Politics Without Purpose.

And its consequences.

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I was reading recently that President Trump is doing badly in the opinion polls, and that this unpopularity is apparently believed to put the future of some of his policies in question. Now, I don’t normally comment on US politics, because I’m not an American and my first-hand knowledge of the political system there is out of date. But I just want to take this little factoid as a point of departure for a discussion this week of what “public opinion” means in a democracy, how it influences governments in theory and practice, how it relates to other and different pressures on government, and how governments respond to it (if at all) today. None of this is straightforward.

Mr Trump is not alone in his unpopularity of course. President Macron in France is by some measure the most unpopular holder of the office in modern times, Mr Starmer in the UK is similarly psephologically challenged, and indeed it’s likely that we have never had a bunch of western politicians so unpopular with the electorates that voted them into power. But what, if anything, does this have to mean in practice?

Not very much necessarily. Mr Trump and Mr Macron are elected Presidents in their second terms. I gather there is some discreet whispering about a potential third term for Mr Trump, but the French Constitution doesn’t give Mr Macron that option. In principle, an elected fixed-term President in their last term does not have to worry greatly about their popularity level. I say “greatly” because there’s no doubt that, pragmatically, an unpopular President has a harder time getting things done, and that the Opposition will feel encouraged. In a parliamentary system, on the other hand, an unpopular leader can damage the party’s strength through losses in individual elections for parliamentary seats, or at regional or local level, as well as the chances of winning the next parliamentary elections. Thus, Mr Starmer may not be long for this political world, and across in Germany Mr Merz may yet set a record for the shortest Chancellorship in history. If he survives, it will simply be (shades of Mrs May in the UK), because nobody can agree on a successor.

Yet why should the question of temporary popularity, for all that it obsesses both politicians themselves and those pundits for whom politics is a kind of spectator sport, be seen as so important? How does it fit into the wider picture of how power is gained and exercised in a democracy, and who has influence and how? The answer to that question is surprisingly complex, and gets us involved squarely in the engineering-style analysis of politics that I’ve always been attached to, and that underlies all these essays. (Substack requires you, right at the beginning of your writing, to set out a kind of manifesto of what you intend to do. This is mine, albeit written so long ago that hardly any of you will have read it, but it essentially sums up my approach.)

So we can see politics as essentially a question of different forces acting on a body, and most political decisions as the results of the complex interactions of such forces. We can look at these forces individually (“public opinion” is one such), see what is going on below the surface, and conclude that not all forces operate in the same way. So once more, as on previous occasions, I’m going to turn over a stone and see what’s underneath and what crawls out, which may not be altogether what we expect. Wile I’m at it, I’ll aim a few passing kicks at some of the lazier assumptions of Liberal democratic theory.

Let me begin apophatically by saying what I’m not going to talk about. Some will immediately say that in the West we don’t live in “democracies” anyway, and some countries (usually the US) are in practice little better than Nazi Germany. Such opinions are held most strongly by those who have never spent much time in an authoritarian state or a dictatorship, or a country where the state doesn’t exist and where political power comes, very directly from the barrel of a gun. Nor do I propose to engage with those who see hidden powers and secret organisations directing the affairs of nations. Of course any political system is subject to all kinds of influences, including international and financial ones, but equally, political systems are far too complex for any one influence to be decisive, and it is always wise to avoid the temptation of seeking simple answers to complex problems.

So with that out of the way, let’s stipulate that I’ll be talking about western states only, for reasons of space and coherence, and about states that describe themselves as “democracies” and in general accept each other as such. This doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t other countries in the world that describe themselves as “democracies,” or that they don’t have some interesting lessons for us (China is most often mentioned here.) But that will have to be for another time.

It won’t surprise you at all to discover that there is no consensus about what “democracy” means, even in the West, for all that we may read that it is being threatened, must be protected and defended, should be extended, und so weiter. Indeed, here is an interesting article which gives you a taste of the complexities and controversies surrounding the definitions and theories related to democracy. I suppose to the extent that a simple definition is required for our purposes here, we can say that a democracy is a political system where the political unit in question is run broadly as desired by the people. And notice that such a definition is about the nature and purpose of a democracy, not its structure and the way it functions.

Yet most people today, unprompted to do any research, would probably describe democracy precisely in terms of structures and processes. Thus, elections, courts, constitutions, parliaments, organised political parties, political campaigns, vote-counting, lack of corruption etc. are seen as fundamental constituents of democracy. And these are all things that we have sought to impose on countries outside the West, with varying degrees of success. This concentration on means rather than ends would seem strange to most of the major figures who have written about politics in western history. But such factors are, of course, the concerns of Liberal political theory, which is almost exclusively focused on processes and structures, which are to be examined, reformed and evaluated in loving detail. Yet few Liberal theoreticians have ever really devoted much time to the question of what democracy is for. Indeed, whilst it’s accepted that political parties have programmes, much as car manufacturers have images and advertising campaigns and their cars have technical differences, the real issue is access to power, and competition for power between organised and disciplined formations, according to complex rules, and umpired if necessary by the Courts. When in power, these various formations will pursue the interests of those they represent. Thus, for Liberalism, as for George Orwell’s Party, the purpose of power is power itself.

If this sounds a little like a sports competition, that’s not entirely by coincidence. Like sports clubs, political parties rise and fall, and their players move from one team to another depending on convenience and how they see their future. Their games are governed by precise and complex rules, and they are accompanied by an entire parasitic class of analysts and commentators. And just as major football teams now exploit their supporters by charging extortionate entry fees and marketing ever-changing souvenir merchandise, so political parties routinely ignore those who vote for them, and their interests, but demand public displays of ideological loyalty.

It follows that, when Liberalism triumphs, and eats up all competing ideologies which could serve as a basis for party formation, “politics” is empty of even the limited degree of conflict of half a century ago, and indeed empty of politics itself, as it was historically understood. Conflict is therefore internecine, simply about access to power and wealth, and leads inevitably to the kind of intra-Liberal civil war that seems to be underway in the United States, and may spread elsewhere. So someone like Mr Starmer is best seen as a late-stage mutant of this type. It’s unfair to reproach him for not having a vision or a strategy because nobody ever told him he needed one. He just needed the skills to rise to the top of the Party: the purpose of power, after all, is power. This is the logical result of an ideology which obsesses over process, structure and detail, and is quite uninterested in content. It loves nothing more than technical “reform” and “reorganisation” because that is what it feels confident trying to do, and indeed all it feels is necessary. (There’s a useful if worrying comparison here with the old Yugoslav Communist Party, whose leaders were confronted in 1991-92 with a type of problem they had never had to deal with before, and for which they were simply not equipped.)

In the past, Liberalism had been held in check by outside forces which to some extent imposed agendas on it: the classics are Nonconformist Christianity in Britain and Republicanism in France in the nineteenth century, and the challenge from Socialism and Communism in the century that followed. But once these ideologies were disposed of, and Liberals found no further need to appease the electorate with actual changes for the better, then Liberalism reverted to the pure pursuit of power that it always had been.

The logical consequence of this is that, since major political parties now differ only on points of detail, there is no particular reason for party leaders to take “public opinion” at all seriously, beyond tweaking their advertising campaigns from time to time. Increasingly, the electorate does not vote, or stumbles listlessly from one party to another and then back to the first, depending on who has most recently disappointed them. In this limited sense, we can say that public opinion has an influence. Yet if it hardly matters, in the end, who you vote for, then one would expect there to be less and less for political commentators to say. Instead, this genus has multiplied beyond all reason in the Internet age, surviving by treating politics simply as internal soap-opera, like a survival game set on a desert island.

In spite of this, and as part of the breathless search for any obscure or overlooked marketable nuance, public opinion is still treated as if it were actually important, and as if statistically irrelevant movements in the opinion polls actually had significance, and could lead to something tangible. But whereas in the past public opinion was something that had to be taken account of (and we’ll get to that), now it is just something to manipulate. The electorate is sliced into segments, and messages contrived for each segment where you seek support, and dismissive or fear-inducing messages developed about other segments that you treat as enemies. This is not a new idea—in some forms it goes back at least to the 1980s—but it is increasingly all that politics is about.

M. Mélenchon’s party in France, for example, for all that its rhetoric occasionally references both traditional Socialist ideas and obscurantist Islamist teachings, is entirely a product of the triumph of modern Liberal ideas of what politics is. La France Insoumise in spite of its name, regards most French people as the enemy. The ”France” it claims to represent, the “real France,” is ideologically and racially determined, just as the reactionary, Catholic France of Charles Maurras was. Except here, the pays réel is of immigrants, the very young (18-25), the progressive urban middle classes working in education and similar jobs, and various sexual minorities. The rest of us, the pays légal, can get stuffed. Thus, the crisis in Gaza is seen not as an opportunity to put pressure on the French government, but as a purity test, and a demonstration of the discipline of the Party. So the approved slogan is FREE PALESTINE, although nobody really knows what that signifies, and demonstrators carry the Palestinian flag. Thus, media and government can simply dismiss them as anti-semites (which to be fair, I suppose, some of the Islamists influential in the Party certainly are.)

But before I’m accused of unfairly singling out M. Mélenchon, I should add that this type of unforced error is quite normal today, where political movements no longer seek to persuade or convert, or to influence governments, but simply demand allegiance, rather like football fans parading in their team’s shirts and chanting approved slogans. Indeed, protests against what is happening in Gaza today have been incompetently handled everywhere, almost as if the organisers were just going through the motions. Where are the slogans saying HANDS OFF GAZA, STOP GENOCIDE, STOP THE SLAUGHTER, which would be much harder for the media to ignore, and for politicians to reply to? (I was going to write “Amateurs!,” but that’s actually the way that professional modern political movements work.)

All of this, of course, is far removed from the old idea that politics was actually “about” something, that there was a purpose in government other than the basic Liberal one of the pursuit of power, and the use of power to help your fellows, and harm your enemies. The purpose of power was more than just power. Indeed, Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister for much of the 1960s and 1970s, actually entitled two books of his collected speeches Purpose in Politics and Purpose in Power. And Wilson, for all that his final withdrawal from politics was ignominious, led a reforming government the like of which is inconceivable today.

I have already suggested in two previous essays that the fundamental problem with the modern political system is that what I describe as the “transmission mechanism” is broken. That is to say, if you accept that the policies of government should, no matter how imperfectly, be moving the country in the direction that the mass of the people want, then there has to be a transmission mechanism to make it possible, analogous to the steering wheel and the engine of a car, which makes a car go where you want. Contemporary discussion of politics essentially avoids this issue, obsessed as it is today with the detail of how power is acquired and lost, who's in and who’s out, who’s up and who’s down. Rather than parties serving a representative function, they now manipulate client groups. Rather than asking “how can we meet the aspirations of our supporters?” they ask “how can we get the support of this bloc of people by promising to do something about their aspirations.” The difference may not sound much, but it’s fundamental. Politicians no longer exist to serve but to be served.

The idea that politics has no purpose would have seemed strange at almost any other time in history. The very word “politics” comes from the Greek and means essentially the management of the polis, the political unit. The Greeks, or for that matter the Romans, Medieval Kings or, let’s cast the net widely, Confucian scholars at the courts of Chinese Emperors, had very clear ideas what the purpose of politics (in this sense) was. Aristotle saw rulers and their advisers (he would not have understood what we mean by “politicians”) as craftsmen, writing constitutions and cleverly fashioning laws to make people both happy and virtuous. Such rulers should be the aristoi, the “best,” with both rights, as full citizens, and also responsibilities far beyond anything that would be acceptable today. (And indeed, in Athens in particular, elections were not regarded as particularly important: the city’s officials were chosen by lot: what we now call sortition.) Aristotle regarded politics as a consequence of ethics: something that would be incomprehensible if suggested today.

The idea that people should be personally responsible for choices that affect them, and personally responsible for the consequences, survives only in the idea of the referendum today, and even then only at the margins of most political systems. The modern image is of rival firms producing breakfast cereals, and competing with each other in a market under agreed rules. Just as the number of companies actually capable of making breakfast cereals at scale and then marketing them is limited, so it takes money and resources to organise a political party, even if these days there is no longer a need to go to the trouble of finding an ideology. And in practice, the electorate (or the “consumers” of politics, if you prefer) are just as helpless in the face of what looks like choice, but really isn’t. Modern political parties need voters, not members, and between elections when there is nothing for them to do, voters can be treated with disdain. And unlike consumers of breakfast cereals, consumers of politics can in theory be frightened or coerced into voting against certain political forces.

But at least consumers of breakfast cereals get something for their money. Voters just get ignored. And this is actually the problem. You can have non-ideological political systems (Japan comes to mind) which are often transactional: vote for me and I’ll look after you. This is often the pitch of someone born in the constituency, who knows large numbers of people there and whose re-election depends on delivering on promises. Much of the West now has a non-ideological system which doesn’t even work transactionally: vote for me because it’s your duty, or because the other party is worse, but don’t actually expect anything. Your representative is the person we choose to be your representative and ask you to vote for. The problem is that with breakfast cereals there are healthy alternatives: with modern western political parties you don’t even have that.

What this has done is to reveal the gaping hole that always existed between the people and the rulers, and the lack of any obvious transmission mechanism between them in a Liberal society. Other societies may have clan or family mechanisms for raising grievances to high levels: Liberal societies consciously try to destroy such structures, and substitute professional political parties, which theoretically represent different groups in society, generally denominated by class. In theory, again, parties exist which cater to different flavours of “public opinion.” The voter, like the purchaser of breakfast cereals, votes for the party that most nearly corresponds to their tastes, and somehow it all comes out in the wash, just don’t enquire too closely into the details. In reality, of course, and like breakfast cereals, you can only make your choice from what’s available. Just as Liberal economic theory holds that supply will spontaneously arise to meet demand, so Liberal political theory seems to assume that the supply of political movements will always correspond to the totality of political demands, and each assertion is about as improbable as they other.

In reality, none of this has never been the case, even in countries with elaborate systems of proportional representation. The needs, interests and wishes of different parts of the population can’t be tidily separated from each other, to be considered like blocks of shareholders in a company. All political parties are themselves coalitions, and platforms offered to the electorate are themselves necessarily compromises. Attempts to map overt political platforms onto the variety of interests and needs among the electorate rapidly become impossibly elaborate, even before you get to internal contradictions and inconsistencies on both sides.

Moreover, there are cases when things that a government wants to do, or things that a large proportion of political consumers want, are just not possible. This takes us to a very important subordinate question: what is the proper role of government? Here, Liberal theory sees government as little more than good management, and governments themselves rather like accountancy practices or managing agents for apartment block: if they are not doing a good job, replace them with another that will do better. This is consistent with the Liberal view that politics is concerned with power alone, and not really “about” anything. Yet of course governments have to deal with substantial problems every day, and a common complaint of the politically-inexperienced coming into office is that they are immediately overwhelmed with masses of complex problems to which there is no obvious answer, and with very limited room for manoeuvre.

Yet whereas most traditional theories of government stressed the need to govern well, and saw wise government as an art, Liberal theory is entirely about the mechanisms of power and how it is gained, held and controlled. (The last is a point I return to below.) Naturally, then, politicians brought up on a Liberal political system have no idea what to do when confronted with real, fundamental problems, and when politics turns out to be about “something” after all. But it’s been a feature of the last decade that real, fundamental problems have become more and more common, and more and more complex. Notably in the case of the Ukraine crisis, today’s political leaders clearly lack the skills and experience even to comprehend what is going on, and so like robots they repeat both actions and words from the past, because they have no idea what to do otherwise. Nobody told them that politics was going to be like this, or they wouldn’t have joined. In their guts they must appreciate that, however bad the present is, the future will be worse, and so they are desperately hanging onto the present, frightening as it is, because at least they have become accustomed to it, and have their sound-bites ready.

Yet ordinary people generally consider that they have elected governments to do things, and they should be given the authority and freedom to do those things. Government overreach can be a problem, certainly, but for most ordinary people overreach is a lesser problem than under-performance. Yet Liberalism, for historical reason, plays up the role of the Courts, the media and what it calls “civil society,” in all of which it is well represented, as equal to, or even more important than, government itself. So it’s mordantly amusing to read in the media of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) that a government has decided to do this or that “in spite of protests from human rights groups,” who, when last I looked, were not elected by anybody. But the egoistic sense of entitlement of the PMC—the shock troops of Liberalism—mixed with disdain for ordinary people and their opinions, inevitably produces such situations.

It is because Liberal politics is entirely about the struggle for power that so much effort goes into making government less effective. (After all, it’s not as though governments actually needed to do things.) Rather, because politics is a game, it’s important that the various players all have some of the prizes. Thus, the Liberal fixation with the “separation of powers” —a term not found in Montesquieu, and an idea that pre-dated him—which is the efficient management of an oligarchy such that no single actor becomes too powerful. Although the actual separation of powers is never complete in any democracy, and hardly visible in some, and there are social, business and family connections throughout the ruling class of any system that make the concept of limited value, it is an obsession of Liberal thinkers So each defeat for a government in the Courts, or each critical report by a parliamentary committee tends to be seen as good in itself. (Relatedly, western governments will give money much more readily to organisations abroad that put constraints on government, than to projects to make governments more effective.)

So in Liberal theory, government, as such, has no special status. This is something of a disappointment to electorates, though, who generally expect governments to perform. Thus, public dissatisfaction with Liberal political system stems less from the failure of governments to do the right thing, than from their failure to do anything. Yet the Liberal conception of political action is at best superficial, at worst non-existent. Rewarding themselves and their class, penalising others, making themselves feel good with performative social legislation, and above all bossing other people around and inflicting ever more detailed rules and regulations on them represents much of actual Liberal politics. Then, there are interesting social experiments, in the teaching of reading or mathematics, for example, where if things go wrong only the children of the inconsequential suffer. And that’s quite enough to be going on with, thank you.

Except it isn’t. Reality comes knocking from time to time and demands an answer, and sometimes that answer may be difficult to market: a problem that doesn’t usually afflict breakfast cereals.

The result is that there is always a gap between what governments actually do, and what they would like to do, promise to do or indeed what the public wants them to do. All governments are reality-constrained, as even Mr Trump has recently discovered with his rebounding economic sanctions against China. All governments have to manoeuvre in the triangle made up of what they want to do, the outside pressures that bear upon them, and what public opinion wants. Governments in recent times have become much worse at this, because in many cases they have no developed ideas, and are not interested in what the public wants anyway.

We can see all these factors at work already in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2001-2 in Britain (and to a lesser extent in some other European countries as well.) Public opinion, as such, seems to have been uninterested in the approaching war, but as often is the case a minority of people felt extremely strongly against it, even as many pundits and self-appointed experts were strongly in favour. Traditionally, governments dealt with this kind of protest, if not exactly by ignoring it, then by responding minimally, and waiting for the fuss to die down, which it nearly always does. This was the tactic used in response to anti-nuclear campaigners in the 1980s, where the government concluded, rightly, that the campaigners would never have the backing of anything like the majority of the population, and that the problem the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and other organisations posed was essentially one of political management. So government Ministers gave interviews, letters from anti-nuclear campaigners were given courteous replies, and things carried on as they otherwise would have. Even the hawkish and confrontational instincts of Mrs Thatcher were relatively controlled. (This case was different from the situation in certain European countries with fragile coalition governments, where public protests against the installation of intermediate-range ballistic missiles actually brought some governments down.)

The Iraq War case is interesting because it can be seen as a cvil war within Liberalism and the PMC. The humanitarian interventionists, then in full flower and well represented in the Blair government, collided head-on with the international law groupies, for whom the performative and rhetorical nature of their subject suited exactly their PMC-Liberal mentality. Unfortunately for the latter, they could not explain how their opposition to the Iraq War could be reconciled with the indecent glee with which they supported the attack on Serbia in 1999 during the Kosovo crisis. In fact, of course, it could not, any more than preaching from two conflicting verses in the Bible can be reconciled, so the response was a mumbled incoherence which no more than reflected the incoherence of Liberal ideology itself. It was nonetheless all necessary to preserve the idea that the Liberal-PMC elite existed on a higher plane than mere governments, and was entitled to lecture them on how to behave.

But numbers of ordinary people were also very opposed to the war in Iraq, and made their feelings known publicly. The Blair government, new to power and political responsibility, and essentially staffed by the PMC, reacted as clumsily as you might expect: trying to frighten people with stories of Iraqi attacks on the UK, and lying about the professional assessment of the presence of WMD in Iraq (which was that it had probably all been destroyed, although judgements of that kind could never be absolute.) Rather than engage with its critics, as previous governments would have done, no matter how cursorily, it tried to pummel them into silence: an early sighting of the typical Liberal-PMC response. Ironically, this actually turned pubic opinion into more of an issue than it would otherwise have been, and probably caused more objectively important issues, such as relations with the new Bush administration, to be pushed aside. To the extent that Mr Blair was politically damaged by this episode (and that can be exaggerated) it was primarily because he and his government had no idea how to handle political opposition in the country properly..

In the past, governments in western democracies found themselves having to manoeuvre adroitly between the three poles I described above. Pubic opinion was an influence in the sense that, for many subjects, a pragmatic judgement had to be made about whether the decision or the initiative in question was worth the trouble it might cause. In those days, political leaders would say things like “parliament won’t like it,” or “there will be too much public opposition.” These were essentially pragmatic judgements: it was not necessarily that a majority of public or parliamentary opinion was against a government, but rather that opposition was of such an extent that continuing was more trouble than it was worth. The more important the subject, obviously, the greater the level of opposition was required to make the government backtrack. The most famous case is that of Vietnam, where the majority of the US population supported the War, and it was only mass protests by the children of the PMC itself that forced a change of policy.

In other words, there were no hard and fast rules, and sometimes governments did act against overwhelming public opposition. The best example is perhaps the decision of the 1964-70 Labour government to allow a Bill to be introduced in 1965 to abolish capital punishment, and to put the weight of the government behind it. This was against massive public opposition (some 80-85% of the population supported hanging) which was why the government chose this indirect route. Even though there have been no executions in most peoples’ lifetimes, support for capital punishment still remains strong in Britain and in many other countries.

A similar example is the resolution of the crisis in Northern Ireland where, after a disastrous start, successive British governments spent decades looking for a negotiated solution. Even during the Thatcher era there were indirect contacts with the IRA and the Republican movement, and the process leading to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement of 1998 involved at least a decade of careful and sometimes agonisingly difficult secret negotiation. Neither Parliament nor the public were informed until very late, because the degree of likely public opposition would have scuppered peace initiatives. Public opinion on the mainland was highly inflamed, and ranged from blanket condemnation of everyone in the Province (“nuke the bastards,” “tow it out and sink it”) to more specific animosity against the IRA after bombs were exploded in England (“wipe them all out.”)

But this was in the past. Whether you think governments in the past took more account of public opinion because they felt obliged to, because they thought it was right, or even from completely cynical motives, or all of the above depending on the situation and the country, the fact is they don’t do it now, and don’t see why they should bother, even if pundits fixate on its statistical manifestations. Liberalism has always been an elitist ideology that distrusts ordinary people and lectures them from the heights of moral superiority: now it sees no need to pretend to be anything else. Political parties of all shades have been reduced to supporters’ clubs, buying the souvenirs and chanting the slogans. But when politics has been drained of politics, and no longer has any definable purpose, it’s not surprising that people are now asking exactly what purpose politicians themselves serve.