what is once sprung cannot necessarily be unsprunged
the problem of cognitive hysteresis
Just a thought on the general subject of All Of This Stuff, occasioned by a conversation on social media and by leafing through “The Unaccountability Machine” in the hope of remembering how to stretch my poor old head around a book-sized set of concepts to hold the entire structure all at once.
In that book, I diagnosed the problem of populism as being that people had got tired of not being listened to by the systems that governed them, and responded by using the only remaining communication channel they had. To take the title of my post on the US elections, the gap between governance and governed had got so big that the only signal that channel could carry was a scream. This was (and is) my theory of Trump, Farage, Meloni, etc etc.
But there’s an obvious objection; paying attention to these voters doesn’t actually seem to help. The British Labour Party, for example, does nothing other than performatively listen to the concerns of the post-working class in post-industrial regions, abandoning the socially liberal middle class part of its coalition to do so. The electoral results have been … pretty bad.
Why? I think back to the concept of “hysteresis”, which was very big in econometrics when I was an undergraduate. The word comes from engineering; it describes the state of, say, a spring which you’ve stretched too much so it won’t spring back anymore. In economic concept, it refers to a similar well-observed property of unemployment, that long or deep recessions produce a “scarring” effect which reduces the capacity of the economy so that you can’t just reverse the shock that took you into recession.
There are a lot of reasons why this happens, but a significant research program seemed to find that there are genuine bad consequences at the individual level from being unemployed. People get demoralised, they lose skills, they just “get out of the habit” and become less employable. It’s pretty tragic, and one of the best reasons to try as hard as you can to not have major episodes of unemployment.
Something similar might be going on with the angry popilists of the world. Over the course of the events described in my “cybernetic history of the neoliberal era”, people just got out of the habit of being voters. They forgot what it was like to be involved in politics, they got used to the emotional charge of not being listened to and lost the skill of communicating politically themselves. Now, the political system is listening to them – my god, it’s listening too much to them – but they don’t feel like it is, because they no longer recognise the sensation of being listened to.
What do you do in a situation like this? In any other context, from a bad marriage to a failing brand, the expert advice would be “it can’t be saved, move on”. But of course, the government is a unique entity in our system, because it can’t do that.
Is there room in your theorising for voters being wrong? In both ways: of wanting the wrong things, and of wanting things wrong.
There's two aspects within wanting things wrong. First is the practical, mechanical sense: they want some end goal and demand what they think will achieve it, but it won't, so it doesn't, and they're even more unhappy. Second is in the deeper sense of not liking what they want. It's a key insight in psychology that human 'wanting' and 'liking' systems are separable - with results very visible in addiction. It seems quite possible that voters want things that they don't in fact like getting.
Perhaps more controversial is wanting the wrong things. It is a bold politician who tells the voters they're wrong - although in the past they absolutely did used to argue with the public and take a contrary view. In a democracy the voters have the final say about who is right to be in power. But it is possible for people to want bad things. If you're very liberal you say it's fine for them to want and get things that are bad for them, that's up to them. But liberals - and liberal democracy - is kind of big on the idea that you may want bad things for other people but you don't get to give it to them.
"<i>What do you do in a situation like this? In any other context, from a bad marriage to a failing brand, the expert advice would be “it can’t be saved, move on”. But of course, the government is a unique entity in our system, because it can’t do that.</i>"
After the workers' uprising in Berlin in 1953, Bertoldt Brecht suggested otherwise
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Which stated that the people
Had squandered the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By redoubled work. Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung