‘A Lesson in Politics’

The mid-term elections in America have gone the way that most pundits predicted: a Republican rout in the mid-terms. The discussion immediately went on to the next question: what does this mean?

In some ways the answer is ‘not very much’. The mid-terms are the only real opportunity American voters get to voice their dissatisfaction with an incumbent party and incumbent President. Almost all of President Obama’s predecessors have been treated in a similar way in their time – both Republican and Democrat. So the voters may want to register their disappointment with President Obama now but perhaps no more than they wished to register their disappointment with President Bush in his day and so on. It is true that disillusionment with Obama may be more serious because of the unbelievable and impossible to live up to expectations which he and those around him promulgated ahead of his arrival in the White House.

The fact that voters get opportunities to register dissatisfaction is of course one of the healthiest aspects of a healthy democracy. But the manner in which they do so is becoming an issue in all our democracies in the West. America’s electoral system allows only for a switch to the other party with the very very occasional independent thrown in.

Until recently British voters had a similar choice – to rotate between the two main parties but with the opportunity to punish both at once by going with the Liberal Democrats. The latter were for years able to appeal to a certain type of voter not least because they had no chance of holding office and therefore could portray their principles as standing aloft from the grubby concerns of other politicians.

Since going into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010 that stance has fallen apart. And the Liberal Democrats are – all polls show – now no longer the party of ‘opposition’ to the two main parties. Indeed they must now fight to be even the fourth party at the next election. There are many lessons to be taken from this but one is the fact that politics ‘taints’. The process of compromise, bargain, meeting in the middle is something everybody in the business of politics becomes aware of. But much depends on whether publics are encouraged to understand this.

One temptation of politicians is to hide the brute bargaining of power while pretending to keep their principles clean. Yet doing so accentuates the divide between voter and representative. In every part of the political divide and each democracy we must be careful not to develop purist publics and ‘tainted’ representatives. All the populist and in some cases demagogic movements of our time come from the message that all ‘them’ in Washington or Westminster are the same.

Ideals are vital in politics. But should we end up in a position where the public hold ideals the politicians cannot live up to, the result will not be not bi-annual expressions of dissatisfaction but a growing generation of political malcontents.