Max Fisher, The New York Times, March 29, 2019; original article contains links.
Image from article: Brexit supporters gathered outside the Parliament in London on Friday. Credit Niklas Halle'N/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
LONDON — If you ask British voters what sort of plan for leaving the European Union they support, you tend to get hesitant, vague answers.
But ask them what they oppose and you hear forceful clarity. No to Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal. No to leaving the European Union without a deal. No to “remoaners,” as tabloids call those who want to stay in the bloc.
No to Ms. May herself, whose approval ratings are deeply negative. No to her rival and leader of the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn, whose poll numbers are even worse.
In a recent YouGov poll asking Britons whether Ms. May or Mr. Corbyn would make the better prime minister, the runaway winner was “not sure.”
British politicians turn out to have a similar problem making any choice at all. On Wednesday, lawmakers said they would seize control of Brexit by holding votes on eight different ways forward — then voted them all down.
Like the electorate, Parliament turned out to oppose everything. The result is chaos and drift.
There is more than indecision or gridlock at play here. Britain’s breakdown, though particularly acute, represents a much wider phenomenon.
Across Western democracies, politics are increasingly defined by opposition — opposition to the status quo, to the establishment and to one’s partisan rivals.
Image from article: In Britain, Brexit has been animated by opposition to the European Union, rather than any clear alternative to membership in it.CreditDaniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
People have always organized more easily around what they’re against than what they’re for, but this is different. Politics have grown viscerally tribal and voters instinctively destructive.
This trend, driven by social change, economic upheaval and technological disruption, is worsening some of democracy’s gravest problems.
It is feeding partisanship’s rancor and intransigence, as voters organize around opposing the other side. It is deepening instability, with elections that fracture parties and eject whoever holds power. And it is driving populist revolts, as citizens clamor to tear down establishments and status quos.
Across Europe, mainstream parties have splintered, weakening centrist leaders and empowering hard-line populists. In the United States, all-out partisan warfare has made cooperative governance unthinkable.
The trend is captured best by France’s “Yellow Vest” protesters, who can agree only on their anger at their status quo and distrust of institutions. Their tear-it-all-down ethos has left them, despite their impressive power to mobilize, politically inchoate.
“This is happening everywhere,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University political scientist, referring to the collapse of what scholars call Schumpeterian democracy, named for the Austrian theorist Joseph Schumpeter. Long the basis of modern democracy, in which establishments managed popular will and sought a common good, it is giving way to a new system that is both primal and distinctly 21st century.
“For better and worse, the moderation, policy stability and informal checks imposed by the establishments’ monopoly over access to elected office are disappearing,” Mr. Levitsky said. With social distrust and political chaos rising, he added, “This is going to be a major challenge going forward.”
A New Kind of Divide
In 2015, the political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster identified a mystery: Americans expressed record levels of party loyalty and party-line voting, but were less likely than ever to identify as Republican or Democrat. How could people be simultaneously at their most partisan and least supportive of their own party?
The answer, they found, was a rising force called negative partisanship. Americans increasingly voted based on their fear and distrust of the other side, not support for their own.
This had a more destructive effect than merely widening partisan divides. It weakened parties, now less able to draw on a united base or enthusiasm for an affirmative agenda. And it empowered whoever would promise to tear down the other side [JB underlining].
“This has generated an electorate that is more biased against and angry at opponents, and more willing to act on that bias and anger,” the political scientist Lilliana Mason wrote in a book-length study of the change, which she credited to the parties growing socially and demographically homogeneous.
Parties organized around opposition have proven less able to govern. Republicans ran for three consecutive elections on opposition to Obamacare. But after taking the White House and both houses of Congress, the party failed to unite around any plan to replace it.
In Britain, Brexit has been animated by opposition to the European Union, rather than any clear alternative to membership.
The politics of destruction tend to lead to breakdown. Parties might do well in one election by promising to crush the other side — as Republicans did in 2016 and Britain’s Labour in 2017 — only to suffer their own humiliating defeat in the very next cycle.
Image from article: Migrants near the border between Serbia and Hungary in 2015. Populist parties have surged amid recent increases in immigration by championing nativist fears of lost national identity.Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
In Britain, every major political figure has higher disapproval than approval ratings, leaving politics rudderless. While polls are not so dire in the rest of Europe, the trend is similar.
The Revolt Against Everything
Voters are rejecting more than their opponents — economic, social and demographic change have sparked uprisings against any perceived fixture of the status quo.
The 2008 financial crisis, along with skyrocketing income inequality, have stalled wages and social mobility across the West.
When people hold “low trust in government and low or static expectations for their future lives,” according to research by The Gallup Organization, support for populist, anti-establishment politics surges.
Research by Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk found that as inequality rises, citizens become less likely to believe that their government is truly democratic — undermining legitimacy of the system itself.
This anger, studies suggest, can be as much about dollars and cents as about fear of losing status relative to one’s neighbors and losing control of one’s future — a backlash layered with whites’ growing fears of demographic change.
Populist parties, rising steadily since the civil rights movements of the 1960s, have surged amid recent immigration booms by championing nativist fears of lost national identity, and railing against establishments as having sold the people out.
Image from article: France’s Yellow Vests offer a glimpse of post-establishment politics at its purest. The movement has rejected mainstream parties, traditional media and organized labor, aiming to channel members’ demands directly into policy. Credit: Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Brexit channeled these sentiments, framing the European Union as the ultimate establishment, and immigration as a perilous threat. So did European and American populists, running on hardening borders and retaking control from corrupt elites.
But no set of renegotiated trade and visa arrangements could deliver on Brexit’s underlying promise of restoring a sense of order that, for some supporters, came from long-gone social orders. So no plan can win the support to prevail.
Populist parties have suffered similarly Pyrrhic victories across the West, following their stunning successes in 2015 and 2016 with setbacks and stalls. Still, the underlying outrage and distrust remain, leaving mainstream politics unable to fill the vacuums opened by populists.
Collapse of the Old Way
“From the birth of liberal democracy through the late twentieth century,” said Mr. Levitsky, political establishments “more or less” controlled access to elected office.
Change, much of it technological, has ended that era. Outsider candidates can raise money online, running without the consent of party chiefs or groups like organized labor. They can reach voters through social media, circumventing gatekeepers and mainstream media.
The rise of primaries in the United States since the 1970s, and outsider parties in Europe, further weakened mainstream parties’ control over ballots. Voters, not establishments, now control access to office.
“This, of course, is democratizing. But it is also destabilizing,” Mr. Levitsky said. Self-interested establishments often blocked popular ideas and minority groups. But they also formed what the French call a cordon sanitaire — quarantine — against nationalist or far-right politics.
This quarantine has begun to crack, with right-wing populists claiming to represent the true will of the people against mainstream parties that want to suppress that will. Their battle for control has deepened voters’ sense that democracy itself is at stake.
In Britain, supporters of Brexit often see delays and setbacks as proof that elites never really intended to allow popular will to prevail. Mainstream leaders, including Ms. May, have warned that revoking Brexit would shatter Britons’ already-tenuous faith in their democracy.
Talk of remaining has become a political third rail even as polls suggest it now has majority support. Lawmakers are scrambling for any Brexit plan with a public mandate when none appears to exist.
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