I have come to appreciate David Runciman as a thinker and writer (his book The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present is really good), but even moreso as a podcaster; the podcast he sort of emcees, Talking Politics, is a pretty reliable must-listen for me, at least right now, because of Brexit; but it's also taught me a great deal about how British people argue and disagree. They do so in a way, and at a pitch frequency, barely audible to American ears. But if you listen long enough, even a clueless American can begin to hear it.
Anyway, this piece from The London Review of Books is Runciman's politico-psycho-analysis of David Cameron and the run-up to the Brexit referendum. Because I suspect the Brexit referendum will turn out to be a more consequential vote for the world than the vote that put Donald Trump in power--and certainly damaging to the UK in a way that Trump is unlikely to be for the US--and I think Runciman among the most astute analysts of British politics that I know, this is very much worth reading, both as a piece of medium-term political journalism and for its more perennial thoughts on the nature of politics.
Runciman's brief (and fairly negative, I think it fair to say) discussion of the political ineptitude of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg suggests that he (Runciman) has been reading his Weber lately, and that he suspects someone else (Clegg) never has. (Of course since the 2015 campaign and Brexit in 2016, Clegg has decamped for Silicon valley, where his utopianism may meet more fertile potting soil, and a more dangerous long-term impact.)
But the real interest of the piece comes from its interesting analysis of Cameron as a politician, and as a leader:
He was a many-faced politician, leading a many-faced party at the head of a many-faced government, which meant he was particularly well suited to keeping the show on the road. He knows this about himself. He says he was never the stand-out among his Conservative contemporaries at any particular aspect of the political arts: not as astute as Osborne; not as far-sighted about the need for change as Michael Portillo; not as oratorically gifted as Hague. But he was enough of all these things to be the one true leader among them. It is also striking that for someone who is so keen to divide the world in two, he recognised that his style of political leadership was anything but binary. He calls himself, with only a hint of vanity, a ‘political decathlete'…
In many ways the oddity is that Cameron managed to retain his non-binary view of politics when he had such a binary view of other people. And it’s not just his fellow politicians that he sorts into team players and the rest – it’s society as a whole. He talks repeatedly about British society being broken and of the need he felt to fix it. When riots broke out across England in the summer of 2011 he says it confirmed him in his view that this is a ‘broken society’, something he claims his Lib Dem partners in coalition were too ‘squeamish’ to admit. This is absurd: if politics can be multifaceted then so too can everything else. Society does not have to be either broken or fixed: it can be both and it can be neither.
In the end, Runciman thinks, it is precisely his inability to stop thinking he needed to think in either/or ways that encouraged him to design the Brexit referendum as an either/or choice. As he says at the end of the review, "why on earth did he turn British politics into just another either/or question? It was a crazy thing to do, and it has left politics looking broken."
On a first careful reading, the only word in the review I might dissent from is the second from the end in that last passage, right there. Read this piece and then read Weber's wonderful essay "Politics as a calling" (which is coming out in a new translation soon in a pretty volume from NYRB, edited in part by a friend of mine, Chad Wellmon), and be informed.
Incidentally, if you want a larger discussion of Cameron and the referendum, listen to Runciman talking with Helen Thompson, his colleague on Talking Politics, about the LRB piece and HT's alternate take on Cameron. Like all episodes of TP, it's worth it.
Happy Saturday.