Populism is Not a Four Letter Word.

What does the Green Party's success and momentum mean?

I woke up this morning to the news that Hannah Spencer of The Green Party of England and Wales, also known as “Hannah the Plumber”, had won a by-election in Gorton & Denton, becoming the fifth Green MP in the UK parliament, but in a febrile political context where almost anything feels possible. (For the record, the independent candidate, Sir Oink A-Lot, received 159 votes).

Some will see this news story simply as noise, but others see it as a major signal. This could be a typical mid-term moment in a country with an exaggerated sense of its own importance, where voters protest against the government, before the larger parties regain the seat at the general election. But it could also be a sign of what people love to call “a major realignment” in British politics, which also speaks to wider political trends around the world.

I am moved to write today because I feel the latter - I believe there is a deeper story here, playing out across different horizons.

Since we are again entering party political terrain, I am obliged to say that I am writing in a personal capacity here on The Joyous Struggle, and nothing that follows speaks for any organisation I am associated with.

The result was not a huge surprise, not least because of the recent surge in Green Party membership to over 200,000 members, inspired partly by the leadership of Zack Polanski. And I did experience it as broadly good news, if only because the most likely alternative was a victory for Reform, who are leading in the polls nationally, despite, or I sometimes fear, because they Trump-aligned, if not inspired.

Indeed, the most important thing to notice about this by-election is not actually who won, but the duo that came first and second.

What’s going on?

Well, more than I can say here, and I am not a political commentator, but I hope I can offer some perspective on what I think this result means, both to politically homeless people like me contending with bigger-than-self issues, and more generally.

**

I don’t think politics will save us, at least not as it is currently conceived. On the other hand, the avoidance of politics won’t save us either; if we do not understand that the love of power co-arises with the power of love, then the devil will have fallen out of heaven in vain. On the other hand, because there are always at least three hands, the saviour mentality may not be helpful either, because it is not clear what we should be trying to save, when there is so much to let go of.

On the fourth hand (why not?) no matter how many spiritual songs speak of surrender, of letting it go, of letting it be, of rolling with it; I believe that’s not even half the story. They say the penalty for refusing to participate in politics is being governed by people you don’t like or respect. They say if you are not at the table, you are on the menu. They say that freedom comes from participation and cannot be properly experienced without it. Sometimes we are supposed to show up and say: Hey! No! Stop! What are you doing? Do this instead! There is the wisdom of surrender and acquiescence, and then there is also the duty to show up, the dignity of resistance, and the joy of creative agency.

Perhaps the aim is not to save anything in particular, but to feel more alive. As Roberto Unger puts it in The Self Awakened:

If spirit is a name for the resistant and transcending faculties of the agent, we can spiritualise society. We can diminish the distance between who we are and what we find outside of ourselves.

It’s that kind of politics that I believe in and want to be part of. Our psyches are strengthened when we can see ourselves in the world that is being built around us.

So what’s going on?

I was invited to give a speech on the inner life of the future at NYU a couple of years ago, and lucky to share that privilege with the political scientist Ivan Krastev, who gave a wonderfully laconic but extremely incisive analysis of why, all over Europe, there is a major clustering of political energy towards what some see as extremes, but others see as necessary points of urgent emphasis: he called them ‘the immigrantion right’ and ‘the climate left’.

Now, I am allergic to the political spectrum. I think it’s a really stupifying conceptual device, and I believe that thinking in terms of left and right stunts political imagination. However, I can’t fight on all fronts at once, and it remains part of popular vernacular. With that caveat in mind, Krastev is on to something.

Political culture is currently so volatile, and social media campaigns so influential, that political shifts that used to take generations now can happen in years. I know the idea that the next UK General Election will be primarily a battle between the Greens and Reform seems far-fetched, but I think it would be wise to act now as if that could be the case.¹

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There was a fascinating exchange (in a US context, granted) on the podcast Interesting Times that I came across in an article on The Liberal Imagination by Jon Baskin in Point Magazine:

ROSS DOUTHAT: It is impossible for me—as a religious person, I’m sorry—not to look at progressivism right now and say, “You need something else on the horizon besides saying we’re all going to be inclusive, and we’re going to get rich together with flying cars.” You need to say, “So that we can live in some specific way that we are supposed to live.” What is that way, Ezra Klein? How then shall we live?

EZRA KLEIN: My friend, I am a liberal. I actually believe in creating a space for liberal individual flourishing of different kinds. … I don’t really want to tell you where you have to drive your flying car.

Later in that same article, there is a powerful commentary:

“Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind,” wrote the liberal critic Lionel Trilling, “we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like.”

What that last quotation means is that voters are looking for ‘imagination and mind’ and they are seeing it in parties we often dismiss as ‘populist’ who speak in a more directly emotional register. The populist parties can also be seen as post-technocratic parties with vision, whether or not you like the visions on offer.

With these thoughts in mind, beyond the noise, one way to understand what is happening in politics, not just in the UK, is that there is a post-liberal reckoning, in which people reach to defend what is sacred to them, whether or not they are religious. In fact, the idea of ‘metacrisis’ originally came from the theologically-informed book The Politics of Virtue by Milbank and Pabst, which is a kind of post-liberal critique and manifesto. My open letter to the human rights movement was a different kind of ‘now what?’ reflection, and though I land in a different place, what is happening is that liberalism, broadly conceived as the ideology of rights and markets and incremental improvements informing most mainstream or left-of-centre, centre, and right-of-centre parties in reccent years, has failed to adapt to recent history and appears unable to update itself. Mann’s It was not supposed to end this way captures that idea of an ideology dying because it doesn’t realise it’s an ideology, well.

Why is this relevant? Because one of liberalism’s problems is finding a public role for the sacred, and in the context of Reform v Green, there are arguably two experiences of the sacred being defended, and they are both fundamentally about our ideas of home, identity, and belonging and why they feel threatened. As socio-economic conditions fail to improve and ecological collapse comes closer to home, we will look to the sacred more than ever. I still live a life made possible by liberalism, and I would defend many aspects of it, but it has failed to update itself, and does not appear able or more likely willing to connect with voters in a more directly emotional register about who we are, what life is for, and what is worth protecting.

At their very rare best, when they are not being sexist and crypto-racist or taking very dark money, populist parties like Reform are post-liberal communitarians saying something recognisably human like:

Please slow down, World, and give us a chance to catch up, because I feel I am disappearing, I don’t know how to feel my roots, life and has stopped making sense, I don’t recognise myself, and I don’t recognise my community - it is not about racism and it’s not crazy that I want to ‘take back control’.

The Greens are saying something more like:

Mother Nature is under attack from multiple parties, and we can do better than an economy built for billionaires. The world has enough for everyone, but we need to share it better. It is not naive to say that Humanity’s ultimate strength lies in peace, it is wise to recognise that our interbeing is premised on care, and whether local or international, no matter who we are or where we came from, we can find ourselves by helping each other.

Neither message entirely rings true to me, but I know which one I resonate with more.

Reform may be trying to reform itself, and it exists because millions feel disaffected, and doubtless it includes many people of good will who view the world differently. Even so, it remains strongly anti-immigration and all that this can and often does mean in terms of racial bias, ecocide, and authoritarian leanings. Their policy to remove indefinite leave to remain status from long-term residents would be a direct hit on my mixed-race and partially Indian family, so I feel it personally.

To cut to the chase, I am writing today because I feel BOTH that I want an empathetic politics where we listen carefully to those with different socio-economic contexts and cultural formations who have been failed politically, AND I feel that we have to resist proto-fascist bastards with every ounce of our being and get behind those who are most likely to defeat them. I am beginning to think that might be the Green Party.

***

It’s a lot to take in, and it is too early to be sure, but what used to be the centre of politics is hollowing out, and it may simply be time to pick a side.

Indeed, there is a paper on The Metamodern Condition that indicates this need to pick a side is part of what separates postmodern value relativism and purpose nihilism from the post-relativist metamodern sensibility. Perhaps it remains possible to try to shape our chosen side so that it is just ‘side enough’ to beat the other side, while still being fundamentally sideless at heart. But we need to get real, too. A Reform Government is, to me, a very scary prospect.

There is a Latin expression that trainee doctors learn early in medical school about what to do when encountering a new patient. Primum Non Nocere: first, do no harm.

So it’s definitely YES to a different kind of future where politics is not all about winning elections and we come together as a larger WE, but it’s definitely NO to political parties that would destroy nature and culture in the name of ‘the people’. And that means YES, in the short term, the relatively proximate WE, the WE I feel closer to, has to try to win in whatever way we can.²

**

I need to write in the style of a rant now, but I promise not to linger in invective.

Politics in the UK is just generally embarrassing! It is fundamentally broken. It is mostly dysfunctional. It is typically boring. And, overall, it has failed. Our politics are generally embarrassing because, inter alia, we have an anti-democratic voting system called First Past the Post (I mean, what are we, horses?). Politics is broken because trust in politicians has never been lower, the influence of foreign money has never been greater, and social media disfigures our political culture. The political system is dysfunctional because the legitimacy conferred on the state by the people is utilised or coopted to support capital interests in ways that exacerbate inequality and weaken the public realm. Political news is often boring because there is no animating vision, and it seems repetitive. And our political institutions have failed because, if nothing else, our neglect of nature has become a national security problem, and our rivers are, alas, literally full of shit. (Which gives a whole new meaning to the expression: You can’t make this shit up).

I am, however, still a relatively political animal. Like many others, I identify as weary, but I have not completely checked out. I admire The Rest is Politics, even if it is mostly ‘first horizon gossip’ and occasionally I get invested in a particular issue like Scotland’s independence referendum in 2014, Brexit in 2016 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Like more people than political pundits tend to understand, I am a mixture of several political sensibilities: formed by liberalism, invested in environmentalism, wary of socialism but curious about anarchism, respectful of conservatism, vigilant about fascism, sympathetic to feminism and nationalism, protective of individualism but not terrified of communitarianism, wondering about eudaimonism, and keen to transcend and include the whole schebang into something wiser and better.

From those vantage points, I try to think of The Donald as little as possible, I stopped caring much about UK political news about a decade ago, and leaving Twitter helped me feel free of it. In the last general election, after careful thought, I felt the best way to express myself as a citizen was to go to the polling booth, deliberately spoil my ballot, and write about it. People will say I wasted my vote, but without knowing the context and the constituency, that is simulated thinking. I believe I did all I could with it, and I have never felt more democratic.

So that’s the context in which I meet the Green Party today. Hello.³

(See here for more details of the model).

In Horizon One, as indicated, there is genuine and justified fear of a Trump-level event in the UK in the not-too-distant future, with Reform currently leading in the polls, and Labour once again at war with itself. That leads to a strong sense of “we have to do something” - an appetite for agency. This fear is not UK-specific; it’s part of a broader socio-political trend in many parts of Europe and elsewhere. But the UK focus can be a good creative constraint, and might even be necessary, even if there is a place for external advisers and contributors who would not necessarily support the Green Party in a different political and planetary context.

In Horizon Two, there is a recognition that the Green Party of England and Wales is having a moment, with a charismatic new leader who seems to be culturally quite metamodern, at least in the sense of understanding serious play, but not necessarily in any other sense (though he appears less ideological and more pragmatic than many others in the party). The growth in the Green Party’s fortunes means that those seeking to respond to the perceived threat may see a major role in contributing to the party’s efforts as part of their response. While browsing Twitter this morning for ‘takes’ I was struck by this one by Dr Kate Webb, quoting Caroline Lucas that the Green Party is “not a vague emotion but a powerful activity”.

There is a new form of “populism” emerging that is not about immigration, and speaks from joyous affect and conviviality rather than critique and ressentiment (though it may be necessary to say something like “the primary problem is billionaires”). Two things are going on here - the first is to see the Green party as a kind of affordance and opportunity; to support the place that seems ripest for post-conventional thinking, that may go on to inform a coalition government in a few years. But equally, and perhaps even more important, several people within the Green Party that I know and have worked with appear to be seeking help to articulate positions that are socially taboo within the party, particularly on defence, aspects of economic policy, and identity politics. This is where the Green Party may need to be less ‘green’ in the spiral dynamic sense, to make the most of its potential.

Indeed, just this morning, Rupert Read said this:

The Party will now face much greater scrutiny: of its internal rivenness and hard-left-entryists, of its dangerously ideological commitment to a wacky form of identity politics, of some of its culture-war rhetoric, of its insufficient policies/emphasis/honesty on the great and terrible challenge of climate-adaptation, of its lack of any planning as yet for how it would cope with hostile bond markets etc if it actually got into power... but what is exciting about the last question in particular is that for the first time it is now as feasible as it is vital to ASK the question: How should Greens best prepare for a role in GOVERNMENT.⁴

In Horizon Two, there is also scope to innovate beyond the idea that ‘populism’ necessarily means a division between ‘the people’ and everyone else, and that populism is necessarily divisive in spirit. I am reminded of an essay by Will Davies on Green Populism, building on thinking by Clive Hamilton in Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (2017):

The dawn of the Anthropocene grants a new ontological equivalence to the human and non-human worlds, albeit with a particular responsibility accorded to humans in effecting the natural disasters that now confront human and non-human history. ‘Human’ and ‘natural’ history converge into a single field, as the separation of nature from culture, science from politics, is no longer tenable. This nevertheless poses the question of how the non-human world is to be introduced to politics and represented as a matter of concern. My proposition is that, echoing Shrecker’s claim, the very safeguarding and mourning of life itself can become the trigger for political engagement, in which expertise becomes modelled around the ideal type of the nurse rather than of the classically modern scientist. And yet, in the Anthropocene, the care for life cannot stop at the bounds of humanity, but must extend beyond that. To recognise our ‘terrestrial’ being is not only to reject borders as the limits of ethical commitment, but also species…Anthropocentrism is unavoidable given the unique role played by human beings in bringing us to this geo-human point in history, but at the same time the project of caring for the non-human and desisting our violence against it is now an ethical injunction that should supplant the scientific ‘vocation’ towards infinite ‘progress’. The modern conceit, that the value of ‘progress’ can be oblivious to rare deeds or losses, is no longer tenable. On the contrary, recognising and publicising the meaning of specific losses, through rare deeds and mourning, is integral to the politics of conservation. “Stop, you’re killing everything!” should be the cry.”

That argument is quite specific, but it shows the scope to develop a very different kind of populism. Another way to see it is that there is a new populism on the horizon that is up for grabs, and it’s a populism that is more inclusive by design, built on what Alex Evans calls The Larger Us. I am not sure whether this is naive, and it might be.

On balance, though, I think it’s better to see new attempts at populism as a necessary and real fiction, a kind of pre-figurative as-if idealism that shapes the world for the better, even if it might fail as an action plan. The Green Party might well be a good vehicle for this kind of experimentation. I mean, you can hardly get more populist than winning with “Hannah the Plumber”, so it seems a good day to have this thought.

And here’s how to situate that idea conceptually:

In Horizon Three, there is a more general longing for “a new politics” that is not directly to do with any political party, but with the prepolitical sanity of not killing each other or destroying our only home, the parapolitical practice of experimenting with different ways of living and working and deciding, and the metapolitical courage to make politics about something other than war, technological innovation, and indefinite economic growth. The need for metapolitical courage arises mostly in Horizon Three, but that horizon has real effects in Horizon One. In H3, there may not be political parties or even nation-states, and the ‘Media’ and ‘Education’ that shape ‘Democracy’ would look different, so much so that these three things may become one relational process. However, the point for now is just that visions of Horizon Three should feel inspiring in some ways and discomforting in others, which is roughly how I feel about the Green Party more generally.

And so, the extent to which the Green resurgence in the second horizon is transformative will depend on the quality of the third horizon vision. ‘The work’ of progressive political innovators is to make innovations in policy and practice H2+ rather than H2-. The strategic question is whether the Green Party can indicate what an H2+ political strategy looks like. And that is the question I land on, for now.

If the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is right that “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things”, might it not be rather fun to be defeated by a grand political project that forever transforms what we mean by politics?

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1. The causes of the shift in political culture and myriad and complex, and I don’t want to get diverted here, but I’d the 2008 financial crisis was a structural break in normal political expectations, that socio-economic precarity was then heightened by the advent of the internet-enabled smartphone and social media, which was later further confounded by COVID shifting our general sense of political reality. As a result of these factors, and others including various wars, volatility indices jumped across virtually all Western democracies simultaneously, suggesting a systemic rather than country-specific cause. That means the transmission mechanism between political sentiment and electoral outcome has accelerated dramatically, and what used to take a generation now takes a parliament or less.

There has been a systematic decomposition of stable political identities. Traditional voting was essentially sociological, based on intergenerational identities informed by your class, your union, your church, your community etc. Voting is now much more situational and emotional, because the political economy is more volatile and the infosphere is completely different. Fifty years ago, voters consumed political information slowly and through heavily filtered channels. Now, sentiment can shift and compound in days because the feedback loop between events, media, social media, and polling is essentially instantaneous, which means a government can haemorrhage support in weeks rather than years, while small and new parties can achieve a lot, quickly.

An example of political volatility is Emmanuel Macron founding a political party from scratch in 2016 and winning the presidency and a parliamentary majority within a year, but then, within six years, the majority was gone.

Another is Keir Starmer’s popularity rating, which -amusingly - was minus three when he became Prime Minister and maxed out at neutral shortly afterwards, but then plummeted to minus forty-four within a year.

2. Leaving politics to one side, this is the kind of both both/and and Either/Or sensibility that I feel is the analytical signature of metamodernism, and for what it’s worth, I believe is NOT currently the ethos of the Green Party, which is more likely to get lost in bothandism in perpetuity (but that could change).

3. It seems appropriate and timely to repeat a revised version of a footnote from my last post.

Part of me feels a political party named after a single colour can never hope to win. Everyone knows there are so many other colours, so the party’s name itself screams out: Narrow! Fixated! Partial view! Single-minded! In the spirit of nama rupa, that things take on the form of their names, the Greens are a hopeless case. I am joking, I think, but I also feel it. I mean, how can the explicit green, alone, without any other colours, expect to win against all the other implicit colours? At an intuitive level, it feels like Green could always do more or less well, but like any other colour, it will never win a decisive majority to govern the whole colour palette, and it wouldn’t seem fair if it did. Like I say, I’m joking, I think…

In case you’re curious, I have been working on climate change and philosophical dimensions of our ecological crises for over a decade, so there is some natural affinity with the Green Party’s historical championing of environmental causes, but I don’t (yet) see myself as ‘a green’ in a party political sense. There are a few things I like, so I am tempted. I know and admire and have worked with some leading Greens, as already mentioned, and the fact that they are the only major political party that questions the presumed wisdom of indefinite economic growth is important, totemic even, because there’s a kind of radical sanity there in my view. The party also seems to have a grasp of systems thinking and structural violence; of first, second and third-order effects of policies. And they see that the UK will work best when Scotland, England, Wales and (Northern) Ireland have as much autonomy as possible, which matters to me as a Scot.

So I like the Green Party epistemically - what it thinks about and how it thinks about it - but I am wary of it aesthetically - how it feels and how it makes me feel. I say ‘aesthetically’ rather than ‘morally’ because I think how things appear and seem is more relevant to how people vote than what is perceived to be right or wrong. I am not quite sure what makes me hesitate, but it’s something about what I perceive to be a judgmental atmosphere, a self-righteousness, a fear of hierarchy, even when hierarchy is necessary, and an idealism that is not altogether real. I sense change is afoot, though, and these concerns may not hold.

4. (I agree with most of that, but I have to confess I laughed at that last line, which is so resonant of a famous moment in British politics, at least if you are Gen X or older, when David Steel said to The Liberal Party gathering in 1981, “Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government!”, and they did not come close.)