Why don't the people vote like they're supposed to?

It's not just an X-Y axis.

Whenever two or more pundits are gathered together to talk about Our Democracy, they soon turn to the question of why people aren’t voting in the way they should. It’s not just a matter of voting for parties the pundits dislike: it’s more serious than that. It’s that people seem less and less interested in voting for traditional parties and traditional party candidates at all. So why are the people getting it wrong so consistently, and why are they even electing candidates and whole governments from completely outside the traditional political system? What’s going wrong?

Let’s start by recognising that what’s at issue here is not Democracy, in the sense that Pericles or the progenitors of the French Revolution would’ve understood it, but rather a particular conception of political life, based on Liberal political assumptions and practices. Liberalism sees politics as an essentially a technical issue, a competition for power between professional political parties, each representing, or trying to represent, the economic interests of different groups. So elections are like football matches, and the team that scores the most goals gets to form the government. Electors are assumed to be rational decision-makers, who carefully scrutinise the prospectuses of the parties, just as a rational investor (to adapt the metaphor) would carefully examine the situation of companies before investing in them. So there’s an X and Y axis: economic interests are plotted against economic offers, and the winner is the party that manages to make the optimum offer by finding the right intersection.

As a model of how elections actually work, this is, of course, ludicrous. We notice this most obviously in elections outside the traditional West, which generally turn on issues that have nothing to do with economics. That’s why western states are inevitably “surprised” and “disappointed” by results from around the world, where “moderate” or “pro-western” candidates lose, with grim regularity, to “nationalist” or “populist” candidates, who respond to issues that voters actually care about, and which often have little to do with rates of tax or reforms to economic legislation. Funny, that.

But the system has started to break down in the West as well, in recent years, and it’s an index of the ruling elites indifferent grasp of reality, as well their enslavement to the liberal model of politics, that they are actually surprised. In a sense, the liberal explanation of  political behaviour is half right: it’s a matter of supply and demand, certainly, but not just in the area of economic policy. People who can’t find a job, or are worried about losing theirs, people with oppressive debts or who are forced to work long and unsocial hours to earn enough to fed their families, are probably not that exercised about changes to marginal tax rates. And as for other subjects that people are worried about, crime and insecurity, education and health, immigration and cultural issues, well, the X-Y axis simply can’t accommodate them, so they are assumed not to exist. For politicians to mention them, still more for voters to vote according to them, is somehow cheating.

It wasn’t always thus. For nearly two hundred years after the French Revolution, it was reasonable to speak of politics in “Left” and”Right” terms. Class and economic differences were acknowledged, and elections in many countries did turn, at least partly, on issues of wealth and poverty and the distribution of income. Why and how that changed is a familiar enough story: the rise of a professional, fairly prosperous, political class, living in the capital and all attending the same schools and universities; the end of mass political parties; the consolidation of the media; the technocratic mindset of government, without the slightest vision, except the sort that you find in a management textbook … all that is obvious enough. The funny thing, though, is that liberal pundits have actually been surprised by a turn of events which is basically what their own theories would have predicted. The traditional parties no longer supply what the political market wants. Inevitably, therefore, new forces have arisen to respond to demand. Fifteen years ago, the mobile phones that were available ranged from mediocre to horrible. When Apple introduced the iPhone, which was actually easy and pleasant to use, it obliterated the competition, and all phones since it appeared have been essentially copies, since that’s what the market wants. So the traditional parties of Left and Right, alone in their little technocratic burrows, are the Nokias, the Sony Ericssons and whatever the other company was, I forget now, that was bulldozed by Apple. But of course they don’t want to lose their market share. So like traditional phone manufacturers, the traditional political parties are heaping scorn on the newcomers, and suggesting that it’s actually the market that is wrong, not them, because the public doesn’t appreciate them, or is deceived by clever advertising.

Like all metaphors, this can’t be pushed too far, but it is suggestive nonetheless. Effectively, the supply of political ideas no longer corresponds to the demand for them. In theory, the parties could adapt, as Nokia could have. And they have advantages as incumbents, with a servile media and a set of warring, often inexperienced alternatives. But in countries with flexible political systems, like France, they are already dying or dead, even as their zombie leaders strut around between TV studios explaining why the voters are wrong. It would be nice to think that a political equivalent of Apple will arise to take over, but I wouldn’t count on it. When political systems become terminally incapable of providing what people want, they die. Sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently, rarely without complications and stresses of some kind. The problem is not with the people, but with the system. And so far, the system is showing no signs that it understands this.