Whatever may be missing from the Labour leadership election no one could reasonably complain that there’s a “vision” deficit. By their own account every candidate has a vision, and they rarely miss an opportunity to remind us of the fact. When ballots were finally issued and the Guardian printed short statements of intent by those putting themselves up for election, the word occurred in every mini-manifesto – sometimes twice. Having a vision, it appears, is a necessary price of entry for this contest, the one indispensable quality any serious candidate must lay claim to.
With every other boast there are hazards. Experience in office brings with it the baggage of uncomfortable past associations; long consistency of principle lays you open to a charge of dogmatic inflexibility, but vision is, it seems, unimpeachable. And when politicians aren’t implicitly laying claim to it for themselves by hammering on about their vision, they’re arguing that we are crying out for it ourselves, vision-starved masses yearning for a steely gaze that reaches beyond the horizon of the short-term political cycle.
It’s hardly new, this almost neurotic need to assure the electorate that you’re seeing things. One of the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citations of the word in a specifically political context dates back to 1926. And Henry Fowler, in his Dictionary of Modern Usage of that same year, noted: “Vision, in the sense of statesman-like foresight or political sagacity, is enjoying a noticeable vogue.” In fact, he was a little behind the times. Search for the term in Google’s ngrams feature, which charts the frequencies of words and phrases in printed sources from 1800 onwards and you can see an Everest-like spike in usage, which reached a high point in 1920.
Was it a postwar hunger for grand, League of Nations-style helmsmanship? Or does it reflect the huge surge in interest in spiritualism that followed the mass bereavements of the first world war? Perhaps what we see in that high point is the older meaning of the word – “an appearance of a prophetic or mystical character” – handing the baton on to a new one. Either way, the vogue drops off. There’s another, smaller surge for the second world war, and then it isn’t until the late 1980s that we’re back to 1920 levels and above.
A search for the term “vision statement” offers one clue as to what happened then and the term’s political ubiquity now. Nonexistent until 1953, it takes off like a space shuttle in the early 1980s, as it becomes one of the unavoidable buzzwords in business theory – a must-have marker of the forward-thinking CEO. There were those for whom it buzzed infuriatingly. In 1987 Time magazine reported that George Bush Sr had responded to well-meaning advice about his presidential campaign’s shortcomings with a contemptuous remark about “the vision thing”. If he’d hoped to bat the word away, he failed – and a fear of being found visionless has plagued politicians ever since.
Oddly, given its particular appeal to the left, it owes much of its potency to the self-regarding machismo of America’s corporate elite, who embraced the opportunity to reframe maximising shareholder value as a kind of epic quest.
Politicians have to inspire people, of course, and sometimes have to do it with a prophetic grandeur. There’s a time for Martin Luther’s “dream” and Churchill’s “broad, sunlit uplands”, summoned for those who listened to them like a glimpse of the promised land through ragged cloud. But that time isn’t every single day. And in any case it’s going to be up to history, or us, to decide what is visionary and what isn’t.
When you hear a politician reflexively ticking the vision box, you hear someone laying claim to an honour that can actually be conferred only by posterity, someone trying to lever a quite ordinary capacity to think about problems and their possible solutions into something far more heroic. And it works about as well as a dullard repeatedly telling you how charismatic they are.
More worryingly, perhaps, there are no guarantees that “vision” won’t turn sour. A campaigning strategy that priorities a fantasy future over a marginally ameliorated present can be a dangerously heady intoxicant. Trump has “the vision thing”, and it allows him to hurdle over the irritatingly immediate realities of economic and social problems in the US to a better world in which a 30ft high wall runs the length of the Mexican border. Politics would be better if those Google ngram charts started to slope downwards again.
