Party On

During my period of lurgy-incubation, I picked up an article in an FT Magazine stacked up from a week ago, talking about a crisis facing political parties. In the article, there was a ministerial quote decrying the nefarious influence of consumerism and entertainment, which I felt was very revealing about the fuzzy discourse regarding the role of politics in society, which is shared by politicians and the public alike. Sure, there is competition for people’s time – given a choice between hunting bargains at a half-price sale and writing on a political issue to a local MP, the majority of people would opt to spend their time on the former. This may be linked somewhat to the associated argument about working hours, available leisure time and how we use it, however the fact is, we make choices on how we spend time because we can draw a comparative scale of priority and opt accordingly. The minister’s complaint cited in the article does not assert adequately the elevated priority of politics and therein lies, partially if not wholly, the confusion over political engagement versus a distracted consumer society.

Political engagement and consumerism must/can/should not be considered on a comparative, competitive plane. Consumerism, as those denizens of the “science” of marketing will attest, is predicated upon dissimulation, the objective of which is to conjure impulse desires from diversionary, often trivial, matter using the metamorphic tools of “cool”. Its disposability appeals to a public sense of immediate right without residual duty - certainly the kind of behavioural thinking that the major political ideologies generally preach against? Politics should not be allowed to stray from its grand topics, the interplay between the inextricable conceptions of Power and Justice, with stability of society as an objective. The uneasy juxtaposition of politics with the culture of consumption will be continually indulged if political argument is not rescued from the prevalence of consumer iconography, and its critical fundament reasserted: we should not be trying to make politics “cool”, as the issues will never move fast enough to capture the vagrant definition of that word. Where parties and their political product are left to perception as unfashionable brands instead of issues in conflict, political activism will continue to suffer predation by consumerism in the jungles of the public mind.

It is clear that ideologies founder in an ever more individuated, personalised, society. Membership of a party is an overt investment of self into a community of ideology, and a labelling of opinions: “I am Left” or “I am Right”, and I accept the associations that come with each. A reluctance to be perceived as harnessed into the classical “Left/Right” wing taxonomy is indicative of a very modern ideological morphology, a mode of eclecticism that enables people to select allegiances to specific causes, confounding the traditional left-right polarisation – consolidated world-view dogma has given way to “pick-n-mix” political consciousness. In an accelerated society that serialises its re-invention of “what’s hot and what’s not” in Sunday supplements, sways of fashion (the proponents of which are indeed the kind of celebrity populists described in the article) are allowed to override a focus on normative principles. Problematically, this forces a descent into individuated minority political opinions, which remain dormant and unexpressed, perhaps until an obscure party, bolstered by cheap celebrity sponsorship, allows the fragments to collide in an outburst of sudden indignation. In this sense, I share the disturbing opinion on the ascendant threat of “ugly parties” founded on single issues, the UKIP being a particularly relevant example. Furthermore, it should not be ignored that an additional impact of the rise of single-issue parties would be the inevitable calls made for a fundamental review of electoral mechanisms, to enable a more proportional system – no small matter for our established electoral culture and institutional mechanics.

Whilst the majority political parties may not disappear completely, it is possible to envisage a political topography emerging that sees a greater emphasis on networks of smaller interests with formal affiliations to a high-visibility political party. Boosting party currency, for example, may take the form of a further commoditisation of political leverage into an open market of interest groups. If the issue-by-issue political approach becomes prevalent, instead of putting themselves in apposition to political interest groups, parties may choose to homogenise such interests to capitalise on the popular wind of the moment. Ironically, this may draw on precisely the kind of strategic brand capitalism employed by some large commercial brands – if my brand capital falters, I re-invent subsidiary brands aimed at re-casting my image for the market. By increased “selling” of their political leverage to interest groups to prevent further erosion, parties may relinquish some of their own policy-making process in favour of a ready-made vote-winner, but may do so perhaps in the hope that these interests can eventually be absorbed into the party brand. Whether the public will buy into this, is another question.