But She's Got High Hopes

High apple pie in the sky hopes

You can hope against hope
That nothing will change
Grab a hold of that fistful of rain

Warren Zevon

I don’t know if it is politically correct these days to refer to somebody as the tallest dwarf in the circus. But if that expression ever fit anybody, it is Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election. To explain, for foreign readers: Andy Burnham is a purportedly nice bloke, who would probably be a decent geography teacher in a secondary school and dresses like it, but through sheer inoffensiveness managed to worm his way into the middle-ranks of Gordon Brown’s government. Having failed to defeat Jeremy Corbyn in a bid to become leader of the Labour Party, he then was given a sinecure as Mayor of Manchester, where his job has been to bung money at pet projects. With Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership teetering and replacements circulating, Burnham would like to make a move to become PM. But he needs to become a Member of Parliament for that, and is therefore participating in a Parliamentary by-election in order to leap through the first hoop that will take him to his final destination as King of the Clowns.

I attempted to watch an episode of Question Time last week in which Burnham and the other candidates in said by-election stomped on each other’s oversized shoe, sprayed each other with water out of flowers in their lapels, honked klaxons in each other’s general direction, and threw custard pies. Question Time in ordinary circumtances is bad enough - I stopped watching it in 2016 when I realised I would rather be tortured by Le Chiffre than endure an hour of such bickering - but this was something else. The average episode of Question Time feels like being stuck in a lift with the five finalists in a competition to be the Worst Person in the World. This was different; most of the people involved were not malign, and came across indeed as entirely well-meaning. But it was a farce - an exercise in sheer narrative construction in which the BBC pulled out all the stops in order to portray Andy Burnham, Gordon Brown’s YTS kid, as a plausible Prime Minister-in-waiting, and Robert Kenyon, the Reform candidate, as a neanderthal lunatic.

Just watch the first five minutes, if you are based in the UK, and listen to Fiona Bruce’s line of questioning: ‘How, Andy Burnham, can we restore trust in politics? What will you do as Prime Minister, since we all know that you are running and that you are Sir Keir Starmer’s natural successor? That’s very interesting, thanks. And now, turning to you, Robert, why do you hate women?’ I only very slightly paraphrase.

I like women very much, but I do have to say that there was one genuinely malign figure on the panel, who happened to be the only female: Sarah Wakefield, whose tagline is ‘Don’t vote in anger, vote in hope.’ This is in line with the Green Party’s central message, which is ‘Let’s make hope normal again.’

There is much to be said about the use of the word hope in the modern left; one is reminded very strongly of the quote-unquote, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, ‘non-partisan’ campaigning group Hope Not Hate, which also co-opts the word in a vaguely nausea-inducing way, and which is very much in on the action when it comes to making an example of anybody who has the temerity to stand for Reform. And ultimately one obviously thinks of Barack Obama, who would seem to be the wellspring of ‘hope-ism’ in the current era. Why has ‘hope’ taken on such significance for the contemporary left, though, and what does it mean?

The deployment of the word seems properly labelled as politico-theological. Hope is something that Christians are called to do - it is a concept that is imbued with religious significance that retains a cultural resonance. This, of course, gives its secular use an (entirely unjustified) moral heft. And that usage also gestures towards a sort of utopian, end-of-the-rainbow-ism; it purports to draw everybody’s gaze in the same direction, and to fix it on the same object.

This has three consequences which are write large across leftist rhetoric in the current moment. First, hope pacifies. We all want something to hope for, don’t we? Who could be against hope? But secularised hope is passive, not empowering. The point of hope is that it is not outcome-dependent. Hope is a stance one adopts in the face of evidence, and that is indeed the essence of it. One does not hope foolishly, knowing that what one hopes for will never be attained. But one hopes in expectation of divine assistance. This is why hope is the cousin of faith, and that is the source of its beauty in the religious context. But in the political realm it is stultifying: nothing, the message goes, can be attained or achieved without us, your divine benefactors. Live in hope; trust in our assistance. Do not for one second imagine you can succeed with your own resources. Your duty is to set your store in us - whatever the evidence before your eyes suggests.

Second, it accuses. Implicit in the use of the word ‘hope’ is the insinuation that if one is not hoping then one is committing a sin - the sin of despair. If one does not hope then one is, indirectly, calling into question the power and trustworthiness of the one in whom one properly hopes. One is impugning his character by suggesting that he is not faithful. And therefore one is setting oneself apart as one who not only sins, but rejects right order.

This is worse than doubt, because one can still hope in the face of doubt (doubt is even, you might say, the ontological condition of hope - we hope precisely because there is doubt). Despair is deliberate: it is a choice to rely on oneself and one’s own resources alone. Judas is the ultimate figure of despair, not because he betrayed Jesus, but because, after having recognised his wrong and atoning for it, he went ahead and committed suicide all the same. He took his own fate into his own hands, and thus abandoned hope. This is what truly condemned him. Hence secularised or politicised hope carries the same message of condemnation for despair: one must recognise and atone for one’s sins (capitalism, whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, etc.), but one must then put one’s trust in political power to provide the remedy - with the State (and the expert who advise it) existing precisely to achieve this.

Third, hope is future-oriented. To hope is to long for something that one does not currently possess. One looks to what is above, and beyond. And in this sense the practice is also transformative. Therefore, although politicised hope is passive in the way I have just described, it is not exactly to be labelled conservative. It is inherently about change. Living in hope means looking to a future which is potential and which definitionally has not yet actualised. It postulates sunlit uplands. And it is therefore, by necessity, dissatisfied with what Oakeshott would call ‘present laughter’, preferring ‘utopian bliss’.

I think I hardly need to spell out how these three characteristics - passivity, accusation and future-orientation - play out in current leftist discourse, but I wanted in particular to draw attention to this short clip from the Question Time episode under discussion, which has been widely shared (I first came across it thank to the ever-brilliant Chris Bray - a ‘hard recommend’, by the way):

You almost have to watch the clip in a gap between your fingers, because the spectacle of a purportedly intelligent and educated woman saying such self-evidently stupid things, and in such an obnoxiously patronising way, is so excruciating. (Just listen to the condescension toward this working class oik that drips from her voice when she turns to the audience to sarcastically comment, ‘He’s really good at explaining things, isn’t he?’)

But let’s set to one side the fact that Wakefield simply cannot address the perfectly obvious point being made (that the more people there are who come to a country the more houses will need to be built). Let’s also set to one side the fact that she would sooner deflect attention by giving Andy Burham an opportunity to respond on her behalf than actually say what she thinks. And let’s also set aside the fact that she makes herself look like - I am anxious not to use unnecessarily inflammatory or denigrating language - an idiot. Let’s instead focus on the very important ‘tell’ in her closing comment:

Whoever lives in this country has an impact on housing. Of course… The numbers of people in a country. That’s not necessarily to do with immigration [emphasis added].

There is a saying, attributed to Maya Angelou, which goes, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time’. It is not always a great heuristic, but it has its merits when parsing the behaviour of others. And it is a useful one to apply here too. Because what Wakefield says tells us an awful lot about what she is actually hoping for - you can practically see her pointing to the spade and calling it one at the top of her voice - and, by extension, what kind of person she is and what she believes. The number of people who live in a country, let’s repeat, have an impact on housing, but that’s not necessarily to do with immigration. It could just be you, in other words - the people who were born here. Maybe you’re having an impact on housing, too.

Now, you can see two thought-processes playing out here. The first is a reflex - the bitter, unkind reflex of somebody who has just been bested in a debate and made to look like a fool by somebody who one considers to be one’s social and intellectual inferior - and it goes something like this: maybe it would better, all thing considered, if the likes of you and your ilk, Robert Kenyon, just went and crawled under a rock and died. That would be a nice way to reduce the pressure on housing in the local area, wouldn’t it?

But the second thought-process is obviously more important. Wakefield genuinely does not see, or accept, that there is a difference in entitlement between the people who were born in a country and the people who come to it later on. She does not even see a difference in entitlement between the people who are already citizens of a country, even if they weren’t born there, and the people who come to it later on. To her, it’s all just numbers. Residents, citizens, natives, immigrants. They all put pressure on housing. They are all, in that respect, the same thing: in the same way that all lego figures take up the same amount of space in the box, all human beings need the same amount of housing. So where’s the beef?

The vision of the future that occupies her mind is obvious - open borders. She wants to live in a world in which there is no meaningful distinction between immigrants and non-immigrants, because everybody is interchangeable to begin with. I don’t need to belabour that point (a few years ago a policy document was leaked proclaiming that ‘The Green Party wants to see a world without borders’ but that more modest aims had to be pursued in the short-term due to open borders being a ‘tough sell on doorsteps’). What instead I want to draw attention to is the way that hope is operationalised, or indeed weaponised, in the service of that vision.

In the first place, you will have noticed how pacifying Wakefield’s position is. The implicit message is that everything is just going to happen as ordained (she makes a point of saying that in her view closing borders absolutely will not make a difference to pressure in housing) and that therefore there is no point in resisting it or agitating against it. The best thing to do is just trust the experts - those who get it - to ensure that it all happens in such a way that enough houses are built, that everybody integrates, and that all is tickety-boo. Just vote for us and we’ll do the rest.

Second, you will also notice how it veils quite vicious condemnation. Sarcasm (‘He’s really good at explaining things, isn’t he?’) is indirect aggression. And Wakefield clearly does not just think Kenyon is wrong - the antipathy is visceral. In part, this is a feature of class relations in Britain: the hereditary middle-classes hate nothing more than a working class person who they feel to be uppity. But a special place in hell is clearly being reserved for Kenyon and those, like him, who counsel despair in the sense which I earlier described it. Remember, to hope is to put one’s trust in those who know best; to despair is to fail to give sufficient trust, and to instead to think for oneself. Those who question the proper repository of hope are undermining it, and calling its authority into question. This is intolerable to those who purport to possess such authority - to not be hopeful is interpreted by them not as a mere failing or character defect, but a sin.

Third, there is the metaphysical aspect to Wakefield’s position. Here is a future, she implies: the future in which distinctions between countries, and between people, are immaterial. That is what you must fix your eyes upon. And that is what we can make present - we, the Green Party, can, if we try very hard, actualise what is potential. If you vote for us, all of your wildest dreams will come true; that utopia, the utopia which you presumptively hope for (lest you, remember, be guilty of despair) can and will be made real. The Afghan will lie down with the Somali, the Union Jacks will be beaten into ploughshares, and with our divine assistance this dearly longed-for hope will come to fruition.

As I have said before (and I am hardly the first person to make this point) a great deal of secular political thought appears almost parasitic on underlying patterns that are religious in origin. In modernity, as our old friend Carl Schmitt put it, ‘the omnipotent god [has] became the omnipotent lawgiver’ and the ‘systematic structure’ of our understanding of the state is therefore founded on ‘secularised theological concepts’. It is probably no accident that this is most visible in the most atheistic segment of society - the bourgeois left - and it can be seen in many other fields than merely in attitudes towards hope, of course. But it is in the deployment of similarly religiously inflected terms - hope, faith, guilt, shame - that we see it most clearly.

Wakefield will not win. But the pattern of thinking which motivates her is common in the political and, really, university-educated classes. What lies at the bottom of it is the confusion of hope with optimism. Hope is for the human soul. Optimism - the belief that things can be made better by doing x, y or z - is the stuff of human action. That we have the two confused is a symptom of a much deeper and broader malaise - that we have simply replaced one actual clerisy with another, fake, one, and have lost the capacity to distinguish between what is properly for politicians to do and what is, appropriately, not. In turn we do not recognise that when we discuss what to do in the real world, we invoke an inchoate understanding of the human soul which subconsciously retains its spiritual import (every individual does matter in the same way, in spiritual terms) but without a concept of the spiritual as such and without a way of thinking through where spirituality should be relevant and where it shouldn’t. This is a strange position for a society to be in, and it would be unwise to expect it to be stable.