AT THE END OF 2016, Oxford Dictionaries pronounced ‘post-truth’ 2016’s Word of the Year. At the end of 2017, Collins Dictionaries gave a similar honour to ‘fake news’. In both cases, the populace barely bothered to shrug: in the new world order, what did it matter if the Establishment disapproved of their happy-go-lucky approach to the consumption of news? Yet the choices were telling. Something has gone wrong with the way we discuss our collective affairs, and it is affecting the way we do politics, too.
The malfunction relates to the value we place on objective truth. A common duty of honesty and accuracy is the main ground rule of the well-informed, unintimidated, fact-based debate through which democracies are supposed to reach wise decisions. If that ground rule is no longer generally accepted as such – and in the age of people power it appears not to be – our capacity to govern ourselves intelligently hangs by a thread.
This must be worth fixing; and I will try, in the next chapter, to suggest a way of fixing it. But we need to be clear about the problem. It isn’t that voters keep making the wrong choices. Maybe they don’t. If they do, they are entitled to: that is what democracy means. (And it’s not as if the political Establishment’s choices are infallibly wise either.) Nor should we let the term ‘populism’ mislead us into thinking that the problems we face result from allowing the badly educated masses too much influence over complex questions about how they are governed. Sometimes it feels that way, as successive popular votes produce outcomes that appear to fly in the face of common sense. But the truth may well be the exact opposite: these perverse electoral outcomes result from voters having too little power, not too much.
Yes, the people are listened to as never before, but their practical power remains minimal. You don’t believe me? Consider this. In the democratic UK, the past four decades have seen two huge changes in national direction. Mass immigration has been encouraged on a scale never previously contemplated, without any attempt to seek a popular mandate for such a change. And our union with Europe has become closer and closer, notwithstanding the governing elite’s repeated insistence that no such change was taking place and that, if it were, the people would be consulted. Of course millions felt betrayed.
That doesn’t mean that the policies themselves were without their merits, or that the Brexit vote was a wise response to either. But that vote does suggest that a sizeable proportion of the electorate felt that, in pursuing them, their representatives had exceeded their mandate, and that they – the voters – had been left with too little power, not too much. Citizens’ juries and regional assemblies are all very well. They’re scant compensation if we feel that the questions that really change our lives are decided elsewhere, by a different kind of citizen.
A study of thirty-eight countries published by the Pew Center in October 2017 confirmed a wide and growing appetite for more direct forms of democracy. Sixty-six per cent of those surveyed expressed approval for a system ‘in which citizens, not elected officials, vote directly on issues of national importance to decide what becomes law’. In the UK – where 47 per cent of respondents identified themselves as dissatisfied with the way democracy is working in their country and only 49 per cent said that they ‘trust the national government to do what is right for our country’ – there was still widespread support (84 per cent) for representative democracy as a good form of government. But 56 per cent also expressed approval for the direct system, in which citizens decide. Only 38 per cent felt that this would be a bad idea.
And that, for now, is the big, inescapable challenge facing parliamentary democracy: the people consider their power insufficient. They – we – have a point. We vote once in a while in elections, under the influence of campaign rhetoric and manifestos that are consistently and shamefully economical with the truth. We delegate decision-making to representatives whose interest in our concerns seems to rise and fall with the electoral cycle. And every now and then we are invited to make decisions directly, in referendums. Those moments shine and vanish like April snowflakes. The rest of the time, we are nobodies. Power remains with the representatives – and with their parties; and with their parties’ paymasters. They fear us more than they used to; their agendas remain their own.
The direct decisions are cruellest: creating the illusion of power but not the reality. UK governments have used referendums with unprecedented frequency over the past twenty years. Ostensibly, the aim has been to delegate power to the people; cynics say that the real purpose has usually been to pass the buck for politically unrewarding controversies. It barely matters: the referendum process, whatever the motives for using it, is unsatisfactory. No matter how complex the question, the voter can tick only one box, once. The question generally comes down to a choice between the known and the unknown, which makes honest debate difficult and informed decision-making impossible. Instead, the plebiscite just takes a snapshot of national mood. They might as well use the same ballot-paper question every time. ‘You feelin’ lucky?’ would cover it.
Nonetheless, each referendum is treated, absurdly, as infallible. The polls close, and the debate closes with them. Votes are counted, the verdict is proclaimed, and voters revert to their accustomed role as the governed, without even the prospect of future votes to restrain their intermediaries in the political class who claim, ever after, the people’s mandate – and who furiously discourage further public discussion of the issue in question. In other words, the referendum disempowers the people. They get one stab at getting it right and no chance to revise their judgement in the light of subsequent experience – especially if, as in Germany in 1934 or Turkey in 2017, the referendum verdict explicitly removes limits on an autocrat’s power. No wonder Clement Attlee – the man who oversaw the UK’s great democratic levelling from 1945 to 1951 – denounced referendums as ‘a device for demagogues and dictators’; no wonder Margaret Thatcher, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, quoted him approvingly four decades later. Mistakes and deceptions in general elections can be rectified next time round; referendum choices are all but irreversible. That is their danger: they deny voters what Pericles called ‘the wisest of all counsellors: time’.
The people are not infallible. The point of democracy is not that an electorate knows better than its wisest members but that it will produce decisions that command popular consent. In the words of the US academic Dexter Perkins (writing, like many of democracy’s most eloquent defenders, at a time when the horrors of the Second World War were still fresh memories):
The best wisdom is to be found in the collectivity, not because any member of the collectivity is himself as wise or as well informed or as disinterested as some notable individuals may be, but because the reconciliation of the wills, the aspirations, and the interests of all, even the prejudices of all, provides a more solid and enduring basis of action than the will, the aspiration, and the interest of any individual or of any class.
Yet it is also true that, on most questions – in politics, culture, justice and more – the people have a remarkably reliable capacity for arriving collectively at wise answers in the end. Lies are seen through, with hindsight; fallacies and follies reveal themselves; infatuations are grown out of; and once-outlandish ideas eventually find their moment. But the truth takes time to get its boots on. That is the people’s weakness. Collectively, we struggle to thrash our way through options quickly and sensibly: partly because of the difficulty of deliberating en masse but mainly because we habitually answer questions about our opinions without deliberating or investigating at all. In short: our default mode is ignorance.
From the individual’s point of view, this often makes sense. If your power to influence a policy decision is vanishingly small, why waste time and energy bringing yourself up to speed? At a group level, however, this ‘rational ignorance’ makes public opinion a dangerously unstable force, ill-informed and capricious – and particularly vulnerable to referendums. We veer wildly but confidently from extreme to extreme as flaws in previously held positions belatedly become clear. Yet the political chancer who snatches a referendum victory when the pendulum of opinion is at its furthest point can claim the people’s mandate ever afterwards.
This is great for those who aren’t ashamed to play dirty (and for the unseen forces whose wealth helps them to do so). Who needs slogans to be defensible, or campaigning methods to be irreproachable, when you need only to win the argument for a day? It’s not so good from the electorate’s point of view, since it encourages dishonesty at the expense of good government. Honest politicians, who fiddle shiftily in grey areas trying to work out precisely what they can and cannot reasonably promise, are easily outshone in campaigning by those who – in the words of Broadway’s favourite Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton – are prepared to ‘flatter [the people’s] prejudices to betray their interest’. All too often, we are gulled into voting for dishonest or reckless campaigns on platforms that are either undeliverable or, worse, deliverable but stupid.
Wise government was not included in Churchill’s list of democratic essentials. Yet no political system that lacks the capacity to deliver it can endure for long. If the system in question is a representative democracy, the people, denied a role in day-to-day decision-making, need to feel broadly confident that their representatives will govern them in a way that they would – ultimately – consider wise. Yet how can they? It becomes plainer each time we go to the polls that the big party machines focus more on politics (how to win power) than on policy (how best to exercise it). Much of the campaigning for the 2017 general election verged on the farcical, as senior figures from both main parties got tied up in knots being evasive or inconsistent about which policy positions they actually supported. The big question that the election was supposedly called to resolve – i.e. precisely how Brexit will be achieved – was barely mentioned, let alone honestly discussed. Yet somehow we allowed the campaign sweet-talking to persuade us that our would-be representatives were interested in what we wanted; and were surprised to find that, once we had given them what they wanted, they no longer found our views so fascinating.
It’s our own fault: we never learn. Again and again, in elections and, especially, in referendums, we, the people, allow ourselves to be seduced by implausibly extravagant promises – from the wildly inflated forecasts of oil revenues that nearly led to Scottish independence to Vote Leave’s notorious offer of an extra £350 million a week for the NHS if we left the EU. We know we’re being promised the moon, but we like it. And so we dispense our electoral favours casually and, in effect, encourage politicians to deceive us. The politician who comes clean and tells us, adult-to-adult, that there isn’t enough money to give us everything we want will always lose votes relative to the politician who tells us that there is. Later, we fume impotently at disappointments that we could, had we taken the trouble to give the matter our full attention, have anticipated easily.
But – and this is the crucial point – there’s a reason for our gullibility: where politics is concerned, we have no responsibility. We can insist that our views be heard. We know that we will have no role in their implementation. We therefore feel under no obligation to ensure that they are wise, well-informed views. Why should we? Getting things right is a problem for the political class, not us.
Examples of public ignorance abound. The most famous relate to the entirely imaginary Public Affairs Act (1975), about which, in studies spanning several decades, a substantial proportion of those polled regularly express firm and often partisan opinions. Here are some others: one American in three cannot name a single branch of US government, and one in three cannot name a single freedom protected by their constitution’s First Amendment (Annenberg Public Policy Center, 2017); one Briton in four does not know that members of the House of Lords are not elected directly by the public (Audit of Political Engagement, 2010); the average British voter overestimates the scale of benefit fraud by a multiple of 34:1 (Ipsos MORI, 2013); only one American in four knows the length of a US senator’s term (Gallup, 1991); 19 per cent of Britons think the sun revolves around the Earth (Gallup, 1996). Those come from polls and surveys. I might equally well cite the outcomes of real-world votes, from the Greek people’s contortions over their EU bail-out in 2015 to the Turkish people’s renunciation of restraints on arbitrary power in 2017. In practice as in theory, we make frequent use of our self-awarded licence to be stupid. When we do, the price we pay for doing so is real. In voting for Donald Trump, for example, Americans appear to have committed themselves to approaches to climate change and MMR vaccination that cannot possibly do them anything but harm, as individuals and as a nation. (I’m deliberately avoiding more contentious issues, such as nuclear brinkmanship or economic protectionism.) Many of us feel that Brexit, too, is an example of collective folly, although others would disagree. The point that matters, in this context, is not the particular choice but the underlying problem: the fact that, if and when voters make an ill-informed, un-thought-through choice at the ballot box, and the sunlit uplands they have been promised then fail to materialise, it’s the people and the nation, not the politicians who made the promises, who suffer the consequences. From the individual politician’s point of view, the transaction may still have been worthwhile, transforming him or her from nationalist agitator into head of state, for example, or from ex-Mayor to Foreign Secretary. Thus populism, all too often, benefits not the many but the few.
But electoral outcomes are not primarily about the fulfilment or frustration of politicians’ individual ambitions (whatever some politicians and political journalists may feel). The main result of an ill-judged vote is, simply, a badly managed nation: poorer, more divided, less secure. The public’s ignorance and folly trickle upwards into government, as the political smooth-talkers they have empowered attempt, in office, to justify the dubious platforms that won them their mandates. This is no small problem at a time of global political turmoil and cut-throat economic competition. Our need for our representatives to possess both intelligence and integrity has rarely been more pressing; yet Parliament is overflowing with chancers and fools. Or perhaps it only seems that way – thanks to another unfortunate effect of our slapdash way of doing politics: a widespread and corrosive distrust of politicians. Repeated disappointments have left us feeling chronically disillusioned. It doesn’t matter which party we support (or even, necessarily, whether the cause we supported won or lost the vote): most of us share, to a greater or lesser extent, a frustrating, infuriating sense of being cheated by those who are supposed to represent us. And many of us are deciding that we’re not going to take it any more.
We all know that our world is changing. All but the most complacent of us now keep a more or less permanent half-eye on what’s going on in the world – partly because technology allows us to but mainly because we are anxious about the effect that current affairs will have on our own well-being. British voters have never been less content to let the ladies and gentlemen in Westminster and Whitehall get on with running our lives, unquestioned. What happens in Parliament matters to us; and if it doesn’t deliver the outcomes we want, we make our displeasure known. Yet somehow it still feels as though those in the thick of it are fobbing us off.
Our discontent manifests itself in unfocused outpourings of digital rage but not, so far, in any particularly rational or coherent demands. Online anonymity relieves us of any sense of obligation to check our facts or formulate workable proposals or even tell the truth, just as it emboldens us to lash out without restraint at those who disagree with us. The sound and fury and dishonesty feed off one another – and still we have nothing to show for them.
The parliamentary Establishment, for its part, has begun to speak up for itself, turning our rage back at us. Politicians and political commentators have fulminated in increasing numbers about the perils of populism, often eloquently. The most visible fruits of populism – Farage, Trump, Le Pen, Wilders – give them plenty of supporting evidence. Just look at what the people will do – goes the argument – without the restraining influence of wiser representatives. Of course they must be kept at arm’s length from important decision-making at a national level: they are too stupid and ill-informed to be allowed to govern themselves.
It sounds persuasive. Yet perhaps we are looking at the problem the wrong way round. We justify denying the people a more direct role in the system on the grounds that they, the people, are stupid and illinformed. But what if it doesn’t work like that? What if, in fact, we, the people, are stupid and ill-informed because we are denied a more direct role in the system?