Abracadabra politics

Take an argument, draw the eye away from the main point so it gets mixed up with other issues, then rubbish it. Now you see it, now you don’t. It’s remarkably successful. You can tarnish a whole party and half an electorate with the same brush. It moves the electoral dial. And it’s deeply cynical and deceptive. 

Here’s a trick: Taking the Knee. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But it makes a simple point, powerfully, about racism and inequality. Now pull back the lens to take in the wilder fringes of the Black Lives Matter movement (watch the screen not my hand) and it morphs into an altogether different, more menacing beast. 

Taking the knee becomes an attack on capitalism, a call to disband the police, abolish prisons and fling open borders. It becomes wokeness on steroids, threatening the very fabric of our comfortable existence in a world already burdened with a sufficiency of fear. The net is immeasurably widened. You pull in an awful lot more fish. 

This sleight of hand was perfectly illustrated by an artful piece in the Spectator magazine last year headlined Revealed: What ‘Black Lives Matter’ really stands for. You name it, BLM was behind it. 

This is abracadabra politics. It has many practitioners, some who excel, some you see coming a mile away. Boris Johnson is to abracadabra politics what Yoda to wisdom is. He’s been at it a long time. Priti Patel, not so much. 

It’s an exclusive club, this magic circle. Natalie Elphicke, the Tory MP for Dover (she of the photo opportunity on empty Channel beaches), says the England footballer Marcus Rashford should stay out of politics. Presumably on the grounds that free speech is the preserve of, well, MPs who do photo opportunities on empty beaches. 

Disinformation (or, to give it its correct name, hogwash) is not an exclusively Right-wing thing. Take the word fascist: a portmanteau expression beloved of the far Left. The www.joingantifa.org website carries the headline: Do you oppose any of these Fascist leaders?  This is illustrated with pictures of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Robert Mugabe, Donald Trump (with Jeffrey Epstein), Jain Bolsanaro and Boris Johnson. Same trope, different angle. 

Fascist is a term of abuse so fuzzy that it has lost all meaning much like that already hackneyed invective ‘woke’, the aunt Sally of the Right. The chic French libertarian Right rails against ‘la culture woke’. This is not debate. It’s a bar-room slanging match.

The omission of nuance, as Danny Finkelstein argues in an excellent piece in The Times, is not a “mistake”. It’s a deliberate deception by people who know exactly what they’re doing and which buttons to press. It is agitprop in its purest form, damning anyone remotely associated with anti-racism by association. 

Fake news, a subset of abracadabra politics, is not new. It has a long and (un)distinguished pedigree. No sooner had Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1439, then it was open season for stirrers. And it flourished. Sensationalism sells. Social media is only its latest iteration. 

It’s no coincidence that a lot of fake news revolves around race or national and ethnic sentiment, the soft underbelly of society. In 1475 a Franciscan preacher in Italy famously stoked anti-Semitism with stories of Jews who drank the blood of children they killed – the so-called blood libel, which had originated in England in the 13th century. In the mid-1700s, during the height of the Jacobite rebellion, seditious printers reported that King George II was ill to provoke an uprising. 

But we shouldn’t be too harsh on ourselves for being credulous.  Who isn’t prone to confirmation bias? We like to be told that what feel in our bones – our bias – has some foundation in truth. This is the bait that hooks us into the dark underworld of prejudice. 

Human beings are naturally gullible creatures. Our minds are naturally drawn to illusions that defy what we know to be true. Deception-as-politics is a finely honed art. 

This analysis in the New York Times by journalist turned magician Ian Frisch captures the idea.  Magic comes alive, he writes, when it’s shared between two (or more) people. It builds a connection between performer and spectator. A magician doesn’t just create a fantasy. He bend, twists, or breaks our sense of objective reality.” That’s a powerful thing. 

You can see where I’m going with this. Abracadabra politics takes you to places other politics can’t reach. It’s more than spin. It’s dangerous. Saddam Hussein’s vaunted weapons of mass destruction articulated something we thought we knew. It confirmed a bias we had. Saddam was a bad man. It followed that he must have WMDs. It turned out to be an illusion, but it was powerful enough to wreak havoc in the Middle East. 

What is especially egregious about playing fast and loose with the truth is that it has real consequences. When the Franciscan preacher accused Jews of infanticide it led to a pogrom. When Priti Patel – the Home Secretary for Pete’s sake – appears to side with racist chanting by England fans, she bears some responsibility the next time a brown or black person is abused or attacked.

Taking the knee is gesture politics. But so is singing God Save the Queen or wearing an NHS badge. They are shorthand for profoundly held beliefs. There is no sleight of hand. 

There’s a perceptive profile of Johnson in this month’s Atlantic magazine. The nub of the piece is the author’s conversation around storytelling and myth-making. The point of politics – or life — for Johnson is not to squabble over facts. It is to offer people a story they can believe in. People live by narrative,” he says. 

There is some truth in this. Leaders must offer a vision, an idea of the kind of country they want to see. It needs to be compelling and persuasive. Brexit, the defining event of our lives, was very largely won by a narrative that people bought into or believed in.

But if that is all there is then the idea is hollow, if the narrative is a substitute for real change then it is no more than a cock-and-bull story.  The story is no longer a means to an end but the end itself acting merely as a vehicle for self-promotion.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.