I liked this from Robin McAlpine of Common Weal yesterday, although I do not agree entirely with all he said in the article it comes from:
I always thought that, in politics, you get more out of challenging ideas than you do from insulting people. For myself, I now think that its imperative that we change our ways. I'm always trying to change mine. The path we're on leads places I don't want to go, that you don't want to go.
It's not about weakness, timidity or fear of anything that isn't consensus. Be robust. Fight for what you believe and fight hard. But fight ideas, not people. People are fragile, ideas are resilient. They can take it, we can't.
After every war the future is created by the survivors. Who do you think will be the ultimate survivors of a hate-fest? And do you want the world they'll create?
That's worth remembering.
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When popular ideas such as those of peace, welfare and humanity that caused people to support Corbyn as soon as the PLP stopped blocking them, threaten the ‘powers that be’, the latter, realising the futility of attacking the ideas, resort to attacking a straw man to which they attach his name.
That they do it now with such vigour is testament to the weakness of their ideas.
I’m not even a full-blown Corbynista!
I think McAlpine is mistaken in his analysis here. For sure, there are ideas and concepts like public choice theory and regulatory capture which lurk in the hearts of good and bad men equally who take an interest.
But there are some people both in and out of government who belong to a strain of pure evil, who will adopt whatever ideas keep them in charge or in work. Sometimes, like a stopped clock, they will alight on good ideas but for the wrong reasons, or switch ideas because of expediency. They need to be held up to ridicule if they are identified and trying to influence public policy in order to continue and enhance the restrictions that make us less free than we could be.
I confess I do not entirely follow your logic
Take the Prime Minister of the 1840s as an example, Sir Robert Peel, who came to power supporting the Corn Laws and ended office opposing them. He wasn’t interested in doing right by the people, and was just out for himself. Pure evil.
There are people today who walk among us who have been vigorously critical of the EU in the past and now support membership. People who have said we will become better off more slowly when we leave the EU, and now take the view that not being a member will be a disaster and we will be worse off. There are people who say taxes on unhealthy lifestyles will work, and when they don’t they claim the intention was right but the outcomes were not. If they do not review their intentions, again, pure evil.
You could discuss ideas with them all day, but the only idea that genuinely interests such people is being in charge and/or being taken notice of.
But you can expose their hypocrisy
It won’t help saying a great deal about them beyond that
I think that this is well intended but the limit to it is do we really know what we are dealing with now?
There have been some unprecedented events since 2008 as contemporary capitalism fails.
Things are not the same as before. There is a sort of subtle persistence and robustness to some really bad ideas that have inculcated our lives.
And I’m sorry but people are resilient – not ideas. They put up with all sorts of crap. And their prejudices in particular are resilient and easily exploited by fascists. Ideas and beliefs are held by people, and informed by the context those people live in and their reaction to it.
Remember the cunning of unreason. It is all around us.
Those who wish to change things (progressives) are not necessarily driven by hate. They are driven by a passion and quest for fairness. Is this a message to fascists only?
Who knows how things will end? But if it ends bloodily, the establishment, top 5 % , the bankers, the ‘economists’, the hate filled politicians etc., will only have themselves to blame. And I for one will not make excuses for them. For, have they not been warned enough?
A grim appraisal I now but……………………………..
@PSR”And I’m sorry but people are resilient — not ideas. They put up with all sorts of crap. And their prejudices in particular are resilient and easily exploited by fascists. Ideas and beliefs are held by people, and informed by the context those people live in and their reaction to it. ”
Have to agree entirely: dangerous ideas are held by dangerous people. Ideas don’t exist without people giving voice to them. The Common Weal is really saying go for the concept, not the man. That’s fine for an academic discussion – but life threatening if that same idea, when put into practice by your government, means you cannot feed your children.
Peter
I thought I was a bit out of order when I said this but thank you for understanding my point.
Yes – ‘Don’t play the man, play the ball’ they say.
But the Right play the man, woman and child every time. Mercilessly. Like the extremists they are. I’ve had enough of them to last me a life time. A belly full.
Of course insults are raw gut reactions, they are useless in combatting both ideas and the people who express them.
But they have their place, in private, to release anger and frustration.
Not in the public sphere though. Derision to expose liars and fraudsters works better.
As for people not being resilient? I see no evidence of that.
Some are so immune to others’ opinions that they actively thrive if they get any sort of attention. Extreme egocentrics are of that kind.
There is another kind who even jubilate if they are attacked with insults, it gives them an excuse to spit out their bile at people and humiliate them…(thinking of one in particular…).
Fighting ideas intellectually is all very well, but even Ghandi, Luther King, and Mandela fought people occasionally. And if they did not use insults, they certainly exposed their personal hypocrisies, their nasty deeds, their personal corruption. People cannot always be dissociated from ideas. They think them, express them, change them into policies.
Cameron’s lazy, weak and greedy personality partly explains his decision to call for a referendum. A personality can cause an idea to become a policy, given the right (wrong in this case) circumstances.
This is just one example, there are many more to be found in History.