Prince of the Cuddlecrats

On the sociology of political nihilism and our recovery from it

‘Her ambition was an extremely distressing condition. She sought power the way a superstitious man might look for a four-leaf clover.’

-Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

One of the most notable features of political commentary as it takes places nowadays is that although we interest ourselves in a certain amount of tittle-tattle with respect of our leaders, and although scandals can still scupper political careers, by and large we behave as though there is no real connection between the personal qualities of leaders and the quality of governance. We do not conduct ourselves as though the temperament and character of politicians is something to which it is worth devoting much serious attention, and instead tend to treat the substance of policy as existing in a separate universe to the qualities of the people who make it.

This is almost a total reversal of how the ancients thought about matters. For Aristotle, say, or Plato, what mattered was making sure the right people were in charge - or that those in charge were educated properly - on the basis that good governance would then largely take care of itself. In those days, there was thought to be no disentangling the quality of policy from the qualities of the policymakers. If you wanted good rule, you needed good rulers, and in many ways it was as simple as that.

This peculiar refusal on our part to engage with the question of what sort of traits we ought to prize in our political leaders causes us to lead ourselves down a lot of blind alleys. In particular, it results in a failure to think clearly about the personal incentives which face those who govern us, and how these might indeed play out in the way in which we are governed. The result of this is what we accept a mode of politics which is to our vast detriment almost as though it is the natural way of things, when in fact it is anything but.

I aim here to elucidate this in reference to a subject which at first blush will strike absolutely nobody as interesting or important - the UK’s Liberal Democrat party. Overseas readers in particular will have to bear with me in respect of this topic. But it will be useful for them to do so, because approaching matters through this lens will prove illuminating. This is because, despite appearances, the Lib Dems and their leader Ed Davey are at the cutting edge of what I think of as political reason in modernity. That they have a snowball’s chance in the Atacama desert of getting into power again is entirely, as I will show, beside the point. Their value is in clarifying for us what modern government is really all about: the practice of governing as a self-perpetuating end in itself, done for the benefit only of those who themselves govern, and seeing no particular value in acting in the national interest except incidentally when doing so would align with the real overarching objective. The result, as the Lib Dems perfectly demonstrate, is a bleak void in which politics is pursued for the sheer sake of politics. Observing this will take us back to our old friend Machiavelli, the ‘teacher of evil’, to explicate things for us and hint at a way out towards something better.

The Third Option

Foreign readers may, I suppose, stand a fighting chance of having heard of the Liberal Democrats (the ‘Lib Dems’). Ostensibly Britain’s ‘third party’,¹ their main claim to fame in recent years was their coalition with the Conservatives during the 2010-2015 period, when they were the junior partners in government. As the Liberal Party they were long ago the Tories’ main rival (they were in government for significant stretches of the 19th century and were in power at the outbreak of WWI) but they were supplanted by Labour in the early-mid 20th century and diminished to a demoralised rump. In the 1980s they merged with the Social Democrats, a Labour splinter group, and repackaged themselves as what we now know of as the Lib Dems. Their fortunes have waxed and waned since then - they’ve tended to have something between 10-50 MPs (out of 650) at any one time and roughly in the region of 10% of the popular vote. Before Parliament dissolved for the current general election campaign they had 15 MPs, but they are poised to have grown a little when the campaign is over.

What constituency, interest, or ideology do the Lib Dems represent? To ask the question is in a sense to commit a category error.² The modern Lib Dems have no point or purpose in the meaning with which one would normally understand a political party to have a point or purpose. Rather, they exist to perform one role alone: to pose as a palatable alternative for people who feel as though, due to prevailing circumstances in their local constituency, a vote for the Tories or Labour would be wasted.

My local area is a classic case in point. The borough in which I live is one of the staunchest Labour-voting areas in the country, and there is almost no conceivable way in which a Conservative candidate could ever be voted in as local MP or even as a member of the borough council. The local Lib Dems therefore position themselves (they put this openly on all their leaflets and posters) as the only realistic other option to voting Labour. And this allows them to make a little headway with people who aren’t tribal Labour supporters, particularly in local government elections. For instance, because I live in one of the ‘posh bits’ of my borough, where people are not tribally predisposed to voting Labour, the local councillors in my ward are all Lib Dems. The converse is true out in the countryside to the north - a rural stronghold of the Tory party, where Labour politicians barely bother campaigning, and the Lib Dems can therefore hoover up voters dissatisfied with the Conservatives.

The party hence inhabits a kind of political lagrange point, hovering in a gravitational mid-range between the two mighty gas giants of British politics, the Tories and Labour, where there is what - to mix my scientific metaphors - biologists would call an ‘evoluntionarily stable strategy’ of triangulation. They are therefore best thought of as a sort of parasite on normal politics – a purely nihilistic presence which exists simply because it can. Where Labour is very strong, they survive as the ‘other option’ for people who don’t want to vote for Labour, and mutatis mutandis for the traditionally Tory-voting parts of the country. They are a kind of epiphenomenon of the tribal way in which the two-party first-past-the-post system has developed across time, rather than a political movement as such - an accident rather than a design.

The Voice of Carers Every Day

The result of this is that the party, definitionally, is an ideological void. It does not seek to win power. Rather, it seeks only to survive. Like an amoeba groping its way through pond scum for edible substances, it moves this way and that at random, putting out feelers, until it latches by happenstance onto a cause which it senses it can squeeze for whatever nutritional value it needs to sustain itself.

When I was a teenager this cause was raising taxes (yes, raising taxes) in order to invest in public services, in a bid to present itself as the party for grown-ups. In 2003 it was being against the Iraq War. Later, briefly, the cause was shrinking the size of the State and supply-side reform. After that it became being against requiring university students to pay fees for their education. In 2016 it became hard-core Europhilia and campaigning against Brexit. Nothing really connects these issues except perhaps that they represent the hobby horses of a particular class - the type of people who are too snooty for Labour but too ‘wet’ for the Tories - whose own opinions and priorities tend to fluctuate with the vagaries of fashion. And so Lib Dem policymaking takes on the aspect of a tombola, with manifesto commitments being pulled out of a hat to a drum roll: ‘This year, our big idea will be…..’

Thus, in 2024, the Lib Dems are going all in on something that is once again completely unrelated to what went before – they are now trying to convince us that they are the party of ‘carers’, i.e., people who look after somebody (usually a relative with a serious health condition or disability of some kind) - I believe the word that is used in most other Anglophone countries is ‘caregiver’.

Visit the party’s website and this has become basically the only message that one can discern. ‘The Liberal Democrats’, it says, ‘will be the voice of carers every day, fighting their corner in Parliament’. Ed Davey, the leader, is billed as ‘a husband, father and carer’ (he has a teenage son with a severe neurological condition). And, we are told, it is his ‘experience of caring’ that motivates Davey’s politics. A Lib Dem government would therefore itself, the website implies, embody the principle of ‘caring’, elevated to a kind of ideology of its own: ‘the story of millions, caring for each other, dealing with tough times, and keeping going with love’. (This drivel is even supplemented by a schmaltzy video, in which Ed attempts to tug our collective heartstrings by – in my view rather distastefully and exploitatively – inviting us to watch him looking after his own son.)

The amoeba, in other words, in its mindless, random gesticulations, has put out a tendril and found something tasty. There are votes, it senses, in this ‘caring’ concept. Something which it can feed on until the next electoral cycle. Something which it can absorb into its amorphous body and suck dry. Something that will make it sound nice and differentiate itself in a crowded political marketplace. Something which will alienate nobody (who could be against the ‘party of carers’ except perhaps a heartless cynic like me?) and which has a reasonable prospect of inducing a segment of the population to swing yellow - enough at any rate to keep the amoeba alive until the next meal comes along.

A Party of Instinct

There is plenty that one could say in criticism of this politicisation of care. But the point to emphasise here - and the point of wider significance - is that the Lib Dems are at the cutting edge of what I have elsewhere referred to, following Foucault, as ‘political reason’, in that they are not a party of principles, belief, or ideology, but rather merely of instinct. Their goal is best understood as being to identify means for their own continued survival as an end in itself - a kind of gesturing towards the exercise of government not out of an interest in governing as such, but rather because a semblance of that interest is necessary for an ongoing existence as a political party.

The chain of causation does not in other words flow from a particular goal, or from a desire to represent a sectional interest, to the creation of policies to realise that vision. It flows the other way round, with the existence of the political party making it necessary to identify goals to achieve, or sectional interests to represent, at any given moment. The overriding objective is the naked self-interest of the party in maintaining itself as a going concern, and everything follows from there. The substance of what is being advocated does not particularly matter except in its instrumental value with respect to getting enough votes to stay on the road.

And so, if this means Ed Davey re-inventing himself as a touchy-feely, warm-hearted ‘carer’ - a Liberal Cuddlecrat - then so be it. Davey is unknown abroad. But political nerds here in Britain will remember his early days, when he was an infamous ‘Orange Book’ neoliberal engaged in very uncuddly endeavours like privatising the Royal Mail. They will also remember his subsequent reinventions as a fire-breathing proponent of stopping Brexit and later a hard-core net-zero environmentalist. Being a prominent proponent of ‘caring’ is then as logical a next step in his career as any other, in that it follows the pattern of there being no particular pattern at all, beyond what is politically expedient within the context of third party positioning at a particular point in time. The point is not belief - the point is rather what appears, here and now, to be a useful cause to be seen to be adopting. At the moment ‘caring’ seems to fit the bill. In 2029, assuming the next general election is around that date and the country is still in one piece (a big assumption), it will be something else again.

Always and Endlessly Governing Afresh

The position of the Lib Dems is almost unique in the political world - they are an artefact of Britain’s bizarre electoral system, which can only realistically tolerate the existence of a binary choice and yet has somehow ended up with a smorgasbard of options for voters. But this very oddness makes them a particularly useful lens through which to look at modern politics in the round, because, as we shall see, that oddness is best understood as a purification and perfection of an aspect that is present amongst all political parties and politicians across the world. The Lib Dems are unusual. But this unusualness derives from the fact that they are at the pinnacle of a movement that is present everywhere to some degree or other.

This takes us, as promised, to Machiavelli. I have previously described Machiavelli, following the Straussian reading of his work, as the founder of modern political philosophy as such. Prior to Machiavelli, political thought was in essence a branch of theological thought. And government was understood in essence as a theological enterprise. Machiavelli, however, recasts it as an independent body of doctrine, and one which does not derive from theology but from personal, human incentives. He was interested not in the ruler’s emulation of God in the administration and enforcement of laws, but in the purely secular question of how the act of ruling itself could be perpetuated across time - how it was that a governing framework could remain secure and maintain (and possibly then also expand) its power.

Machiavelli tells us, right from the outset of The Prince, that there are basically two ways in which this can happen, and hence two essential types of State. It follows that there are by implication two basic frameworks of government, and two basic justifications for governing in modernity. The first of these, famously, is the principality, and the second is the republic. People familiar with the work of Machiavelli - or who have read my previous posts about the subject - will have an idea in mind about that basic dichotomy, and will know that the the principality is a State in which government secures itself by governing effectively in instrumental terms and thus keeping the population pliant and loyal, while the republic is a State in which government is secure because it represents and gives effect to the norms of a people which are considered to be virtuous.

But what I wish to emphasise here, and what is often I think overlooked, is that for all that the dichotomy between principality and republic is important, Machiavelli almost exclusively focuses on a particular type of principality: that in which the prince comes to power afresh, rather than having inherited his status. This was simply because ‘it is in the new principality that difficulties arise’. It is really when a new prince comes to power, whether through force or fortune, that he has to think seriously about how to make sure the population remains loyal. And it is therefore really only the new prince who has to have a strategy for ongoing survival.

The real distinction at the heart of Machiavelli’s thought, and the matter which he was chiefly interested in, was not then the difference between republics and principalities as such. It was rather between on the one hand the republic, in which the State represents a virtuous people, and on the other the ‘new’ principality - a situation in which the ruler must provide a justification as to why he personally should be in charge, in the absence of some other prima facie claim (such as having inherited the position as a monarch).

I emphasise this for two reasons. The first is that it to a certain extent recasts the question as a sociological (or even anthropological) one. If a prince must justify his own position through reference to secular reason, then we must become interested in the sociological question of what justifications will be taken to be good ones by those who are governed. That is point one. The second point is that it liberates us from thinking of the principality as, strictly speaking, a one-man endeavour: a kingdom. It allows us to understand ‘princely rule’ as institutional. It is a mode of governance which derives its justifications, and which is indeed forced to justify itself, on the basis that it is not inherited, and has not simply always been there, but is a perpetual blank slate. And governance in this mode is therefore a kind of ongoing, unceasing, series of justifications as to why it should be perpetual – why it should always and endlessly, as it were, exist afresh.

This means that ‘princely rule’ is best understood as a mode of governance which must continually reflect on its own position, and continually justify its position, at any given moment. In this sense it is – and I use the word advisedly – progressive. Bernard Crick, who was a very deep reader of Machiavelli, brings home this point very forcefully when he remarks (almost offhandedly in his comments on the Discourses on Livy) that the reason why growth in GDP is a matter of concern for modern States is simply a feature of their princely tendencies. A governing framework which is seen to be promoting economic growth is one which is deeply engaged in the ongoing project of justifying its existence. And this is so institutionally and, of course, personally in the sense that many politicians and civil servants derive their status from remaining in power or having good jobs, and justify their remaining in power or having gainful employment through reference to the notion that they are in some sense ‘in charge’ of metrics like GDP growth.

The exercise of modern government in its princely mode, then, can be understood as a perpetually shifting programme of tinkering and reform. Nothing must ever stand still, and government must never be satisfied, because it is always and necessarily insecure. It cannot point to divine right to justify its existence (this goes without saying in modernity) but nor can it point so some other intrinsic source of legitimacy such as blood or natural talent or inherited status. It can only point to the fact that it, precisely, governs: it acts upon the world and makes it in some way better. Government itself in this mode is purely recursive, and self-perpetuating; government is driven to govern more and more for no purpose other than that governing is what it does - in order that it can go on governing in perpetuity.

And this is both institutional and personal. It is how the project of government as such sustains itself, but it is also how all of the bits and pieces of a governing framework - political parties, civil service departments, quangos, regulators, etc. - sustain themselves. Moreover, it is also how the very individuals who are employed within that framework are sustained: i.e, through a discourse in which they construct their own role and status as being necessary because it is connected with the exercise of government.

For Machiavelli, then, the distinction between republic and principality is defined not so much on the basis of representative versus personal rule, but rather on the basis that there are governments which have intrinsic legitimacy and governments which must constantly make a claim to be legitimate deriving from the very fact that they govern. In the former mode, the governing framework is secure because its basic role is to enshrine, and enforce, the norms of the populace as law. In the latter, it is secure because it is always doing something new for the purported benefit of the population. And by extension, of course, where republican rule is almost static (its character changes slowly in response to gradual shifts in the population’s norms), princely rule is always relentlessly expanding its horizons to as to find new reasons to govern and hence to exist.

Pure Political Virtuosity

This obviously puts the efforts of the Lib Dems - and, by extension, all modern political parties - to continuously reinvent new ways of governing, and new fields of government, into perspective. Following Machiavelli, modern political parties can in essence set out two different stalls to voters. The basic pitch can be either:

a) We will govern on the basis that we think society can largely be left to its own devices, and we will therefore concentrate on making and enforcing laws which represent the population’s virtues (i.e. to emphasise the republican mode);

or,

b) We will govern on the basis that it is necessary and beneficial that we govern, since the population cannot govern itself, and we will therefore do X, Y and Z, not to mention A, B and C (i.e., to emphasise the princely mode).

In reality, political parties will to a greater or lesser extent represent a mixture of these two ideals, but in modernity we see a gradual creeping towards position b), driven inexorably by a gradual abandonment of the idea that there is anything that is beyond the project of governing the world itself. And the Lib Dems are at the forefront of this movement, as we have seen, because they have so completely embraced the nihilism which is at the heart of that position - wherein government is reduced to a mere series of promises to do yet more, whatever those things might be, in the interests only of presenting a plausible justification for continuing ever onwards.

In their case the nihilism is complete because it is so evidently self-interested; lacking any realistic prospect of ever winning an election outright, the Lib Dems are reduced to a vacuous aping of what a governing party might actually promise if it were serious about ruling. Like any trained monkey, their capering mimicry is all the more exaggerated for all that it lacks substantive content. But this absolute emptiness makes it possible to see with much greater clarity what is actually going on, and therefore to see the Liberal Democrat party for what it is: a microcosm what is true across the piece politically in the developed world, where government increasingly is practiced simply for the sake of governing, and in the interests of those who govern.

It seems strange to label the antics of modern politicians (and it is fitting that Davey’s general election campaign so far has chiefly consisted of attention-seeking stunts) as acts of political virtuosity. But this is the label that Bernard Crick used when describing this mindset, and the label is appropriate if we agree with Machiavelli’s analysis that to transform a republic into a principality - to govern effectively as a prince - was indeed political virtuosity’s absolute pinnacle. To take a largely self-governing society and to transform it into something which thinks of itself as incapable of self-government, and therefore requiring of your government, is what the act of governing as a prince is all about. And that is largely the exercise which our rulers have embarked upon: turning government to personal ends such that it works in their own interests and sustains them. While Ed Davey’s Lib Dems can hardly be said to be playing a major role in this process, they nevertheless symbolise it, in the flagrantly self-interested way in which their pursuit of politics is carried out.

And in this regard, of course, the shift in focus to ‘caring’ is itself also emblematic, in that it opens up such an elementary aspect of the human character - the fact that we care for and look after each other - to yet more government intervention, and hence yet more justification for government’s growth. That the Lib Dems will never be in a position to realise their vision in this regard is beside the point; what matters is the fact that, in their frivolous pantomime of what government looks like, it is precisely the princely mode which they most perfectly instantiate. The aim of the game is to keep on going - nothing more and nothing less than this - and this is the only reason why the party ultimately exists.

The Prince’s End

Our interest, then, as people who care about the future of the West, needs to become once more the subject which we have largely abandoned: the temperament of those we appoint to rule us. It seems self-evident that this has to come about through the way in which people are educated - starting from a very young age, and running through into the universities, properly reconstituted. Recognising that this is the case is of course much easier than achieving it. But recognition is the necessary first stage in any process of renewal.

Those of us who do care, then, need to get serious about precisely that project. And here it is worth returning briefly, as a sort of coda to these observations, to Machiavelli. As Niccolò himself puts it in one of the titles to his Discourses (Discourse 1 of Book Three), ‘In order that a religious institution or a State should long survive it is essential that it should frequently be restored to its original principles’. Thinking deeply and carefully about the elucidation of those original principles, then, is the obvious starting point in the process of our restoration. We need, in short, to go back - way back - before we can take those principles forward. Time is against us in respect of this task; the hour is late. But we have in our favour the deeply unattractive nature of the nihilistic void that awaits us if we fail, as is evidenced by the appalling spectacle that our politics has become, and as is rapidly becoming more evident to the population at large as the consequences of princely rule play out. In this respect too, Ed Davey and the Lib Dems’ symbolism is useful.

1. In recent years the Scottish National Party has had many more MPs than the Lib Dems, but it does not field candidates across the whole country - only in Scotland.

2. The old Liberal Party was a repository for nonconformist votes in the 19th century and I am given to understand that there remain traces of this heritage in the voting patterns in some parts of the country, such as the South West of England and the Scottish Highlands.