#auspol this rare HD footage of Queen Victoria has profound hints (I think) to how we don’t understand…
#auspol this rare HD footage of Queen Victoria has profound hints (I think) to how we don’t understand politics. The adulation for the monarch was genuine. Quick thread on why the wrong people keep winning elections. /1 https://t.co/PzFRURYZJr
The problem with our ideas about democracy are, we don’t really have any ideas about democracy. We have some vague sense that it means ‘the people’ (whatever that means) are in charge. It hasn’t ever really meant that. They get a say every few years as to who will lead. /2
We also have a vague sense democracy means fairness and equity, and sharing wealth. History shows that’s never really happened. Material living standards have risen, but relativities between wealthy and poor are worse, and much of the rising tide is funded by personal debt. /3
What makes progressively-minded people tear their hair out is that conservative politics, a promoter of the status quo, keeps winning elections. Even when it kills hundreds of thousands of people in a pandemic, popularity is barely dented. Why? /4
Back to Queen Victoria. Conservatives understand very well that peoples’ deepest desires aren’t for uniformity, for equity and sharing. The engine room of all societies is comparison, status. In a monarchy, the King or Queen represents the pinnacle of a hierarchy of status. /5
Take the monarch away and people will reinvent the hierarchy using other metrics. This is what conservatives understand, and progressives don’t. Conservatives speak about ‘aspiration’. About the ‘politics of envy’ when inequality is attacked. They know what they’re doing. /6
It may seem a sad truth (more on that in a second), but people are much less concerned about the relative wealth and status of social groups, than they are about their personal position in the social hierarchy. What will fire them up is a perception they’re moving up or down…/7
…this hierarchy. It’s easy to be a bit superior about that, seeing it as shallow behaviour. But underneath status is a perception of value. We all rank the things that interest us according to our perception of quality. Hierarchies derive from these perceptions of quality. /8
Progressive politics needs to find a way to tap into this foundational social psychology. Promising to level hierarchies is disastrous strategy. People don’t believe it, they know there are legitimate distinctions between better and worse, in everything. /end