The Age of Mistrust?
This blog is part of 'The Age of Mistrust?' season at the British Academy.
I want to talk to you about my recent book, 'Why Politics Fails' — a pretty fierce title.
If you say that politics is failing, you better have a good answer. There is a simple answer in the book, and it's an answer that comes from decades of my and other scholars’ research in politics, economics, and across the social sciences. The argument I make overall is that our politics fails because time and time again, our individual self-interest overrides our collective wellbeing. In other words, even though each of us might think we're public spirited, we often end up acting in what turns out to be our particular interest at any point in time. It's the interaction of all of our individual self-interest that prevents us from getting what we want. You can think, for example, of low traffic neighbourhoods, a controversy in the UK at the moment. They're great when you have them on your street — it means that your kids can go out and play and kick a ball around — but it diverts traffic to other streets creating problems for other people even as you are benefiting. And so, as we add together all of these individual self-interests we might have, we sometimes end up with collective bads like pollution on different streets.
The way the book is structured is to look at five big things that I think we all broadly agree on: democracy, equality, solidarity, security, and prosperity. But I can't cover all of those here.
So what I'm going to do is talk about democracy. I'm going to talk about our abilities and our desire to govern ourselves and why we often seem to feel that we're in a democratic malaise, that governing ourselves isn't making us happy. The reason for that is that we get caught in what I call ‘The Democracy Trap’. And the quickest way of summarising the Democracy Trap is to say that there's no such thing as a will of the people.
And that sounds rather unfortunate if you want the people to govern themselves. So what do I mean by that? Well, I don't mean that we can't all agree. Sometimes we might all agree. For example, I imagine that we could get a hundred per cent, or at least almost a hundred per cent approval to not be invaded by planet Mars. I think we could all agree on that, except possibly for a few traitors to Earth's survival. There are some cases where we do all agree, but they're very rare because most of the time in politics we disagree on things. We want different outcomes. We want the government to do different things, we want different things to be allowed or to be banned. But let's imagine the case where we did insist that everybody actually agreed. How would we implement that?
Well, one way would be to provide everybody with a veto. Family life is sometimes like that, right? If you don't all want to go on holiday to Croatia, if your seven-year-old child insists on not going, then I guess they have a veto, and you don't go. But when we scale up from the family to a parliament or even a nation as a whole, then giving everybody a veto stops working. The example I draw on in the book is the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 17th century, which I know it might seem an arcane example. The parliament that they had then called the Sejm, a parliament with an unusual institution: to give every parliamentarian a veto. It was called the ‘liberum veto,’ which means ‘I freely oppose’, and meant that during parliamentary sessions, any parliamentarian could essentially raise their hand to announce their liberum veto and end that parliamentary session or that debate. Of course, this got abused over time. More and more sessions were banned until half of the sessions in any given decade just collapsed. Poland-Lithuania, you will note, no longer exists — one of the reasons being because on either side of it were aggressive and hostile states, Prussia and Russia. The Prussians and the Russians weren't idiots, they realised that it would be quite handy to buy off Polish-Lithuanian parliamentarians and have them exercise their veto. Consequently, this prevented the parliament from defending itself, from producing the kinds of bills that might've allowed Poland-Lithuania to exist to the present day.
So we can't all have a veto. We do all disagree, and we have to manage that disagreement somehow. But as we do, we end up pivoting between two risks: a risk of chaos and a risk of polarisation. The risk of chaos is where we can't come to any kind of agreement at all. And many people reading this will remember a period where Britain couldn't seem to come to any agreement. In March of 2019, Theresa May was desperately trying to pass a Brexit bill, to pass a bill that would bring Britain out of the European Union, as the public had clearly voted for a few years earlier. And yet, because there were so many different ways of Brexiting, it wasn't entirely clear how Britain should do so. It was that multiplicity of options and the multiplicity of preferences in parliament that made it very hard to make a decision.
So the way that political scientists think about this is to go back to a famous but unfortunate political scientist, the Marquis de Condorcet who was a great French thinker, an aristocrat, but unfortunately happened to be an aristocrat during the French Revolution — and so, was guillotined. But what Condorcet left us before his head left his body was an argument that with certain sets of preferences, that voters might have and a certain number of voters, we can sometimes end up cycling to infinity and beyond and never make a decision at all.
So, with Brexit, it would look like this. Theresa May preferred her deal to a no deal, which she had as her backup plan to a new referendum. Then there were remainers and they wanted a referendum. And if not that, a soft Brexit like May's deal, but definitely not a no deal. But then on top of that, you had a group of people called the ‘Spartans’. The self-declared Spartans — the right of the Tory party — and they wanted a no deal for its own sake. In fact, they hated Theresa May's deal so much they would've been willing to risk a referendum which they thought they would win instead. This order of preferences makes it very hard to come to any conclusions. So, if you put up May's deal against no deal, it gets voted down by the remainers and the Spartans. But then if you put up a referendum against no deal, it gets voted down by May and by the remainers and equivalently, a referendum against May's deal is going to get voted down by the Spartans and by Theresa May's team.
And so, you've got a majority for each of the options — majorities that keep on cycling around. For reasons like this, Britain was ultimately unable to come up with any decision at all in the spring of 2019. But let's fast forward, because in December 2019 Boris Johnson won a huge general election victory — a victory that was based entirely on the proposition that he could get Brexit done, that he could end the chaos. But what Britain exchanged for chaos was polarisation. We now had a clear victory — we had a very hard Brexit under a very large majority under Boris Johnson. But with polarisation comes a new problem — the problem of losers' consent. Because in any large victory that is not total, where not everybody agrees, there are losers. And the losers' consent has to work in two ways.
Firstly, the losers have to be willing to agree that they lost at all. And it's not clear, for example, that people supporting remain actually agreed that they had lost the referendum and that it shouldn't be overturned. But at this stage, they knew that they had lost.
In turn, the winners also need to get the consent of the losers. They need to not ride roughshod over them or call them enemies of the people. Here, I think, Britain has struggled more and the absence of loser's consent can really quite quickly spill over into invective and into violence.
To give you some more extreme examples, in 1936 the Spanish Second Republic collapsed because when the popular leftist front won the election, their opposition on the right and in the military declared that should the left win the election, there would be military trouble. And that's precisely what happened as General Franco and his co-ideologues overthrew that regime — the losers in that case didn't consent and they showed it. Or we can think about the 2020 Presidential Election in America, and particularly the 6 January insurrection in 2021, where the supporters of Donald Trump didn't give their consent or indeed believe that they had lost.
Democracy is always going to be a challenge to us because those twin perils of chaos and polarisation are going to follow us around. We always disagree, and what we have to do, as I said in my Reith lecture on the future of democracy, is to find a way to disagree — but to do so agreeably, to be able to make a decision without harming each other. The easiest way to do that would be to return back to another thing that I think we all agree on, and I talk about in my book: some form of extended economic prosperity where losers can be bought off by the gains of winners.
Our democracy seems so hard at the moment because it's difficult, in an era of stagnant growth rates — worse than they've been since the Napoleonic era — to find ways to buy off or to keep peace with the losers in our democracy.
Professor Ben Ansell FBA is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at University of Oxford and a Professional Fellow at Nuffield College
