was that the MAGA movement , being a Radical-Right grouping , was seeming to shift towards Extremist-Right methods to pursue their political ambitions.

Though there has been a great deal of theorising about the ascendance of the Radical and Extremist-right within the United States, one concept that has received little attention is relative deprivation.

Though there have been attempts to link a rise in extremism to absolute deprivation, the results have been mixed at best. For example, it is well established that a university degree and economic security are no barriers to radicalisation and extremism.

However, the same cannot be said of relative deprivation. So, what is Relative Deprivation, and what role does it play in fuelling radical and extremist-right movements?

Relative deprivation, contrary to absolute deprivation, is not necessarily based upon one’s objective socio-economic position within society. One can feasibly be relatively well off and still feel deprived. As the psychologists Kunst and Obaidi argue, since humans ascertain their position in society through comparing themselves to one another, and ‘relative deprivation involves the perception that oneself or one’s group does not receive valued resources, goals, ways or standards of living, which others possess and one feels entitled to’. This is what we need to understand when we begin to think about the rise of Far-Right in the United States - many Americans are feeling that their communities are worse off now relative to the past, that they have been robbed of what they considered to be theirs and are looking for someone to blame.

This can have some interesting implications when applied to the rise of the Far-Right in the United States. One theory behind the rise of Trump, and the Far-Right more generally, was the ‘left behind’ thesis: that it was those who were feeling the greatest level of economic hardship that fuelled his ascendancy to the presidency and made up the bulk of the MAGA movement. Whilst it has been observed that upward mobility was low and life expectancy was shorter in areas that leaned most towards Trump, there are several issues with this explanation. Firstly, when Trump won the 2016 election the United States was in the middle of an economic recovery, and manufacturing jobs were on the rise . Secondly, Trump supporters were generally not poor. In 2016, roughly two thirds of his supporter base had an average household income of above $50,000. Whilst economic factors undoubtedly played a role in the rise of the MAGA movement, the picture is more complicated than expected, and something more is needed to explain the populist rage that fuelled Trump’s rise in 2016 and which sustains the Far-Right today.

This is where relative deprivation enters the picture. The rise of the Far-Right was not about deprivation per se, but the perception that many in White America felt deprived relative to others, and thus that their status was diminished. This is especially true of White Supremacist organisations in the United States, who view the country as uniquely ‘theirs’. White America felt that for much of the United States’ history they had been justly dominant, and that this was something that should continue. With America’s growing racial diversity and the continued effects of globalisation, many white Americans felt, and feel, ‘ under siege by these engines of change’ . Understanding this, it is unsurprising that these anxieties and their political expression are finding increasing mainstream support, with many feeling that that their communities will face utter marginalisation unless the hierarchies of the past are re-established.

This feeling is no doubt partially responsible for the rise of the populist MAGA movement- that the elites, illegal immigrants, liberals and many more were to be held responsible for their plight, and to be opposed in order to ‘make America great again’. Far more concerning is the rise of those that are willing to attack the groups and forces that they see as taking away what they see as their rightful position in society. Events like Charlottesville and the Capitol Siege are now part of a worrying trend of Extreme-Right violence in the United States.

The rise of xenophobic, anti-establishment, and discriminatory politics is the end product of this anxiety, and like Donald Trump, it is unlikely to go away anytime soon. It may in fact become worse over time as the anxiety of white America only increases and the winds of change continue to blow.

Whether the narratives provided by the various Far-Right groups in the United States are factual or not is of little importance to their continued rise. They offer a narrative to explain world change, to frame and understand one’s anxieties and to offer a remedy. The great failure of modern liberal politics (in the US and beyond), as many are increasingly coming to realise, is that it’s narratives about the world have been ringing more and more hollow . To fail to tackle this fear head on, or to even mock it, is to allow it to grow ever more rampant, and allow extremism in the United States to grow.

The Capitol Siege should be a wake-up call to liberals the world over. There needs to be a counter-narrative, an equally compelling story that can be told that doesn’t lead people down the paths of racism, xenophobia, and violence. With the election of Joe Biden and the return of business-as-usual politics to Washington D.C, there is a fear that nothing will fundamentally change, on both the left and the right. If nothing is done to address these underlying anxieties, the worst may still be yet to come. Instead of denouncing the far-right’s supporters as being morally beyond the pale, more should be done to understand why people would even support that kind of politics in the first place.

 

Gideon Jones is a MA student in Terrorism, Security & Society at the War Studies Department, King’s College London, and completed his BA in History at the University of Warwick. Coming from Northern Ireland, he has been brought up in a country scarred by the issues of terrorism, conflict, sectarianism, and extremist ideology. Through this experience, he has been given valuable insight into how the legacies of such problems can continue to divide a society decades after the fighting has stopped, and how the issues left unresolved can threaten to upend a fragile peace. Gideon is a Staff Writer at Strife.

The Legacy of Coronavirus

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By Hassan Kabalan

Source: Pixabay, 2021.

Crises and Change

Pandemics, such the Spanish Flu, have historically been agents of major change. Plagues have been recurring agents of disruption in human history and when such disruptions coincided with other crises - such as climate crises, major wars and economic meltdown—they marked watershed moments, which transformed the course of history. As pandemics recede, they initiate major cultural, economic, political, and social transformations, lasting far beyond the disease itself. The great plagues of history reshaped healthcare, economics, religion, the way we socialize, and the way we work, and COVID-19 will be no different. At this point it remains unreasonable to assess the political, economic and societal impacts of the current pandemic. But one may draw some preliminary conclusions while the pandemic is still ongoing, as governments seek to delineate plans to manage the crisis and allow for a recovery later.

While experts are still debating the social, economic, political, and geopolitical impacts of the coronavirus, one thing is certain: policymakers need to address the major problems with the old neoliberal model by endorsing a stronger role for governments in the economy.

The Old System: Neoliberalism and the New System of Governance

One major ramification of the current pandemic is the weakening of the neoliberal conservative model as envisioned by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. This model sought to limit the role of governments as much as possible while expanding the influence of the private sector. Politicians at the heart of the neoliberal revolution in the early 1980s, along with the leaders of the main global institutions, emphasised the need to liberate ‘’individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong property rights, free markets and free trade” (Harvey, 2005: 2). They also shared the goal of expanding the domain of markets into new fields that, until then, were largely outside the market economy, such as education and healthcare. The state was seen as disrupting the potential for creative growth of market forces. Accordingly, its authority should be restrained, allowing market forces to function unhindered. Neoliberal politicians also share the goal of challenging traditional sources of opposition, such as labour-unions, anti-establishment movements or even countries that have maintained devotion to welfare state provisions.

This is not to argue that neoliberals seek to completely abandon the concept of government. However, a new type of state role emerged, particularly with the inception of the concept of governance in the 1980s, which has been exploited by neoliberals to help attain their objectives. Governance can be defined as a particular type of ‘’management, originally used in the private sector but that increasingly has been adopted by government, which recreates the mechanisms of a free market for the decision-making process’’ (Ives, 2015: 3). Most importantly, the term emphasises that governments, mandated by citizens through elections, are just one player in the decision-making process, instead of being the predominant one. Instead of seeking to promote public interest, the term governance puts governments on equal standing – if not lower – with other actors. Accordingly, rather than being checked by the government, private factions are seen as negotiating partners. Therefore, under the concept of governance, governments are no longer seen as advocates for the public interest. Rather, they are viewed as one actor representing a competing interest with other legitimate stakeholders and public interest can thus be achieved through negotiated settlements with these players.

Defining neoliberalism and governance allows for establishing a link between the two concepts. Against the backdrop of this new understanding of the role of governments, neoliberal politicians implemented radical policies, dismantling the welfare state that had been established in many parts of the world, particularly in the West. Such policies included the large-scale privatization of public services such as healthcare and education, reducing benefits for the poor and disadvantaged, and a lifting of regulations on banks and stock exchanges. This was based on the presumption that free competition, although it may provoke occasional crises, can eventually provide balance and stability to everyone in the society.

The Pandemic Hit

The current pandemic shows that in times of severe global crises, market forces are the first to collapse and are thus incapable of providing solutions. The coronavirus exacerbated existing socio-economic disparities, pushing cities all over the world into full lockdowns. These measures took an enormous toll on the labour market, with rising unemployment levels and a significant drop in labour force participation. Although not all countries- and people- will be similarly affected, these problems will be similar everywhere. The likely extent and repercussions of the post-crisis recession will be worse than those of any global economic crisis since the end of the second World War.

In October, the World Bank declared that the crisis may drive 150 million additional people below the poverty line by the end of 2021, negating decades of progress. Accordingly, the pandemic has profoundly disturbed employment everywhere. Despite the tremendous measures taken by governments to support businesses and secure jobs through job retention schemes, millions of workers have already lost their jobs, while many self-employed individuals saw their incomes collapse. Accordingly, the economic implications of the crisis have not fallen with equal severity on all shoulders. According to a McKenzie report, low-income and low-skill individuals have had tough times retaining their jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, the crisis has been severe on women. First, the pandemic has damaged service occupation with high women employment shares—restaurants and other retail establishments, hospitality, and healthcare. Additionally, the pandemic has also been a grim reminder of the great risk of violence and harassment facing women during times of crises. Furthermore, ethnic minorities were disproportionately affected by the pandemic. For instance, in the US, employment levels for African Americans decreased by 9% between December 2019 and October 2020, almost double the 5 % for white Americans. In the UK, 22% of people of Black, Asian and minority groups (BAME) were dismissed from their jobs, far above the average of 9 percent.

Furthermore, the current pandemic brought great disruption to the workforce, prompting transformation in business models, many of which are likely to persist in the post-COVID-19 world. In particular, the pandemic accelerated 3 major trends that may endure to varying degrees with different ramifications for work. First, according to a McKinsey Global Institute report, hybrid remote work may persist: 20 to 25 % of employees in developed countries and about 10 percent in emerging ones may work remotely three to five days a week, mainly in the computer-based office work arena; That is four to five times the level during the pre-COVID-19 period. Second, the rise in share of e-business and the “delivery economy”- according to the report, the numbers grew two to five times faster in 2020- is likely to persist. This trend is upsetting sectors such as travel and leisure, thus accelerating the decline of low-wage jobs in brick-and-mortar shops and restaurants while growing jobs in distribution centers and last mile delivery. Third, according to a new McKinsey Global Survey of executives, companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years, while the share of digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by a significant seven years. Prompted by social distancing obligations and stay-at-home instructions that produced a critical labor shortage, companies were looking for new measures to harness emerging technologies to carry out their core tasks with less human labor: fewer workers per store, fewer security guards and more cameras, more automation in warehouses, and more machinery applied to nightly scrubbing of workplaces.

While the idea of a tipping point for digital disruption isn’t new, the survey suggests that the pandemic is a tipping point of historical significance and that major changes will be necessary as the economic and human situation develop. As the job market endure a radical transformation, communities and workers will have to adapt swiftly. While older generations may find it harder to adapt to the structural challenges, young people have so far been impacted the most by pandemic related job losses. However, it is the blue-collar workers who potentially face the biggest challenges: they are more vulnerable to job losses related to both structural changes and COVID-19 (a McKinsey report estimates that given the trends accelerated by the pandemic, more than half of the low-wage workers currently in declining occupations will have to shift to jobs that require different skills in higher wage categories to remain employed). Individuals looking to make those transitions may need considerable training and acquisition of new skills to acquire jobs in growing occupations.

What Should Governments Do?

Shortly after the global outbreak of the pandemic, governments all over the world realized that without their intervention, markets would continue to collapse, and eventually trigger a global economic crisis not seen since the Great Depression in 1929. As mentioned in the previous section, during 3 decades of neoliberal policies, governments intervened only to regulate emerging problems, creating an asymmetric relationship between the public and private sectors that can only be depicted as private profits – public risks. The continuing fallout of COVID-19 illustrates how neoliberal policies undermined ability of public institutions to react to the challenges governments face today. When the government is seen not as a partner in developing value but as just a fixer, the public sector is starved of resources. Welfare programmes, education, and healthcare all become underfunded. Such negative impact on a depleted public sector was already apparent to those needing governmental support the most, particularly the under-paid workers who needed to reinforce their income with social benefits that were regularly being rationed and lowered. However, the pandemic has made it obvious that a depleted public sector cannot properly respond to new challenges and threats.

Nevertheless, there are cases showing that it is possible to overturn this process. For instance, in March 2020, the Spanish government did temporarily nationalize all private hospitals and health-care providers, something that was impossible to consider before the pandemic. Accordingly, Italy has stepped up plans to rescue the bankrupt flagship carrier Alitalia, as the government created a new company to press ahead with Alitalia nationalisation plan. Meanwhile, the French government has asserted that it will intervene in any way necessary to protect the country’s economic assets, with Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire even claiming that this may include capitalising businesses or taking stakes in struggling firms. In the US, the current pandemic led to the implementation of ideas that would have been deemed very radical just months ago.

As early as March 2020, U.S. policymakers adopted interventionist ideas such as direct cash transfers, freezing mortgage foreclosure, and governmental nationalization of troubled businesses. These measures can be seen as major intellectual vindication of the progressive left, which has always been highlighting the very issues that the pandemic has now evidently uncovered: precarious employment; income and wealth disparities; an unaffordable healthcare system, housing problems, and the problems of personal debts.

This is a welcome return to reality – in which unity and solidarity are possibly more crucial than boasting about measures enriching only a few. These measures basically show that the pandemic has revived the social contract in developed economies— for now. However, the measures demonstrates that it is simply inadequate for governments to interfere as the spender of last resort when crises happen. Rather, governments should be actively shaping markets to make sure that they deliver the sort of lasting outcomes that support everyone. For too long, governments have socialized risks but privatized rewards: when economic crisis occurs, government is seen as the saviour; but when the economy is thriving, the government is ignored and big corporations soak up the benefits, at the expense of the public. The pandemic offers a chance to reshape this dynamic and call for a better social contract.

History shows that crises can sometimes unleash a new era of change. In the US, the Great Depression was the catalyst for the Social Security Act of 1935; in the UK, the Beveridge Report, which helped establishing the modern welfare system, was drafted during WWII. In this pandemic too, beyond seeking to build on existing channels to address the urgent issues, governments may take innovative measures to enhance the social contract in the long term. These measures could form the basis for a new role for both the private and public sectors. The post-pandemic world needs government that understand that without strong state support- and effective public institutions- the economy will not be able to recover. Most importantly, political leaders will have to realize that massive governmental support will be crucial to help to masses of the unemployed, and that sectors such as housing and health should not be left to the private sector. Policymakers should also prioritize addressing inequality, as unemployment and income losses in the wake of the crisis are large enough to trigger an economic depression that can last for years. Indeed, as always, there will be voices concerned about the increase in budget deficits and public debt than by the rise of unemployment and losses of income generated by the pandemic. But prioritizing the restraint of public debt over restoring the pre-crisis unemployment rates is simply bad economics. A crucial element of governments’ post-crisis recovery strategies will be to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This is important since these enterprises account for a staggering 70% of employment worldwide, and because they were disproportionally affected by the ongoing crisis. Hence, according to the likes of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Council of Economic Advisers chair Jason Furman, what is needed is more governmental spending.

COVID-19’s Possible Legacy

Empowering the state will undoubtedly involve risks. Reference to the historical record indicates that authoritarian regimes on the left and right have always emerged during periods of crises and emergency, as the need for powerful leadership was used as a pretext to destroy democracy. Tough times are always seen as an opportunity for authoritarian elements that exist on the margins of every society to represent themselves as the saviours of their people and the entire world. In view of these risks, two things are crucial: ensuring the independence of the legislature and judiciary branches and the preservation of a strong civil society. A balance of power between the state and a strong civil society- by which is meant the associations, interest groups and the employers’ and union organisations- is crucial for the safeguard of the democratic ideals.

The pandemic has already had monumental and potentially enduring implications on everyday life. Our work and social interaction have gone virtual, with even G-7 leaders organizing their conferences virtually. Most importantly, the crisis has revived debates about healthcare systems all over the world, possibly to the benefit to those arguing for universal coverage. And it can have an even broader geopolitical legacy. The Spanish Flu in 1918 and the Great Recession that followed precipitated a wave of nationalism, authoritarianism, and subsequently another devastating world war. Certainly, the same may happen in the aftermath of this pandemic, reversing the tide of globalization while inflaming xenophobia at a time when all nations should unite against Covid-19. In fact, it is already obvious that this pandemic, despite its predicted relatively lower mortality rate than other pandemics, will have major social, geopolitical and economic reverberations, overshadowing the much deadlier 1918 Spanish Flu. The coronavirus struck at the core of our interdependent global order while breaking new grounds. It is the first global pandemic in an era of social media platforms, an era of identity politics and political polarization. Indeed, we will need time and perspective to understand how this crisis will reshape the world. However, the sense that we are witnessing some of the seams of our social cohesion tear is not totally unfounded, and history suggests that similar shocks often coincide with moments of transformation and development —and sometimes even growth. A good start would be to acknowledge that while the pandemic is not culpable for the perilous economic balance in many places at risk of conflicts, it will probably increase the likelihood of further strife. Just as a health crisis can cause economic collapse, economic crises may generate political instability in countries least prepared to withstand the consequences. In the future, many priorities in the West- such as climate change, migration, and pandemics—will necessitate cooperation with the countries currently most threatened by the coronavirus. The reverberations that the world ignore today can have destabilizing implications for years to come.

 

Hassan is a second year PhD candidate at King’s College London’s War Studies department. His thesis examines sectarianism from an inter-group perspective. His main research focus is on sectarian relations/ sectarian identity, geopolitics and international relations. Hassan previously completed an MA in Geopolitics, Territory and Security from King’s Department of Geography in 2018. He currently works as a teacher assistant at KCL.

Book Review - Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

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By: Bradley Lineker

Review: Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), trans. Elizabeth Manton. ISBN: 9781408890264. Price: £16.99

Introduction

Utopianism has long been discredited in political thinking. According to theorists like Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper, the pursuit of perfection has invariably ended in tyranny, disaster, and death. Yet, on the first page of Rutger Bregman’s[1] new book, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There, there is a quotation by Oscar Wilde: ‘progress is the realisation of utopias’,[2] which asks us to think otherwise.

Bregman’s purpose, he tells us, is to ‘unlock the future. To fling open the windows of our mind’,[3] to get us to think not only about the world in different ways, but also about what we want it to look like. The book’s broad argument is relatively simple: previous utopias have only been blueprints about how the world should be, and not what it could be; a journey planned out to the minute and metre instead of relying just on a compass bearing. ‘And I do mean horizons in the plural[,]’ Bregman tells us, ‘conflicting utopias are the lifeblood of democracy[.]’[4] This isn’t a new argument. However, it is precisely the lack of utopian thinking that has stopped our politics from imagining different possibilities; according to Bregman, life and society have become schematized. It is the things that structure our society and political culture that Bregman is seeking to deconstruct, so to create space for new and alternative thinking. In this way, the book offers a snapshot of market liberalism; depicting it not as the well-oiled system that it pretends to be, but as an uneven cobbled-together mass of contradictory ideas and forces.

On this account alone, the book is remarkably successful in getting its reader to rethink stock ideas and phenomena. It particularly shines when considered as a well-packaged, and eminently readable, alternative think-tank digest. This is not to say that all Bregman’s positions are completely sound – plenty of work remains to be done on these areas – but that’s not necessarily the purpose of the book: the point is to get people thinking. This is a book about ideas and the aim of this review is to offer an open-handed discussion about the things that have been presented. Therefore, the first half of the review will assess the book as it is, breaking down the book’s core arguments into three thematic areas before the second half offers some points of discussion.

The Book’s Structure

The book is broken down into 11 breezy chapters (including the epilogue), of about 30 pages each. These cover a variety of topics, ranging from the support of universal basic income, to the absurdity of measuring by GDP, then on to the nature of employment in the post-capitalist world, before finally outlining how ideas can change the world. The translation from the original Dutch is close-to-perfect, and the prose is breezy, warm and accessible.

A word of note, though, the book has been designed to be a flowing external commentary of the work of other researchers in the areas Bregman has chosen to cover, and should not be read as anything else. It is also western-centric, which Bregman openly acknowledges. In fact, only the ninth chapter deals with the world ‘outside the gates of the land of plenty’[5] in any meaningful way, and, even then, it’s a loose chapter on the pitfalls of international development and the international border system.

Basic Income

Basic Income perhaps represents, more than anything else, the flagship of Bregman’s work so far – indeed he tells us that someone once called him ‘Mr Basic Income’[6] – so this idea unsurprisingly constitutes the first third of the book. Bregman outlines several examples about the utility and logic behind basic income, the most important being the ‘Mincome’ experiment, where in the 1970s people in the Canadian province of Manitoba were given ‘free’ cash instead of benefit entitlements. Through these examples, Bregman not only compellingly demonstrates their effectiveness but also addresses several of the key concerns around the utility of basic income. For instance, ‘people are concerned that if there was a basic income, then people would stop working, but in the Mincome experience the opposite seemed to happen.’[7] According to Bregman, this is attributed to three basic premises: (1) people often know what’s best for themselves,[8] (2) people want to succeed[9] and, (3) free from the mental demands of poverty (the ‘scarcity mentality’[10]), people make better decisions. He situates the debate over poor relief as to whether a life without poverty is ‘a privilege you have to work for, [or] … a right we all deserve.’[11] However, instead of letting his argument rest on moralism, he says that such a policy ‘meets the left’s demands for equality and the right’s demands for a smaller state’,[12] as it eliminates the need for a vast, weighty welfare system predicated on ‘control and humiliation.’[13] Such a tactic – of appealing to both sides of the political spectrum – is a signature of Bregman’s attempt throughout the book to bring together blocks of political opinion and point them in new directions – and it’s very welcome. In sum, Bregman’s arguments for basic income are well-considered, skilfully-constructed and offer a compelling avenue of debate on policy-making moving forwards.

 

 

Economic Measuring, Jobs and the Second Machine Age

The next third of the book looks at general economic measuring, jobs and his proposed 15-hour week. Bregman is right to criticize the current structure and timetable of the modern workforce,[14] however his proposed remedy isn’t entirely persuasive. The current timetabling of work arguably arose from the factory floor, and while Bregman does touch on this, he doesn’t do a good enough job of demonstrating how this was a method for a particular moment in time. Much the same as his treatment of GDP,[15] it may have been beneficial to show how current working patterns are also the result of fulfilling past needs – so to better persuade the unconvinced reader that they are outdated. Instead of this diagnosis, then, more attention is given to Bregman’s prescription, which consists of a 15-hour working week.[16] While he shows that, logically, shorter working weeks aren’t necessarily less productive, and they would undoubtedly lead to benefits to overall health and happiness, more is needed to reconfigure established traditions, such as a clear demonstration of the total redundancy of the current status quo. Seen next to the ready-packaged-policy of basic income, it is hard to see immediate uptake for a 15-hour week. This is particularly true, he argues, when governments are much more likely, for example, to make ‘labour costs, such as healthcare benefits … paid per employee rather than per hour.’[17]

However, his arguments about the need move beyond GDP as a measurement of a how a country are doing are compelling. For instance, a CEO who ‘recklessly hawks mortgages’ adds more to the GDP than a ‘school packed with teachers.’[18] Indeed, as he states ‘if I were the GDP, [the] ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and being berserk on black Friday.’[19] One of his more powerful sections is his argument on the ways we gauge profitability: as we don’t measure the long-term benefits of good education, we picture state services as a continual drain on our resources, and not something that rightfully should grow with our economy.[20] In a word, we don’t consider education as the investment that it should be seen as. Therefore, in his eyes, we need a ‘dashboard of indicators’ that include money and growth, but also a sense of community, service, the nature of jobs being created, pursuit of knowledge, social cohesion and free time.[21] While Bregman’s arguments are well put forward throughout this section, he doesn’t go far enough with these ideas. The dominance of GDP as a measurement of a state’s health says so much about the relationship between the state and businesses which the author, unfortunately, doesn’t explore.

A World Without Borders and Education

There is a rhythmic progression to this book, in that it moves from almost-policy (Basic Income) to over-the-horizon ideas (the 15-hour working week), to the truly utopian - a world without borders. Bregman tells us that ‘borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history’.[22] He outlines a number of moral[23] and economic arguments[24] about the benefits of a world without borders and even conducts a six-page deconstruction of the usual arguments against migration,[25] but it would take a brave political leader in today’s climate to turn this into policy. But, as Bregman says, the point is to create new avenues of thinking and alternative utopias.

However, of greater interest, one of Bregman’s more interesting and incisive sections, on education, is slightly hidden away in a chapter entitled ‘why is doesn’t pay to be a banker’. Echoing recent trends of analysis, Bregman rigorously outlines how corporate culture has channeled ‘thousands of bright minds … to increase profits instead of find[ing] the cure for cancer.’[26] In particular, he argues that tax cuts in Reagan-era America spurred bright graduates to go into finance, rather than teaching or engineering.[27] Furthermore, he argues that all the big debates in education are about format or delivery, ‘education is presented as a lubricant to help you glide more effortlessly through life.’[28] Instead of looking at values, or addressing the problems in our societies that need solving, our education systems focuses on competencies. Alternatively, according to Bregman, we should be asking ‘which knowledge and skills do we want our children to have in 2030?’ This would give them a platform to create new futures, rather than carry on the same tired patterns of today.[29] It is these sections that the book particularly shines, and it is a pity that there aren’t more of them.

Points of Discussion: the need for narrative?

Overton’s window, as Bregman tells us, is a theoretical device that depicts political positions that are popular with voters versus those that are unpopular. He then goes on to state that populism has shifted the window to the right, skewing what we typically consider to be the political centre ground.[30] In a world where the internet has only made people cling ever more tenaciously to their beliefs,[31] how do ‘new ideas defeat old ones’?[32] Bregman doesn’t offer many answers here, as his account only looks to describe the problem as he sees it and to offer new avenues of debate. Inescapably, the failure of today’s progressive politics is more than just lacking a utopia to aspire to – there is a need to construct a coherent, easy-to-digest, narrative for why the world (and our societies) are the ways they are.

Part of an answer to this question lies with identity, something else the book doesn’t directly address. For a long time, left-wing movements across Europe refused to engage in the ‘dirty’ debate of national identity, and this abdication has provided right-wing movements with unquestioned authority and legitimacy in dictating what is best for a country – and what isn’t. George Orwell famously wrote, for instance, for the need of socialism in the UK to consider the intrinsic nature of Britishness as a positive force, before it could become successful as a project.[33] Indeed, in an interview about the book, Bregman himself says: ‘We associate nationalism as [an] inward-looking [ideology], which is about protecting what you already have. In the ‘90s there was this notion of the Netherlands being a ‘guide-country’, being the most tolerant on earth. You can feel patriotic on entirely progressive ideas.’[34] This is perhaps best shown with the United Kingdom post-Brexit, as it faces a breakdown in the ways that people self-identify as British or English/Scottish/Welsh/Northern Irish, European or non-European. The question isn’t whether progressive politics comes to terms with national identity, but how.

A key theme running throughout the book is the debate between free trade and protectionism, which has gathered renewed relevance since the election of President Donald Trump and Brexit. The fascinating subtext beneath this ongoing debate is, unfortunately, only hinted at by Bregman in his epilogue,[35] as it has typically been the forces of the right that have generally reaped the biggest rewards from the rapid expansion of free trade and open markets; yet, the ‘alternative-right’ as they are called in the US, or ‘Brexiteers’ in the UK, have reaped the rejection of these principles, to form a new right-wing populism with a protectionist outlook. Bregman’s contribution here is to point out that the left lost the trial of strength against the neo-liberalism of Reagan and Thatcher, and now is losing the battle of ideas against the protectionism of Trump and Brexit.

Here, as the author hints at earlier in the text,[36] the neo-liberal project has been grossly negligent in creating the programmes needed to balance out the effects of free trade. As Bregman says, the coal miners, steel workers, and car manufacturers have been neglected for generations, and whole stretches of Europe are now in a ‘post-industrial’ malaise. This is why protectionist alternatives look so appealing after all, even if they make less sense in today’s world. Such a narrative is simple and easy to understand – so what is the progressive alternative narrative of why things are the way they are? A state-based programme of redistribution is certainly a good starting point, but in order for people to support it as policy, it needs packaging in an equally potent narrative. As Bregman tells us, after all, people typically vote ‘less by their perceptions about their own lives than by their conceptions of society’.[37]

An alternative way to frame these ongoing debates is changing how a state sees its role in the lives of its citizens: treating them as people to be nurtured, rather than as things to be managed and controlled. Bregman himself shadows this approach when he references the economic debate between Keynes and Hayek/Friedman. If we take basic income as an example, such joined-up thinking within the state – not of management, but of development – would help avoid the pitfalls of state involvement that we have seen elsewhere. If we look at the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) a few generations after the initial idealists set it up in 1948, we have a bloated system that is chronically mismanaged, underfunded and under-planned-for (where is systematic government planning for higher education bursaries for doctors and nurses, for example?), under-appreciated by its users, and which desperately needs renewal (not replacement, mind you). It is possible that such a fate would befall basic income if the same joined-up thinking that is lacking in regard to the NHS, wasn’t developed in conjunction with it.

Conclusion

This is a book that does have flaws. With hindsight, and taking nothing away from what Bregman puts forward, it may have been prudent to begin with the financial crisis, how the chosen strategy after 2008 was, as he paraphrases, like ‘standing at Chernobyl and seeing they’ve restarted the reactor but still have the same old management.’[38] As Bregman implies, this decision wasn’t because of cognitive dissonance, but that there weren’t enough different ideas to lead change.[39] This is the single most compelling part of his rationale for the need for alternative political thinking, yet it is buried away in the tenth chapter. Framing the book in this way would have led to a stronger discussion of the rejection of ‘technocratic’[40] politics by many people in the form of Trump and Brexit, and then to what needs to be done to address this. That being said, Bregman is correct in saying that the left is always the strongest when speaking from a position of hope[41] and this is missing from their narratives at the moment. By packaging these ideas within a utopian framework – as he does – it certainly generates the type of approach that needs to be taken.

As stated many times through this review, this book does not contain all the answers – and it never has any pretensions to do so. ‘Utopias’, or so Bregman tells us, ‘offer no ready-made answers, let alone solutions. But they do ask the right questions.’[42] The same could be said of this book. It achieves its aim of creating new avenues of debate, encouraging the reader to think past certain established orthodoxies. Yet, as Bregman himself intimates at the end of his epilogue, there is so much more left to be done before such new progressive politics achieve the critical mass to become a credible alternative to what we see today.

Bradley is currently a fully-funded doctoral candidate in the War Studies Department at King’s College London. He has extensive experience working as a consulting research analyst with the UN, DFID, and the private sector, on areas ranging from Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, and Syria. Bradley is currently using this experience to base his PhD research, which examines the nature of humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees in Jordan. He has also written on neo-patrimonial networks in the Angolan civil war, state-capture in Mozambique, and the concept of liberty during the French Revolution.

Notes:

[1] Among other things, Rutger Bregman is a historian and works as a journalist for De Correspondent, The Guardian and The New York Times.

[2] Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Translated by Elizabeth Manton. Title page.

[3] Ibid. Page 11

[4] Ibid. Page 21

[5] This is the title of the ninth chapter

[6] Ibid. Page 238

[7] Ibid. Page 37

[8] Ibid. Page 32

[9] Ibid. Page 44

[10] Ibid. Page 57

[11] Ibid. Page 97

[12] Ibid. Page 45

[13] Ibid. Page 44

[14] Ibid. Page 127-133

[15] Ibid. Page 116

[16] Ibid. Page 142-143

[17] Ibid. Page 148

[18] Ibid. Page 107

[19] Ibid. Page 105-106

[20] Ibid. Page 121

[21] Ibid. Page 123

[22] Ibid. Page 217

[23] Ibid. Page 220

[24] Ibid. Page 216

[25] Ibid. Page 221-227

[26] Ibid. Page 167

[27] Ibid. Page 168-169

[28] Ibid. Page 170

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid. Page 254

[31] Bregman, Utopia for Realists. Page 234-236.

[32] Ibid. Page 239

[33] Orwell, George, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’, The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume 12, A Patriot After All 1940-1941 (Secker and Warburg 1986-7) pg. 393

[34] Bregman, ‘Capitalism will always create bullshit jobs’: Owen Jones meets Rutger Bregman. Interview, 9th March 2017. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsutNKH7KiE

[35] Bregman, Utopia for Realists. Page 225

[36] Ibid. Page 46

[37] Ibid. Page 240

[38] Joris Luyendijk as cited in Bregman, Utopia for Realists. Page 243

[39] Bregman, Utopia for Realists. Page 243

[40] Ibid. Page 248/249

[41] Ibid. Page 261

[42] Ibid. Page 14

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