One rule for him... | thearticle

Anyone surprised by Dominic Cummings’s behaviour during the lockdown, and his negligent explanation for it, simply hasn’t been paying attention. His words and actions have given ample

evidence of his contempt for popular opinion and, almost as much, for that of elites. You might say this is his USP. He cultivates a persona of charmless menace, putting it about that he’s a

guy who doesn’t play by the rules. His clothes are a kind of adolescent advertisement for his iconoclasm. As the possessor of a good Oxford degree in history, he has accumulated an eclectic

assembly of intellectual idols, many of them in rarified fields in which he has no qualifications and of which, he admits, he has limited knowledge (ie. mathematical geniuses like Gödel,

Turing and von Neumann). He’s also a fan of the Manhattan and Apollo Projects, along with the “the ARPA/PARC project that created the internet & PC”. Not notably numerate himself, he

idolises the theorems, calculations and predictions of those who are. His blog is often intelligent but marked by an obsessive, autodidactic quality; at other times it comes across as a bit

like fan mail. He is a believer in the cult of the modern, in all those neat devices and smart ideas that light the way to the stars. Emotionally, his words transmit the impression that he’s

never advanced far beyond his undergraduate days. In his imagination, reality seems to have a tendency to disappear miraculously into a fantasised future of scientific order and

technological mastery. There’s more than a touch in him of a young Trotskyite from the Russian 1920s, and yes, a young enthusiast for National Socialism in the German early ’30s, before the

bills had to be paid. I do not suggest, of course, that he shares those ideas, but simply that his writings convey a stylistic resonance with those historical moments. In the words of Clive

James, from a book review of _The Appeal of Fascism: a Study of Intellectuals and Fascism_, they were “Clever men, without imagination, gambling with the liberties of the many for a dream.”

In something of that spirit, Cummings aims to revolutionise dear old Blighty, with its dysfunctional traditions, outdated customs and democratic delusions. Power is the drug, settling

accounts the reward. His bêtes noires are many: MPs, civil servants, the media, of course; he plays both sides of the class war, advising journalists outside his home to “get out of London”

and talk to people who are not “rich remainers”. As a presumably well-paid adviser to the Prime Minister, married to a woman with an aristocratic background, he pretends he cannot organise

childcare in London. And this is the man who wants to reorganise the country? At the same time, he fancies himself as a bit of a savant: his writings suppurate with an irritable sense of

intolerance combined with that old Nietzschean will to power. What of his distinctive achievements? These have crystallised into a handful of mendacious slogans — bullying, three-word

injunctions like “Take back control”, which is said to have won the EU referendum, and “Get Brexit done”, thought to have been the key to Boris Johnson’s general election victory. (Both of

those claims are open to challenge.) In short, Cummings seems to be a member of that distinct sub-species within the human menagerie — the zealot who believes his personal rectitude

justifies his dreams of revolution, and never mind who gets hurt along the way (after all, they probably deserved it). Given the largely derivative, if sometimes interesting, ideas reflected

in his writings, along with his monomania, apparent affective inadequacies and extensive power, it is natural to be concerned by his degree of influence. In politics, disasters stem mainly

from false premises. Cummings has a fair crop of them. He clearly considers the furore over his escapades during the lockdown as a storm in a teacup. It’s not. His actions are not merely

personal lapses. They point to the contradiction at the heart of “populist'” democracy. Wherever you look in Cummings’s life and works — in his blogs, campaigns, utterances, current

activities — you find the same patterns at work. Populism presents itself as the epitome of democracy, when in fact it is profoundly antagonistic to it. In former times — that is, just after

the referendum almost four years ago, when Theresa May replaced David Cameron as Prime Minister — the core of her approach to Brexit was the idea of the “Will of the People”. It was a

phrase she repeated incessantly as a shorthand for her political philosophy. She may well have been unaware of the sinister history of the language she was deploying and of its incoherence

as a guide to action. Cummings is probably too bright to parrot such a banal, dubious form of words, but he is nonetheless fully signed up to their implications. The campaign he ran and the

government of which he is the _primus inter pares _(as suggested by the events of recent days) is Britain’s first unarguably populist government. In its own estimation, it stands both on and

for “the will of the people”. In the British system of “elective dictatorship” — to use Lord Hailsham’s phrase of 1976 — this means it can act almost as if opposition does not exist. For

his part, Cummings seems to think because he’s clever and energetic, nothing can possibly go wrong. The fact that he did well at Oxford and can manage a campaign, however, does not mean he

has much idea of what politics is about — what it is _for — _nor what dangers are secreted within his sometimes fancy, sometimes fatuous schemes. He will probably pay for his delusions

sooner or later, but sadly, so will the rest of the country. There are two difficulties with May’s claim about the “Will of the People”, and it’s as well to be explicit about them: first,

there is no such thing as “_the_ People”. There are simply people, or more precisely, citizens; whether “people” or “citizens”, they are all, of course, different and cannot be subsumed

under a single, collective label. Second, given that “_the_ People” do not exist, they cannot have a will. Instead they have many, conflicting wills, which is why we need representative

democracy to help arbitrate between their various differing wants and needs. This is not, of course, because representative democracy is a perfect system — there is no such thing as a

perfect system — but because it provides mechanisms for mediating between the power, and not infrequently conceit, of prominent political actors like Cummings, and the voters who will suffer

the consequences of their plans and decisions, should they go wrong. The idea of “the will of the people” is widely assumed to have been one of Rousseau’s main propositions, but that is not

quite the case. The nearest Rousseau came to using those actual words was in the phrase – “_le_ _volonté générale” _(the general will)._ _Two centuries on, the resonance of these words

stems not so much from Rousseau’s use of them as from their inclusion in Article Six of the French Revolution’s _Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen_, adopted on August 26th,

1789. It begins with the assertion: “The law is the expression of the general will.”__ According to James Swenson, author of _On Jean-Jacques Rousseau_, the French thinker only used the

phrase once in all of his writings in an obscure passage of the _Discours sur l’économie politique. “_But,”_ _Swenson adds, “it is indeed a faithful summary of his doctrine.” Rousseau, who

died in 1778, might well have been dismayed at the use of his concept as a charter for oppression. This occurred just over decade after his death, as the French Revolution passed rapidly

from idealistic hopes to bloody tyranny when hundreds of thousands lost their lives as “enemies of the people” on the scaffold. Edward Craig, editor of the _Routledge Encyclopaedia of

Philosophy, _notes that Rousseau, in _The Discourse on Political Economy: “_…emphasises that the general will exists to protect individuals against the mass, not to require them to be

sacrificed to it.” But he also observes: “It is… an unfortunately obscure and controversial notion.” Since the late eighteenth century, this charter for revolutionary dictatorship has been

frequently and powerfully attacked by leading European thinkers from Constant and Hegel in the nineteenth century to Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell and Isaiah Berlin in the twentieth.

Although the use of the term by the Jacobins may have been a misunderstanding of Rousseau’s intent, the phrase itself is ripe for misinterpretation. It has duly been deployed as a charter

for savage, arbitrary actions from the French Revolution to this day. In December, 1793, Robespierre stated: “The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the

nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death.” In similar fashion, dictators of all stripes — Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and many others — have claimed they represented the

“will of the people” and used its corollary, “enemies of the people”, to isolate, suppress and destroy all who opposed them, or might possibly think of opposing them. The essential problem

with the phrase is self-evidently that it excludes a huge number of people from “the people” simply on the grounds that they don’t agree with the government or prevailing opinion of the day.

The “will of the people” divides people into two opposing blocs — those who agree with the government and the rest. In this sense, it is a fundamentally anti-democratic device: liberal

democracy is a procedural system in which the rights of all individuals, whatever their opinions, are protected by a series of defensive barriers, political, legal and customary. There is no

surer way of breaking down these barriers than by simplifying difficult questions, organising a once-and-for-all poll to decide them and then excluding the losers from an effective voice in

the consequences of the vote. Unless they are very carefully designed, referenda are crude, majoritarian devices which can neither capture the complexity of issues nor the subtleties of

opinion. Their main effect is to atomise society, leaving each individual powerless to affect the single, basic division between winners and losers. For winners like, in this case, Cummings,

there’s the thrill of victory. But complexity has been reduced to a binary “yes/no”. That doesn’t mean the complexity has disappeared. It is being ignored. Ever since the referendum, 

leavers have repetitively insisted that, “_You lost, we won, it’s democracy, live with it”._ Yet voting is not in itself democracy. It may be a way of delivering democracy, a necessary

method in particular circumstances, but it is not in itself the democratic idea. The basic concept underlying democracy is not voting, but the inviolability of individuals acting under law.

When any major public issue is held to be settled indefinitely by a public vote on a single day with victory or defeat determined in principle by one vote, we are not looking at an example

of democracy, despite May’s and others’ insistence that the EU referendum was the “largest democratic exercise” in British history. Instead, following De Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill and

other leading liberal theorists, we are confronting an example of the “tyranny of the majority”, a phrase Dominic Grieve once uttered in parliament to the apparent incomprehension of most

members as well as, to judge by the public debate, most of the British electorate. If Johnson and Cummings force their hard Brexit on the British electorate, they will not profit from it.

Indeed it is virtually certain that those who have led this process will ultimately be condemned by the great majority as the fools, charlatans and wreckers they are. As the ensuing disaster

unfolds, whether quickly or gradually, they will be blamed for most of what goes wrong: a lot has already gone wrong, and very soon much more will. Of course, there will be attempts to

divert blame onto others — remainers, naturally, and Europeans, equally obviously. But lies don’t last forever. Any thoughtful person with a passing knowledge of history and literature

should recognise in the term “the will of the people” the spectre of the enraged mob. I remember watching the film of _Julius Caesar_ at school, in which with Marlon Brando plays Mark

Anthony. The mob are scouring Rome for the conspirators who have assassinated Caesar. Coming across a man scurrying home, they ask him his name: “Truly, my name is Cinna,” he replies. The

immediate answer: “Tear him to pieces; he’s a conspirator.” “I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet,” the man protests. “Tear him for his bad verses,” comes the chilling reply. And when

the poet repeats that he is not Cinna the conspirator, one of the mob says: “It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.” Or in plain words,

kill him for having the wrong name and “let him go…” Theresa May was plainly unaware that each time she referred to “the will of the people” as the pretext for her policy, she was calling

forth some of the most terrible spirits to have ever haunted human societies. Her words were not just a condemnation of her own impoverished general education, but of the prevailing absence

of basic knowledge in the wider English elite. Many senior Tories and their advisers — like Cummings — were educated at top universities. What they lack is wisdom, judgement, care and moral

seriousness. Judging by the lamentably unconvincing account Cummings gave of his actions in ignoring the very lockdown regulations that he himself helped introduce, he certainly lacks these

qualities. Taken all in all, today’s government ministers and their advisers seem a superficial, unreflecting bunch. But there is more to it than that: Cummings’s behaviour during the

lockdown is an almost textbook demonstration of the contradiction within populist democracy, which is concerned with establishing autocratic power in the name of the people. We do not have a

government so much as a pressure group in power; we do not have an administration but a sect. It is all rather reminiscent of Rosa Luxemburg’s critique, a few months after the Russian

Revolution, of the pretensions of Leninism: “At bottom, then, a clique affair — a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a

handful of politicians.” Given the story of Brexit, who can be surprised that the government’s approach to Covid-19 has also been characterised by propaganda rather than policy, by 

questionable, sometimes plainly false, claims, unhelpful secrecy, poor use of available resources and, above all, a lack of analytical rigour and precision. These are people who value the 

achievement of their career goals and vindication of their personal prejudices, not only far above popular consent, traditional norms and ethical principle, but even above simple

effectiveness. At best, they are campaigners, not leaders. As Scott Fitzgerald wrote in _The Great Gatsby_: “They were careless people — they smashed up things and creatures and then

retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”