Russell Brand might be better off actually trying to help the dispossessed

The comedian Robert Webb is so incensed by the anti-politician rhetoric of the comedian Russell Brand that's he has rejoined the Labour Party. Perhaps Webb should have talked this through with his sometime collaborator, the comedian David Mitchell. Mitchell insists, in response to the campaigning for more robust press regulation by the comedian Steve Coogan, that involving politicians in press regulation could be "catastrophic". Which rather suggests that Mitchell also sees politicians more as problem than solution.

Good on all of them. It's nice to see clever, funny people exhibiting passionate engagement with current affairs. But I can't help wishing that these comics were all just a tiny bit less attractive. As the unattributed wit once said: "Politics is showbusiness for ugly people." Good gag. Yet, as Brand declares his empathy for the dispossessed and the problems they face, you do wonder if he'd be more usefully employed actually taking political surgeries and engaging with trying to help people directly.

However, few people in showbusiness could even begin to handle the level of contempt that politicians routinely face. And even if they could, they might find it harder to bear the public scrutiny of their private lives that politicians have to accept. That, after all, is where Coogan came in. And Britain may be ready to read and listen to the social critique that Brand so eloquently offers. But it's probably less ready to vote for a recovering heroin addict and non-recovering womaniser, even if Brand were not exhorting people never, ever to vote.

In his notorious political essay for the New Statesman last month (commissioned by himself, as guest editor for a week), Brand quoted the comedian Billy Connolly, who warned that: "The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever being one." Now, leaving aside the fact that it's pretty wonderful that such a thing as a "notorious political essay" is doing the rounds in the UK, the fact remains that all people who have a desire for a public profile and an audience believe in their ability and right to have power over others. The main difference is that people in showbusiness are accountable to the market, while politicians are accountable to the democratic will of the people. (Obviously, both sets of people rely on the perfidious media to set out their stall, which causes no end of resentment.)

By projecting himself as a passionate, radical thinker and anti-establishment poster-boy, Brand is building Brand Brand. In his essay, Brand acknowledges the hypocrisy of having "without a flicker of self-awareness palmed off my shopping bags jammed with consumer treats and headed for the throng" of a Reclaim the Streets march that developed into a riot. But he doesn't much like it when another protester questions his right to be there because "you work for MTV".

Now, I like Brand. I see his appeal. I love his writing. But I also find him absurd, because he doesn't see that he is criticising the politics of individualism from a platform entirely reliant on the personality cult he himself has zealously constructed. This was what Jeremy Paxman was getting at when he took Brand to task the other week for believing he had the right to call for revolution. I found it touching when Paxman asked Brand if he didn't think that perhaps politicians feel rather paradoxically powerless themselves. Maybe, he said, "they're simply overwhelmed by the scale of the problem". It's not that I agree with Paxman. Connolly's point, surely, was that what marks politicians apart from others is that they don't feel overwhelmed at all, that they have the arrogance to believe that they are part of the solution. But Brand has that arrogance, too. In his essay, he calls for "six billion individuals" to seize the moment and join "the revolution of consciousness". He calls it optimism. But it's also arrogance, the idea that the world could heal itself by thinking, in unison, like Brand.

In part, Brand is just working the programme, bringing the philosophy of Narcotics Anonymous meetings to the pages of a political magazine. Brand exhorts people to find their connection to God or their higher power in order to understand that they are not the centre of the universe and that their self-destructive impulses cannot be beaten through their own willpower; that, on the contrary, it's self-willfulness that leads people into addiction. The addiction anonymous model asks people to accept that they can't have one drink, because they don't have the willpower to resist a second. You gain self-control by accepting that you don't have any. It's the opposite of politics, and this explains Brand's seemingly nihilistic view quite fully (if you leave aside the fact that arrogance is supposed to be the enemy of recovery from addiction).

I saw Brand's Messiah Complex show in London the other week, in which he – in jest, of course – compares himself to Che Guevara, Gandhi, Malcolm X and Christ. The picaresques by which he drew self-deprecating parallels between himself and these figures were beautifully constructed. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if there was a corner of Brand's mind, perhaps unacknowledged even by himself, where he wonders whether there's some higher spiritual purpose in his own fame and success – and the platform to proselytise that it has delivered to him.

Brand talks about being famous in his show as well, and the access to endless vaginas it has brought him. Jemima Khan, presumably the attractive woman Brand says he accepted the guest editorship of the New Statesman to please, was in the audience. I can't speak for Khan, but if a man I had been romantically involved with spoke in public about women in such reductive terms, I would not be comfortable. Yet part of him, quite clearly, is deeply romantic. There's something as self-destructive as drug addiction in embracing a persona that glorifies the physicality of sex over the intimacy of emotion. The way in which Brand talks about women generally is not empathetic towards the women in his life as individuals.

Yet the promotion of empathy is surely key to the spiritual renewal that Brand appears seriously to be preaching. And funnily enough, empathy is central to the thesis of comedian David Baddiel, in his show, Fame: Not the Musical. (As are anecdotes about his great friend Russell Brand.) Baddiel believes that there is a lack of empathy for the famous. It's why, he thinks, trolls send them insulting tweets or post nasty comments below their articles. It's why, he thinks, critics feel free to say awful things about their work.

The point I think Baddiel is missing is that his own awareness of himself as "famous" leads him to believe the lack of empathy he experiences is bound up with his difference, his fame. It is, in the particular. But, more generally, the urge to "other" people is endemic. Sure, putting people in a box marked "famous and therefore not like us" is a way of absolving oneself of empathy for that person. But so is putting people in a box marked "feckless" or "immigrant" or "weirdo" or "old" or "lefty" or "Tory" or "woman". A good way of dispatching the need for empathy is to find any label that can in some way read: "Not like me."

Politicians are routinely accused of lacking empathy, with some justification. Yet, you could argue that they are merely giving (or failing to give) as good as they get (or fail to get). Politicians live in a box marked, in giant, angry letters: "Not like me." It's a box Brand believes they should be sealed up in, without even the occasional vote to acknowledge their existence. Maybe Brand is utterly wrong. Maybe the "revolution of consciousness" he calls for needs to start with some rumination on the idea that it is precisely by insisting on our right to have no empathy for politicians that we get the empathy-lacking politicians that, if the non-comedian Alexis de Tocqueville was correct, we perhaps deserve.