THERE ARE PLENTY in Westminster who feel that the people have too much power already. There’s a hint of menace in the anger of the aggrieved masses as it rattles the walls of the West’s great democracies, after decades of peace and stability. Who in their right mind would open the gates now?
Yet the rattling continues, and the anger grows louder. The people feel cheated. Our reasons differ, but the cumulative effect of our disillusionment is dangerous. Some feel betrayed by the Brussels-friendly elite who pursued their European ‘project’ without popular consent. Others feel betrayed by the recklessness of Brexit. Both blame a dysfunction at the heart of British democracy: an imbalance of power between government and governed.
The more you look, the more subsets of the electorate you can find who feel that the political status quo isn’t working for them. You can query the commentariat’s shifting labels: the left-behinds; the have-nots; the somewheres; the just-about-managing; the young; the white working classes; ethnic minorities; the ‘many’. It’s hard to quarrel with the underlying truth: that millions within those groups feel badly served by conventional representative politicians – and are open to the suggestion, from left or right, that representative democracy itself has failed.
Lurid revelations of Establishment sleaze feed such resentment; populist politicians thrive on it. The rise of Corbynism may have taken most political pundits by surprise. To historians, it was foreseeable. If enough voters are sufficiently disillusioned, it ceases to matter if they don’t all want the same thing. It ceases to matter, too, if many can sense something not entirely trustworthy about the crowd-pleasing leader who promises to banish their troubles. They take a punt on them anyway, in the not unreasonable belief that they can hardly be worse than the current set-up.
And if the new political programme on offer doesn’t stand up to rigorous scrutiny, that doesn’t matter either. If voters’ resentment is real, and especially if it is justified, they won’t be focusing on the programme. They’ll be focusing on their grievances; and their critical rigour, which may be considerable, will be directed at the flaws of the people and the system that let them down.
Glastonbury festival-goers’ chants of ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ in June 2017 offered a taste of what the future might hold for British politics: citizens expressing their preferences directly, vociferously and (seemingly) unanimously, having reached their apparently spontaneous conclusions through hard-to-fathom processes of crowd dynamics. Questions about the feasibility of Labour’s spending proposals, or the ambiguity of the party’s position on Brexit, played no part in Corbynmania. Nor did the processes of Parliament. Instead, the collective consciousness of festival-goers seemed to decide on the spur of the moment that it liked the cut of Corbyn’s jib – and was disgusted by May’s. At around the same time, the collective judgement of the electorate was shifting in a similar direction.
There’s an obvious attraction to this kind of politics, which gives ordinary people the influence they are usually denied, while empowering the kind of common sense that Westminster tends to lack. Who but a political professional could have imagined that, comparing persona with persona, the public would prefer the robotic cynicism of Theresa May’s ‘strong and stable’ campaign to Corbyn’s aura of down-to-earth authenticity?
Crowds may be ill-informed. They’re seldom stupid – and woe betide the public figure who gets caught trying to pull the wool over their eyes. But there’s an obvious place for the political wisdom of crowds to express itself: elections. That’s when we decide which politicians we trust to represent us; and there’s no better basis for such decisions than individual and collective gut feeling.
The trouble starts when the same kind of forces begin to affect day-to-day policy choices, where what matter most are the relative merits of policy alternatives. In that context, the confidently delivered opinions of the crowd are less helpful. We have seen this with any number of difficult issues, from Brexit to runway-building, university funding to social care. The crowd makes its mind up not by number-crunching and exhaustive weighing-up of the pros and cons, but by seizing on the position that seems to make most sense. Well-informed and illinformed hold equal sway. A simple slogan (‘dementia tax’) can change the collective mind in an instant – and no amount of quibbling about the actual, detailed impact of the policy in question will change it back. Crowds are won over, as Joseph Goebbels allegedly boasted, by arguments that are ‘crude, clear and forcible’, appealing ‘to the emotions and the instincts, not the intellect’.
One obvious drawback of an excess of ‘crowd power’ in national decision-making is that it reduces our chances of being governed wisely. Carefully evaluated policies are dropped in an instant if they seem to be playing badly; popular ones are persisted with long after their drawbacks have become obvious. And policies based on unpalatable truths (for example, that we must either spend less or tax ourselves more) rarely play well. In crowds, we prefer easy options, and rarely examine them closely.
But there’s another, more sinister drawback. Crowds struggle to tolerate dissent. The complex processes by which large masses of people reach seemingly spontaneous unanimity may never be fully understood, but one ingredient in the mixture is fear. Fear of being out of step makes us keep our reservations to ourselves. Whether it’s a political judgement (‘Should we support the invasion of Iraq?’), an aesthetic one (‘Did the band play well or badly?’) or even a personal one (‘Was Princess Diana a vain, manipulative, self-indulgent toff – or a beautiful, compassionate, almost saintly People’s Princess?’) – the answer is a snap one. It starts off localised and then spreads, like flame across paper, until it has consumed everything.
Mystery surrounds the first stages of the process, although you can be pretty sure that, where politics is concerned, there will be organised groups actively manipulating it. (There’s even a new word, ‘astroturfing’, to describe the growing phenomenon of fake grassroots activism.) Thereafter, it’s all about momentum: a proposition that gains some can quickly become unstoppable. The lack of formal safe space for contrary positions means that unanimity is not only reached but reached too quickly. In area after area (race, gender, religion, war), dissenters give up the fight, their views shunned first as heresy and then as unspeakable taboos.
The intellectual processes by which we reach these collective conclusions may be no shallower in a physical (or digital) crowd than in a traditional election. In an election, however, there is a safety valve: the secret ballot. Those who are intimidated into silence by strident activists can vote in accordance with what they really feel. They make their choices as individuals, in private.
In the world of mass, real-time, collective discourse, the individual lacks this right. Instead, you can either get with the programme, or stick your neck out and oppose it, or keep your views to yourself. History suggests that, for the individual, there is much to be gained by keeping your head down; and that, for society, there is much to be lost by ceding political influence to those who act most aggressively. Effective agitators often focus their fiercest attacks on opponents, not policies. Successful revolutions resort easily to terror.
In a liberal, open, pluralist society, dissent is not taboo. But the liberal consensus, as we know, is broken. It’s decades since a British political leader even tried to obtain meaningful popular consent for the core liberal values that were Eisenhower’s ‘treasures’. Instead, voters have simply been bribed to go along with programmes of social liberalism: first with economic growth, then with the pretence of growth (achieved at the expense of future generations). We have been lectured on the virtues of economic liberalism, which we are told has made us prosperous. The idea that the principles of liberal democracy have a value in themselves, and might even be worth some trade-off in terms of prosperity, has been all but forgotten.
Yet the public, contrary to what many in Westminster patronisingly assume, is not indifferent to political first principles. Post-referendum research suggests that concerns about sovereignty, for example, played a bigger part in the Brexit vote than most Remainers like to admit. Perhaps, given the chance, they would show some enthusiasm for our intangible treasures as well. Instead, denied the opportunity to engage in a constructive, grown-up way with the complexities of government, the public are increasingly doing so destructively instead.
You can understand the anger. Why wouldn’t people resent all those years of deference to an Establishment that appears to consist largely of tax-dodgers, expense-fiddlers, bullying buttock-gropers and asset-stripping fat cats? But the actual process of throwing off the Establishment yoke is proving dangerous. Hard-won traditions of tolerance in public life are being washed away by waves of collective self-righteousness (stirred by digital troublemakers who wish us ill); and influential figures in traditional politics, instead of providing protection, are surfing the waves.
If we are not careful, the age of people power will become an age of loosely organised intimidation. Perhaps it is already doing so. Intolerance from the far left drove the BBC’s political editor to take a bodyguard with her to Labour’s 2017 party conference; a few weeks later, intolerance from the Eurosceptic right saw universities pressed by a government whip to account for their teaching of matters relating to Brexit. The right-wing press heaps abuse on anyone in public life suspected of insufficient enthusiasm for anything from Brexit to poppy-wearing. John McDonnell, who may soon be our Chancellor of the Exchequer, has said that ‘I want to be in a position where no Tory MP can travel anywhere without … direct action’.
On reflection, it’s absurd to have imagined that liberalism – a philosophy that can be almost entirely summed up in the phrase ‘live and let live’ – could have continued to thrive in such an age. Yet it is also absurd for liberals to concede defeat. I’m pretty sure that most people don’t want to live in a society in which orthodoxy is enforced by fear. I’m pretty sure that most people, on left and right, have a general sense that our old, open, tolerant way of doing politics has served us relatively well. We just don’t know how to protect it – especially when there is so much of the old politics that we really do want to get rid of.
For those whose political lives have been lived out on social media, such concerns may seem academic: the nit-picking neuroses of the middle-aged, middle-class ‘centrist dad’. Crowd politics is what happens on social media: it is normal. Masses of people vie through simultaneous debate to establish their views as received orthodoxies, with the less confident simply signing up to the orthodoxy that seems to have prevailed. If you are young, and this is what you are used to, why would you consider it less democratic than the representative form of democracy that has betrayed you?
Yet it is. The dynamics of unmediated direct democracy are as destructive as they are powerful – as the Founding Fathers warned 250 years ago. When we make our decisions collectively, we are rarely truly collective. Instead, fear of being out of step makes us feign more orthodoxy than we feel; the illusion of unanimity fuels collective intolerance; ‘spontaneous’ collective choices are often orchestrated by activists; demagogues stoke mild gripes into burning grievances; majorities, real or pretended, tyrannise minorities; and cruelty and injustice – not to mention folly – can all too easily result.
If you doubt that such forces are already changing the way we live, consider the increasing influence of digitally expressed public opinion on complex decisions about medical treatment, from vaccinations to tragic individual cases such as Charlie Gard’s. Consider recent outcries about the appointment of Establishment figures to head public inquiries (into the Grenfell Tower tragedy, for example). Consider how rarely – in our shared discourse – we admit the possibility that a public figure accused of abusive sexual behaviour may be innocent. Crowd emotion can be a powerful force for good, but it is no respecter of ‘intangible treasures’ such as the independence of the judiciary or the presumption of innocence. And when politicians try to harness that force for their own ends, the effect can be dangerously inflammatory – as when John McDonnell claimed that victims of the Grenfell Tower tragedy were ‘murdered’ by Tory cuts. (Nor is it just the far left from which such threats come. Think of the pro-war lobby’s ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’ approach to invading Iraq; or, for that matter, of the Daily Mail’s ‘Crush the saboteurs’ approach to Brexit.)
Perhaps this is people power. But the people, in such contexts, are rarely empowered. They are merely enlisted as the demagogues’ enforcers – and are liable to be brutally disillusioned if they imagine that there is any more to it than that. Populism, as the US academic and author Jan-Werner Müller famously observed, never demands that all the people be heard. Rather, it defines part of the population as the true or authentic people, and the rest – those with whom the populist politician disagrees – as a corrupt elite; or, more menacingly, as enemies of the people.
Several of the mainstream media’s most articulate commentators (Nick Cohen, David Marquand, Philip Collins, Philip Stephens, Janan Ganesh) have made and developed this point. It is too late. Like the well-meaning politicians of Westminster, the decent, thoughtful journalists of what used to be Fleet Street are now on the wrong side of history. Years of shameless partisanship by over-powerful editors and media barons have exhausted the credibility of the entire profession. If a social media mob wants to denounce its opponents as, in effect, social deviants or enemies of the people – well, why shouldn’t it? The mainstream media has been doing it for years.
And so we find ourselves at a moment of great danger; but also, if we are bold, of great opportunity. Until now, Westminster’s default response to the challenge of extra-parliamentary ‘alt-democracy’ has been to promise to ‘listen’. The effect has been as disastrous as appeasement usually is. Ministers have found that listening merely gauges people’s views, which shift with every alteration of the breeze. The people, meanwhile, feel no less excluded, and no less angry, and no less demanding, than before. Fear of their clamour has made their elected representatives shiftier. It has yet to produce many tangible benefits for those doing the clamouring. It’s the old politics, not the new, that gets the blame; demagogues rise on the resulting tide of resentment; and those ‘intangible treasures’ that were once the pride of British politics are left, unguarded, to look after themselves.
Liberalism enables a political discourse that is not distorted by fear. Populism, in its rawest forms, doesn’t. The decline of the former and the rise of the latter are two sides of the same story. And the idea of bringing sortition to the House of Lords is relevant to both.
That single, simple, bold reform could harness the power of populism in a focused, constructive, democracy-friendly way. Instead of merely trying to appease the swelling mass of alienated voters, we could empower them. By giving Westminster a small injection of direct democracy, we could re-emphasise and re-legitimise our commitment to representative democracy. We need a People’s Chamber not because ‘the people’ are good and politicians are bad (the corrosive myth of populism), but because it would make Parliament more responsive, providing a mechanism through which voters could modify their instructions in the light of unfolding events. It would make Parliament more representative, visibly refuting the notion that Westminster is only for the elite. But its greatest value might simply be that, by giving people power a role in Parliament – small and symbolic but also palpably real – it would act as a safety valve for the resentments of all those who see themselves as ‘excluded’, and as a safety belt for all who fear being crushed by the raw power of those resentments. The people would have to put up or shut up: engage with the problems of politics in a grown-up way or leave it to the professionals.
I imagine that popular political passions would rage no less fiercely. Channelled through Westminster, however, they would add to the authority of the parliamentary system instead of eroding it. In effect, for the first time, we would all be in it together.
The House of Lords’ traditional purpose was to keep as much power as possible in the hands of the ‘haves’. Its constitutional virtue, which evolved by accident in, for the most part, the twentieth century, has been to keep some power in hands other than the government’s. In recent years, its democratic shortcomings have caused both its power and its independence to evaporate. Yet when governments are influenced ever more irresistibly by the unseen machinations of the rich and powerful and the whims of (alleged) public opinion, ordinary people need such independent protection more than ever – just as workers in the 1970s and 1980s needed protection not just from exploitative bosses but also from the union barons who claimed to be their exclusive voices. A chamber of peers randomly selected from the entire electorate would provide as solid a guarantee of each individual voter’s rights as it is possible to imagine.
‘Listening’ to the people is merely another way of keeping them at arm’s length. Empowering them is a way of engaging ordinary citizens, directly, in decision-making. The former is a tactic with which to pursue or cling on to power. The latter would be an act of profound political trust: a vote of confidence in the core democratic belief that no one has a better right to determine how a nation should live than that nation’s people.
If you don’t share that belief, you will not object to the current system, in which the conscience and intelligence of the population are rarely consulted: only their casual, ill-informed views. If you do share it, however, the case for empowering change is as powerful as it is urgent. Eisenhower, as so often, put it best: ‘It is only as we govern ourselves that we are well-governed.’