Magi, Mentalists and Fools: The Decline of Political Delusion

Posted on December 29, 2007
Filed Under Politics |

Gordon Brown has recently been compared with the Wizard of Oz at the point where he is discovered to be a fraud. The curtain has been pulled and all the magic has leaked out of the illusion, leaving a clumsy operator impotently pulling at the levers of power, cynically observed by those who have lost their credulity.

This could be applied to any other leader, of course, like the snubbed pariah Robert Mugabe or the sidelined and discredited George Bush, each now viewed as paragons of corruption and ineptitude, rather than heroic wielders of power.

It is the same for any leader, as the glamour fades to revulsion and the willing suspension of disbelief gives way to the hardened and jaded analysis of failure. The wishful, almost childish willingness to trust in Tony Blair naturally turned to embittered hatred when he put his faith in himself and his own beliefs at odds with the palpable wishes of his country. He simply broke the spell.

It is this willingness to be enchanted, to be enraptured and seduced which the mass of people bring to the political contract between government and governed. In turn, those who occupy positions of power need to charm and entice their audience and maintain the illusion that the entertainment provided is worth the price.

This is where the process of government is failing, perhaps because the illusionists are simply not up to the tricks needed or perhaps because they are aware that they are becoming ever more superfluous ciphers and one day soon their own game will be up. When the real magicians in the form of business and interest groups are manipulating the politicians like marionettes, how can the politicians be expected to put on a convincing show? When the real seat of power is in Brussels and not Westminster, is not the portrayed exercising of power merely a tacky sham?

People in power are forever pretending to know the wishes of the people. They need to perpetuate this charade to legitimise their actions. The problem is that most politicians have only operated in the bizarre and unreal sphere of politics and have never occupied the place which everyone else would recognise as the real world, so some kind of illusion is needed. They therefore rely on things like focus groups, which they think will allow them to pry into the minds of average or ordinary people. It may be apocryphal, but one such focus group was said to be pulled from a seemingly random selection of people in a shopping centre. Apart from the fact that the circus was in town that day, so policy was possibly made by jugglers, fire-eaters and acrobats. Politicians do not know what anyone thinks, but they will try to sell you ideas like a fairground hawker if there is money to be made or an election to be won.

When the conjurors become clumsy butterfingers and end up actually sawing the lady in half, it is time for the fools to step in. The fool was traditionally allowed to tell the king home truths about his royal inadequacies which were denied to other commoners or courtiers. He may have teetered on a tightrope of opposing truthfulness or sycophancy, but at least he had the expectation of being heard. It is this facility of being heard which now needs to be signalled to the politicians who seem to be engaged in an act of their own trickery and delusion, where they seem to be floating away from the constraints of reality and responsibilities of office. The voice of everyone can now be listened to as a muffled uproar, hissing and fizzing in every media, but forever inarticulate, fading and forgotten. Huckster politicians still make declamations which resonate from the centre of the stage. The rest of us are like children at a pantomime, shouting “It’s behind you!” to the pretended befuddlement of the star turn and with us much chance of changing the predetermined outcome of the show.

If politicians want to remain believable, they have to be more adroit at pulling the wool over our eyes. They have to stop pretending to be truthful because their lies will keep finding them out. They have to reinstate the contract between the trickster and the fooled in such a way that the duped viscerally feel they are getting a good deal, even when they intellectually know they are not. People do not really believe in magic: they just want to be allowed to pretend. In order to facilitate this, the political classes need to become more aloof and stop pretending to be everyone’s best mate, everybody’s new pal acquired last night at some drunken bout at the pub.

It is said that politics is showbusiness for unattractive people and the business of government has now become part of the global media onslaught on people’s minds everywhere. Politicians are people in a play, characters from a soap opera, actors in a film or models in an advert. Their soundbites are nothing more than the catchphrase of a comedian, a company slogan or a garbled axiom.

If we want to be left alone in peace, we have to pretend to believe in illusions once again. We have to clap and cheer the political classes and tell them their tricks are wonderful. Say we did not see the clumsy sleight of hand, the obviously palmed card, the plant in the audience. It is only when we voice our suspicions that the act is fixed that they will keep insisting otherwise and legislate to enforce our belief, probably under pain of torture and death.

Let’s just go back willingly to the good old days of mutual unconditional assent and separation from known reality. Just close your eyes, click your heels and believe.

Just before Dorothy leaves the Emerald City, she speaks to the great, the grand Wizard of Oz and asks whether he will leave with her.

“Yes, of course,” replied Oz. “I am tired of being such a humbug. If I should go out of this Palace my people would soon discover I am not a Wizard, and then they would be vexed with me for having deceived them. So I have to stay shut up in these rooms all day, and it gets tiresome. I’d much rather go back to Kansas with you and be in a circus again.”

[I wrote this originally for BlogCritics]

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