There are two power blocs driving politics today. First, there’s the proletariat. These are the working-class voters who go to Trump rallies in the U.S. and powered Brexit and Boris Johnson’s campaign in the U.K. They see their best world receding and they want a tough guy to bring it back.
Second, there is the precariat. These are the young and educated voters caught in the gig economy, who see no career security ahead. They want leaders like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn who will promise enveloping policies — free college, free internet, free child care — to give them some sense of safety.
These two groups are different in some ways. When the proletarians attack their enemies, they do so from a position of perceived social inferiority, so their attacks are resentful and brutal. When the precariat attacks, it does so from a position of perceived moral superiority, so its attacks are filled with ridicule, mockery and scorn.
But the movements do have parallels. Both are driven by a fear of the future, and of each other. Both have a tendency to embrace catastrophic, apocalyptic visions of the ruin around us. Dystopia has become the opiate of the activist class.
Haunted by economic insecurity, they will tolerate any sin in their leader — racism, anti-Semitism, dishonesty — so long as that person is willing to fight and be on their side. They both support massive, unrealistic policy proposals, because they reject the idea that politics is simply the muddled way we settle differences with people we disagree with.
These two power blocs are driving the debate and setting the agenda. But there’s another group of people, who have become the most interesting part of the electorate, both here and in Britain. It’s the exhausted 75 percent, people who are defined not by any common ideology but by an affective state — they are simply worn out by the endless war between these two armies. Exhaustion has become an independent force in modern politics. Many people are voting for whatever candidate will exhaust them less.
Thursday’s British election was defined by the fact that most voters were simply ground down by Johnson and Corbyn. The Economist called the election “Britain’s nightmare before Christmas.”
Writing in The Guardian, Rafael Behr observed, “We live with the undertow of sadness and dread. We are braced for that feeling, like seeing callous hands rummaging in a private drawer where a delicate, tangled identity is stored and pulling at the threads. It feels like exile.”
People in the exhausted camp are tired of having politics thrust in their face every hour. As Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute has found, young people who are “lonely at least once in a while” are more than seven times more likely to be active in politics than those who are socially active. Those who are exhausted have other things to do. They want to restore politics to its rightful place, and find meaning, attachment, entertainment and morality in something else besides Twitter wars and election campaigns.
Years and years of exhaustion have also made these people weary, cynical and disgusted. Exhaustion, as always, induces a sort of pessimism, a feeling that we are living in terrible times, a sort of weariness of the soul. As Peter Stockland of the think tank Cardus put it, “The combined effect of fear and exhaustion” is “producing a cynicism so deep and murky and toxic that it verges on the sin of bearing false witness against reality.”
But the chief feature of the voters in the exhausted group is timidity. They do not get energy from conflict, the way, say, Trump does. Their instinct is to keep their heads down and just get through this craziness.
On campuses 10 percent of students are able to intimidate the other 90 percent, who don’t want to say the wrong thing and get canceled. In Congress, the Trumpians are able to intimidate the members who realize what a problem he is. The people in the two big power blocs are not good at winning the war against each other, but they are really good at intimidating the moderates on their own side.
In this way, those in the exhausted camp perpetuate their own misery. They complain about the terrible choices each election cycle, but never organize enough or become imaginative enough to offer something they themselves might want.
In Britain they’ve mostly taken money out of politics, but they still had an election even worse and more polarized than our own. In the end, if Johnson, as expected, wins easily, it will be in part because exhausted voters will have swung to Trump/Johnson nationalist demagogy since the only alternative is a Corbyn/Sanders class war.
In the States, voters still have a chance to turn the emotional page, to elect a person who displays that you can be a progressive or you can be a conservative without turning politics into perpetual war. Pete Buttigieg is rising and Joe Biden’s support is resilient precisely because they are not exhausting.
The interesting question is whether, in the heat of battle, the exhausted voters can get over their fatigue, cynicism and timidity and take their own side in a fight.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | The Politics of Exhaustion
Opinion | The Politics of Exhaustion
There are two power blocs driving politics today. First, there’s the proletariat. These are the working-class voters who go to Trump rallies in the U.S. and powered Brexit and Boris Johnson’s campaign in the U.K. They see their best world receding and they want a tough guy to bring it back.
Second, there is the precariat. These are the young and educated voters caught in the gig economy, who see no career security ahead. They want leaders like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn who will promise enveloping policies — free college, free internet, free child care — to give them some sense of safety.
These two groups are different in some ways. When the proletarians attack their enemies, they do so from a position of perceived social inferiority, so their attacks are resentful and brutal. When the precariat attacks, it does so from a position of perceived moral superiority, so its attacks are filled with ridicule, mockery and scorn.
But the movements do have parallels. Both are driven by a fear of the future, and of each other. Both have a tendency to embrace catastrophic, apocalyptic visions of the ruin around us. Dystopia has become the opiate of the activist class.
Haunted by economic insecurity, they will tolerate any sin in their leader — racism, anti-Semitism, dishonesty — so long as that person is willing to fight and be on their side. They both support massive, unrealistic policy proposals, because they reject the idea that politics is simply the muddled way we settle differences with people we disagree with.
These two power blocs are driving the debate and setting the agenda. But there’s another group of people, who have become the most interesting part of the electorate, both here and in Britain. It’s the exhausted 75 percent, people who are defined not by any common ideology but by an affective state — they are simply worn out by the endless war between these two armies. Exhaustion has become an independent force in modern politics. Many people are voting for whatever candidate will exhaust them less.
Thursday’s British election was defined by the fact that most voters were simply ground down by Johnson and Corbyn. The Economist called the election “Britain’s nightmare before Christmas.”
Writing in The Guardian, Rafael Behr observed, “We live with the undertow of sadness and dread. We are braced for that feeling, like seeing callous hands rummaging in a private drawer where a delicate, tangled identity is stored and pulling at the threads. It feels like exile.”
People in the exhausted camp are tired of having politics thrust in their face every hour. As Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute has found, young people who are “lonely at least once in a while” are more than seven times more likely to be active in politics than those who are socially active. Those who are exhausted have other things to do. They want to restore politics to its rightful place, and find meaning, attachment, entertainment and morality in something else besides Twitter wars and election campaigns.
Years and years of exhaustion have also made these people weary, cynical and disgusted. Exhaustion, as always, induces a sort of pessimism, a feeling that we are living in terrible times, a sort of weariness of the soul. As Peter Stockland of the think tank Cardus put it, “The combined effect of fear and exhaustion” is “producing a cynicism so deep and murky and toxic that it verges on the sin of bearing false witness against reality.”
But the chief feature of the voters in the exhausted group is timidity. They do not get energy from conflict, the way, say, Trump does. Their instinct is to keep their heads down and just get through this craziness.
On campuses 10 percent of students are able to intimidate the other 90 percent, who don’t want to say the wrong thing and get canceled. In Congress, the Trumpians are able to intimidate the members who realize what a problem he is. The people in the two big power blocs are not good at winning the war against each other, but they are really good at intimidating the moderates on their own side.
In this way, those in the exhausted camp perpetuate their own misery. They complain about the terrible choices each election cycle, but never organize enough or become imaginative enough to offer something they themselves might want.
In Britain they’ve mostly taken money out of politics, but they still had an election even worse and more polarized than our own. In the end, if Johnson, as expected, wins easily, it will be in part because exhausted voters will have swung to Trump/Johnson nationalist demagogy since the only alternative is a Corbyn/Sanders class war.
In the States, voters still have a chance to turn the emotional page, to elect a person who displays that you can be a progressive or you can be a conservative without turning politics into perpetual war. Pete Buttigieg is rising and Joe Biden’s support is resilient precisely because they are not exhausting.
The interesting question is whether, in the heat of battle, the exhausted voters can get over their fatigue, cynicism and timidity and take their own side in a fight.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article