Challenging ‘political’ rule; why now?
We seem to be living through an age of anti-politics — an apparent rejection of corrupted or cynical political intermediaries.
There may also now be a high expectation that this rejection will gain the support it needs to change things, because we are also living in an age of disintermediation — the leitmotif of the digital age.
The Internet likes nothing better than finding greedy, lazy intermediaries and replacing them. Everyone from bookmakers, second-hand stores, bookshops, record stores, currency dealers, holiday letting agents, record labels, broadcasters, newspapers, craft shops, cab-firms, supermarkets, ….
Only a minority of the population take an interest in politics, but that active minority seem to like the sound of someone who doesn’t appear to be beholden to political power — a straight talker.
We’re told that the voters like uncomplicated candour as well. But, it turns out, as an observation of actual politics tells us, they don’t really. They don’t vote for ‘outsiders’ when it really counts.
They will vote for them only as long as they’re convinced that it’s a protest vote, and not a consequential one. On Election Day, voters are less likely to vote for fringe parties in seats where they are actually likely to win.
Also, political activists and the general public are very different people. Idealistic activists are also unwelcome intermediaries (in this case, ‘moralistic and impractical’) and they may be no more attractive to voters than the ‘corrupt and cynical’ politicians.
More to the point, knowing what this minority of the population are against tells us little about what they are in favour of.
I’d argue that the word ‘populism’ (not a word I like) is often used to describe people who demand more reflexive forms of policymaking because they don’t like the kind of political correctness or the complicated pragmatic solutions that come out of the more reflective and deliberative forms of government that we get from the political establishment.
‘Populism’ throws out the ugly-but-wise baby of pragmatic consensus politics with the political bathwater.
Up until now, the voters have chosen the political clones over the shouty activists on Election Day and there’s no reason to think they won’t keep doing so.
This reflexive instinct may often come from the political right, but it also has a counterpart on the left — an impatience with the small-c conservatism and pragmatism of the Labour Party establishment — in this case, the … er… Tory-Lites … that we are hearing a lot about in the current Labour leadership contest.
It’s not the politics of the general public, but the active politicised minorities that haunt both the right and the left of politics. In the UK, that means UKIP and the factor that is now very much in evidence in the Labour leadership contest. What the former Tory minister, Peter Lilley, called “the lumpenintelligencia who read The Guardian.”
It’s not hard to understand the appeal of political idealism. The electoral and economic cageyness of the political establishment has no easy-to-grasp supporting logic or emotional appeal. Reading Alan Johnson’s defence of New Labour’s record, it read like a list of genuinely huge achievements that have no political value — a government of prose and not poetry. A problem brilliantly foreseen by Chris Dillow here.
Those political greybeards seem to be whispering “Muggles” whenever they hear active politicised minorities and their emotionally-literate-but-politically-deluded cri de coeur.
Added to this, the political establishment is very corrupt and self-serving. They all look and sound the same. They all went to the same universities and they’ve never done a proper job in their lives.
Darwin treated diversity, not strength, as the determinant of long-term survival, and the political beltway is anything but diverse. It deserves to die.
Depending on the electoral arithmetic, some (not all!) politicians can be lazy political lackeys — ignoring their less active constituents and taking their instructions from party bosses, and newspaper owners, getting their views spoon-fed to them from sleazy think-tanks, a vast bloated lobbying industry and a smug, self-serving ecology of political insiders.
This is why I think it’s important to restate this simple observation about the difference between democracy and politics.
Perhaps it’s time to start riding this demand for disintermediation, and using it to call for more democracy rather than more politics. At the moment, both UKIP and the Corbynistas look like political rather than democratic tribes, and I’ve argued here that democracy is a political end in itself.
(PS Sorry for all the self-linking here — I’m still struggling with how to use blogging to do long-form writing)
