She can’t win hearts — or mindsWhat roles do reason and emotion play in politics? Is success a matter of winning over hearts, or about changing minds? To solve this conundrum comes a memoir by someone who apparently can do neither very well: Ten Years To Save The West by Liz Truss.
The ex-Prime Minister has tried to put renewed shine on her political career, culminating in a reappraisal of decisions that almost crashed the economy and foreshortened her premiership. But a bit like The Wizard of Oz, the book also invites readers to consider some intriguing counterfactuals, at least inadvertently: would the eventual political outcome have been any different, had our protagonist only had more brain or more heart?
As far as the former goes, Truss seems unable to defend the Reaganite values she espouses by giving intellectually persuasive reasons for them. Her favourite word is “instinctively” — as in “I see myself as an instinctively anti-establishment figure” and “I am someone who instinctively wants to shake things up”. There’s little attempt to put rational flesh on the basic neoliberal bones. At one point it looks like she might try — “politics has to be about… the conservative values of patriotism, freedom, and family” — but then immediately retreats into gut feeling again: “We know instinctively why they are better than those of our opponents.”
Throughout her career, colleagues are always gently taking her aside to suggest she should approach issues in a less pugnacious, more collegiate spirit, but she flatly refuses (“they are never going to agree, so it is pointless to try to persuade them”). In place of thrashing out complex ideas, she prefers “ideology”; without which politics “is like trying to navigate a hazardous mountain range in the dark without a compass”. Translation: she has found a few simplistic mantras that appeal to her, and by God, she is going to stick to them. Again, there is no attempt to argue with sceptics: “you either believe in big government running everything or you don’t; you either believe in low taxes stimulating economic growth or you don’t”.
And just as she has no interest in arguing about why she is correct, when it comes to her ideological opponents — Leftists, educationalists, environmentalists, Tory wets, the legal establishment, the Westminster blob — she is equally uninterested in explaining why they are wrong. Everything she disagrees with is basically the fault of Michel Foucault, who she “discovered while taking a course in political sociology”.
In place of rational justification comes a deluge of contemptuous invective. Left-wingers are lily-livered do-gooders, wracked with liberal guilt and self-loathing; educationalists advocating for child-centred play in nurseries are “so-called experts”; environmental campaigners are “watermelons” (green on the outside, red in the middle); world leaders “pontificate” at “jamborees” and “shindigs”; the media is essentially trivial and personality-obsessed; Tory dissenters to the Truss doctrine have forgotten what real Conservatism is; and so on.
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