Politicians prefer lazy moralizing to intellectual enquiry.

I say this because of Sunak's speech last week in which he condemned far-right extremists "who are hostile to our values and have no respect for our democratic traditions." What he did not do in that speech is ask: why has right-wing extremism increased from a nuisance to something more troubling?

His opponents were quick to point out that Sunak's Tory colleagues have been promoting it. But that's only part of the answer. Anderson and Braverman have been sowing their seeds in fertile ground. We now have abundant evidence corroborating Ben Friedman's 2006 finding that economic stagnation breeds illiberalism and hostility to democracy. Ana Sofia Pessoa and colleagues have shown that "fiscal consolidations lead to a significant increase in extreme parties' vote share." Markus Brueckner and Hans Peter Gruener have described how "lower growth rates are associated with a significant increase in right-wing extremism". And other researchers have shown how deaths of despair - which are symptoms of underlying social problems - are correlated with higher support for Brexit and Trump.

Sunak, however, like Starmer, omitted to mention all this evidence. Public opinion is not an exogenous datum. It is shaped by socio-economic conditions and political activity. Intelligent politics wouldn't merely condemn some beliefs, but inquire into their origins.

This, however, is by no means the only sign that Westminster is divorced from social science.

Another example is the demand from many Tories for tax cuts and a smaller state. What this misses is that achieving this cannot be merely a matter of ideology and will-power. A smaller state requires particular socio-economic conditions, one of which is an economy healthy enough to provide decent public services with a lower tax take*.

Yet another example was Liz Kendall telling youngsters that there'll be "no option of a life on benefits". This is mere punching down which not only begs the question of how many people actually want such an option, but also deflects attention from much bigger economic issues, such as how to end our 15 years of stagnant productivity and real wages.

What we have in all these cases is vacuous moralizing where there should be serious thinking about the social sciences. Gary Younge is dead right to say that the commentariat is "more interested in denouncing what is happening than understanding why it is happening." And Phil Burton-Cartledge is right to say that political commentary is "superficial" with no grasp of the social relations, the articulations of interests". And what's true of commentators is true too of politicians. As Lewis Goodall recently tweeted:

The Westminster (and much of the internal Conservative) conversations continues to miss everything which is driving [the collapse in Tory support] - the quietly radicalising effect of a collapsed NHS, a broken housing market, near bankrupt local government, a still sclerotic economy.

In one respect, this ignorance is unusual. Thatcher and Blair both entered office with some ideas about society and the economy - Thatcher about how we needed to curb trades union power and bring down inflation and income tax rates down and Blair about how social democracy could be updated to tackle late 20th century social problems. Starmer's Labour, by contrast, shows no similar sign of engaging with social or economic analysis. There is, in media-speak, no "narrative."

Why is this?

Partly, it's part of a general decline in intellectual standards, which has seen the expunging of intellectuals from public prominence. It's always easy to prefer lazy moralizing to serious thinking: such moralizing, of course, has as much connection to serious moral philosophy as economicky talk has to proper economics.

One reason for this decline lies in the dominance of the worst sort** of journalist, the Westminster political correspondent who views everything through the single lens of what plays well to their own tiny minds. Starmer can get away with drivel about the Tories maxxing out the nation's credit card because it is a good "attack line". The truth? Well who gives a damn about that?

The dominance of that sort of journalism has another effect. Politicians' priority is to respond to 24-hour news, and news itself has a bias in favour of salient individual events and against slower-moving trends. This means that important emergent trends - those underlying forces shaping public opinion - are neglected: the rise of immaterial labour which has contributed to liberal attitudes among the young; the economic stagnation that's led to illiberal reaction among others; or the rise of an unpropertied graduate cohort that feels alienated from politics.

Such ignorance is of course reinforced by the media's class bias: although most journalists are poorly paid the most dominant media figures are not, and come from a privileged elite (pdf) which feels little need to understand society and economics.

Such insularity and incuriosity means that the political class has been systematically surprised by important developments such as Brexit, the popularity among the young of Corbynism or the sudden collapse in support for the Tories.

But there's something else. Labour and the Tories are scared to look at the economy for fear of what they might find. It's unlikely that productivity and real wages can be raised much by mere tweaks acceptable to the forces of conservatism and their gimps in the media. Instead, thinking people who are not especially leftist now realize that promoting growth requires changes in property rights: higher taxes on landlords; less power to nimbys to block new building; the break-up of big companies; less restrictive intellectual property law; and tax simplification. All of these measures would be opposed by powerful interest groups. And that's before we even consider the possibility that inequality and even capitalism itself might be barriers to growth.

Attacking benefits claimants or migrants is easy. Attacks upon the powerful - land-owners, financiers, rentiers and monopolists - are not.

Taking the easy line, of course, runs into the dilemma: either we see public services decline even further, or taxes have to increase still more. Either risks further enflaming hostility to the political class - a hostility which will not take an intelligent or enlightened form.

You might think there's a way out of this dilemma: politicians should show some intellect and courage. But then, to call for this in the absence of socioeconomic conditions that produce such people is itself another form of lazy moralizing.

* There are other pre-conditions. Marxists would point to an absence of class struggle, whilst the right might point to a society and culture of individual or community self-help. All agree that a smaller state is the product of social conditions, not merely a moral desideratum.

** There's stiff competition, from financial journalists who can't distinguish between expertise and vested interest or from music journalists who don't know an ostinato from off stump.