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September 20, 2009
In What Works Doesn’t Work in the London Review of Books Ross McKibbin offers an insightful account of modern politics in liberal democracy. He says that in a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s whole life, his ‘vocation’, and the modern political party was his home.
Others, like the Italian sociologist Robert Michels, argued further that for the modern politician the political party was a form of social mobility, so that eventually the protection of the party’s bureaucratic structures – the machine – became more important than the interests of the people the parties were supposed to represent.
McKibbin then develops the professionalism in terms of British politics that apply equally to Australia:
Professionalisation has always been a necessary characteristic of modern British parties, but in the last twenty years or so extreme professionalisation has become the dominant characteristic. The typical politician today, whether minister, shadow minister or ‘adviser’, proceeds from student politics (often with a politics degree), to political consultancy or a think-tank, to ‘research’ or the staff of an active politician. He or she is ‘good at politics’ – which means being good at the mechanics of politics, not necessarily at its ideas. The consequence is that the mechanics drives out the ideas, and the immediate expels the long-term .
Politics, he says is what the Daily Mail says today; the long-term is what the Daily Mail might say tomorrow. The crucial relationship now is between the politician, the journalist and the ‘adviser’.
He adds that public opinion is continually tested, but not in ways likely to supply anything other than the desired answer: what the opinion-testing seeks is ways to achieve the answer that’s wanted.
So today’s politician falls into the hands of the focus group. But the focus group, and the question on which it is asked to focus, is manipulated by the political consultant every bit as much as the focus group manipulates him. Each deceives the other. The result is that the political experience of the modern politician, the person good at the mechanics of politics, is exceptionally narrow: the political elite is now probably more divorced from society, and from any wider organising principles or ideology, than at any other time in the last 150 years.
The culture of the focus group (it includes the popular and financial press)reinforces the political status quo and encourages a hard-nosed, ‘realistic’ view of the electorate that denies the voter any political loyalty, except to ‘what works’. ‘What works’, though, is anything but an objective criterion: these days it is what the right-wing press says ‘works’. The war on drugs doesn’t work; nor does building more prisons; nor, one suspects, will many of the anti-terror laws.
The focus group truths are taxation (too high), crime (too much), choice (not enough), asylum seekers (too many), the public sphere (too big) and the elimination of these blemishes became the desideratum of politics.
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Yes. Yes. Yes.
(Weird image appearing in my head of the ACCC investigating the lack of competition and cartel-like arrangements for policy fixing because of the effective duopoly in the national executive market, with conflicts of interest among major suppliers of revenue streams - the same well-funded lobbies determining the policies of both members of the cartel, and with significant barriers to the entry of new players into the market, and all leading to poor value to consumers and really poor indices for Corporate Social Responsibility of the major players).