'Politics Isn't About Politics for the Overwhelming Majority of People'
'Politics Isn't About Politics for the Overwhelming Majority of People'
Byline Times' editor Hardeep Matharu on the new edition of the paper, why the right are using 'performative cruelty' as a strategy and what the left must learn about the role of emotions in politics
“The overwhelming majority of people do not think about policy at all, and this is something that people who work in politics – and especially on the political left – have just completely missed,” political scientist Brian Klaas tells the June print edition of Byline Times.
The UK-based American author, who is the Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London, offers his insights for an edition exploring why and how politicians on the right are targeting a base of people, not with policies, but with a performative type of politics that aims to make cruelty its purpose.
At its heart, Klaas’ key takeaway is that, for many, politics is not actually about politics – but an arena for their more emotional, and sometimes primal, projections to be given expression.
“Britain, to my mind, lags behind the Trump effect by several years, but there are aspects of it seeping in from the US,” Klaas observes.
“During the Trump years, there was a depressing realisation – as my colleague at The Atlantic Adam Serwer observed – that ‘cruelty is the point’. From this, we can start to understand that this is actually what politics is to some people.
“Trump wasn’t trying to pretend that he was doing cruel things for good reasons – he was just trying to punish people who, to those on the political right, deserved punishment. That’s the thing that most people are waking up to in the US; that you can do a heck of a lot of damage in a really vindictive, petty, cruel way, and actually consolidate support among a certain percentage of the electorate. The biggest question is how big that group is?
“I think, relatively, it’s a minority. In the US, it’s probably 30 to 35% of the population that actually enjoys the cruelty, which is terrible – I mean, it’s a huge number of people. But it’s not a strategy to grow the electorate, it's a strategy to consolidate people who already like you. And I think that’s what is really happening on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Much has been made since the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump of the notion that politics is being driven increasingly by emotion. Both were the ultimate ‘culture war’ fronts: eras in which the normal rules of politics seemed to have been suspended and alternative realities erected around what is expected of those in public life, and politics itself.
Combined with the rise of social media, and data-driven political campaigning, there isn’t a way to simply ‘go back’.
Although polling shows that the UK Government’s culture war distractions are not priorities for the British people – who consistently indicate that they intend to elect a Labour government at the next general election – this doesn’t mean there are no lessons to be learned, particularly by those on the left, about what politics represents today. Particularly when it comes to the emotional needs of the electorate.
“My biggest insight into politics, which I got from working in political campaigning before I became a political scientist, is that the overwhelming majority of people do not think about policy at all,” Klaas says. “And this is something that people who work in politics, and especially on the political left, have just completely missed.”
While policies are important for some, an emotionally-resonant ‘big vision’ of how politics can change people’s lives is taking primacy for potentially many more – in addition to the minority base for whom the extreme emotion of cruelty hits the mark (and on which an arguably disproportionate focus is targeted by our media).
People want something to believe in. That is why the June print edition of Byline Times dissects the UK Government’s ‘theatre of cruelty’ – which puts asylum seekers, the sick and disabled, homeless people, the trans community, and the poor centre-stage in its attacks – and shows why such a strategy is unlikely to work.
Not only does this performative politics not tackle any of the real challenges many more people are struggling with in their day-to-day lives – beyond promising a sense of psychic justice to a minority of individuals – it does nothing to inspire a sense of progress or how things could truly be different. That they could even be different.
Cruelty is the point. To a point. Many, many more of us want something to hope for.
“Why this is so culturally resonant with people, especially when it’s around issues such as illegal migration, is that a lot of politics for people who don’t think about it every day, equates to distributing justice and giving people what they think they deserve,” Klaas observes in the latest Byline Times print edition.
“This idea that ‘these people’ broke the rules and they deserve to be punished in some potentially really public way or really harsh way. That impulse is very old. People attended public hangings for a reason.
“When we look at politics, it’s about arguing about your policies – but you’re not going to convince these people by saying ‘here’s our new policy idea’.
“On immigration, this speaks to the question: what does it mean to be me? It’s an identity question. People usually talk about ‘identity politics’ as some abstract or policy-driven issue – but I think a lot of people feel it internally.
“In the UK, this is the concept of some people feeling immigration is changing what it means to be British. And identity is very, very important to our sense of self. But when you argue about that using a statistic, it’s really ineffective – because that’s not the level at which these people are thinking about this problem.”
To tackle the performative politics of cruelty, politicians on the left need to understand what it taps into – and what politics represents for people today.
Bringing down the curtain on the Conservatives’ theatre of cruelty, as the recent local election results indicate is now happening in the UK, will help set the stage again for a politics that really matters.
Hardeep Matharu is the Editor of Byline Times
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