Ever heard of the political idiom: ‘bleeding heart’ liberal before? The term refers to left-wing politicians who are overly empathetic with disadvantaged groups on issues such as social welfare and education.
Now I would definitely not say Andy Burnham is open to criticism here (he is a Catholic with what many may identify as liberal views) as such, Burnham cannot be labeled as a liberal in the classical sense.
I am starting to feel slightly aggrieved and let down by the 17th Century religious iconography and broader etymology of the term.
I’ve perhaps been challenged myself on Y number of many occasions, to come up with an alternative stance to this notion of apathy that is such a critical number one perceived flaw of adversarial politics in the Westminster model. Conservatives direct all their criticism at the expense of the disadvantaged. The left succeed by effectively protecting the rights and interests of the very same disadvantaged citizens.
Assuming 14th Century figures like the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer, looked at the New Testament and picked out what you might call a surface-level conflict with the political model and accentuated the impetus to intentionally act to protect those in downtrodden and vulnerable situations which Jesus himself asks us to do by considering others above ourselves.
The challenge for Burnham therefore is one of immense self reflection to avoid such a conflict. Does the new PM continue to offer a path of promises or will there be a terminal point of departure?
https://unherd.com/newsroom/andy-burnhams-radicalism-will-stop-at-the-treasury/
Comments
Empathy as a Boundary-Making Exercise
The term "bleeding heart" carries an ambiguity that the post only partly addresses. It names both the impulse to care and the institutional form that care takes when it becomes a political programme. The first is a disposition. The second is a structure. They are not the same thing, and conflating them is where the trouble starts. It is worth being clear that the original arguments were often valid. The problems being addressed were real. Inequality, discrimination, exclusion, neglect of the vulnerable - these were not invented. The people who pushed for action were responding to conditions that needed a response. The diagnosis was frequently correct, and the intent was frequently honourable. Nothing that follows should be read as a claim that the causes were false or that the concern was unwarranted. The problem is not the impulse and not the initial argument. The problem emerges when a valid concern becomes a project, and the project requires a boundary. The boundary defines who is inside it, who is being helped, and by implication who is outside, who is not. Every act of political care draws a line. The line is not neutral. It determines whose complaints are heard and whose are dismissed. When that boundary is drawn from one worldview and treated as universal, the people outside it are not simply unhelped. They are framed as obstacles. Their objections are read as resistance, their concerns as bad faith. The structure produces this outcome regardless of the intentions of the people inside it. Feedback from outside the boundary is filtered as noise. The original argument, which was sound, is now defended by a mechanism that no longer resembles it. The pattern is familiar from systems work. A subsystem that grows powerful enough to dominate the wider system stops serving that system and starts extracting from it. The boundary becomes institutionalised. The framing becomes fashionable. The people outside it are first ignored, then vilified, then treated as the problem itself. The mainstream is currently on the outside of a boundary drawn by a project that no longer knows when to stop. That is not a moral observation. It is a structural one. The pushback is the system responding to a boundary that has excluded too much. Whether the response corrects the boundary or simply draws a new one in the opposite direction is the open question. The post asks whether Burnham can reflect. The structural question is whether any political project can recognise its own boundary before the people outside it force the recognition. Regards,
Russell Larke
BA (Hons) Business Management | MSc Candidate (Systems Thinking)
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