Latest / Stay in the Room Podcast / Same Target, No Agreement

Transcript

Same Target, No Agreement · Stay in the Room Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: In the first week of November, 1932, Berlin's buses and trams stopped.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: The city's transport workers had struck.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: For four days the depots were blocked,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: track was torn up,
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: and the few trams driven by strikebreakers had their windows put through.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: The dispute was over two fennigs an hour.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: The transport company had wanted a much deeper pay cut.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: The Social Democrat Aligned Union had bargained it down to that and accepted
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: the settlement,
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: The Communist Trade Union rejected the compromise and called a strike.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: So did the Nazi one.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: The strike leadership that ran the walkout was dominated by the Communists.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: But Nazi representatives sat on it too.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the government's own records called it.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: The Communist National Socialist strike leadership.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: They were not allies.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Within months of Hitler taking power, his regime would be arresting Communists by the thousands.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And over the years that followed,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: tens of thousands of the party's members were imprisoned or killed.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody on that picket line was confused about who the other side was.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: They were there anyway.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Not only against the pay cut,
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: but against the settlement the Social Democrats' union had signed,
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: and the union's authority to sign it.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: That picket line is worth keeping in mind,
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: because it is the cleanest available answer to a question that keeps coming back.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: The popular version of the question is horseshoe theory.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that the political extremes curve round towards each other, until they almost touch.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Closer to one another than either is to the centre, it is intuitively satisfying.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: It explains the strange bedfellows, and it asks you to believe something that is usually false.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: That people who despise each other's entire view of the world are nonetheless alike underneath.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sharing a temperament or a psychology that the centre lacks,
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: the trouble is that it treats every case of opposites lining up.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: As the same phenomenon,
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: when there are at least three,
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: sometimes two movements genuinely share a political program on some question.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: That is ordinary overlap.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they share a way of doing politics,
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: the contempt for process,
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: the appetite for enemies, while wanting entirely different things.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: That is closer to what horseshoe theory is reaching for.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes they share nothing but a target.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Treating all three as proof That the extremes are secretly alike.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is a category error.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it hides the one that matters most here.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: The communists and the Nazis on that picket line were not alike underneath.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: They did not need to be.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Each was running its own doctrine.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And each doctrine happened to point at the same target.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: The communist line was set in Moscow.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Under what the Comintern called its third period, social democrats were not a rival on the left.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: But the principal obstacle to revolution...
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Social fascists, whose moderate reforms propped up capitalism and delayed its collapse.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: The German party put it plainly.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Fighting fascism meant fighting the SPD.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Just as much as it meant fighting Hitler.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: There is a famous phrase people reach for to summarize that bet.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Attributed to the party's leader.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Its provenance is disputed, so I'm leaving it out.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: The doctrine needs no help from it.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: It is in the party's own statements.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: The Nazi Union had its own reasons.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they were not the communists' reasons.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: There was a federal election three days into the strike.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And backing a popular walkout was a way to reach workers,
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: who would otherwise never have looked at them.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Two doctrines.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: No shared programme and no need of one.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: One shared target.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Not the pay cut as such, but the arrangement that had produced and defended it.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Social Democrats' Union and its claim to speak for the workers.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: I want to give this a name, because naming it is what lets you test it.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Call it the common enemy effect.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Two actors,
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: ideologically distant,
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: each acting on a doctrine of its own,
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: arrive at the same institution, as the main obstacle to what they want.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: That is enough to produce convergent rhetoric, or even direct cooperation, on that front.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Without any convergence of values or temperament behind it,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: the precise word for what it produces is conditional convergence.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: The alignment depends on the target.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Take the target away, and what remains is incidental at best.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing strong enough to have put them on the same side of anything.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what makes it more than a relabeling of horseshoe theory.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: It predicts something horseshoe theory does not.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: If this is what is going on,
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: the alignment should be substantially stronger,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: wherever the shared target is involved, than anywhere it is not.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Two actors who turn out to converge just as strongly,
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: across a whole range of unrelated questions, are not showing this effect.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: They are showing ordinary overlap, which is a different thing.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Horseshoe theory can absorb either result, which is exactly what is wrong with it.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: This one can fail.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: So test it.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: George Galloway,
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: who is standing in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on the 8th of October,
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: spent nine years presenting a programme on Russian state television,
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: from 2013, until Ofcom revoked RT's British licence in 2022.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Neil Oliver,
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: the former BBC presenter now on GB News,
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: has cited Galloway by name as an authority on the weakness of the British Army.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: On Ukraine and NATO, the two arrive in roughly the same place.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: In the permission slip, I set out how differently they get there.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: One says the hardest part out loud, and the other never has to.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: That difference in route is not a complication for this argument.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: It is what the argument predicts.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Galloway reaches the target through an explicitly geopolitical position.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: He has said in terms that he supports Russia's war, as part of an anti-imperialist framework.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oliver reaches it through distrust of the institutions reporting the war,
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: and of the governing class he sees behind them.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Those are my characterizations of two records,
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: not labels either man uses, and you should weigh them as such.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: But the pattern they describe is visible in the record.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Same destination, different machinery.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now look away from the target.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Galloway's Workers' Party runs on redistributive socialism.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oliver's politics are the populist rights.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: On the fundamental question of what an economy should be organised to do,
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: their programmes point in very different directions.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: They are not wholly unrelated elsewhere.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Both are fluent in distrust of the establishment,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: and a sceptical listener would be right to point that out.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: But notice what that shared ground is made of.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is not a shared programme.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: It is another shared target.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: The establishment itself.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Which is exactly what the effect would lead you to expect.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where they overlap, they overlap against something.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Where the question is what to build, they part company completely.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: A framework that confirms everything you pointed at is not a framework.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it is worth showing one it rejects.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump spent months calling Zohran Mamdani a communist lunatic.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Then in November last year, the two met in the Oval Office.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And were warm to the point of unsettling their own supporters.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: That looks like a candidate.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Two men at opposite ends, suddenly friendly.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: There is even a possible shared enemy.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Since Mumdani came to power by beating the democratic establishment's candidate.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't fit.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason it doesn't is instructive.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: When Trump explained the warmth, he did not describe a common opponent.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: He described common ground.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Housing.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Affordability.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: A safer city.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Some of Mamdani's ideas, he said, were the same as his own.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: That is overlap on particular policies, plus a meeting that suited both men politically.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: The effect predicts convergence against a target.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: This was convergence on a handful of issues,
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: and a deliberate willingness by both men to emphasize their common ground.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: There is a third reading, and it is cleaner than either.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Back in September last year,
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: before the election,
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: and while he was still calling Mamdani a communist,
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Trump predicted he would prove to be one of the best things ever to happen to
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: the Republican Party.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: That is not a shared target.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it is not shared policy.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: It is the calculation that a radical-looking opponent is useful to have in view.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it requires nothing of the other man at all.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: No common enemy.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: No common ground.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Not even a meeting.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: A sceptical listener might reach for that as the explanation, and they would have a case.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: The framework puts it in the other pile,
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: which is what it should do, which leaves the distinction worth carrying away.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Opposites meeting is not this.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Opposites agreeing is not this.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Opposites cooperating is not this either.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Opposites converging specifically against the same target, and only there may be.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: One thing needs saying plainly.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: The mechanism in 1932 and the mechanism now are the same.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: The stakes are not remotely the same, and nothing here should be read as suggesting they are.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: A by-election in central London is not the last winter of the Weimar Republic.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: I am comparing the shape of reasoning error, not the size of its consequences.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the common enemy effect has a second property,
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: which is easier to miss than the first, and matters more.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: It tells you nothing about what happens next.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: The communist's bet was that a shared enemy's fall would clear the ground for them.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: It did clear the ground.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: It cleared it for whoever was organized to walk onto it.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that was not them.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The aftermath of a common enemy's collapse is not automatically inherited by
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: the people who helped bring it about.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: What follows will be shaped by whoever is organized and positioned to take advantage of it.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror image mistake was made in the same months by
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: the conservative circle around Franz von Papen who helped put Hitler into
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: the chancellorship.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Believing a cabinet of conservatives could keep him
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: in check They thought they could use his political strength,
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: without surrendering control of it.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Same error.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: From the other direction.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: The communists thought a force would clear the way for them.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: The conservatives thought they could harness one.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Neither had asked who would be holding it afterwards.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: That is the question to bring to any strange alignment.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it does not require believing anyone is secretly alike.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: When two people who agree on nothing start pointing at the same target,
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: the useful thing to ask is not what they have in common.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: It is which of them has thought about the day after.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Standing on the same picket line tells you what two people are against.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: It tells you nothing about which of them will be standing when it is over.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: The strike's history is recorded in the Reich Chancellery's own files.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Galloway's framing of Russia's war was reported by Novara Media.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: The Trump and Mamdani meeting was reported by the Associated Press and others.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Full sources are at the foot of the written version.