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Bruce Ackerman, political writer
Cosmos vs patriots. Cosmopolitans come in two varieties: for left cosmos, the pressing need is to deal with world problems—global warming, nuclear proliferation, and the unjust distribution of wealth and income. For right cosmos, it is to break down barriers to world trade. Cosmos of all stripes demand a big build-up in the powers of world institutions, and a cutback on state sovereignty. For local patriots, the cosmos represent a new imperialism of Davos-man and his do-good hangers-on. Left pats insist on protecting local workers from foreign competition and local cultures from McDonaldisation. Right pats want to protect the natives from strange ethnics and engage in pre-emptive strikes against threatening foreign powers. Pats of all varieties insist that the nation state remains the best last hope of democracy against the meritocratic pretensions of cosmo-elitists.
Lisa Appignanesi, writer
Global vs the local. Environmental issues seem to belong to the first, but their political reality will be translated by the wind farm or nuclear station next door. Web and new technologies connect us globally, but can be banned locally; ditto with human rights. Meanwhile, we have no institutions, bar an emasculated UN, with which to deal with the global, while local politicians—from oil barons in Russia and the US to Sunni or Shia militants in the middle east—instrumentalise all problems in the name of power. Goodbye, oh heating world.
Arthur Aughey, political writer
Immanuel Wallerstein defined the politics of the 20th century in terms of an irresolvable tension between the modernity of technology—the capacity of human inventiveness to increase our material wellbeing—and the modernity of liberation, the capacity of political action to enhance our secular wellbeing. The ideological faithful on the left and the right, albeit for different reasons, believed in the harmony of technology and liberation; the ideologically sceptical on the left and the right, again for different reasons, agonised about technological enslavement masquerading as emancipation.
However, for both, the distinction between technology and humanity was the commonsense complement to an ethical system that distinguished between the determined (our creations) and the autonomous (our capacity for freedom). That tension will be challenged in the future because technology will develop personality and persons will become "bio-technologised." In this new era the faultline of politics will be between post-humanism, the radical version of which would abolish all distinctions between the natural and the artificial, and old humanism, the radical version of which would transform the inheritance of the modern into a quasi-sacred and romantic cult of authenticity. The contesting visions are likely to be Blakean in tone, about the nature of being and not about the distribution of wealth.
Michael Axworthy, former civil servant
The end of the cold war removed the edge of the left/right division, and left a question about the direction of political leadership. Political spin moved into that space, but the spin doctors got overconfident, and scandals and cover-ups followed. Truth reasserted itself, and the people became disillusioned. They see a country that has real problems: terrorism, climate change, an overblown civil service that neither governs nor critically analyses the operation of government. Above all, a country lobotomised by the failure of state secondary education, and the failed theories of comprehensive schooling and child-centred teaching.
The division in future will not be between left and right, but between the vested interests of governmental incompetence on the one hand, and the democratic urge for reform on the other. Sooner or later some politician will discover the opportunity to reassert honesty and integrity, tackle the problems, and achieve popularity.
Julian Baggini, philosopher
The new conflict is between liberal universalism and a communitarianism which asserts the need for cultures to maintain their own values and traditions. Is the latter just a temporary brake on the former, or will the universalist dream die? One of the tasks of politics is to work out which values are universal and which are not.
Robin Banerji, journalist
In the 21st century there will be a new emphasis on the rights of the group as opposed to the 20th century's concern with the individual. Meanwhile, the relationship between the human and the non-human (primarily animals but also plants, plant species and perhaps even landscape) will become important as the consequences of climate change play out. Political Islam, which looks so menacing at the moment, will be contained and defeated, as it is a negative, nostalgic and reactive movement. Great progress will be made in biosciences and in particular neuroscience. The first challenge will be to understand the links between mind and brain, and once those are worked out, medical and bio-scientists will move towards a new understanding of the physiology of the unified mind and body. This will have profound consequences not just for healthcare, but for law and even for philosophy and religion.
Cheryll Barron, writer
What comes next is giving the intellectual heritage of non-western cultures a place above the salt. "If we are to feel at home in the world after the present war," Bertrand Russell wrote in 1946, "we shall have to admit Asia to equality in our thoughts, not only politically, but culturally." His prescription is exactly right for today's eastward shift in economic and political power.
Don Berry, journalist
We need a planet-saving alternative to democracy. Mankind is set on exhausting the planet's resources. Voters in rich nations will not want to give anything up; voters (or dictators) in developing nations will seek what the rich have. Since democracies must reflect what majorities want, they cannot stop this process. (Dictatorships won't care.) Science will not rise to the challenge. Old ideas about philosopher-kings and benign dictatorships may be revived. Completely new ideas may emerge. Either way, democracy as we know it will not survive the century.
Philip Bobbitt, political writer
Nation state versus market state. The constitutional order of the nation state saw its role as one of regulating and reversing the results of markets. Market states, by contrast, try to use the market to achieve their governmental goals. Relatedly, nation states used law as a way of enforcing the moral codes of the dominant national group—usually, but not always, a dominant ethnic, cultural, linguistic and racial group. Nation state political parties saw law as the means of achieving their moral goals. Market state parties, whether deregulating industries or deregulating women's reproduction, try to maximise the choices of citizens without taking for granted anything much in the way of agreement about common goals. Among other consequences, this new constitutional order will generate a new form of terrorism.
Rudi Bogni, banker and director
Left vs right was and is purely a nominal distinction between two strands of the same totalitarian posture. The real problem of the 20th century was that the demographic and economic pressures that fractured the empires gave rise to national states with leaderships ill equipped to face the nihilist challenge. The vacuum was filled by totalitarian regimes, whose ideologies set fire to Europe and the world. Remember that Hitler was a failed architect, Stalin had studied for the priesthood and Mussolini was a schoolteacher. The heirs of the 19th and 20th century nihilists are today's faith-based terrorists. If today's democracies fail to win against the new nihilists on the intellectual and communication level, they will have no chance to win in the security space and will create another dangerous vacuum, ready to be filled. Nation states have proven a disastrous political experiment in the 19th and 20th century; they may well prove catastrophic in the 21st century, due to nuclear proliferation. Nevertheless, I hope that the 21st century will see a substantial reduction of political infrastructures. If a conglomerate is bad or indifferent at most of what it does, shareholders force it back to its core competences. Everything else has got to go. Why should it be different for governments? This is neither left nor right; it is common sense. Large countries' politicians love to deride small countries' direct democracies. Why? Because they fear their example and their nimbleness. The political systems inherited from the 20th century, whether democratic or totalitarian, are neo-feudal, incompatible with a 21st century when electors vote every so many years, but consumers vote and bloggers blog 24/7.
Joe Boyd, music producer
The big divide in the coming decades will be between the "reality-based community" and the "ideologically-based community." It was often observed in the 20th century that extreme right and left curved round behind the spectrum and met each other—sort of like Hitler and Stalin sharing a beer in Hades. The common ground extreme groups share is a deep-seated resistance to facts, whether Bush's resistance to climate change data or Brezhnev's refusal to accept that reversing the flow of Siberian rivers was not a good idea. There is now a clear divide between those who are prepared to face uncomfortable truths and those who persist in insisting that their views of what ought to be will ultimately trump what is. David Brooks, journalist
Instead of left/right we're moving to open/closed. It's really a debate about how confident people feel. And the next big intellectual development will be unifying what we know about the brain, about genes, about human nature, to maximise human flourishing.
AS Byatt, novelist and critic
We will be governed by a kind of consensus populism—beliefs, ideas and policies that arise on blogs, websites, focus groups and so on. (Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced their candidacies on the web.) This has its appeal. It is also frightening, as Tocqueville found American democracy, because it leads to tyranny of the majority. It goes with vast quantities of not wholly accurate information—Wikipedia is splendid and maddening. Menzies Campbell, leader, Liberal Democrats
Liberalism vs authoritarianism is fast becoming the philosophical divide within developed societies. 9/11 and other terrorist atrocities have heightened a sense of anxiety about security in an increasingly globalised world. The response from governments has been to try to gain ever greater knowledge and control of the lives and activities of their citizens. The British government is one of the worst offenders. Identity cards, the excesses of the DNA database, and a relentless drive towards extending the period of detention without trial are all symptoms of its authoritarian tendencies.
There is no "war" against terrorism. The terrorist is a criminal and should be treated accordingly. The creeping power of the state is the order of the day, but terrorism thrives where civil liberties are denied. Liberals must make that point forcefully and oppose and reverse the trend towards authoritarianism.
Douglas Carswell, politician
The political faultlines in the years ahead are likely to see centralisers pitched against localisers, and believers in old-style representative democracy slug it out with the new direct democrats.
Few people today seriously believe that politicians should centrally manage our economy. Yet the default assumption of the political establishment today is that it should centrally manage public services. This assumption will unravel.
At the same time, expect the politics of "anti-politics." Voters are starting to recognise that the current political system is a bit of a con, and they will lose faith in the "quango state" that today really decides how our country is run. People will start to recognise that real power now lies in the hands of remote and unelected officials—not those you elect on polling day: 90 per cent of planning decisions are made by council officials; Nice and other quangos really run the NHS; unelected judges decide what constitutes school uniform; human rights rules govern immigration policy; the QCA decides what children are taught. Expect to see YouTube-style technology empowering small groups of activists outside the conventional political process. This will raise fundamental questions about the nature of our political system. Expect parties to hold proper open primaries to choose their candidates, a loosening of the party whip system, a greater role for independents, and less central direction. Stephen Chan, academic
In certain respects the accomplishment of the left has been to entrench conservatism. The bureaucratisation of social democracy means that no life is any longer free of reporting and performance criteria, standardisations and imposed safety measures. The meeting of left and right in Europe is about the size of the openings and escape clauses within life's measured accountabilities rather than about ideology.
When it comes to ideologies and philosophies, the debate around multiculturalism unites the conservatisms of both left and right. The emerging dogma from both Blair and Cameron is to do with One Britain with Colourful Flourishes. It is not to do with a debate and a dynamism about how Britain might be changing into something different. The unity of left and right is over a limit to change. I cannot see how this approach can be called progressive, nor how it can accommodate the tensions of confessional divides—which reflect those in the world at large. As if that world could be shut out of Britain. Dave Clements, policy analyst
Once upon a time, housing policy was about building houses. The NHS had something to do with treating the sick. Schools were places where we sent our children to be educated. Social care supported society's most vulnerable members. And social security was about guaranteeing an income for those who had no other means. In the 21st century, they won't be talking about decent housing anymore, but about decent behaviour and decent neighbourhoods. The sick, in a throwback to the morality of the workhouse, will be divided into the deserving and undeserving of treatment. And the education system will be more interested in the contents of children's stomachs than their minds. Social services will finally come to the conclusion that we're all vulnerable now. And the social security system will be deemed unsustainable and prone to "timebombs," as the working population gets sicker and older by the day. Despite this, the authorities will continue to claim to be improving "outcomes" and promoting our "wellbeing" despite our refusal to be officially "happy." And we in turn will be rendered mute by an impenetrably empty rhetoric generated by a vacuous managerial political culture devoid of anything that might engage those it reluctantly courts only when it absolutely has to. And yet everybody will be urged to become "active" citizens.
Harvey Cole, businessman
The 70 years to 2077 in Britain fell into two phases. The first was a period of apprehension, dominated by fears that failed to materialise, in which political parties split along authoritarian- libertarian lines. The second period, of retreat, was triggered by the sudden combination of feedback from global warming, a failure of crops and water in Asia and the rapid spread of a series of pandemics. A new party, the Islanders, swept to power in Britain (which was relatively unaffected by disaster at first). It was dedicated to localism, but soon the disruption in the rest of the world led it to split into rival urban and rural segments. Life in large cities was disrupted by unreliable energy supplies, symbolised by the collapse of the City as lifts in office buildings worked only spasmodically. National government was displaced by local groups, increasingly armed. Conflicts over territory, food and resources escalated.
Robert Cooper, EU official
History, said Hegel, is the growing idea of freedom. In the 19th century, freedom came from the rule of law and the state. In this century, freedom will come from international law, but there is no international state. When Hegel wrote, the vital issues of the day—public health, workers' rights, education, the franchise—were problems brought by industrialisation. These were solved through the national state, which brought an identity for people dislocated from the country, a legal framework for industry, and solutions for the problems it created. In the 21st century, the new forms of communication have brought us a new world and we need a new constitutional form too. The big question is how to organise this world in which politics and identity are national, but we can survive and prosper only if we act internationally. It is fine to talk about "the international community," but who is it and how can it function?
Mark Cousins, film critic
By the end of the 21st century, politicians and the idea of the executive will have disappeared entirely. As everyone will be connected to some evolved form of the internet, all political decisions will be made by daily and weekly referendums. Right and left will still be underlying polarities, but will disperse into the hundreds of decisions a citizen will make annually. There will be no political class to pillory. Instead, the new dilemma will be how to delineate a constituency. By nation? Supranational region? Continent?
David Cox, writer and broadcaster
In the absence of ideological conflict, interest groups are likely to reclaim the political process as a means of pursuing advantage. The constituencies most likely to find themselves in significant contention are not represented by existing political organisations, so new formations and battlefronts are likely to emerge.
Age may become one important faultline. Young adults are being squeezed ever harder by their elders, who own most of the available wealth but expect their juniors to fund pensions and other privileges which they will not be able to enjoy in their turn. At the same time, the young are being bequeathed problems generated by their parents' self-indulgence, like climate change. These will further impoverish the relevant cohort and feed an appetite for redress.
Diane Coyle, economist
Technocracy against democracy. There are already important areas of public policy being run by experts rather than elected politicians, and run better than they were when electoral pressure affected outcomes: monetary policy is the obvious example. But there is a tension here. On one hand, new technologies give us hyper-democracy, rapid and massive populist pressure online. On the other, cognitive science and empirical social science build up a more reliable evidence base for technocrats about how people take decisions and what their consequences will be in practice.
William Davies, policy analyst
A new politics of autonomy has arrived. On the one hand, imperatives and strategies for reducing autonomy are growing by the day. Public services are increasingly coercive, where people refuse to act in a way that will increase their health or wealth. Rights are becoming housed in our bodies rather than our minds, as biometrics become the means of accessing services. On the other hand, we see an assembled group of autonomists—religious factions, businesses, libertarians, binge drinking hedonists—who assert their right to select a lifestyle. Set in contrast to biological and sociological expertise, the demands of these latter groups come to be appear irrational, quaint or plain wrong. The worry is that without any fundamental reason to respect individual and collective choices, democracy itself will become tarred with the same brush.
Geoff Dench, sociologist
The environmental crises which loom in the 21st century—not just because of climate change but also the timebombs of population growth and resource depletion—will see a revival of "centre vs periphery" issues, in place of right vs left. On one hand we will see the development of technology strengthening cosmopolitan tendencies, in particular through the growing supranational organisation of science and the accreditation of scientific expertise. But on the other, there will be a resurgence of nationalism around politics, asserting the collective ownership of natural resources rather than individual rights in productive property.
Overall we could see a return to an international order not unlike that under European feudalism. Hierarchies of political units devoted to husbanding their own(ed) lands would look to the new church—"universalist science," probably in alliance with a number of re-oriented faith groups including Christianity and Buddhism—to secure the legitimacy and authority of their regimes, as protectors of the planet. Most political processes, both at global level and within smaller units, would be conducted by experts. And most political conflict would be between expert cosmopolitans, geared to the interests of larger communities, and locals. Democracy would be weak, as the causes supported by the largest numbers of individuals would often not be those in the best interests of the planet.
Meghnad Desai, economist
Left/right, north/south, east/west are dead. Politics will be global and/or personal. What little the state will be asked to do—mainly local issues—it will fail to do. People will devise their own solutions, however imperfectly. They will move across borders and create the preconditions of a global polity, not as a behemoth but as a beehive.
Ronald Dore, economist
The salient political fact will be class rigidity, the attenuation of social mobility under the combined inheritance effects of money, culture and genes. "Right" and "left" opposed the self-interest of the orthodox rich against the sympathies of the upwardly mobile for those they had left behind, plus the conscience of the deviant rich. In the two-nations future, the conscience of the rich will be on its own.
Two centuries ago, in the first two-nation era, Thomas Arnold offered the conscientious rich a classic statement championing "fraternity through greater equality" against liberty. "Knowing full well that [people] are not equal in natural powers, [nor in] artificial advantages; one of the falsest maxims which ever pandered to human selfishness under the name of political wisdom [is that] civil society ought to leave its members alone, each to look after their several interests, provided they do not employ direct fraud or force against their neighbour".
Anthony Dworkin, political writer
It is a fashionable illusion to suppose that the left/right distinction is obsolete. It remains the key ideological dividing line because it is not dependent on a particular set of social and political circumstances but is rooted in the central question of the purpose of collective public policy. Essentially, the left is more inclined to see the state as an enabling force that can improve the conditions and prospects of its citizens, while the right sees it more as a restrictive force that is best employed in preventing harm. Politics may be clustering in the centre, but differences of instinct and outlook remain important. Who can doubt that Gordon Brown and David Cameron, at heart, see the world in different ways?
The divide between these inclinations carries over to foreign policy. The left tends to see international politics as an arena for promoting development and wellbeing, while the right sees it more in terms of eliminating security threats or restrictions on trade. New issues like climate change or terrorism are not the exclusive preserve of left or right, but responses to them are likely to divide on recognisable left/right grounds. So although Iraq and questions of military intervention do not neatly map on to a left/right framework, there are clear differences between leftist interventionists (who emphasise universal values and human rights) and rightist ones (who emphasise security and the balance of power). There may be occasional coalitions that cut across the left/right dichotomy, but these won't represent any cohesive ideology or broader view of the role of public policy—while the categories of left and right will continue to do so.
The answers are spread across four pages. Use the links below to navigate.
This is Page 1 (A-D)
Page 2 (E-I) Page 3 (J-M) Page 4 (N-Y)
Bruce Ackerman, political writer
Cosmos vs patriots. Cosmopolitans come in two varieties: for left cosmos, the pressing need is to deal with world problems—global warming, nuclear proliferation, and the unjust distribution of wealth and income. For right cosmos, it is to break down barriers to world trade. Cosmos of all stripes demand a big build-up in the powers of world institutions, and a cutback on state sovereignty. For local patriots, the cosmos represent a new imperialism of Davos-man and his do-good hangers-on. Left pats insist on protecting local workers from foreign competition and local cultures from McDonaldisation. Right pats want to protect the natives from strange ethnics and engage in pre-emptive strikes against threatening foreign powers. Pats of all varieties insist that the nation state remains the best last hope of democracy against the meritocratic pretensions of cosmo-elitists.
Lisa Appignanesi, writer
Global vs the local. Environmental issues seem to belong to the first, but their political reality will be translated by the wind farm or nuclear station next door. Web and new technologies connect us globally, but can be banned locally; ditto with human rights. Meanwhile, we have no institutions, bar an emasculated UN, with which to deal with the global, while local politicians—from oil barons in Russia and the US to Sunni or Shia militants in the middle east—instrumentalise all problems in the name of power. Goodbye, oh heating world.
Arthur Aughey, political writer
Immanuel Wallerstein defined the politics of the 20th century in terms of an irresolvable tension between the modernity of technology—the capacity of human inventiveness to increase our material wellbeing—and the modernity of liberation, the capacity of political action to enhance our secular wellbeing. The ideological faithful on the left and the right, albeit for different reasons, believed in the harmony of technology and liberation; the ideologically sceptical on the left and the right, again for different reasons, agonised about technological enslavement masquerading as emancipation.
However, for both, the distinction between technology and humanity was the commonsense complement to an ethical system that distinguished between the determined (our creations) and the autonomous (our capacity for freedom). That tension will be challenged in the future because technology will develop personality and persons will become "bio-technologised." In this new era the faultline of politics will be between post-humanism, the radical version of which would abolish all distinctions between the natural and the artificial, and old humanism, the radical version of which would transform the inheritance of the modern into a quasi-sacred and romantic cult of authenticity. The contesting visions are likely to be Blakean in tone, about the nature of being and not about the distribution of wealth.
Michael Axworthy, former civil servant
The end of the cold war removed the edge of the left/right division, and left a question about the direction of political leadership. Political spin moved into that space, but the spin doctors got overconfident, and scandals and cover-ups followed. Truth reasserted itself, and the people became disillusioned. They see a country that has real problems: terrorism, climate change, an overblown civil service that neither governs nor critically analyses the operation of government. Above all, a country lobotomised by the failure of state secondary education, and the failed theories of comprehensive schooling and child-centred teaching.
The division in future will not be between left and right, but between the vested interests of governmental incompetence on the one hand, and the democratic urge for reform on the other. Sooner or later some politician will discover the opportunity to reassert honesty and integrity, tackle the problems, and achieve popularity.
Julian Baggini, philosopher
The new conflict is between liberal universalism and a communitarianism which asserts the need for cultures to maintain their own values and traditions. Is the latter just a temporary brake on the former, or will the universalist dream die? One of the tasks of politics is to work out which values are universal and which are not.
Robin Banerji, journalist
In the 21st century there will be a new emphasis on the rights of the group as opposed to the 20th century's concern with the individual. Meanwhile, the relationship between the human and the non-human (primarily animals but also plants, plant species and perhaps even landscape) will become important as the consequences of climate change play out. Political Islam, which looks so menacing at the moment, will be contained and defeated, as it is a negative, nostalgic and reactive movement. Great progress will be made in biosciences and in particular neuroscience. The first challenge will be to understand the links between mind and brain, and once those are worked out, medical and bio-scientists will move towards a new understanding of the physiology of the unified mind and body. This will have profound consequences not just for healthcare, but for law and even for philosophy and religion.
Cheryll Barron, writer
What comes next is giving the intellectual heritage of non-western cultures a place above the salt. "If we are to feel at home in the world after the present war," Bertrand Russell wrote in 1946, "we shall have to admit Asia to equality in our thoughts, not only politically, but culturally." His prescription is exactly right for today's eastward shift in economic and political power.
Don Berry, journalist
We need a planet-saving alternative to democracy. Mankind is set on exhausting the planet's resources. Voters in rich nations will not want to give anything up; voters (or dictators) in developing nations will seek what the rich have. Since democracies must reflect what majorities want, they cannot stop this process. (Dictatorships won't care.) Science will not rise to the challenge. Old ideas about philosopher-kings and benign dictatorships may be revived. Completely new ideas may emerge. Either way, democracy as we know it will not survive the century.
Philip Bobbitt, political writer
Nation state versus market state. The constitutional order of the nation state saw its role as one of regulating and reversing the results of markets. Market states, by contrast, try to use the market to achieve their governmental goals. Relatedly, nation states used law as a way of enforcing the moral codes of the dominant national group—usually, but not always, a dominant ethnic, cultural, linguistic and racial group. Nation state political parties saw law as the means of achieving their moral goals. Market state parties, whether deregulating industries or deregulating women's reproduction, try to maximise the choices of citizens without taking for granted anything much in the way of agreement about common goals. Among other consequences, this new constitutional order will generate a new form of terrorism.
Rudi Bogni, banker and director
Left vs right was and is purely a nominal distinction between two strands of the same totalitarian posture. The real problem of the 20th century was that the demographic and economic pressures that fractured the empires gave rise to national states with leaderships ill equipped to face the nihilist challenge. The vacuum was filled by totalitarian regimes, whose ideologies set fire to Europe and the world. Remember that Hitler was a failed architect, Stalin had studied for the priesthood and Mussolini was a schoolteacher. The heirs of the 19th and 20th century nihilists are today's faith-based terrorists. If today's democracies fail to win against the new nihilists on the intellectual and communication level, they will have no chance to win in the security space and will create another dangerous vacuum, ready to be filled. Nation states have proven a disastrous political experiment in the 19th and 20th century; they may well prove catastrophic in the 21st century, due to nuclear proliferation. Nevertheless, I hope that the 21st century will see a substantial reduction of political infrastructures. If a conglomerate is bad or indifferent at most of what it does, shareholders force it back to its core competences. Everything else has got to go. Why should it be different for governments? This is neither left nor right; it is common sense. Large countries' politicians love to deride small countries' direct democracies. Why? Because they fear their example and their nimbleness. The political systems inherited from the 20th century, whether democratic or totalitarian, are neo-feudal, incompatible with a 21st century when electors vote every so many years, but consumers vote and bloggers blog 24/7.
Joe Boyd, music producer
The big divide in the coming decades will be between the "reality-based community" and the "ideologically-based community." It was often observed in the 20th century that extreme right and left curved round behind the spectrum and met each other—sort of like Hitler and Stalin sharing a beer in Hades. The common ground extreme groups share is a deep-seated resistance to facts, whether Bush's resistance to climate change data or Brezhnev's refusal to accept that reversing the flow of Siberian rivers was not a good idea. There is now a clear divide between those who are prepared to face uncomfortable truths and those who persist in insisting that their views of what ought to be will ultimately trump what is. David Brooks, journalist
Instead of left/right we're moving to open/closed. It's really a debate about how confident people feel. And the next big intellectual development will be unifying what we know about the brain, about genes, about human nature, to maximise human flourishing.
AS Byatt, novelist and critic
We will be governed by a kind of consensus populism—beliefs, ideas and policies that arise on blogs, websites, focus groups and so on. (Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced their candidacies on the web.) This has its appeal. It is also frightening, as Tocqueville found American democracy, because it leads to tyranny of the majority. It goes with vast quantities of not wholly accurate information—Wikipedia is splendid and maddening. Menzies Campbell, leader, Liberal Democrats
Liberalism vs authoritarianism is fast becoming the philosophical divide within developed societies. 9/11 and other terrorist atrocities have heightened a sense of anxiety about security in an increasingly globalised world. The response from governments has been to try to gain ever greater knowledge and control of the lives and activities of their citizens. The British government is one of the worst offenders. Identity cards, the excesses of the DNA database, and a relentless drive towards extending the period of detention without trial are all symptoms of its authoritarian tendencies.
There is no "war" against terrorism. The terrorist is a criminal and should be treated accordingly. The creeping power of the state is the order of the day, but terrorism thrives where civil liberties are denied. Liberals must make that point forcefully and oppose and reverse the trend towards authoritarianism.
Douglas Carswell, politician
The political faultlines in the years ahead are likely to see centralisers pitched against localisers, and believers in old-style representative democracy slug it out with the new direct democrats.
Few people today seriously believe that politicians should centrally manage our economy. Yet the default assumption of the political establishment today is that it should centrally manage public services. This assumption will unravel.
At the same time, expect the politics of "anti-politics." Voters are starting to recognise that the current political system is a bit of a con, and they will lose faith in the "quango state" that today really decides how our country is run. People will start to recognise that real power now lies in the hands of remote and unelected officials—not those you elect on polling day: 90 per cent of planning decisions are made by council officials; Nice and other quangos really run the NHS; unelected judges decide what constitutes school uniform; human rights rules govern immigration policy; the QCA decides what children are taught. Expect to see YouTube-style technology empowering small groups of activists outside the conventional political process. This will raise fundamental questions about the nature of our political system. Expect parties to hold proper open primaries to choose their candidates, a loosening of the party whip system, a greater role for independents, and less central direction. Stephen Chan, academic
In certain respects the accomplishment of the left has been to entrench conservatism. The bureaucratisation of social democracy means that no life is any longer free of reporting and performance criteria, standardisations and imposed safety measures. The meeting of left and right in Europe is about the size of the openings and escape clauses within life's measured accountabilities rather than about ideology.
When it comes to ideologies and philosophies, the debate around multiculturalism unites the conservatisms of both left and right. The emerging dogma from both Blair and Cameron is to do with One Britain with Colourful Flourishes. It is not to do with a debate and a dynamism about how Britain might be changing into something different. The unity of left and right is over a limit to change. I cannot see how this approach can be called progressive, nor how it can accommodate the tensions of confessional divides—which reflect those in the world at large. As if that world could be shut out of Britain. Dave Clements, policy analyst
Once upon a time, housing policy was about building houses. The NHS had something to do with treating the sick. Schools were places where we sent our children to be educated. Social care supported society's most vulnerable members. And social security was about guaranteeing an income for those who had no other means. In the 21st century, they won't be talking about decent housing anymore, but about decent behaviour and decent neighbourhoods. The sick, in a throwback to the morality of the workhouse, will be divided into the deserving and undeserving of treatment. And the education system will be more interested in the contents of children's stomachs than their minds. Social services will finally come to the conclusion that we're all vulnerable now. And the social security system will be deemed unsustainable and prone to "timebombs," as the working population gets sicker and older by the day. Despite this, the authorities will continue to claim to be improving "outcomes" and promoting our "wellbeing" despite our refusal to be officially "happy." And we in turn will be rendered mute by an impenetrably empty rhetoric generated by a vacuous managerial political culture devoid of anything that might engage those it reluctantly courts only when it absolutely has to. And yet everybody will be urged to become "active" citizens.
Harvey Cole, businessman
The 70 years to 2077 in Britain fell into two phases. The first was a period of apprehension, dominated by fears that failed to materialise, in which political parties split along authoritarian- libertarian lines. The second period, of retreat, was triggered by the sudden combination of feedback from global warming, a failure of crops and water in Asia and the rapid spread of a series of pandemics. A new party, the Islanders, swept to power in Britain (which was relatively unaffected by disaster at first). It was dedicated to localism, but soon the disruption in the rest of the world led it to split into rival urban and rural segments. Life in large cities was disrupted by unreliable energy supplies, symbolised by the collapse of the City as lifts in office buildings worked only spasmodically. National government was displaced by local groups, increasingly armed. Conflicts over territory, food and resources escalated.
Robert Cooper, EU official
History, said Hegel, is the growing idea of freedom. In the 19th century, freedom came from the rule of law and the state. In this century, freedom will come from international law, but there is no international state. When Hegel wrote, the vital issues of the day—public health, workers' rights, education, the franchise—were problems brought by industrialisation. These were solved through the national state, which brought an identity for people dislocated from the country, a legal framework for industry, and solutions for the problems it created. In the 21st century, the new forms of communication have brought us a new world and we need a new constitutional form too. The big question is how to organise this world in which politics and identity are national, but we can survive and prosper only if we act internationally. It is fine to talk about "the international community," but who is it and how can it function?
Mark Cousins, film critic
By the end of the 21st century, politicians and the idea of the executive will have disappeared entirely. As everyone will be connected to some evolved form of the internet, all political decisions will be made by daily and weekly referendums. Right and left will still be underlying polarities, but will disperse into the hundreds of decisions a citizen will make annually. There will be no political class to pillory. Instead, the new dilemma will be how to delineate a constituency. By nation? Supranational region? Continent?
David Cox, writer and broadcaster
In the absence of ideological conflict, interest groups are likely to reclaim the political process as a means of pursuing advantage. The constituencies most likely to find themselves in significant contention are not represented by existing political organisations, so new formations and battlefronts are likely to emerge.
Age may become one important faultline. Young adults are being squeezed ever harder by their elders, who own most of the available wealth but expect their juniors to fund pensions and other privileges which they will not be able to enjoy in their turn. At the same time, the young are being bequeathed problems generated by their parents' self-indulgence, like climate change. These will further impoverish the relevant cohort and feed an appetite for redress.
Diane Coyle, economist
Technocracy against democracy. There are already important areas of public policy being run by experts rather than elected politicians, and run better than they were when electoral pressure affected outcomes: monetary policy is the obvious example. But there is a tension here. On one hand, new technologies give us hyper-democracy, rapid and massive populist pressure online. On the other, cognitive science and empirical social science build up a more reliable evidence base for technocrats about how people take decisions and what their consequences will be in practice.
William Davies, policy analyst
A new politics of autonomy has arrived. On the one hand, imperatives and strategies for reducing autonomy are growing by the day. Public services are increasingly coercive, where people refuse to act in a way that will increase their health or wealth. Rights are becoming housed in our bodies rather than our minds, as biometrics become the means of accessing services. On the other hand, we see an assembled group of autonomists—religious factions, businesses, libertarians, binge drinking hedonists—who assert their right to select a lifestyle. Set in contrast to biological and sociological expertise, the demands of these latter groups come to be appear irrational, quaint or plain wrong. The worry is that without any fundamental reason to respect individual and collective choices, democracy itself will become tarred with the same brush.
Geoff Dench, sociologist
The environmental crises which loom in the 21st century—not just because of climate change but also the timebombs of population growth and resource depletion—will see a revival of "centre vs periphery" issues, in place of right vs left. On one hand we will see the development of technology strengthening cosmopolitan tendencies, in particular through the growing supranational organisation of science and the accreditation of scientific expertise. But on the other, there will be a resurgence of nationalism around politics, asserting the collective ownership of natural resources rather than individual rights in productive property.
Overall we could see a return to an international order not unlike that under European feudalism. Hierarchies of political units devoted to husbanding their own(ed) lands would look to the new church—"universalist science," probably in alliance with a number of re-oriented faith groups including Christianity and Buddhism—to secure the legitimacy and authority of their regimes, as protectors of the planet. Most political processes, both at global level and within smaller units, would be conducted by experts. And most political conflict would be between expert cosmopolitans, geared to the interests of larger communities, and locals. Democracy would be weak, as the causes supported by the largest numbers of individuals would often not be those in the best interests of the planet.
Meghnad Desai, economist
Left/right, north/south, east/west are dead. Politics will be global and/or personal. What little the state will be asked to do—mainly local issues—it will fail to do. People will devise their own solutions, however imperfectly. They will move across borders and create the preconditions of a global polity, not as a behemoth but as a beehive.
Ronald Dore, economist
The salient political fact will be class rigidity, the attenuation of social mobility under the combined inheritance effects of money, culture and genes. "Right" and "left" opposed the self-interest of the orthodox rich against the sympathies of the upwardly mobile for those they had left behind, plus the conscience of the deviant rich. In the two-nations future, the conscience of the rich will be on its own.
Two centuries ago, in the first two-nation era, Thomas Arnold offered the conscientious rich a classic statement championing "fraternity through greater equality" against liberty. "Knowing full well that [people] are not equal in natural powers, [nor in] artificial advantages; one of the falsest maxims which ever pandered to human selfishness under the name of political wisdom [is that] civil society ought to leave its members alone, each to look after their several interests, provided they do not employ direct fraud or force against their neighbour".
Anthony Dworkin, political writer
It is a fashionable illusion to suppose that the left/right distinction is obsolete. It remains the key ideological dividing line because it is not dependent on a particular set of social and political circumstances but is rooted in the central question of the purpose of collective public policy. Essentially, the left is more inclined to see the state as an enabling force that can improve the conditions and prospects of its citizens, while the right sees it more as a restrictive force that is best employed in preventing harm. Politics may be clustering in the centre, but differences of instinct and outlook remain important. Who can doubt that Gordon Brown and David Cameron, at heart, see the world in different ways?
The divide between these inclinations carries over to foreign policy. The left tends to see international politics as an arena for promoting development and wellbeing, while the right sees it more in terms of eliminating security threats or restrictions on trade. New issues like climate change or terrorism are not the exclusive preserve of left or right, but responses to them are likely to divide on recognisable left/right grounds. So although Iraq and questions of military intervention do not neatly map on to a left/right framework, there are clear differences between leftist interventionists (who emphasise universal values and human rights) and rightist ones (who emphasise security and the balance of power). There may be occasional coalitions that cut across the left/right dichotomy, but these won't represent any cohesive ideology or broader view of the role of public policy—while the categories of left and right will continue to do so.
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