The fatal allure of 'narrative'

How did politicians drift so far from the median voter?

Back in 1915 an American magazine called The Unpopular Review complained that ‘the modern public, when hypnotized by a dominant impulse, is quite as capable of manifestations of mob-mind as any Shakespearean multitude’.

The Unpopular Review was an explicitly right-wing publication, and denounced ‘free-speech anarchists’ whom it believed were ‘found distinctly among a certain small and fairly well-defined class of socialist or semi-socialist clergymen and other humanitarians’ – this was back in the Old Times when free speech was a left-wing cause.

If this reactionary organ felt overt contempt for the masses, as Christopher Lasch wrote in The True and Only Heaven, this feeling would also become far more prominent after the First World War among leftist intellectuals in New York.

Disgusted by prohibition, the first red scare, the Scopes trial and the 1924 immigration restriction, publications like The Nation declared that ‘people who think are in a minority in every country,’ despairing of the ‘belligerent sense of election cherished by vulgar and ignorant men.’

That particular editorial came in support of H.L. Mencken’s attack on religious fundamentalism; Mencken was editor of a magazine called Smart Set, and described himself as a member of the ‘civilised minority’. He ridiculed the ‘booboisie’, or general public, and was pleased to conclude on reading Walter Lippmann’s Phantom Public that having ‘started out in life with high hopes for democracy’, Lippmann had ‘come to the conclusion that the masses are ignorant and unteachable.’

Lasch also noted that, from the mid-20^th century onwards, there was an increasingly belief among left-wing policy experts that the public had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards progress, because of their ‘intense nationalism’, opposition to radical social ideas, refusal to question the reigning system and their fear of the outside world. Many were influenced by Robert Lynd’s Knowledge for What? in 1939, which found that liberal attitudes correlate with IQ and social conservatism was a facet of low intelligence, which should therefore be ignored.

Thurman Arnold, in Lasch’s reading, argued that administrators should lie to the public because they would revolt if told the truth about the changes to come. Arnold thought that policy questions were a matter for ‘experts’ not ‘orators’, and believed the future was with the ‘new class’.

The Arnold plan has been essentially followed since, with western politicians presenting as fait accompli radical social reforms they had disavowed until the time was right, and sympathetic media had prepared the ground. It worked, until it didn’t; now the Americans have their Caesar and populist Right parties lead across Europe, including Britain where Reform are at record highs. (Indeed, one poll has them at almost the combined Labour-Tory vote share.)

Parties of the centre-left and centre-right are not only falling behind, but seem to be chasing the populists, trying to fight them on their favoured ground and accepting their narrative framing. The radical Right’s most favourite ground is obviously immigration, which has seen a hardening of attitudes across Europe these past couple of years and in Britain has become the most important issue to voters.