Culture contra ideology.

In The Revolt of the Masses (1922), Ortega y Gasset, describing the "triumph of hyperdemocracy" observed that

 
   a characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups 
   traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar. Thus, in intellectual 
   life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can 
   note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual.... The 
   characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to 
   be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace 
   and to impose them wherever it will. ... The mass crushes beneath it 
   everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, 
   qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think 
   like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. 

As Ortega notes, "hyperdemocracy" has no specific ideological allegiance. It is a function of neither the Left nor the Right, though it can appear as a standard-bearer for either. Its chief characteristic is the assumption of "unlimited rights" and simultaneous repudiation of the obligations that rights entail. The result is not a conflict between moralities but a crisis within the core of moral life. "The mass man," Ortega concludes, "is simply without morality, which is always, in essence, a sentiment of submission to something, a consciousness of service and obligation."

We were reminded of Ortega's melancholy reflections recently when reading George Walden's essay on "New Labour" in the May n issue of The Times Literary Supplement. A Conservative MP from the early 1980s until 1997, Mr. Walden is highly critical of Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia." But he writes less as a defeated politician than a disillusioned one. His essay, essentially a digest of his book The New Elites: Making a Career in the Masses (Allen Lane, 2000), is every bit as hostile to the Tory establishment as it is to Labour. Mr. Walden has two main targets. One is populist ideology or "ultra democracy" (what Ortega called "hyperdemocracy"). The other is what he describes in The New Elites as "our antiquated up/down, Left/Right thinking." About the latter, his chief message is "A pox on both your houses."

We do not share Mr. Walden's confidence that "the Left-Right game is over." It seems to us, for example, that there are substantial differences between Tony Blair and William Hague, just as there were between Al Gore and George W. Bush. We have been hearing "the end of ideology" proclaimed for decades; somehow, though, differences of manners, morals, and sensibility--to say nothing of differences of policy--contrive to keep ideology alive. The U.S. presidential election last fall was so hotly contested because the candidates' supporters understood that the outcome mattered. America led by Al Gore would not be the same as America led by George W. Bush. If the differences between the parties should not be exaggerated, neither should they be forgotten.

Perhaps what we have seen is not the end but the maturation of ideology, in the course of which Left and Right have learned to poach freely on each other's successes. Some observers noted that Bill Clinton triumphed partly by appropriating Republican programs and policies. Something similar can be said of Tony Blair. He has succeeded partly by betraying Labour as traditionally understood and partly by adopting measures first advocated by the Tories. And yet Margaret Thatcher was right when she observed recently that Blair's triumph in the general election this month would be a "socialist victory." (Blair, she suggested, had "socialism ... in his bloodstream.") Whatever else one could say about it, a victory by William Hague would not be a triumph for socialism.

Part of Mr. Walden's message concerns the obsolescence of politics. "The penalty of political progress" he writes, "is indifference to politics, and rational apathy is hard to discourage." But can one really speak of a "rational" apathy here? There is a reason that Tocqueville concluded Democracy in America with a warning that "general apathy," the attitude that democracy was most likely to nurture, was also the attitude it had most to fear. This is because apathy breeds complacency, inviting despotism. There is a sense in which Mr. Walden is right that "if politics matter less, within reason it matters less who is in charge." But everything turns on the meaning of the phrase "within reason." The authors of The Federalist Papers were right that men cannot be counted on to be "angels" and that a good government is one that makes provision for mediocre leaders. But they also assumed that citizens, whatever their absorption in private matters, would remain interested in matters that affected their freedom. The perfection of bureaucracy tends to breed indifference. But that is a tendency to be resisted, not welcomed.