How can we channel our collective anger? Flickr/Chris Beckett. Some rights reserved.
Earlier this year, I organised a two-day conference on ‘Post-politics and Neoliberalism’ at Birkbeck and Canterbury Christ Church universities. Our purpose was to understand the strange death of politics in this country and beyond. Mainstream political leaders are robotic and impotent; Westminster debates are stale and irrelevant. The public has tuned out and turned away, and in response, politicians perform increasingly desperate acts of self-abasement. Iconoclastic mavericks are on the rise, and everywhere there are calls to shrink the state. But while the symptoms of political decay are now clear for all to see, the causes are imperfectly understood. What has triggered public antibodies to react against traditional politics at the start of the 21st century?
It is also unclear how and why the post-political or anti-political turn is working out very differently for the left and right of the political spectrum. As the 2015 election illustrated, neoliberalism is very much alive and kicking. Despite the exciting gains made by social movements in recent years, the government still has formidable influence over the direction the country is taking. The failure of the left, for the most part, to foresee how the election would play out means it has considerable catching up to do. It has neither a definitive diagnosis nor a clear sense of where to go next. This is understandable: the situation we find ourselves in is largely unprecedented, and this is a moment of rapid political, cultural and technological change. So I set out in this article to explore some of the ambiguities surrounding our political predicament, and some of the tensions inherent in the left’s response.
