Whom we call 'us' and whom we call 'them'

GE2017 has revealed - and continues to show up - many interesting things about The New Politics in the UK today. One thing that became crystal clear was that many people were very wrong about the Jeremy Corbyn effect. Since his election (and re-election) as leader of the Labour Party, political pundits, the media commentariat and members of the Party made him the problem. Nowhere more so than in the Parliamentary Labour Party itself, with front benchers resigning and speaking out in private and public in opposition to him. 

The election confounded their expectations and, moreover, rallied serious support around the optimistic social democratic manifesto he led. 

Some of the above have graciously acknowledged they were mistaken. For those Generation X Labour folk who grew up in politics in the 90s and noughties, it is perhaps unsurprising that their political experiences, shaped as they were by the Blair years, led them to believe that they needed to moderate their talk and tone, so as not to scare the neo-liberal horses - mainly the mainstream media, the business and financial services sectors.  

Others, however, have doubled down on their critique, continuing their vilification of the ‘Corbynistas’ - a disparaging term fully intended to call into the imagination the ‘scary’ radical left groups from Central America. 

Unsurprisingly, this is not going down so well and the blogs and Twitter-sphere are starting to fill up with testy discussions. 

I think there are two important things going on here. The first is explained by a critical view of power; the second by the psychology of ‘belonging’ and ‘othering’. 

On power; for more than three decades the neoliberals have held sway; it is their language, their discourse, their social and economic values and principles which have shaped and, increasingly, controlled the debate. When alternatives are presented, the response is, in some version or another, “they just don’t get it”. Thatcher’s famous ‘There Is No Alternative’ speech marked a watershed. It has, since then, been almost impossible to get any serious and sustained discussion of a meaningful and workable alternative to neoliberalism into the public discourse. If you’re serious, sensible, realistic, intelligent, ‘one of us’, you’ll ‘understand’ that neoliberalism just explains the way things are. 

Implicitly underpinning these debates is another phenomenon. The ‘us and them’ polarisation has been called Belonging and Othering. The Haas Institute, at Berkeley University, curates and publishes collections of work which explains it. They say: “While Othering processes marginalise people on the basis of perceived group differences, Belonging confers the privileges of membership in a community, including the care and concern of other members.“Belonging means more than just being seen. Belonging entails having a meaningful voice and the opportunity to participate in the design of social and cultural structures. Belonging means having the right to contribute to, and make demands on, society and political institutions.”

Neuroscientists argue that we have evolved to make these rapid judgements about whether “you’re with me or against me” for our own safety, security and survival. For 80,000 years, social groups have had to decide whether the tribe coming over the hill wanted to befriend or fight. Unsurprisingly, then, Belonging and Othering shows up in every sphere of life. My own work on leading change focusses on these patterns in organisations - and how to work with them. But it is equally present in families, communities, politics. In families, you may hear comments like “he’s just like his father; she’s more like her mother’s side”. In communities, we might hear: “We're real villagers; they’re incomers”. In our politics, at the moment, we’ve got Brexiteers vs Remainers; Left vs Right; or even, as some would have it right now, the Youth Vote v Older People. 

So on the one hand, this an evolutionary psychosocial process that we can’t avoid. On the other hand - and what matters is that - it can have pretty serious consequences. When belonging and othering is taken to extremes bad things happen. 

How The Dominants Act: Stereotype, Typecast, Educate (shape thinking), Trivialise, Exclude, Marginalise, Ignore, Suppress, Exile, Murder (ethnic cleansing)

How The Others Feel: Constrained, Confused, Loss of confidence, Tolerated, Don’t know the rules, Second-class, Resentful, Angry, Fearful

The thing is; we can all become the dominant Us's or the marginalised Thems, in different places, and at different times. What’s fascinating about the Corbyn phenomenon is that it has revealed some rather more well-hidden versions of who’s us and who’s them. The Westminster establishment - in which I include the BBC and pretty much all parts of the mainstream media - was exposed as an ‘us’, challenged by what was represented by the Corbyn ‘them’. Nowhere was this shown up more than the media coverage of Corbyn. 

The good news is that whilst this is inevitable, it is not intractable. The way to handle this phenomenon is to illuminate it, acknowledge it and to develop the practices that tackle it. We do have examples and stories from recent history in which such differences have been overcome. In South Africa, Rwanda and in Northern Ireland (notwithstanding the political alliance between the Conservatives and the DUP risks jeopardising all that work), communities that were literally killing each other found ways to come together in service of a bigger prize and a higher purpose. 

Maybe the left is in urgent need of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in order to be able to move on quickly, to embrace the extraordinarily exciting possibilities and prospects in our new political landscape.