Politics is dominated by people who are interested in politics. That’s a bad thing.
A new year thought for you.
The Conservative Home website tells us that nearly 60% of their panel of Conservative Party members now watch the cranktastic hyper-partisan GB News channel — the BBC only just shades the poll for first place.
60.7% watch the BBC regularly compared to 57.21% who tune into GBN in the same way. Sky (31.38%) and ITN (18.54%) both pale by comparison.
As ConHome puts it…
“GB News, in political terms, has settled somewhere to the left of Reform UK (Richard Tice is a presenter) but well to the right of, say, the Conservative Parliamentary Party’s centre of gravity.”
One of the biggest problems with politics is that it’s dominated by people who are interested in politics. This self-appointed selectorate are reason our last big electoral choice in 2019 was between a crank & a grifter (who they then replaced with Liz Truss).
So, we should start 2024 by thinking about the millions without time and energy for partisan endeavours. Those people who shake their head when the news is on, thinking “what a shower of wankers these people are — it’d be funny if they weren’t involved in such a serious game”?
If you are one of these people, then your country needs you.
Our mission for 2024 should be to energise the many (to coin a phrase) who are largely politically agnostic and commercially / financially disinterested in politics. We need to find a way of motivating them to take up political activity as a voluntary act of altruism.
Because political hobbyists need eclipsing. They have the worst motivations. They are the least likely group of people to ask for an accurate description of any problem, and their solutions will always be in the service of some failed, all-encompassing Theory of Everything — an easy answer that will only compound the errors of the past.
This general approach that we rely on to manage political parties wouldn’t survive very long in any sensible arena.
Businesses or sports teams that made policy in the way would get smashed. However, government by electoral politics is not a rational process.
As I have argued before, perhaps the single most urgent political task that we face is to stop political cranks and grifters from distorting the relationship between voters & those we elect. Because as long as the public sphere is shaped by this dyspeptic minority, electoral politics may no longer be even the least-worst form democracy can take.
And this is particularly worrying today because we are entering a new phase in history where American democracy, with all of its flaws, has to compete for economic dominance with China.
All over the world, we are seeing poor strategic choices being made by liberal democracies that are no longer driven by the distributed moral wisdom of Representative Democracy, but by something that is more plebiscitary — more atavistic, reflexive, and corrupted.
So, the big question for ’24 is this: How do we get people with only a passing interest in politics to step up & save us from all of this?
