Forget unity – now elections deliver revenge as much as representation | William Davies
It is scarcely news that the US is divided – by geography, education and above all a diffuse set of moral and political attitudes that get thrown into the basket labelled “culture”. In the wake of an election that saw Donald Trump win around 47% of the popular vote, there is a renewed anxiety about the depth of partisan polarisation in American life. The worry is that liberals and conservatives don’t simply disagree on values any longer, but stare at different realities – whether on cable news or their Facebook feeds.This is the context for the lurking sense of unease that surrounds Trump’s welcome ejection from the White House: what exactly has been resolved? More importantly for the future, can the institutions of liberal democracy – elected representatives, mass political parties and government officialdom – still resolve such conflicts?We should always be wary of imagining some golden age of liberal democracy, in which political and cultural divisions were converted into consensus – most of all in a society that has so often sought to paper over its racial divides by appealing to some “more perfect union”. But the liberal vision of democracy has always rested on the idea that some kind of shared interest can be divined from the chaos of individual values and attitudes, and given representation in government. The question might still be posed as to what representative democracy can still achieve, under 21st-century conditions.Elections in the liberal west are increasingly acquiring the feel of referendums, in which supporters are mobilised around a binary logic of “for and against”. Emmanuel Macron’s eventually decisive 2017 victory over Marine Le Pen was less a reflection of the public’s faith that he had the answers to the country’s problems, and more because a majority of French voters did not wish to see Le Pen in power. Boris Johnson’s 2019 election triumph was partly based on a rerun of the 2016 referendum (“get Brexit done”), but laced for good measure with a “yes/no” question about putting Jeremy Corbyn in charge of the military. Trump’s electoral potency is that he still represents a deafening “no” to Washington DC and all who thrive there – it just happens that a majority has now said “no” to Trump as well.This more confrontational politics has some undoubtedly positive consequences. Following years of rising political disengagement, as detailed so well by the late political scientist Peter Mair – who described how managerial, centrist parties had been reduced to “ruling the void” left by shrinking participation – we may be entering a new era of mass participation and mobilisation. The 2020 US election witnessed the highest turnout (66%) for more than a century. Brexiteers frequently remind their opponents that leave won the largest number of votes (17.4m) for any option on a UK ballot paper in history. Democracy has grown more passionate and more uncertain, features that make it more exciting and vital.There is also an uncomfortable, but ultimately necessary, honesty about how divisions now show up in electoral geography and demography. It may seem odd to think of the US experiencing a moment of “truth”, given the character of its current president and the beliefs of many of his supporters, but the country is arguably less illusioned than it was 20 years ago about the role of race and violence in its history and politics. There are parallels to how Brexit has produced a new awareness of Britain’s highly uneven economic geography and cultural divisions that actually date back many decades.But the difficulty with a plebiscitary politics is that it serves as an engine for division and mutual animosity, rather than a basis for governmental legitimacy of the sort that liberals traditionally hope for. Despite whatever rhetorical appeal politicians such as Barack Obama, Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron or Joe Biden might make to unity, referendum-style elections often deepen the fractures that they purport to overcome. If political parties in the 1990s had become machines for fundraising and media management, many are now morphing into instruments for “getting the vote out” by fair means or foul. What’s lost along the way is the question of whose interests (as opposed to whose identities and animosities) political parties represent.Elections under these conditions can still produce landslides, such as Johnson’s last year, but they don’t produce mandates. Democracy becomes mesmerising, but inconclusive, and – as with Britain’s 2016 referendum – people can end up more suspicious of their opponents and more convinced of their own rectitude than they were at the outset. Modern democracy has always been shaped by accompanying media technologies: anxiety regarding the newly enfranchised “masses” of the 1920s and 30s was shaped by the rise of radio and magazines, before gradually giving way to pessimism regarding the apathetic television viewer of the 1980s and 90s. Elections of the 21st century have the feel of unruly, addictive and neverending Facebook threads, in which the threat of false or distorted information lurks at every turn.Where elections cease to resolve very much, other than to prove who can mobilise the most supporters, the serious work of political coalition-building leaks elsewhere. In particular, it heads “upstream” into those institutions that liberals once hoped would provide the “apolitical” holding environment for democracy, such as the courts and the civil service. The liberal ideal of ringfencing a democratic space marked “politics” has always depended on bureaucratic and legal mechanisms that purport to sit outside it. And it heads “downstream” into those spaces that liberalism exists specifically to pacify: the streets. All of this has been on full display in the US these past few years, but again it is not hard to point to analogues in the UK.In situations such as those in the US and Britain, liberalism now depends for its survival on adequate constitutional reform – without which it becomes ever harder for disputes to be credibly channelled into the arena of party and parliamentary politics. But we shouldn’t hold our breath. Given limited opportunities for policy victories, few politicians have ever wasted much effort on electoral reform (which holds out scant political rewards for them personally), while the Johnson administration seems intent only on sidelining parliament further, possibly even scrapping the Electoral Commission. Meanwhile, the glaring deficiencies in the American political system – from legalised gerrymandering and voter suppression to the electoral college itself – require more power to fix than Biden has won.The likelier alternative is already in sight. Politics becomes an intra-elite battle to control as many institutions as possible, for as long as possible, while popular discontents are channelled into protest and social media storms. (In this regard, Trump was truly a pioneer.) Without any legal means of establishing legitimate paths forward for governing, or for the satisfaction of public demands, progress is replaced by “an endless pendulum of hit and retaliation”, in the words of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Elections then become opportunities for avenging past defeats. The Democratic coalition mustered an unprecedented mobilisation following the trauma of 2016. For the Republicans, the result of this election – and Trump’s feverish claims of fraud and deception – will offer a rich reserve of indignation for the next four years.• William Davies is a sociologist and political economist. His latest book is This is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain More
