It was John Stuart Mill who is supposed to have first called the Tories ‘the stupid party’; a reputation they seem to be intent on living up (or down) to today. This is not a partisan point, or intended to be; I’ve never characterised those with political views I don’t share as necessarily ‘stupid’, and indeed regard ‘stupidity’ as pretty evenly distributed among all parties at most times. The present-day British Conservative party, however, is beginning to look as though it is taking on the label as a badge of honour; maybe to distinguish it from the ‘experts’ whom Michael Gove so memorably rubbished around 2020 (when they were predicting that Brexit would make us worse off), and from the over-educated ‘élitists’ who are seen as looking down their noses at ordinary folk.
This is why we of the ‘intelligentsia’ (I suppose I must be one of them) need to be careful before calling out the objective stupidity (surely) of men like Lee Anderson, the new Tory MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, and recently appointed deputy Chair of the Conservative Party; when he recently made the astonishing claim that ‘Britain invented everything that’s good in this world’. That came soon after his other notorious assertion: that there was no need for food banks, because anyone with any nous could prepare a nutritious meal from scratch for 30 pence. Hence his current nickname: ‘30p Lee’.
I can’t say whether these statements are proof of genuine stupidity; or of simple ignorance, which is not necessarily the same thing; or (thirdly) of deliberate falsehood, in order to encourage what Anderson would regard as British ‘patriotism’ in his potential voters. But they certainly fit with the current trend not only in British politics, but also worldwide, of disregarding truth and logic in favour of assertions that might carry warmer feelings in those you want to persuade. It’s all part of the new ‘post-truth’ era, associated nowadays with ex-President Trump, but with much older and deeper roots, and a broader appeal, especially to a certain kind of democrat. ‘I’m a free American, and can believe anything I like’, as I heard a contributor to a phone-in programme declare on US radio a few years ago. (He’d been caught out on an obvious falsity.) Arguments are weapons, nothing more; and don’t need to be true or even credible to be effective.
I’d like to think that the recent fashion for ‘postmodern’ relativism – the bane of my scholarly life – is partly responsible for this; but I doubt whether 30p Lee has read any Foucault or Derrida. The solution must lie in education; and education in rational thinking – logic – above all. And perhaps we ‘élitists’ should be less nervous of calling out stupidity, when it’s obvious.
Porter’s Pensées 
Whilst I loathe Michael Gove, he was actually right about “experts”.
We have numerous recent examples;
abolition of boom and bust…leading to bust
opening the UK’s borders won’t lead to mass immigration…it has
lockdown to protect against covid…it certainly didn’t protect those actually at risk
the mRNA vaccine is safe…it probably isn’t ( yes, the jury is out on that one but evidence is mounting)
the Bank of England’s (and ECB) “inflation will be temporary” ..it isn’t and won’t be (print money, get inflation is surely a universal experience) but it certainly benefits the wealthy
I suppose the difficulty is one of definition. Expertise in the scientific field is provable; in any other it is merely an opinion.
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Another thing this post brings to mind is the role of left-of-centre academia in all this.
I always thought that one of Marxism’s (many) problems was that its extensive jargon was rather, erm, alienating to all except its sectarians. Postmodern and postcolonial theories, whatever the value of their insights, seem to suffer from a similar affliction.
The opacity of some of this type of writing is such that academics can disagree over what Foucault’s attitude to objective truth was and one of the key postcolonial texts is supposed to have been based on a misreading of Foucault; though maybe the likes of Foucault and Derrida wouldn’t actually care, given their views on authors and readings.
Of course, none of this means that postmodernists are responsible for Lee Anderson’s idiocies, as Bernard recognises. But it does mean that some academics on the left speak a different language to their fellow citizens. True, many students acquire it, but then they have to. Does this mean that history has to be purely empirical and atheoretical? I don’t think so; old dinosaurs like Max Weber were able to expound theory with clarity and minimal jargon, and the best postcolonial historians adopt the same strategy. Even so, academic standing is more often associated with dense theory and trademark concepts than with clarity and the common touch.
The consequences of this are twofold. For one thing, the likes of Jonathan Sumption can caricature postmodern and postcolonial theory with just enough plausibility to seem credible. The other is that right-wing populist historians can reach a much wider audience than the left.
I do see some signs of a fightback – Bernard’s own recent books are good examples of trying to reach a wider audience in an engaging way, and Alan Lester has shown great patience in engaging the public on Twitter. But others on the left can be snarky about such endeavours, as though a facepalm and sardonic remark on Twitter to a coterie of loyal followers are somehow sufficient to rebut the likes of Nigel Biggar.
All of which brings me round to Bernard’s citation of JS Mill’s remark about “the stupid party”. Ross McKibbin has observed that one of the problems of late C19/early C20 Liberalism was that it alienated much of the working class by its moral disapproval of such key pastimes as going to the pub and gambling. The Tories, ironically, had more of the common touch. There is a danger that today’s liberals respond to populist suspicion of expertise with educated disdain for those without degrees. Maybe the Disraelian Boris Johnson does actually know something useful.
Hope your treatment goes well, Bernard.
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This post brings a couple of things to mind.
The first is something called “Brandolini’s Law”. It’s not really a law, and it may be due to Frederic Bastiat not Alberto Brandolini, but it seems like a useful generalisation. It says that it requires a lot more effort to debunk BS than to put it out there in the first place. Look at all the nonsense that was spread about the EU, or the confusion of the ECHR with the European Court of Justice. Yet how many people understand the workings of either?
Part of the problem is that the world is complicated – sometimes needlessly so. I’m thinking here of the EU’s verbose attempts to define its own constitution, hardly designed to inspire its citizens. Another part of the problem is the lack of education in European matters and the UK’s anglophone bias. But perhaps the biggest is the comparative ineffectiveness of the left in reaching the wider public.
You can dislike the right-wing agenda of a website like “History Reclaimed” and its host of sympathetic YouTube videos but where is the left-of-centre equivalent? Of course, there is this website, thanks to Bernard, and there are some valiant individuals on Twitter, but there appears to be little collective response to the right, perhaps because in time-honoured fashion, the left is itself too divided.
Richard Branson prefers to spend his money on getting carried away by hot air. Murdoch, Barclay and Rothermere spend their money ensuring millions of readers get carried away by their own daily blasts of hot air.
The BBC once appeared to be the saviour of the left from right-wing falsehoods, the uncontaminated well from which everyone could drink. Now the media landscape is fragmented and we all live in our own “filter bubbles” (or perhaps in the case of Porter’s Pensees, a thought bubble?).
So as Sr. Brandolini suggested, it is hard work to debunk misleading arguments. But it is indispensable work, and the left is not well placed right now to carry it out.
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