Response: the limits of representation.
| Author | Gamble, Andrew |
Clarke, Jennings, Stoker and Moss's analysis of anti-politics is persuasive, but will the remedies work? Democracies are imperfect and rarely live up to the ideals of many who fought for them. The fault lies partly with politicians, but also with ourselves. We want contradictory things. We want politicians to refrain from mudslinging, negative campaigning, and point-scoring, and to behave like statesmen, cooperating for the public good. But at the same time we enjoy politics as a blood sport and have a huge appetite for reading about politicians' misdemeanours, mistakes, follies and scandals. Politics has become a soap opera, and is constantly portrayed as such in the media. Politics is also often most effective when it is most negative. Politicians play on the fears, insecurities, and self-interest of voters rather than appealing to their more rational, altruistic natures because such tactics so often succeed. The current contest for the Republican nomination in the United States may seem an extreme form of this but it tells us something about democratic politics and about ourselves.
The paradox of democratic politics can be seen in other ways. The authors identify two harmful consequences of anti-politics; it can lead to complete disengagement and non-participation in politics, and it can give rise to populist parties, which gather support by attacking the established parties and 'the system' as corrupt and incapable of reform. This tactic too has a long history. Oswald Mosley perfected it in the 1930s when he set up the New Party which eventually morphed into the British Union of Fascists. But this second form of anti-politics still assumes that voting makes a difference, that there are some politicians (the populists) who are deserving of the people's trust. Populist anti-politics relies on awakening political passions, and could not succeed without mastering at least this aspect of modern politics. Populist parties do what all opposition parties with no hope of being in government do. They make extravagant electoral promises to rally support, doing so with impunity because they know they will never be responsible for putting these policies into effect. When a party of permanent opposition, like the Liberal Democrats, or a populist party like Syriza in Greece suddenly find themselves in government, they face difficult choices. The Liberal Democrats had retained a memory of themselves as a party of government so they were able to make...
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