Next week, the US Republicans will win one or both houses of Congress. Or fall just short in each. They will cheer the capture of governorships in some states (Nevada, perhaps). But rue losses elsewhere (Massachusetts). The results will signify a lasting Republican realignment. Or a routine anti-incumbent year into which little can be read.
All of these permutations are fun to ponder. But the central point gets lost in the obsession with small variances: the GOP is competitive. This fact should astound more people than it does. For the Capitol siege, for the foot-dragging over whether Joe Biden is the legitimate president, the electoral cost has been, well, not quite zero. (With a less Trumpist candidate, the party would be doing better in the Pennsylvania governor race.) But nor is it very great.
If enough voters punished them, Republicans would have an incentive to change. Instead, the party remains what it was at the turn of the millennium: one half of a 50-50 nation. Lots of voters, most of them not extreme or even political, and aware that the loss of their custom would force the GOP to reform, look at this party and decide they can live with it.
Something odd happens when the elites discuss the crisis of western democracy. No one wants to fault the public, at least not in so many words. That would be Marie Antoinette-ish. It would further incite the atmosphere of revolt. And so they look at the crisis through what might be called the supply side of politics. Who owns Twitter and how can it be cleansed of misinformation? Which shadily funded think-tanks in Westminster are given voice by which foreign-domiciled media magnates? Did something called “neoliberalism” dislocate and thus radicalise millions of working people? In that icky phrase of the hour, how can elites “do better”?
There is something messianic about the notion that, if voters err, it is because of goings-on among one’s class at the commanding heights of society. It is far more elitist than just going ahead and blaming the masses.
Some blame is due. In a recent poll by Ipsos for The Economist, British voters agreed by a large margin that economic growth does more good than harm. They just opposed almost every single thing that might bring it about, that’s all. Immigration, housebuilding, spending on science as opposed to pensions: all got a “no”. And these questions weren’t sly or obscurely framed. Respondents were confronted with the trade-offs in explicit fashion: strictly limit immigration even if it harms growth, was one proposition.
So, yes, the past three UK prime ministers were dire. Much of the governing class is unserious. But what is anyone meant to do for an electorate that both obstructs growth and resents its absence? What about the governed class?
That question applies no less to electorates that are fancied to be grown up. This year, the German politico-industrial elite has had its fantasies about foreign relations exposed. Few postwar governments in the rich world have aged worse than Angela Merkel’s. Her successor is accused of the same naïveté about Russia, the same reticence abroad. But none of these leaders acts in a void. They act in the context of national sentiment. In 2019, the Pew Research Center asked Germans whether their country should use force to defend a Nato ally in the event of Russian attack. Some 60 per cent said no. That isn’t a misprint, or even an exceptional number in Europe. And you thought Donald Trump was a threat to the western alliance.
Even since the war in Ukraine, Germans oppose the idea of their nation playing a “military leadership role” in Europe, by a margin of more than two to one. Again, what are leaders meant to do here? It is natural to believe in a conspiracy of Bavarian exporters and Berlin lawmakers to preserve a quietist foreign policy. But it absolves the public.
No one can “Dissolve the people / And elect another”, any more than in Bertolt Brecht’s time. If only a poet would come up with some verse for the opposite mistake, though. In skirting the demand side of politics — the public — the elites have lost themselves in irrelevancies. The apogee of this is the hysterical over-discussion about a microblogging platform that is younger than Greta Thunberg. Twitter is awful. It cheapens even its best users. But nothing much hinges on it. Like Facebook, it radicalises, but not as much as it reflects.
In going on about it, the media will be accused of self-obsession, but I fear something yet worse is going on. It is more soothing to think that what ails democracy is on screen, and not out there.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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