I have never had anything to say about Elon Musk. In our house he is called ‘Ellen Musk’ – nothing to do with Ellen Degeneres or Ellen/Elliot Page (which would, I admit, be controversial) – but simply because our eldest son, who is fond of saying ‘I pronounce it like this’ when everyone pronounces it another way, originally pronounced the name ‘Ellen’. In other words, he is susceptible to the sorts of ‘mind virus’ which are just a normal part of being the son of a father prone to facetious remarks.
But perhaps Elon Musk does deserve credit for something besides being the richest man in the world. I was not very interested in the phrase “two-tier policing’”, but I found the phrase “two-tier-Keir” very amusing. (Musk did not invent it: but he has exploded it.) It is amusing because of the rhyme: nothing can come between an English speaker and his appreciation for a bit of casual rhyme, especially in a doublet. But also the phrase forces us to spell the name ‘Keir’ correctly (as the Guardian failed to do shortly after the election: I am sure I saw ‘Kier’ there, though I did not make a note of the exact article). In addition, it has brought to our attention the possibility that the police in England are rainbow-complacent about protected ideologies like Black Lives Matter and Antifa and Just Stop Oil but rather truncheon-brutal about unprotected ideologies like Nazism and, er, the Liberties of the Englishman. About this, all I will say is that there is no particular reason for us to be shocked that accepted ideologies, even when expressed vulgarly or violently, are policed in a different way to unaccepted ideologies – even if these include old pagan, tribal and religious ideologies which one might have thought have deserved some respect since they have been here for a thousand years.
The point here, however, is that the phrase “two-tier-Kier” illustrates one of my favourite dicta: the dictum that “Two is the political number par excellence”.
Anyone who seeks to analyse politics must continually reflect on twos, and the evident failure of the number two to resolve easily into the number one.
The number one is what everyone wants. A system, with me in power – one king, one law, one word, one truth, one taste, etc. – and no argument, no opposition, no rivalry, no dispute. It is what Charlemagne wanted, and Napoleon – but it is what all politicians want, even the ones who are forced by circumstances to prate about diversity. It is what Sadiq Khan wants. God is great, Diversity is great, and Khan surely fits in a treat in the middle somewhere. It is what Nicole Sturgeon wanted: Scotland the Slave. It is what Boris Johnson wanted: an Eton mess of conformity with a Boris-shaped strawberry on top.
The number two is what we get. Opposition. Difficulty. Something else. An argument. A brother. A rival. A usurper. Prime Minister’s Questions. Gove on manoeuvres. Trouble. Fate. The thing Machiavelli called the goddess Fortuna. Bad luck. Failure. (“Every politician’s life ends in failure”: Enoch Powell, on Joseph Chamberlain, and himself, of course.) And as we struggle to impose ourselves on those who engage in dispute or disagree with us, we find that we may have to use force, or some other form of power: controlling the agenda, say, or actually injecting one’s ideas into the heads of others so that they think they want various things (Net Zero, etc.) when in fact they don’t. In a world of twos, the politician, though he hopes for one, has to fight: and he has to lie: since along with force goes fraud.
Here is where we get the litany: the coups d’état by state against people which I wrote about in an earlier piece, also Goebbels or Hancock type propaganda, and, of course, ‘nudge’.
The entire established and educated system which rules over us is continually drawn into a cognitive dissonance. This dissonance is:
- Politicians are the guardians of a system and have to prevent force and fraud within that system.
- Politicians, in order to do this, have to engage in force and fraud.
I am making a general point.
At this specific moment we have two sorts of serious claim. The first is the position of Starmer, the BBC, the Guardian, The Rest is Politics, etc. all complaining about how “far-right thuggery” is spreading through “disinformation”. This is probably true, at some level, but is emphasised as if it is a sole cause when it is in fact merely one detail in a greater and more complicated story. The second position, therefore, is the one which recognises a greater and more complicated story. Here we have the responsible commentariat who are saying “Well, this misdescribes the situation”, including Ross Clark in the Spectator. Here we try to establish what the actual problems are (as if they have been caused by government policy over decades), and how they are being deflected and distorted by social media, if anything. (This is where we have the interesting point, emphasised by Tucker, that the Establishment tries to generate a moral consensus against a not-quite-existing-enemy by creating via “controlled spontaneity” a loud and noisy opposition to that enemy.)
I, too, think that the government and Establishment are irresponsible. But against this I have to insist on the general point, especially since I don’t see it said very often. This is that, “The government is engaging in misinformation.” And further: “It has to: it is an inevitable part of government that it misleads the people.” (I would not say a priori, “necessary”, though this may be the case; but certainly I think we can say a posteriori, “inevitable”. In other words, it might not always be the case, but it certainly has always been the case.) No government has ever existed which has not attempted to limit the information available to its subjects. No politicians have ever entirely escaped the temptation of the belief that the people cannot handle the truth. No people, therefore, has entirely escaped the tendency to distrust government and even believe in conspiracies about it. We sometimes think ‘conspiracy theory’ is something new: well, we only named it because it came as a shock to those of us who had fallen for the enlightened discourse of ‘democracy’ (almost all of us) that our new shiny political orders were as corrupt as any older ones.
Keir is two-tier. Of course he is. He is a politician. He has to be two-tier. On one tier, the insiders, and the rivals. On another tier, the outsiders, the audience, the population. It is awkward nowadays to separate the two tiers because of the alternative media which has slipped the Leviathanic leash and keeps trying to tell each side the truth about the other. But the two still exist, and still exist in a heavily conventionalised system of separation which is not the less separated for being continually talked on both sides about as if it isn’t. On the second tier we have the claim that Keir is concerned with law and order, harmony: this is a world in which some supposed ‘we’ is innocent and unpolitical and simply good Englishmen and women going about their law-abiding business. But back on the first tier we have the political Keir, using the discourse of neutrality and law-abidingness to benefit his allies and do down his enemies, which include his Machiavellian rivals operating within the system but also the innocents like Mr. Dick (from David Copperfield) or Aloysha (from Brothers Karamazov) or Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust) – that’s you and me – who form the demos and operate outside the governmental system of elites, experts and time-servers and yet exist within the greater system guided by the government. Any politician has two sets of enemies, or opponents, or antagonists: one is explicit, the rival politicians; the other is implicit, the entire mass of the people. Most politicians find that they pay too much attention to one, and lose all sense of the other. By and large, ‘populists’ are simply the politicians who pay attention to the people. The other lot, whatever we want to call them – constitutionalists, I call them – are the politicians who pay attention to their rivals and the system within which they live with their rivals.
I keep saying and will doubtless keep saying – I think the point worth repeating for the edification of everyone – that politics is always duplicitous, for one, innocent, reason: and this is because everything exists on two tiers at once. Keir is a good man, safe pair of hands, respectable figure, has the interest of the nation at heart, etc.; but he is also a one-eyed and one-handed exhibit of the will-to-power, shaking his spear at his enemies and sticking a dagger through the arras at his friends. Everything in politics is two-tone, two-tier. Everything in politics is on stage and off stage – all at once. Every politician comes off stage at times. But not in front of the audience. The fourth wall is broken, occasionally, but is mostly respected. Politicians speak in a ‘political’ way in front of an audience; and this political style of speech is bland, accommodating, inclusive, and then they speak in another ‘political’ way backstage, in front of rivals and allies, and this is more obviously edged with poison, or expressed in swordplay (or knife crime, as we should say nowadays), where the blade is sometimes turned outwards, sometimes inwards. And, more than this, every utterance exists both as a signal to the bewildered audience and as a signal to rivals and allies. At both levels it is political, but political in a different way: pompous and pretentious and studiedly neutral in one, not-coming-off-it-at-all, ‘on guard’, actorly, even, while in the other it is deliberately and sometimes fraudulently confessional, but requiring a much subtler, more believable, less RADA style of acting, in order to sound coming-off-it while certainly never entirely coming-off-it. It is all very Hamlet, play-within-a-play stuff. And everything is politics. Everything is the play. But the play is not one simple thing.
Is this clear? Politicians speak on two tiers. But everything they say is heard on both tiers. And on each tier it has a different signification. All political analysis begins with acquiring a sense of this. Most journalism is simply responding to one aspect of any particular exhibition of this fundamental property of the political system.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
