Don’t confuse the consequences of the outcome with the things that had to be achieved to accomplish it. He got a national referendum on the ballot and got it to pass, despite the establishment (political parties, media, and businesses) being uniformly against it. This is not comparable to burning down a building. Rather it was a precision campaign to identify what it would take to convince a majority of the voting population to adopt a radical political agenda.
Change “Brexit” to “basic income,” “universal single-payer healthcare,” “tuition-free higher education,” “carbon-free emissions” or whatever your preferred legislative objective would be, and the difficulty and techniques would be the same. It was a large accomplishment worth studying.
It’s not obvious to me that either the difficulty or the techniques would be the same for those other objectives as for Brexit. A canny political operative uses techniques appropriate for specific goals, after all.
If your goal is simply to get the UK out of the EU, for whatever reason and in whatever fashion, and if you don’t mind what harm you do to society in the process, then “all” you need to do is to stir up hatred and suspicion and fear around the EU and what it does and those who like it, and find some slogans that appeal without requiring much actual thought, and so forth. Standard-issue populism.
But let’s suppose you want universal basic income and you want it because you think it will help people and make society better. Then:
The “stir up fear and hatred” template doesn’t work so well, because what you’re doing isn’t a thing that can readily be seen as fighting against a shared enemy.
The “stir up fear and hatred” template may be a really bad idea even if it works, because it may do more damage to society than the reform you’re aiming for does good.
The details of what you do and how you do it may matter a lot: some versions of universal basic income might bankrupt the country, some might fail to do enough to solve the problems UBI is meant to solve, some might be politically unacceptable, etc. So you need to sell it in a way that lets a carefully designed version of UBI be what ends up happening.
The available evidence does not suggest (to me) that Cummings has a very specific version of Brexit in mind, or that he is sufficiently concerned for the welfare of the UK’s society and the individuals within it to be troubled by considerations of societal harm done by the measures he’s taken, or of whether he’s ending up with a variety of Brexit that’s net beneficial.
I would have preferred to say the foregoing without the last paragraph, which is kinda object-level political. But it’s essential to the point. When Viliam says it’s easier to burn a building down than construct it, I think he is saying something similar: if, as it seems may be the case, Cummings doesn’t actually care whether he does a lot of harm to a lot of people, then he has selected an easier task than would be faced by someone trying to bring about major reforms without harming a lot of people, and the methods he’s chosen are not necessarily ones that those who care about not harming a lot of people should emulate.
Yep. Looking around me, getting Slovakia out of EU would be relatively easier task than making it adopt UBI, for the reasons you mentioned (plus one you didn’t: availability of foreign helpers).
How clear is it that he specifically got all those things to happen? There were definitely other people involved, after all. Cummings’s own account of what happened no doubt ascribes as much agency as possible to Cummings himself, but there are possible explanations for that other than its being true.
Don’t confuse the consequences of the outcome with the things that had to be achieved to accomplish it. He got a national referendum on the ballot and got it to pass, despite the establishment (political parties, media, and businesses) being uniformly against it. This is not comparable to burning down a building. Rather it was a precision campaign to identify what it would take to convince a majority of the voting population to adopt a radical political agenda.
Change “Brexit” to “basic income,” “universal single-payer healthcare,” “tuition-free higher education,” “carbon-free emissions” or whatever your preferred legislative objective would be, and the difficulty and techniques would be the same. It was a large accomplishment worth studying.
It’s not obvious to me that either the difficulty or the techniques would be the same for those other objectives as for Brexit. A canny political operative uses techniques appropriate for specific goals, after all.
If your goal is simply to get the UK out of the EU, for whatever reason and in whatever fashion, and if you don’t mind what harm you do to society in the process, then “all” you need to do is to stir up hatred and suspicion and fear around the EU and what it does and those who like it, and find some slogans that appeal without requiring much actual thought, and so forth. Standard-issue populism.
But let’s suppose you want universal basic income and you want it because you think it will help people and make society better. Then:
The “stir up fear and hatred” template doesn’t work so well, because what you’re doing isn’t a thing that can readily be seen as fighting against a shared enemy.
The “stir up fear and hatred” template may be a really bad idea even if it works, because it may do more damage to society than the reform you’re aiming for does good.
The details of what you do and how you do it may matter a lot: some versions of universal basic income might bankrupt the country, some might fail to do enough to solve the problems UBI is meant to solve, some might be politically unacceptable, etc. So you need to sell it in a way that lets a carefully designed version of UBI be what ends up happening.
The available evidence does not suggest (to me) that Cummings has a very specific version of Brexit in mind, or that he is sufficiently concerned for the welfare of the UK’s society and the individuals within it to be troubled by considerations of societal harm done by the measures he’s taken, or of whether he’s ending up with a variety of Brexit that’s net beneficial.
I would have preferred to say the foregoing without the last paragraph, which is kinda object-level political. But it’s essential to the point. When Viliam says it’s easier to burn a building down than construct it, I think he is saying something similar: if, as it seems may be the case, Cummings doesn’t actually care whether he does a lot of harm to a lot of people, then he has selected an easier task than would be faced by someone trying to bring about major reforms without harming a lot of people, and the methods he’s chosen are not necessarily ones that those who care about not harming a lot of people should emulate.
Yep. Looking around me, getting Slovakia out of EU would be relatively easier task than making it adopt UBI, for the reasons you mentioned (plus one you didn’t: availability of foreign helpers).
How clear is it that he specifically got all those things to happen? There were definitely other people involved, after all. Cummings’s own account of what happened no doubt ascribes as much agency as possible to Cummings himself, but there are possible explanations for that other than its being true.