Why politics needs a new language

Announcing The Academy 2025, the annual residential summer school organised by Ideas Matter.

Each year, the Ideas Matter charity hosts an intellectual getaway like no other. The theme for 2025 is ‘Upheaval: Why politics needs a new language’. Here, Jacob Reynolds explains what next year’s event is all about. Get your tickets here.

Ours is a time of incredible upheaval. Populists across the world demand a different way of doing things. Companies and governments struggle to keep pace with immense technological change. The geopolitical landscape is more fluid than many can remember. Culture is disrupted – art responds to new formats and social life to new assumptions.

Yet this time of enormous change also seems sometimes like the retrenchment of an old order. For all the talk of populism, a new election in Germany looks set to return Angela Merkel’s party to power. The legacy of Brexit is, for the moment at least, the return of Blair-era technocracy. In culture, the longing for the familiar sees itself play out in nostalgia, revivalism and reboots. As I write this, Britain’s commentators have lost themselves in a moral panic about porn and prostitution, doing little more than recycling the debates of the Seventies and Eighties. Even Trump’s remarkable return to the White House has seen European leaders pledging renewed allegiance to the American imperium. Plus ça change…

Yet the language we use to describe this new era doesn’t seem to fit.

But some attempts have been made to define and dissect our times. As jarring and imprecise as they are, the prevalence of terms like ‘woke’, ‘gender critical’ or ‘two-tier’ speak to an attempt to find an adequate way to characterise the present. Certainly, when the governing Labour Party barely pretends to support working people and instead puts all its energy into mirroring the obsessions of the managerial class, ‘woke’ is a better descriptor than ‘socialist’ - even if some cling on rather desperately to the insistence there is a straight line from Karl Marx to drag queen story hour.

Likewise, ‘conservative’ hardly seems a good term to describe either the establishment parties of the right nor their challengers. The centre-right parties long ago gave up conserving anything, and the radicalism of the challenger parties is hardly Burkean in temperament. The idea of an establishment versus the populists captures the split much better.

But our new terms are hazy and imprecise. To tell the story of populism, you need to uncover a whole buried history of upstart parties – hardly the same as taking your bearings from the classics of political philosophy. To understand woke, one needs to understand how both state and market have become captured by a managerial technocracy - a damn sight harder than repeating lines from Thatcher.

At the margins, there are, of course, some genuinely dissident thinkers. But the plethora of prefixes - neo-reactionary, trans-humanist, post-liberals - suggests that even they are still transfixed by the ideologies of the past.

It would be nice to be writing an article where I have a simple answer to this. To have, packaged and ready to go, a new ideology that captures the present moment in all its complexity. But no such idea exists. Instead, if we want to move forward and think afresh, we have to take a little step back. What happened that made the old ideologies such poor fits for the moment we find ourselves in? Answering this question requires us to have a lot more clarity about what these ideas were - where they came from, what problems they responded to, the society that was a fit for them. Only on this basis do we stand a chance of seeing the gap that has opened up between now and yesterday.

That is why I am very pleased to announce next year’s edition of our annual summer school, The Academy. The theme is Upheaval: Why politics needs a new language and we will be looking at all of this in some detail. We will start with some examination of the big defining ideas of the recent past - as well as looking at some of the new ideas that are gaining ground today.

As ever, The Academy will bring together people from all walks of life who are committed to rethinking some of the basic building blocks of political life. This is a weekend event full of big ideas and friends, old and new. It is a chance to take a little step back and educate ourselves properly. The event is often described as ‘university as it should be’, and this captures the idea that we have a duty to take ourselves a lot more intellectually seriously if we are going to understand what is happening right now.

Tickets can be bought from £145 for the weekend, or for the full experience join us as a residential guest in the wonderful surrounds of Wyboston Lakes. Concessions are available, too, and we hope shortly to announce a Scholarship programme for young people and those on restricted incomes. And if you want to make a Christmas gift for someone you know would love to attend - get in touch with us.

There is plenty more information, as well as the initial reading list, over on the website. We hope to see you there!