Marcus Rashford. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Personal charisma is harder to describe than it is to recognise. You know it when you see it, but isn’t easy to formulate or replicate. For a previous generation it was the boxer Muhammad Ali who possessed it in abundance and was celebrated for it. Bill Clinton and Steve Jobs are more recent examples, and together represent a moment in our recent cultural and political history. Charismatic heroes need to transcend their own field if they are to gain wider cultural recognition and impact.
In recent decades, and perhaps a sign of our culture of cynicism, heroes have popularly been prefixed with the term “flawed”. From the dark and gritty cinematic remakes of Batman and Superman to car-crash reality-TV shows and the new generation of gonzo journalism of Vice, charisma is demonstrated as much by personal failings as public accomplishments. Collectively we seem to have agreed that brilliant also means damaged, with the sugar of remarkable talent or ability flavoured with the spice of deviance, weakness or even sociopathy. Otherwise you get Tom Hanks: great actor, evident star quality, married to the same woman for 32 years, hasn’t put a foot wrong – and so not getting a fragrance campaign anytime soon.
The move from tolerance to actually valuing bad behaviour as a key part of success, and the disappearance of a moral compass for evaluating successful people, coincided with our current form of late-late capitalism. If you are a schoolkid, being tagged a disruptor will get you told off or possibly expelled, but tech entrepreneurs are routinely praised with the same noun. In fact, there is no bigger cliché in the description of anything important, new or good than it being referred to as disruptive. In a previous age, a radical would be an outsider trying to bring a system down; in Silicon Valley, the tech billionaires like to think of themselves as radicals wearing hoodies and posing as make believe hoodlums. Creative destruction is now the mantra of the ruling elite, not the battle cry of the hordes at the gate.
This idea can be traced back to the Moravian-born, Austro-German economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) who was briefly Austria’s minister of finance in the 1920s. How you may ask, might he help contemporary society offer a free pass to Michael Jackson or explain the behaviour of Hedi Slimane or Brad Pitt? Stay with me. Schumpeter saw the economic sphere as subject to the laws of evolution and natural selection and suggested that disruption, or as he put it, destruction, can be good for the economy. Capitalism, he explained, is always on a path to perfecting itself as it weeds out inefficiency and kills the weak, much in the same way as natural selection favours the stronger bull. For Schumpeter, the disastrous collapse of the German economy between the two world wars wasn’t evidence of the capitalist system’s flaws, but rather a demonstration that it instinctively knows how to improve itself.
After a short active political life, and an even shorter and less successful career as a banker, Schumpeter became an academic, first at the University of Bonn and then at Harvard where he began work in 1932. He became a US citizen and an academic cause célèbre in conservative circles (Ayn Rand was a close friend) for his vocal rejection of socialism on the grounds it would lead to dictatorship and for his criticism of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic programme. His principal and, it has to be said, more successful, intellectual opponent was British economist John Maynard Keynes. If in life Schumpeter lived in the shadow of Keynes, in death he got his revenge. Investopedia.com (the clue is in the name) calls the German one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century and the Economist, self-declared in-house magazine of world rulers, has a blog named after him to this day.
Generations of right-wing thinkers and politicians deify him, especially those who came to positions of power after Reagan and Thatcher’s revolutions of the 1980s. Among Schumpeter’s American students and disciples are John Galbraith, the influential American economist, and Alan Greenspan, the longest-serving chairman of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan served four US presidents, from Reagan to George W. Bush. Under his leadership the overarching arguments over how to run the economy seemed to have been settled once and for all.
Roosevelt is quoted as having said that if Wall Street wanted to come on a trip with him, it would be travelling in the trunk, but all of Alan Greenspan’s presidents – three Republicans and a Democrat – chose to chuck the bankers the keys to Wall Street and settle in the backseat with a comic book. Greenspan took office following the various economic shocks of the 1970s and early 1980s, just a few months before a global market crash, and his reign saw booms and busts in which millions lost their jobs, communities were destroyed and ways of life disappeared. Yet Schumpeter’s acolytes simply pointed out that these crises were not necessarily bad for the economy; there were instead “natural churn” and inevitable, their human cost regrettable but necessary. “Look at the long term,” they’d shout, “it’ll all be worth it in the long run!” The solution to the problem of capitalism was more capitalism; the answer to the inadequacies of regulations was removing them altogether.
Even two decades after that 1987 crash and as late as the financial crisis of 2008, the cult of supply-side economics continued. Nearly all the political class of the centre, left and right, looked for answers from Schumpeter’s playbook. After ten years of failed austerity, Theresa May warned voters that Jeremy Corbyn’s vision of public intervention in the economy was fantastical, the idea of investing in public services the equivalent of belief in magic money trees. The number of food banks in the UK over the past ten years clearly do not count as evidence against free-market economic dogma.1 Maybe the fact that the London School of Economics, a bastion of liberalism, in December concluded a wide-ranging study led by Dr David Hope that looked at 18 developed economies over 50 years and showed that cutting taxes for the rich simply does not boost the economy.2
If the crash of 2008 ended the fantasy that boom and bust were just part of the fun rollercoasters in the economic fairground, the Trumpian shitstorm that followed showed the fearsome result of a political class that had failed generation after generation. Then came Covid-19, a virus that has somehow become the antidote to the precarious libertarian individualism of the right. Yet none of these awful, deadly storms will compare with the human and economic tsunami of environmental collapse, waiting for us in a matter of a few short years. Our unbridled, uncontrolled markets, having been rewarded for 40 years of failure, have ultimately birthed an undemocratic form of oligarchic capitalism. The Schumpeterian ideal has not only run out of ideas and credibility – it has also run out of world, having sold the dream of endless growth only to deliver the nightmare of the end of life on earth. No wonder that some billionaire bad boys are erotically charged by the idea of interplanetary colonisation in the manner of cartoon villains. Having nearly destroyed our world, they fantasise about new ones without the rest of us to inconvenience them.
They say every generation creates heroes in its own image, so perhaps we should look away from the proud boys of Silicon Valley and concentrate on the one person who has recently shown the kind of emotional intelligence and empathy, social awareness and commitment to political engagement that we used to and could expect again from our heroes. Step forward Marcus Rashford: footballer and food-poverty activist. Like Muhammad Ali, he complements his talent as a sportsman with an innate understanding of social conditions and a moral response to them. God help the defenders of the status quo standing in his – and his generation’s – way. Masoud Golsorkhi
1. D. Clark, “Number of people using food banks in the UK 2008-2020”, 23 September 2020; statista.com/statistics/382695/uk-foodbank-users/
2. LSE, “Keeping tax low for the rich does not boost economy”, 16 December 2020; lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2020/L-December/Tax-cuts-for-the-rich