A few weeks after February’s Eastleigh
by-election in the south of England, the centre-left, Labourite think tank
Policy Network published a report titled Democratic
Stress: The Populist Signal and Extremist Threat. It addresses the problem
of ‘right-wing populism’. It argues that populist parties like the UK
Independence Party (UKIP) are threatening, or ‘stressing’, liberal democracy in
Western Europe and elsewhere because they are undermining the ‘political
mainstream’ - that is, the realm of ‘parties who sit comfortably within the
pragmatic, pluralistic and institutionally bounded traditions of Western
liberal democracy’. If democratic wellbeing is to be secured, mainstream
parties must change their relationship with the public, the report says.
Apparently there are three political
approaches today ‘which are consequential in terms of real world outcomes: the
mainstream, populism and extremism’. The parties of the mainstream – whether
‘centre-right’ or ‘centre-left’ – have common cause in opposing approaches to
politics that are contrary to their own ‘style and content’. While populism
currently tends to take right-wing forms (UKIP, the Tea Party in America, the
French Front National), populist challenges to the mainstream can also emerge
from the left, the report argues. And any approach to politics that runs
counter to that of the ‘liberal democratic’ mainstream is suspect and a cause
for concern.
The report says liberal democracy’s virtue
lies in its array of checks and balances on majority rule. The ‘populists’, by
contrast, demand a democracy in which ‘the will of the morally pure majority is
enacted - without much if any obstacle’. By wanting to impose majority rule,
the populists don’t appreciate ‘social complexity’. Nor do they accept that
complex bureaucratic institutions like the EU should have the right to impede
what individual states can achieve. Liberal democracy is sensitive to these
limitations and it has a range of institutional constraints on majority
decision-making that safeguard minority interests. À la Robert Dahl, the report champions
liberal democracy as a kind of ‘polyarchy’, a form of ‘minorities’ rule’. Its
aim is to protect minorities from a majority that would otherwise engulf,
overpower and oppress them.
Such a view of democracy is, of course,
not new, so the report doesn’t endeavour to substantiate its assumptions with
much evidence or reasoning. Crucially, the idea that there is in modern Britain
a majority that actually wants to repress ‘minorities’ is not established at
all. The report presents survey data showing popular support for less
immigration, but it doesn’t show that such views have their origin in the
social constituency that the author clearly has in mind: a white working class
with ‘anxieties around culture, immigration and welfare’.
Nor does the report show that discomfort
with immigration levels reveals mass hostility towards ‘minorities’. In
reality, support for tougher immigration laws has come from across classes and
ethnic groups in Britain. Racism and anti-immigration can go together, of
course, but they are distinct phenomena, particularly in our present period
where people’s fears about immigration are less likely to be expressed via the
old language of racial politics than through concepts currently popularised in
different contexts by the ‘mainstream’ itself, like ‘limited resources’ and
‘sustainability’. In any case, the view of immigration as a potential problem
is by no means the preserve of the non-mainstream right; all mainstream parties
now call for limitations on immigration.
What the report’s critique of populism
really amounts to is fear of the public in an era of political fragmentation.
As it correctly identifies, the political certainties of the past are gone. The
breakdown of postwar class-party alignment – where, on average, around 90 per
cent of the electorate voted either Labour or Tory – means the mainstream can
no longer safely channel people’s discontent in the way it once did. As the old
party loyalties disappear, rejection of the ‘mainstream’ sets in, says the
report: ‘Now the space of political conflict is not only contested – the very
rules on which it is based are under question.’ Liberal democracy is itself
placed on trial, says the report, as mainstream parties – ‘the mainstays of
liberal democracy since universal suffrage’ – are abandoned in favour of
apparently radical-right populist parties like UKIP.
The report argues that ‘real “demand”
exists for a populist radical right’. Is this true? Surely UKIP’s recent
relative success is better understood as a product of a longstanding process of
public estrangement from the main parties rather than being evidence of a
sudden ideological transformation among sections of the electorate. There is no
obvious relationship between adherence to ‘mainstream values’ (greater
tolerance of minorities, say) and support for mainstream parties. Indeed,
survey evidence cited in the report seems to indicate that while ending
immigration receives only minority support from younger sections of society,
those sections are still most likely to dismiss mainstream parties at the
ballot box.
The report calls on mainstream parties to
‘address the anxieties that create the opportunity for populist and extremist
parties to emerge and gain support’. This includes strategies ranging from
‘cordon sanitaire’ – mainstream parties refusing to cooperate or share a
platform with the offending party – to ‘statecraft’, where mainstream parties
acknowledge and engage with the ‘thorny issues’ apparently preoccupying the
alienated public (from immigration to ‘on-street grooming’). This is really
about bringing the public back into the mainstream, bringing the apparently
frightened or ill-informed electorate once again under the influence of
mainstream political machines.
How is this to be achieved? Not so much by
parties setting out the precise ways in which they differ from each other, or
through offering the electorate something to vote for, but rather through
manipulating public discourse. Apparently, the problem is less that the ‘populists’
are wrong politically than that the public is ill-convinced, is unaware that
its concerns could be better dealt with in the mainstream. The public needs to
be persuaded that ‘there is a robust mainstream response to [its] concerns’.
The part of the public the report is
really concerned about is, unsurprisingly, the working class, the only class it
discusses at all, in fact. The idea that the working class is politically
volatile and prone to ‘extremism’ is not new. What worries the centre-left and the
political establishment in general is that, unlike in previous periods, today’s
working class is increasingly cut-off from its ‘natural home’ in mainstream
politics. Indeed, the working class was in a sense the original mass deserter
of the mainstream. By the 1980s, millions of workers had come to the conclusion
that the Labour Party lacked any strategy for fighting in their interests. Some
turned to parties on the right; many abstained from voting altogether; most of
those who stayed with Labour did so with little enthusiasm. For the political
elite, this meant that it no longer had a direct check on the political actions
of this unruly mass. Hence contemporary attempts to bring the ‘alienated’ back
into the fold of the ‘mainstream’, under the watchful eye of the political
elite.
In sum, Policy Network’s defence of
democracy amounts to a rejection of the idea that the demos can determine their
own destiny free from the constraints of decrepit political forms. There isn’t
much to welcome in the rise of parties like UKIP. But there is little to defend
in the moribund mainstream, either. Recognising the political bankruptcy of the
mainstream will produce unpredictable electoral outcomes, yes; but it is also a
key starting point to breaking away from the status quo and starting to think
about politics anew.
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