Pop_larity and democracy

Bad news. Part of the problem is u.

In recent newsletters I’ve been writing about democracy: Thinking broadly about who it should serve, why that clashes with our fundamental nature, and also starting to question how—assuming we aren’t prepared to cave in to the limits that might be inherent in that “nature”—we might achieve that new paradigm of service.

Frustratingly, one of the most important challenges we have to face in all this—even if we could apply a bunch of wacky changes to make aspects like voting as accessible and equitable as possible—remains a very civilisation-centric problem:

Popularity

In essence, the modern reality that crashes headlong into any advocacy for conventional democracy is that “better” is often not the same as “more popular”.

You might think of popularity as an ancient problem, but it’s not really. Popularity at the pace and on the scale we experience can only exist with communications and leisure time on the scales we now have.

Combine that with an economy accustomed to attention and soundbites and branding and flash, and democracy quickly becomes a popularity contest rather than a contest of platform or action, or even a contest of ideas.

As an obvious example found in every Western Democracy, if you’re putting your hand up for public service, it shouldn’t really be for glory or wealth—there are plenty of shitty Reality TV or corporate paths to greed and malfeasance—but there’s just no getting around the fact that any space where ‘popularity’ is linked to status and power and wealth will get overrun with other human characteristics like ‘ambition’, ‘over-confidence’, and ‘megalomania’.

It doesn’t help that, in my personal opinion, we’re also all a little open to a naked authoritarian ruler who, for all the shit they pull, sanctions us to deflect some personal responsibility for not living up to our own “aspirational” human ideals.

Deep down, we might suspect we’re a bit “lazy”, “stupid”, “envious” or “evil”, but we’d prefer to be given permission to blame someone else for our problems—especially when that permission is given with authority. So, just quietly, we’re kind-of happy to vote for an ambitious blowhard constructed of slogans, chiselled features, and sawdust—only in politics for their own ego—as an alternative to having a hard internal conversation about what’s wrong with ourselves.

And, it’s also clear the modern media have also a bit to answer for in constructing this insecurity-complex industry that makes us increasingly bad at democracy. But, the apologist might equally point out they get the same response from publishing shit about how “some kid half your age has achieved more than you will in your lifetime”.

It makes you wonder how much of the existence of “popularity” is down to a simple subconscious need for both personal humiliation and indignation, as a way to centre ourselves in the world?

Maybe something we need to protect ourselves from? Or maybe just the pitch for a slightly flaky self-help book!

Sometimes this subconscious-draw to a particular type of blowhard has a logic to it. This is true in the allegory of the “smart business guy” with all the skills needed to run a country; but equally in the idea that doing a post-graduate thesis about the world is enough to understand it. We’ve seen this play out countless times recently as we perform wild democratic swings from the extremes of inexperienced politician-cum-CEOs, to career politician-sans-empathy.

We’ve already talked about how running a business is nothing like running a government. And, in my humble opinion, I think the mere perception that these things have a similar underlying doctrine is responsible for basically all the lost faith in democratic institutions in the past few decades.

But there is similarly childish ignorance in the belief that a politician who has never experienced a life outside the Bubble of Public Service can also really understand their constituents’ desires.

So, if we accept that both the sorts of things that make someone politically popular often don’t make political sense, but also that popularity is part of most democratic systems anyway, we should think about what the limits of popularity are, right?

---

A lot of popularity, from primary school onwards, could be dismissed as just an attraction to confidence, and the respect and admiration that garners. What gives someone that naturally-superior sense of their own value (or, often, just the ability to present the illusion of it) is outside our scope here (or my insight!). But it’s something we all recognise when we see it.

That sort of popularity is a little magical, and difficult—if not impossible—to teach (Hollywood suggests “letting your hair down from its bun, and removing your dorky glasses”). But, popular politicians, while often charismatic speakers, don’t always fit the ‘popular’ stereotypes anyway.

That can, distractingly, suggest that popularity in democracy isn’t as frivolous.

Popularity in politics often appears to be less about a battle for respect and admiration, and more an appeal to stability and comfort: Leadership back to the “safety of the familiar”. And, while this idea of “familiar” might shuffle forward a little, as each new generation is willing to take a little risk to gain ownership of their era, most popular politicians still build their platform on a promise to lead their constituents to a world they can grasp. For example, they will inevitably talk about progress in technology and improving healthcare and education, but they’ll talk about them within the vibe of restoring some imagined ‘stability’.

It’s about “getting back on track”, rather than “going further offroad”.

“You can keep driving your 3-litre petrol car because we’re going to invest in carbon capture start-ups to offset your familiar life!”

What this sense of stability mostly refers to, in practice, is knowing you know the “rules”: Not just the legal rules, but the social ones. That might be ‘work hard and succeed’, or ‘economic growth is good for everyone’, or perhaps even ‘marriage is between a man and a woman’ depending on your background. Popularity in politics comes largely from presenting yourself effectively as someone who understands your constituents’ rules.

This does make sense: The main framework we have for why someone should be popular is the hierarchy we’ve known in the past. But that is also what makes popularity such a problematic path to good governance.

The work of “good” politics should be about staking reputations, not reinforcing them: Good politics should be laser-focused on building better in such a compelling way that it organically becomes a new ‘rule’; so that “marriage is between two people who love each other”.

That marriage example seems like a simple switch. And, if policies and staked reputations are at the heart of democracy, it is: You simply present it as a sensible idea, which embraces different viewpoints and progresses society, without doing anyone else any harm.

But, when you allow popularity to dominate democracy, ‘popular’ ideas become co-opted by people who don’t believe so much in the sanctity of them, as the leverage they give them: Marriage between a man and woman becomes a “bulwark of morality”; hard work is less about spent time or energy and more about “any activity that makes one rich”; and economic growth becomes “good at any cost”.

The danger of this is a politician can sell a vibe which is entirely void of actual policy or intent, in order to treat their donors and friends. You’ll be very familiar with this in its infant form, as ‘populism’ or ‘nationalism’. Most of us alive have forgotten that those things grow up to be ‘apartheid’ and ‘fascism’.

People intent on these ends use vibes built from familiar blocks, and present them as moving a country forward—or, at least, ‘arresting a backwards slide’—to hide their true intent.

And appealing via shallow popularity is a big part of getting you to cooperate to this end.

---

You can’t blame people for voting for “who they like” rather than “what they want”. Of course, most people would fervently deny they haven’t actually read or understood the policies and are only voting for the flashy sound-bite guy. But realistically, no one has time to understand all this stuff in detail and make a true educated choice. So, popularity just becomes a democratic shortcut for a large number of us.

Democracy works—contrary to the more direct understanding of it—not through the majority but through the minority. As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, democracy is a system fundamentally designed to outsource trust. That means, if the minority don’t believe in it, it is not working: A majority can have their way under any political system (if they choose to), but it is only in a working democracy where the minority can aspire to have their voice heard.

---

This is all to say, the only way democracy is functioning is when people feel it is fair enough, so they’ll go along with the majority or plurality vote. That requires us to agree on how we reach an outcome (voting system); then go along with the outcome even if it wasn’t our own preference. And, if it’s consistently not working, collectively agree on the methods for rehabilitating any injustice.

To my mind, reaching a political outcome using systems that leverage short attention spans, marketing money, and our innate need for personal validation has been guiding us down some pretty dark and undemocratic paths.

The fact is, we get nothing from allowing popularity to run our democracy. The people who vote in popular politicians and parties might get a warm glow in their heart when they think about how “clever” they were to vote for the guy most other people voted for, but that’s about it.

I’m not saying popularity and good policies have to be mutually exclusive; of course, the two can exist in the same person or party. But, a party with good, thought-out policies shouldn’t be competing against a party with only a huge marketing budget and a chisled-featured-CEO-leader whose farts make more sense than his policies.

The residue a ‘competition’ like that leaves behind includes that integral democratic minority of people—many who took their democratic responsibility seriously enough to actually read past the slogans and vibes. And when people like that feel they're yelling into an empty room, that’s a sure sign that democracy is not operating as intended.

In a democracy where popularity is the goal, the populists and nationalists require no credible policies or sense, just slogans and blame. And, engaged people will only yell into empty rooms for so long before it starts to stretch the consensus that allows democracy to function.

---

This is a problem that has crept up on us little by little, especially as our days and experiences have become more and more personalised via the surveillance, processing, and sale of our individual preferences by giant global tech companies. Whether you believe this kind of technology has, on balance, made your life more convenient and the services you interact with more responsive doesn’t really matter. The one thing it has certainly done, and will exponentially continue to do, is make you more susceptible to any popularity play that might be available in your democratic politics. Your social media and news aggregators will serve up things that trigger you; your friends and family will have new stories about injustice every time you see them; the political slogans will tap into the zeitgeist... No matter how engaged you are with politics, you’ll be so angry or scared or passionate, that you’ll stop even caring about actual policies.

For anyone who believes in the core tenets of democracy, this should be alarm bells. But it is a challenge we each need to come to terms with in our own way. In the absence of stripping our democratic systems back to their foundations and starting from scratch, our best defence is to—individually—take the time to educate ourselves free of the glittering appeal of the popular.

-T