It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is…

It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is neck-and-neck to win the next election. Modern conservatives understand how people think and behave. And how to win elections. /1 https://t.co/9sKCn4oXy9 https://t.co/SrlpdEhCpj

He may not win the next election. But the fact he has no policies and a track record of divisive attack politics should mean he’s not even in contention. The fact the world is being incinerated by fossil fuels should make Greens a shoe-in at every election too. /2 https://t.co/fzKjTQXskQ

But of course they’re not. Because elections have no relationship whatsoever with reality. They’re popularity contests. And modern conservatives are masters of popularity. /3

Right now for example they’re winning in Europe, the US and polling well here because they’re targeting ‘cost of living’. Let’s look at that. The cost of our lifestyles in the West has always been very high. They’re extremely expensive lifestyles. /4

What’s changed is that conservatives privatised much of that cost, stripping away the public institutions that used to bear it. Just as they privatised a pandemic, and said it was over. It wasn’t over, it was privatised. /5

Each of us individually must now do all the public health work governments and businesses used to do. Just as we have to fund our own health care, and the costs of privatised electricity, transport, medicine, water. Etc. /6

Conservatives and their ‘economy’ (really a code word for removing the State’s role) created the cost of living crisis. By privatising the costs of living. Costs that have always been there. Now they’re using the catastrophe that is for the public, to win votes. /7

The public, smashed by the debts that funded the privatisation of public services, now wants somebody to blame. This is the most basic social psychology. I Tweet about it often. Catastrophe-led change. /8

Human societies don’t change fundamentally, unless presented with a catastrophe. That catastrophe can be entirely human-made. Which is what the cost of living ‘crisis’ is. The conservatives created it. /9

They will now use this crisis of their own making, to win votes. Because only crises shift people. People who were paying no attention to any of the actual causes. Nor were they when the same conservatives confected crises over immigration. /10

What mattered was the perception of a crisis, or catastrophe. That’s what will shift people. Not reasoned argument. It’s why progressives never win, or at least for long. They think good policy speaks for itself. /11

Nobody votes for policy really. Not in any great numbers. They back a team. Like the people whose football teams lose year after year. They still back them. Unless there’s a crisis or catastrophe. That’s all that ever shifts people meaningfully. /12

Here in Oz Albanese, like Biden in the US, came to power promising to ‘end the division’. Like lambs to the slaughter, not understanding what the division is. People LOVE the division. That’s the team sports of populist politics. Team vs team. /13

Dutton, like Trump or Johnson, creates new divisions every day, to continuously energise the teams. Via fake crises, or the reframing of actual crises (like climate change, and Covid). That’s what fires up voters in a popularity contest. /14

They want politics to be that game of football. If one side is useless, they’ll support them just to make it a contest again. Coming to power to ‘end the division’ is a compete surrender to the other team. /15

In the UK, catastrophe has arrived in the form of almost total social collapse. The conservatives there are trying the same tricks again, to try to weaponise that in their favour. This time, the catastrophe is too great. And they’ve been the winning team too long. /16

Teams that win all the time lose popularity. You see it in sports too. People prefer an ‘underdog’. All of it is popularity, the dynamics of it. Because we have a governance system entirely based on popularity. /end