By Steve Hynd
The BBC has an interesting little article on its website right now, looking at American politics and especially the Tea Party movement then asking "Why do people often vote against their own interests?"
The answer appears to be simple according to political psychologist Drew Westen - Americans hate being treated as if they're dumb even when they're dumber than rocks, and explaining things to them is understood as telling them they're dumb.
He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:
Gore: "Under the governor's plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he's modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries."
Bush: "Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers.
"I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math. It's trying to scare people in the voting booth."
Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense - but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.
For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.
Now, I have to admit I wondered why the Beeb wasn't applying all this closer to home with Brown and Cameron - the British electorate are no brighter than the American version and have plenty of history of voting against their own interests. Can anyone say "Maggie Thatcher"? But none of this is exactly rocket science - it's an easily observed fact of life that the easiest way to annoy the stupid is to make them face how stupid they are. They'd rather hide in the sand. Which is why the folks at FOX can cut away early then say Obama was "lecturing" yesterday - and be sure of a receptive, nodding audience of their habitual viewers.
And the end result?
Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:
"You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.
"It's like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy."
As Mr Frank sees it, authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made.
Obama, of course, can fake sincerity with the best of them. He can also do real sincerity and even the cerebral thing. In that sense, he's very much a Blair clone in Blair's 1997 style, all things to all voting demographics, which is why he won. (And Gordon Brown can't which is why he'll lose to David Cameron.)
But we're still getting that "French Revolution in reverse" on both sides of the pond nonetheless, with no Clement Atlee or Aneurin Bevan in sight.
Gets to the heart of the liberal problem, doesn't it? There are ways to frame liberal policy in stories, etc that come from and hit the gut. I've tried it in face-to-face conversations with self-described "conservatives" and it works. But for some reason the Democratic Leadership has no use for it, preferring to believe that people can be won over by appeals to their rationality. That, of course, is based on the Western axiom that humans are rational creatures. To which i can only respond, "The fuck they are." And, "Prove it."
ReplyDeleteIt's why the right so often wins the "debate" in the US; it doesn't bother with appeals to reason. It sticks to morality plays and appeals to the basest motivations.
This post has identified one of the fundamental reasons why progressives have been losing:
ReplyDelete"One of the fallacies that politicians
often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious."
For example, reckless deregulation and fiscally conservative government policies helped produce the great depression. Repeated under George W. Bush, they led to the "great recession". So, logically, we should try something different--right?
This would seem to be obvious but we are working against 45 years of right-wing propaganda--deficits cause inflation, government is the problem not the solution, etc.
The best part of Obama's speech on Wednesday was when he pointed out that the policies of the right wing are what got us into the current mess.
That kind of explanation backed up with human anecdotes will have to be repeated often if we want to undo the now ingrained right-wing bias of the american people.