Get Real. That\u2019s the message being sent in almost every piece of media coverage of Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s one-month-old leadership of the Labour Party, a message which has intensified and become ever more shrill as his speech to the party conference approached. Hyperbolic attacks on Corbyn\u2019s history and political stances (he\u2019s a danger to Britain, he hangs out with people we don\u2019t like, and if you take some of his words out of context, turn them upside down and squint at them through an alcoholic haze, it looks like he once said something tasty about Osama Bin Laden) have done their job, but are limited in their broad efficacy; the segment of the population who lap up this kind of material and internalise its messages are people who were already inclined that way in the first place, and delight in such stories simply because they confirm their pre-existing notions. For the majority of the rest of the UK electorate, who do not wake up in cold sweats at the thought of Reds under their Beds, or simmer with horrified outrage at the slightest departure from the government\u2019s fairytale security narrative, such breathless tales of villainy have a short half-life; they would not survive prolonged contact with the reality of Corbyn\u2019s personality and policies.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s much, much more damaging with that group of the electorate – the group Corbyn\u2019s Labour actually needs to care about if it\u2019s to have a hope of winning in 2020 – is the broader base of the Malthusian pyramid of anti-Corbyn media messaging. In the hierarchy of what you need to take down a populist left-wing leader, allegations of shocking Commie wrong-doing are merely the sharp tip of the pyramid; the broad base needs to be made up of a heady mixture of concern trolling and tooth-sucking that can be lumped together under a single headline; Get Real<\/i>. <\/p>\n
Corbyn isn\u2019t realistic<\/i>. Even if you accept that the ideals proposed by the veteran MP are lovely in theory – a Britain without weapons of mass destruction, with health, education and transport back in public hands, a more robust and caring system of welfare for the sick and the needy, and so on – you are exhorted to accept that they are not realistic in practice. This prong of attack is vital to undermining a return to the left by the Labour party, because survey after survey (with the caveat that I still think that British opinion polling methodology is broken and must be taken with a pinch of salt) shows that a fairly solid majority of the British public actually agrees with Corbyn\u2019s policy prescriptions and stances. These people may be temporarily swayed against New-Again Old Labour (what are<\/i> we to call the party now?) by personal attacks on Corbyn, but that\u2019s not going to keep them off-side until 2020; there\u2019s a real chance that a Labour party united behind its new leader and with four and a half years to reinforce and market its policy positions could turn enough of those preferences into votes to make a big difference on the political landscape. Heading off that possibility is a matter of convincing those voters to ignore their policy preferences, and thus convincing the Labour party to split and infight, convinced that it cannot win with Corbyn at the helm.<\/p>\n
How do you convince voters to ignore their policy preferences when making their political choices? You suck at your teeth, shake your head sadly, and tell them that their preferences would be lovely in an ideal world, but that they are not realistic<\/i>. The electorate responds strongly to this notion of realism; if you want a dramatic example of that in progress today, look to Japan, where the support rating of the cabinet of prime minister Shinzo Abe has consistently been far above the (vanishingly low) support rating for any of its headline policies. The electorate don\u2019t like the policies, but they have been sold on the notion that they are realistic<\/i>, or rather, that the alternatives (supporting opposition parties or otherwise demanding change) are unrealistic<\/i>. Poll after poll confirms that a very significant portion of the Japanese electorate supports Abe\u2019s government despite disliking everything it does. This is much to do with the fragmented and disorganised nature of opposition parties in Japan, but that\u2019s the point, in a sense; the electorate prefers the \u201crealistic\u201d option of the organised, successful, tough-talking LDP, despite disliking its policies, over the \u201cunrealistic\u201d option of the fragmented, bickering opposition parties whose policies they actually like.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what the Get Real<\/i> message aims to do to Corbyn – to push the electorate into seeing him as a dreamer and a fantasist, someone with ideas that are nice but unrealistic and unsuited to government. This isn\u2019t a new idea, nor is it unique to the UK\u2019s situation; such rhetorical spin is a standard ingredient of neoliberalism everywhere in the world. The great triumph of neoliberalism since the 1980s has been to position its stances as being realistic<\/i>, essentially coining or laying claim to a whole swathe of phrases which have become commonplace in political discourse. Aside from \u201crealistic\u201d, consider phrases like \u201ctaking tough decisions\u201d or \u201cfit for government\u201d – neoliberal spin points baked into our conventional political rhetoric, whose seemingly innocent neutrality disguises the power to put anyone expressing a non-neoliberal point onto the back foot. Discussing a left-wing policy idea almost immediately invites a demand to prove that it is \u201crealistic\u201d, putting the discussant on the defensive; the same demand is almost never made of neoliberal policy ideas, and can be laughed off with ease when it is made – rhetorical weapons, once established, are not easily turned against their creators. Why should<\/i> proponents of neoliberal policy have to prove that their ideas are \u201crealistic\u201d, when we all know<\/i> that neoliberalism is realistic?<\/p>\n
This is the unspoken assumption at the core of every article telling Jeremy Corbyn (or Bernie Sanders, or Pablo Iglesias, or Alex Tsipras, etc. etc.) to Get Real <\/i>– an assumption that our current system, the neoliberal economy and society which have been built since the early 1980s, is realistic. Moreover, it is an assumption that the neoliberal institutions and structures of today define the limits of what can \u201crealistically\u201d work. Every idea outside that sphere must justify itself and demonstrate its \u201crealistic\u201d credentials; but the game is rigged, because \u201crealism\u201d is defined in terms of the very neoliberal institutions that the New Left seeks to challenge. If you\u2019re not neo-liberal, you have to prove that you\u2019re realistic, but if you\u2019re realistic, you\u2019re neo-liberal; Catch-22. Thus, \u201crealistic\u201d becomes twisted in its very meaning; it is imbued with innate ideology, becoming a herder\u2019s whip used to drive political thought back towards the present status quo, all the while claiming in wide-eyed innocence that it is free of ideology and merely talking about cold hard facts regarding what is and is not possible.<\/p>\n
The hand-wringing authors of articles demanding realism from Corbyn and his shadow cabinet would no doubt bristle at the accusation that they are doing little more than writing in support of a neoliberal status quo – to their minds, they\u2019re just talking about what\u2019s realistic, which is surely, surely, a fixed term whose meaning cannot be subverted or altered through political will? Yet truly it has been subverted, in a way that is most dramatic if viewed across the span of decades. Little by little, neoliberals on both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere besides, have pushed further and further to the right – digging in and establishing the boundaries of the \u201crealistic\u201d around their current positions before advancing a little further rightwards, dismantling a little more of the state, introducing a little more of the market, or a distortion of the market, then digging in for long enough for this to become the new \u201crealistic\u201d status quo before moving again. Compare 2015 to 2010 and the movement is apparent (look at how the debate over the NHS has shifted from \u201cno privatisation\u201d to \u201cwhich bits is it okay to privatise\u201d) but minor. Compare 2015 to 1995 or earlier, though, and it is hugely dramatic; the complete destruction of social housing, the dramatic attacks on support for the sick and disabled, the sweeping privatisation of health, education and even some parts of the nation\u2019s security forces, the extraordinary subsidising of for-profit industries through in-work benefits for underpaid workers; these are all policies which would have been extreme, radical and unrealistic<\/i> in earlier decades. Today they are government policy, and nobody challenges their realism. The centre has moved; what is realistic<\/i> has kept pace with where the neoliberal movement has brought us. Today\u2019s neoliberalism is an extreme version of the doctrine of Thatcher or Reagan, yet its grand triumph is in managing to align the political meaning of \u201crealistic\u201d with its own extremism.<\/p>\n
Language is important. Hijacking a word like \u201crealism\u201d is an incredibly tricky thing to do (it helps when the owners of most of a nation\u2019s media are on board with your ideology, though), but it affords a huge advantage, one presently being brought to bear on crushing Jeremy Corbyn. Coining your own terms is also a powerful tool; think of terms like \u201ctrickle-down\u201d, \u201cpersonal responsibility\u201d, \u201cwealth creators\u201d, \u201chard-working families\u201d or on the negative side of the equation, \u201cscroungers\u201d, \u201cbenefit cheats\u201d and \u201csomething-for-nothing culture\u201d. Once established in the public imagination through constant media repetition, such phrases encapsulate neo-liberal ideologies in bite-sized pieces of daily vocabulary, which are powerful rhetorical tools that are extremely hard to challenge in the popular imagination. Language is how we define the world around us, so creating widely adopted language which defines it according to your ideology is a huge success for any political movement. (It doesn\u2019t always work, of course; look no further than \u201cBig Society\u201d for an example of a neo-liberal catchphrase which never managed to effectively penetrate the popular consciousness and vocabulary, but swam around, unloved and unwanted, in Conservative talking points and speeches for several years before finally being taken out to the back of the woodshed and put out of its misery.)<\/p>\n