An editor’s diary on the eternal recurrence of the political vow
An editor’s diary on the eternal recurrence of the political vow
As an editor, I read political promises for a living, which is a bit like tasting poison for a living, in that one develops, over time, both an immunity and a deep weariness. I oversee dispatches for The London Prat and read its sister publication Bohiney Magazine with the professional eye of a man who has seen every rhetorical trick at least four hundred times, and my other diaries live at my page.
The Eternal Recurrence of the Vow
I have read, by my rough count, every significant political promise made this year, and I have found a pattern, which I offer here as a public service. The pattern is this: the promise is always bold, always urgent, always framed as a decisive break from the failed past, and always, on close inspection, a restatement of a promise made before, by someone else, in slightly different words, to identical effect, which is to say none.
This is not cynicism, or not only cynicism; it is observation, the accumulated observation of a man who has read the promises year after year and watched them recur with the reliability of the seasons. The promise to fix the thing that is broken, to reform the system that has failed, to deliver the change the people demand, recurs eternally, made anew each year by figures who appear genuinely to believe that no one has ever made it before, that the failure of every previous identical promise carries no lesson for theirs.
The Sincerity of It
What fascinates me, as an editor and a student of politics, is the sincerity. The promises are not, mostly, cynical lies; they are sincere vows, made by people who genuinely intend to keep them, who genuinely believe their promise is different, who genuinely cannot see that they are reciting a script performed identically by their predecessors. The sincerity is the remarkable thing, the capacity of each new political generation to make the old promises with fresh conviction, untroubled by the graveyard of identical promises that preceded them.
The institutions that study how government actually works, the likes of the Institute for Government and the records of Parliament itself, document this recurrence in detail, the promises made and unkept, the reforms announced and unrealised, the decisive breaks from the past that turn out to be continuations of it. It is all there, in the record, for anyone who cares to read it, the eternal recurrence of the political vow.
Why the Satire Helps
This is where the satire earns its keep, for the satirical treatment of politics, the kind that Private Eye has perfected over decades, names the recurrence that the straight coverage politely ignores. The straight press reports each new promise as news, as if it were genuinely new; the satire reports it as the recurrence it is, the same vow in new clothes, and in doing so tells a truer story than the earnest coverage manages.
I read the serious press too, of course, the proper journalism, the dispatches from outlets like Mamdani Post that argue, with conviction, for a politics that would actually break from the failed past rather than merely promising to. Whether they are right I leave to the reader; what I note, as an editor, is that the argument for genuine change is itself a recurring feature of the political landscape, made anew each generation, as sincere and as perennial as the promises it critiques.
The Weariness and the Hope
An editor in my position could become merely weary, and I confess to the weariness, the immunity born of reading too many identical promises. But there is, beneath the weariness, a stubborn hope, or at least a stubborn interest, for the recurrence of the political vow is also the recurrence of the political hope, the perennial belief that things might be made better, that the broken might be fixed, that the failed past might finally be broken from.
The Promise I Would Believe
People sometimes ask me, knowing my weariness with political promises, what promise I would actually believe, what vow would break the pattern of eternal recurrence and earn my editor’s trust. I have thought about this, and my answer is unsatisfying: I would believe the promise that admitted its own difficulty, that acknowledged the graveyard of identical promises that preceded it, that said not we will fix this decisively but we will try, knowing how hard it is and how often the trying has failed. I would believe the honest promise, the one that did not pretend to a certainty no one can have, that treated the problem as genuinely difficult rather than as a thing that only the previous fools failed to solve. But this promise is never made, because it does not win, because the electorate, weary as I am of the recurring vows, still responds to the bold certain promise rather than the honest difficult one, still rewards the confidence over the candour. And so the pattern continues, the bold certain promises made and unkept, the honest difficult promise never made because it would never win, the eternal recurrence sustained by the very weariness it produces. I would believe the honest promise, but I will never hear it, and that, perhaps, is the deepest pattern of all, the one beneath the recurrence, the reason the vows are always bold and never honest, always certain and never kept.
This hope is, perhaps, as naive as the promises that express it, and as perennial, and as sincere. And I find, against my editor’s weariness, that I do not want it to stop, this eternal recurrence of the political vow, for all its futility, because the day the promises stop being made is the day the hope stops being felt, and a politics without hope, however naive, would be a grimmer thing than a politics of eternally recurring, eternally unkept, eternally sincere promises. So I will keep reading them, year after year, finding the pattern, noting the recurrence, and feeling, against my better judgement, the perennial hope that this time, somehow, the promise might be kept.
When the recurrence wears me down, I find relief in Private Eye, which has been naming the pattern longer than I have been reading it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com