Noise and signal
Some quick thoughts on the electoral horse race
I read this thread about this thread about how if Labour wants to win elections it has to accommodate geriatric racists and had some quick thoughts.
Firstly, the first thread is right about the second. This is basic stuff that we’ve all been talking about since 2016 and presenting it as some sort of new epiphany is baffling. Many millions of words have already been written on the phenomenon. This (about America, but describing an almost identical dynamic) remains my favourite, although I’ll always have a soft spot for this one because of the Danny Dorling line.
Secondly, I hate this kind of horse race punditry because it so completely misses the point of politics. It’s as if I was trying to get to Edinburgh from York and someone suggested that I should catch the train to Scarborough because they have catastrophically misunderstood my objective as “catching trains”. Now, granted trains are generally the quickest and simplest way of getting Edinburgh but catching a train only has value insofar as you want to get to where it is going. The purpose of politics is to change the world, not to win elections. Supposing it were true that if you gave up on your ends you might be able to achieve your means: so what?
But, if we’re going to talk about the horse race then there’s something that strikes me as obvious that I haven’t seen discussed, so I wanted to throw it in to the mix. The Tories’ culture-war approach is so short term.
Right now there are votes to be won by taking the reactionary side of the culture war. But these ghastly bigoted old dinosaurs are all going to be dead fairly soon, and it strikes me as exceptionally short termist to be placing oneself on the wrong side of history for the votes of people who aren’t going to be around for much longer. It may well win the Tories votes in elections in the 2020s, but it will surely cost them votes in the 2030s, ’40s and ’50s.
Now granted political memories are short enough, and the UK’s political accountability mechanisms are woeful enough, that the Tories probably think they will be able to simply perform a volte farce when required. But by sticking on the right side of history the Labour party therefore has an opportunity to build up a multi-decade comparative advantage with that key electoral demographic: people who aren’t going to be dead soon.
What I’m suggesting is that we look in a longer-term and less superficial manner at how and why elections are actually won and lost. It’s late and I haven’t the energy to dig out an indicative quote, but take my word for it: about half of War and Peace is Tolstoy talking about how Generals do nothing but talk about how and why this battle or that battle was won or lost, usually in a manner that makes people like them the hero of the story, or at very least the key deciding factor, whereas in Tolstoy’s view none of the things they discussed had any real bearing in the outcome — which was decided by far deeper historic and material conditions and so would have been won by the winners or lost by the losers regardless of any action or inaction on the General’s part (being too mystical for Marx, Tolstoy doesn’t quite phrase it like that, but it’s very much what he means). Politicians talk about winning and losing elections in a similar manner.
Having run elections I’m not quite as fatalistic as Tolstoy, I do think how you campaign can make a (fairly small) difference, and that in a close election that small difference can be the difference between winning and losing (marginal gains and all that). But I do think it is true that our political commentariat massively overstate the amount of influence politicians have over the outcome of elections, are in general terrible at differentiating between noise and signal — between the underlying material conditions that drive the political moment and gossip and trivia, and are terrible at thinking about longer term historical trends (they think at most five years ahead, never twenty).
Taking that step back would show that (hugely oversimplifying) the conditions in the UK over the last 70 or so years seem to have created a political climate in which public opinion oscillates from centre-left to fairly solid right and back again with a phase time of about a generation. Moments of brilliance or inadequacy can change how far the pendulum swings, or extend or shorten the length of time before it swings back, but that’s about all they do.
The right used to be very good at something the left are still completely woeful at, which is to understand when it was their moment and when it wasn’t. If you’ll permit a mixing of metaphors what the right did well was make hay when it was the right’s moment and then, when it was the left’s , rather than allowing themselves to be dragged around by the currents of the moment they set to work planning for the future decades when they would next have their chance. So while Labour was creating the welfare state they laid the foundations for Butskellism, when the left was generating the ’60s counterculture they laid the foundations for Thatcherism, when Blair was doing Blair things they laid the foundations for the Cameronian revival.
Over the last few years there has been lots of breathless prose about the tactical genius of right wing campaigners in the UK, but what is often overlooked is that this long term strategic thinking seems to have disappeared. Indeed in alienating various communities (the young, minorities, people who lose out as a result of their policies, people who weren’t on the wrong side of history, people who won’t be dead soon) who are only going to grow in electoral importance as the century progresses, the right has caused itself some really quite significant long term issues for the sake of some really very short term gains. I’m not sure how widespread this phenomenon is beyond the UK, but the most extreme example of it I can think of comes from the US, and the Republican Party’s decision to force a “pro life” majority onto the supreme court — something I could easily imagine continuing to lose them votes from women even fifty or sixty years from now.
It’s quite clear that in the UK this is the right’s moment. It has been since at least 2015, it will be until probably the end of the decade. But then it might be a while until they have another one, since they seem to have forgotten how to think for the long term and plan for the future. There’s no reason for the left to join them in that myopia.
