But the prospect of a less political world is distinctly scarier than a more political one. Closer examination of the situation shows that our scary politicians often make use of tools and reasoning from outside the scope of the political in order to justify their more extreme programs and initiatives. Politicians are in fact undermining politics from below while using security to attack politics from above.
 
The Chicago School of Economics, so beloved by the aforementioned leaders, assumes that economics is a scientific and technical area in which certain actions lead to predictable outcomes. Pull the levers right and everyone wins. But it doesn’t work like that; ask the people of Chile whose elected government was overthrown - with Western support - by the ‘economically liberal’ dictator General Augusto Pinochet; ask Russians who lived through the nightmare of the Yeltsin years.

The Iraq War was sold to us in many ways depending on where we lived, but a consistent theme running through the sales pitch was that it would make us safer. From the over-hyped threat of WMDs to the sexed-up dodgy dossier, the implication was clear – We, your leaders, know things that you don’t, some of which we can’t tell you, but trust us and we will do the right thing to protect you. The results speak for themselves. Essentially, making something a security issue raises it out of the realm of politics, and its special status as an existential threat to something we value allows the powerful to take extraordinary measures.

Real politics is about prioritizing and making difficult decisions in a complex world, but also about holding power to account. The political realm is under threat from below and from above and we must resist this if we are to retain and re-assert our own power and agency. We need to ensure that politics drive economics, rather than vice-versa, and we must demand the right to be involved in the big decisions. We need to resist the language of security and logic that suffuses our lives with fear for, as Hobbes noted: a life focused on security is not only nasty, brutish and short, but also poor and lonely.
 
In short, we need to re-occupy and re-empower the political rather than shrink fearfully in the face of the false politics of economics, management and security.

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