Where are all the men?

This post first appeared yesterday on the Radix blog...

Why would a relatively sane man like me (perhaps that is overstating the case) dare to risk tiptoeing back into questions of gender politics that got him so roughed up online last time?

A good question. Because this time I particularly have something to say about men, in relation to women of course.

Because despite everything, all the violence against them and the unequal pay gap and much more besides, women have one great advantage over men. Not in all times but now, in the western world.

They have a clear vision of what they could and should become. They have a clear ethic and and an overwhelming sense of themselves as women.

This is clearly not the case everywhere. There are cultures, and some of them have outposts in the UK, where women are seriously threatened. But that may have fuelled the fire in the women who are in a stronger position to act.

They have women's magazines which spread the word. They have a strong sense of sisterhood. They have books for girls about what other girls achieved when they grew up. And whether or not the patriarchy actually exists in quite the way they say it does any more, they have a clear enemy.

This is not intended as any kind of criticism. Quite the reverse. They are now more emotionally evolved than many men, let's face it.

What worries me about this is that I don't see anything remotely parallel available to men in this generation or the one coming up - and I speak as a man bringing up two boys ("You should be teaching them not to rape," I was told last time I wrote that sentence, which kind of confirms my point.)

I am not claiming any kind of victimhood here. But I believe that the only kind of gender reform that is likely to work long term is one which provides some kind of solution for the lives of both genders, so this is not just relevant to the debate - it is central to it.

I was inspired to write this by an elderly clergyman, in his eighties, whose sermon I heard a couple of weeks back, when he asked the congregation - "where are the men?" If it had been a time bank - and I was involved in setting these up sometime ago - I would know the answer: they are at home watching daytime television.

But he didn't mean where were then then - he meant where were they spiritually? And of course so many man make a major contribution in so many ways, but that isn't the point either. As a sex, we have got some work to do - to show what it is that men could and should be now and in the future.
Maybe also to work out why men are so much more susceptible to the lure of screens than women.

Not as a blueprint either, any more than women are projecting any kind of blueprint. But there is a poverty of aspiration in being a man these days, I believe,  and it is time we learned from women, with women, how to grow up.

This is hardly a new thought. But Robert Bly's mythopoetic men's movement was a bit, well, mythopoetic. Nor do I admire some of the examples of manhood that have been set before me by the media for my contemplation. Most of which seem to be some kind of encouragement for workaholism - or some other -aholism.

No, there has to be a better way - but it has to be the men who do it for themselves.

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What does inclusive growth mean in practice?

Since the banking crash ten years ago, it should have been clear to the most bone-headed of policymakers that there was something wrong with our economic orthodoxy.

Unfortunately, the bone-headed seem to have had a most amazing political resilience. The terrible divisions across the USA and the UK too may be one result. The silver lining - and there is one - is that, with no steer and little help from national governments, our cities have found themselves in the economic frontline.

It hasn't been easy but I believe there is a small cadre of local government leaders in the UK, as there has in the US, which has emerged prepared to think and act imaginatively. And fascinatingly, there is really only one game in town now - and it is called inclusive growth.

This is what Charlotte Aldritt says in her new essay on the subject:

"Conventional local economic policy suggests that places must build on their assets and high growth sectors. This is indeed critical. But we should not be deceived that continuing pockets of poverty are likely to be subsumed in growth in deep sea technology or biomedical sciences or gaming software design. They might help if the wealth from these successes trickled down, but the whole reason for inclusive growth is that we have seen time and again that the chances of this are slim..."

It is in short a critique of trickle down economics, which not even the most diehard orthodoxy can now sustain. The difficulty is that city leaders, all too often, simple project their own assumptions, hopes and fears onto the process known as economic growth. As Charlotte says, inclusive growth does not mean old-fashioned redistribution; nor does it mean some kind of abandoning of economics.

She describes something of the process that cities need to go through to get there - but this is difficult stuff for ultra-conservative city leaders of all political colours. Yet in inclusive growth, we have the first glimmerings of a new kind of orthodoxy altogether, post neoliberal, post third way, post Trump perhaps too. It is such an important issue for those reasons.

If you want to join in the debate about what it does mean in practice, you could spend a bit of time in those cities gearing up to do it - Barking & Dagenham, Bristol, West Midlands, North Tyneside, Oldham and so on. Or you could come along to take part in the debate in person with the Centre for Progressive Policy (I'm certainly going to be there) in London on 30 October.

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Liberalism, literalism and the war against imagination

"Liberalism made the modern world, but the modern world is turning against it. Europe and America are in the throes of a popular rebellion against liberal elites, who are seen as self-serving and unable, or unwilling, to solve the problems of ordinary people. Elsewhere a 25-year shift towards freedom and open markets has gone into reverse, even as China, soon to be the world’s largest economy, shows that dictatorships can thrive."

So begins the plea for radical liberalism in the Economist a fortnight ago, and it continued with a diatribe against the kind of liberalism that has become "a complacent elite" that might have come out of my book (co-written by Joe Zammit-Lucia in 2016), The Death of Liberal Democracy?

I know that the Economist regards itself as being a bulwark of liberalism, but it has been largely in the somewhat narrow sense in which Margaret Thatcher's government was liberal. Yes, it gave away council houses to their tenants - but never built any more, so rather undermined the effect. And the particular lassitude that has overtaken this branch of liberalism has happened - not so much because of the importance of markets - but because they were unable to think about anything else.

Radix is a liberal thinktank in a slightly different, though related sense - it is not a Liberal thinktank, as I am occasionally reminded by my colleagues (I fear I may be more Liberal than liberal these days). But liberals are guilty as charged above because they too often ceased to be interested in the problems of ordinary people.

The Liberal Democrats never stopped being interested but, largely I think because of the influx of social democrats, they too often sound like a strange cult dedicated to the preservation of existing institutions, whether they are effective or not.

What we have not done so far is to approach the problem from the other end, so to speak - from a definition of 'populism', though Corrado Poli had a go at this last week from an Italian point of view.

I don't believe, for example, that there are really any parallels between our populists and the Populist Party which emerged in the Midwest in the 1880s and 90s, and gave us in the end little more durable than The Wizard of Oz (the Populist platform included a critique of the gold standard). Though they did unravel into a kind of white supremacy in the end.

Our populists are selling a peculiar and deeply illiberal commitment to old-fashioned states and borders. that makes them the reverse of liberals. They also have a simplistic literalism which has spread through society and emerges in peculiar places.

I speak here of the horror at Chuka Umana's injunction to "call off the dogs" - I don't know how many times I've heard Momentum members shaking with rage ("He called us dogs!"). or of the idea that you can fight racism or right the wrongs of slavery by pulling down a few statues. Or even, dare I say it, some of the defences of #MeToo, which - despite the importance of the movement - suggest that the new generation of boys must pay the price of centuries of sexual abuse.

All of these seem to me as literal and as dangerous as Trump. They are also profoundly illiberal. Perhaps it is time we liberals got together and began the fight back. because populist appears to be getting in everywhere.

I was inspired by David Bollier's lecture for the Schumacher Centre in Kansas, when he talked about the war against imagination. He was referring to the same kind of market literalism that the Economist has occasionally represented, and I absolutely endorse that. But he might equally well be referring to the wider literalism that derives from populism and has us all in its clutches.

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