Russell Brand, a deepening threat to 'entitled' liberal voices

Newsnight presenter Evan Davis's interview with Russell Brand has elicited much denunciation from an indignant liberal commentariat.

Announcing her latest Sunday Times column, Camilla Long tweeted: "PLEASE can someone tell me what we did to deserve "prancing perm on a stick" Russell Brand as a "voice"?"  Why, laments Hadley Freeman at the Guardian, does this purveyor of "ecstatic hypomania", and chauffeur-driven celeb, have the right to pontificate about poverty, injustice and revolution? Over at the Observer, Nick Cohen sneers that Brand is nothing more than a "barmy Beverly Hills Buddhist" with a dearth of alternatives, and should be shunned by the 'gullible' left. 

As with past demonisations of Julian Assange, so much of this is written in smug-liberal 'house style', the sharply-honed barbs grasping for editorial approval.

But beneath all these caustic words, an even more venomous question lurks: why, they really crave to know, is Brand getting all this attention?

Might such animosity be less about his 'infantile' ideas than the discomfiture of Brand threatening to usurp their 'appointed' roles as 'entitled critics', 'public guardians' and 'political reformers'?     

Though we weren't supposed to notice, the Newsnight interview said as much about why people like Davis, rather than Brand, get to where they are; how their words, ideas and worldviews are so widely registered and safely internalised.

Throughout the interview, Davis spoke the lines of homo-economicus, immersed in the business mindset, at one stage flashing-up a cold graph of real post-war wages. His point? That, despite the 'current dip', capitalism has delivered, overall.

But where was the human context? There was no mention of the profound power capitalism has wielded over every aspect of daily life, no suggestion of the staggering inequalities, mental anguish, alienation, despair, greed, misery and murder of the market system. And certainly no admission of the considerable role a capitalist media has played in all of that.  

In a sense, Davis and Brand weren't even in the same studio. Davis, fixated with statistical 'realities', seemed to be 'hearing' Brand's concerns about corporate capitalism and its monolithic sovereignty - economic, political, social, ecological, cultural - as though it were some kind of unintelligible language.

While Davis may see many problems with capitalism, notably as technocratic issues of production, supply, demand, growth, and even the 'costs' of inequality, he still speaks as though it's the definitive order, the norm. Anyone trying to question that orthodoxy, particularly 'non-expert' voices like Brand, are treated as little more than comedian acts, albeit fascinating ones, to be chided and ridiculed. 

Besides boosting ratings and playing 'street populism', the Newsnight piece was an editorial ambush, picking-out and distorting a tiny line about 9/11 from Brand's book. No sooner was the interview aired than editor Ian Katz was tweeting implied slurs about Brand's 'receptiveness' to conspiracy theories. 

Davis also asked Brand why he doesn't stand for political office, an illustration, like the narrow view of capitalism, of the template liberal politics we're encouraged to accept, and why figures like Davis are trusted to be on Newsnight helping to keep it so.   

Any hostile chain reaction to Brand says as much about our routine exposure to Davis's 'sensible' establishment language as it does to Brand's seemingly 'madcap' declarations. In effect, Brand's views only 'stand out' as 'insane' because we're so relentlessly conditioned to see the standard line as sane.

From the smear-laden Independent to a spluttering Daily Mail, sniping dismissals of Brand's 'revolutionary utopianism' allow easy reduction of his arguments to that of showman fraudster. Yet, are we really to believe that Brand sat down with a devious glint and invented some radically-costumed identity in order to sell a tour, a book or other financially-rewarding prop?

Even if Brand is, or gets treated as, some kind of a passing fad, what he's saying about corporate power, consumer culture, media propaganda, environmental calamity and the wider deprivation of humanity deserves all the airing it can get right now.

If it's a choice between gloating, career journalists using large establishment-corporate media to take-down Brand, or small independent media like Brand's Trews helping to expose power-friendly celebs like Boris Johnson and the influence of that corporate media, I know which version I'm approving.

And if Brand one day does takes the full establishment shilling, or revokes all he's said, so what? If we don't have him already up there on the personal pedestal, never mind the 'Jesus altar', we're at least spared the task of those tortured liberal iconoclasts in having to bring him down.

There's no need to idealise and 'follow' Brand, or even expect that he lay out some kind of detailed manifesto. It's enough that he's helping to subvert authority, indict corporate life, expose his insecure media critics, and promote the need for a real humanitarian and, yes, revolutionary consciousness.