Fake News is a term that has become ubiquitous in the media. Its symbolic significance is as great as its meaning is obscure. The symbolic significance is related to the importance that people attach to differentiating the truth and reality from lies and distortions. In the Guardian, the term has acquired a particular significance since it considers itself to be the purveyor of real news reflecting objective reality. In its current war on populism conducted on behalf of the establishment, or of what I have termed the Party of Order, the paper has portrayed social media as the main tool of populism and as the prime source of fake news. It has recently joined the ranks of those that are clamouring for the legal regulation of social media in order to prevent the dissemination of fake news. In one of its most recent salvos in this direction, the Guardian has warned of the extreme dangers that fake news provide by featuring prominently a report on a study which found that “half of Americans view fake news as a bigger threat to the country than terrorism, illegal immigration, violent crime or racism”. The paper has also given significant coverage to the allegations in the U.S. that social media have undermined democracy and national security by allowing Russian interference in the U.S. elections through the spread of fake news. This has been a potent argument in its denunciation of Donald Trump who is regarded as a prime representative of populism. This was most apparent in the 27 May story headlined “Trump not doing enough to thwart Russian 2020 meddling, experts say “. The “experts” who appear in the title of the article in order legitimate the report as expressing real facts, as opposed to fake news, are all members of the U.S. intelligence “community”. In order to imply that Trump is a liar, the paper tacitly assumes that the experts from the intelligence community are reliable and impartial judges of the truth.
The complexities associated with the use of the term has parallels with those raised by attempts to understand the term “populism”. I have been arguing in these blogs that the “party of order”, of which the Guardian is a prime mouthpiece, views populism as a great threat to the established order and to politics as ‘business as usual’ conducted in the parliamentary sphere and in the columns of the traditional “quality” media. These have a self-image of being the guardians of the moderation and objectivity which guarantee the unity of the nation. For order to prevail, politics has to be conducted in what they regard as the centre ground, avoiding the extremes. This is the ground that determines the size and position of the Overton window of what is considered allowable discourse by the media.
Whilst I was trying to clarify my thinking on the complex issue of fake news, I came across an extraordinarily prescient 1992 interview with the well-known French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who died in 2002, entitled ‘The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State’ published in Le Monde. It throws considerable light on the roots of populism and of the fake news phenomenon and provides powerful support for the arguments I have been developing in these blogs, namely that populism is a justifiable popular reaction to the system’s inability and unwillingness to meet the most elementary human needs and to the lack of faith that ordinary people have in those that purport to be their political representatives. Ultimately the populist revolt can also be understood as an expression of people’s feeling of alienation from the state. This forms the core of Bourdieu’s argument, even though the term populism didn’t at the time have the meaning it has acquired today. Bourdieu’s analysis derives from his examination of human suffering.
In this post I will set out Bourdieu’s arguments and explain how they help us to understand the phenomenon of populism. I will analyse the relation of this to the ubiquity of the term fake news in the traditional media in a subsequent post.
Bourdieu’s analysis
The background for Le Monde’s interview of Bourdieu was a special issue of the journal he edited (Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 90, Dec. 1991) had been dedicated to the issue of the suffering. This included “several interviews with people whose voices are not much heard in the media: young people on deprived estates, small farmers, social workers. The head-teacher of a secondary school in difficulty, for example, expresses his bitterness. Instead of overseeing the transmission of knowledge, he has become, against his will, the superintendent of a kind of police station.”
Bourdieu focuses attention on the role of the state. The state is described as having a left-hand. This comprises all those who are charged with dealing with social issues, the “set of agents of the so-called spending ministries which are the trace, within the state, of the social struggles of the past (my emphasis)”. The state also has a right-hand, “the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance, the public and private banks and the ministerial cabinets” which is in opposition to its left-hand. Bourdieu says, in terms that are even more applicable today:
“I think that the left hand of the state has the sense that the right hand no longer
knows, or, worse, no longer really wants to know what the left hand does. In
any case, it does not want to pay for it (my emphasis). One of the
main reasons for all these people’s despair is that the state has withdrawn, or
is withdrawing, from a number of sectors of social life for which it was
previously responsible: social housing, public service broadcasting, schools,
hospitals, etc., which is all the more stupefying and scandalous, in some of
these areas at least, because it was done by a Socialist government, which
might at least be expected to be the guarantor of public service as an open
service available to all, without distinction. . . What is described as a
crisis of politics, anti-parliamentarianism, is in reality despair at the
failure of the state as the guardian of the public interest.
If the Socialists had simply not been as socialist as they claimed, that would not
shock anyone – times are hard and there is not much room for manoeuvre. But
what is more surprising is that they should have done so much to undermine the
public interest, first by their deeds, with all kinds of measures and policies
(I will only mention the media. . . ) aimed at liquidating the gains of the
welfare state, and above all, perhaps, in their words, with the eulogy of
private enterprise (as if one could only be enterprising within an enterprise)
and the encouragement of private interest. All that is somewhat shocking,
especially for those who are sent into the front line to perform so-called
‘social’ work to compensate for the most flagrant inadequacies of the logic of
the market, without being given the means to really do their job. How could
they not have the sense of being constantly undermined or betrayed?
It should have been clear a long time ago that their revolt goes far beyond questions of
salary, even if the salary granted is an unequivocal index of the value placed
on the work and the corresponding workers. Contempt for a job is shown first of
all in the more or less derisory remuneration it is given.”
Bourdieu goes on to point to how the right hand of the state has become corrupted and to the role that the media plays in this process:
“Exemplary behaviour ought to be de rigueur for all state personnel, especially when they
claim to belong to a tradition of commitment to the interests of the least
advantaged. But it is difficult not to have doubts when one sees not only
examples of corruption (sometimes quasi-official, with the bonuses given to
some senior civil servants) or betrayal of public service (that word is no
doubt too strong – I am thinking of pantouflage3) and all the forms of
misappropriation, for private purposes, of public property, profits or services
– nepotism, cronyism (our leaders have many ‘personal friends’ . . . 4),
clientelism . . .
And I have not even mentioned symbolic profits! Television has probably contributed
as much as bribery to the degradation of civic virtue. It has invited and
projected on to the political and intellectual stage a set of self-promoting
personalities concerned above all to get themselves noticed and admired, in
total contradiction with the values of unspectacular devotion to the collective
interest which once characterized the civil servant or the activist. It is the
same self-serving attention seeking (often at the expense of rivals) which
explains why ‘headline grabbing’ has become such a common practice. For many
ministers, it seems, a measure is only valid if it can be announced and
regarded as achieved as soon as it has been made public. In short, large-scale
corruption which causes a scandal when it is uncovered because it reveals the
gap between professed virtues and real behaviour is simply the extreme case of
all the ordinary little ‘weaknesses’, the flaunting of luxury and the avid
acceptance of material or symbolic privileges.
Asked how citizens react faced with this situation, Bourdieu replies:
“I was recently reading an article by a German author on ancient Egypt. He shows how, in a period of crisis of confidence in the state and in the public good, two tendencies emerged: among the rulers, corruption, linked to the decline in respect for the public interest; and, among those they dominated, personal religiosity, associated with despair concerning temporal remedies (my emphasis). In the same way, one has the sense now that citizens, feeling themselves ejected from the state (which, in the end, asks of them no more than obligatory material contributions, and certainly no commitment, no enthusiasm), reject the state, treating it as an alien power to be used so far as they can to serve their own interests.”
A better description of the roots of populism is surely hard to find, particularly if one includes the political class as a whole in the right-hand of the state.
Of politicians, Bourdieu says:
What strikes me is the silence of the politicians. They are terribly short of ideals
that can mobilize people. This is probably because the professionalization of
politics and the conditions required of those who want to make a career in the
parties increasingly exclude inspired personalities. And probably also because
the definition of political activity has changed with the arrival of a
political class that has learned in its schools (of political science) that, to
appear serious, or simply to avoid appearing old-fashioned or archaic, it is
better to talk of management than self-management, and that they must, at any
rate, take on the appearances (that is to say the language) of economic
rationality.
Locked in the narrow, short-term economism of the IMF worldview which is also causing
havoc, and will continue to do so, in North-South relations, all these
half-wise economists fail, of course, to take account of the real costs, in the
short and more especially the long term, of the material and psychological wretchedness
which is the only certain outcome of their economically legitimate Realpolitik:
delinquency, crime, alcoholism, road accidents, etc. Here too, the right hand,
obsessed by the question of financial equilibrium, knows nothing of the
problems of the left hand, confronted with the often very costly social
consequences of ‘budgetary restrictions’.
This was written in 1991, more than two decades before ‘austerity’ and the ‘immigration crisis’ hit the headlines.
Bourdieu also places perhaps the greatest blame on the socialist government in terms that would apply even better to the Labour Party.
“(T)en years of Socialist government have completed the demolition of belief in the
state and the demolition of the welfare state that was started in the 1970s in
the name of liberalism. I am thinking in particular of housing policy. The
declared aim has been to rescue the petite bourgeoisie from publicly owned
housing (and thereby from ‘collectivism’) and facilitate their move into
ownership of a house or apartment. This policy has in a sense succeeded only
too well. Its outcome illustrates what I said a moment ago about the social
costs of some economies. That policy is probably the major cause of social
segregation and consequently of the problems referred to as those of the
‘banlieues’.
It should be noted that in this analysis Bourdieu doesn’t present the welfare state, managed through what he calls the left-hand of the state, as an expression of the benevolent nature of the state per se, but as the result of “social struggles of the past”. This is entirely consistent with what I have argued in my article ‘Class War in Post-World War II Historical Perspective‘.
In Bourdieu’s analysis, therefore, populism can be seen as an expression of popular despair at ‘feeling themselves ejected from the state’, leading to its active rejection. The ‘party of order’, on the other hand, is terrified by the disorder that popular alienation from that state creates and wants to defend the status quo without apparently realising that in doing so it merely confirms popular suspicions and further fans populist feelings. The “people whose voices are not much heard in the media” continue to be excluded from its publications and broadcasts.
I will deal with this in a subsequent post.
Alvaro de Miranda
Alvaro de Miranda is retired from the University of East London where he co-founded a Department of Innovation Studies. He came to the UK in 1958 aged 15 to join his parents who were exiles from the Salazar regime in Portugal. Having experienced fascism, he is particularly alarmed with the recent worldwide electoral rise of the far-right and has been following it comparatively in this blog.
12 June 2019