Back in his campaigning days, Gordon Brown at one point latched on to the slogan that Labour were the “party of the many”, whereas the Tories were “the party of the few”. He was harking back to the old opposition between the Tories, as representatives of the landed gentry and capitalist owners, and Labour, as the new party of the industrial working class—the latter conveniently metamorphosized in Brown’s rhetoric to vaguely defined “working people”. Brown was also following the general tendency of left-wing rhetoric to frame the right as the party of the rich, conceived of as a small elite within a nation.
More recently—and not for the first time—we have seen in the “populist” right an effort to flip this script. The left, we are here told, is the party of urban, educated, rootless elites, while the right is now the tribune of the great mass of the “left behind”, simpler, less educated, increasingly impoverished by the free flow of goods and people across the globe.
These are of course mythologies. In any polity with universal suffrage, and one vote per citizen, no party that is a serious contender for power can be a party of “the few”: such a party could never win an election. Accordingly, no successful party ever defines itself as representing “the few”, and all, in one way or another, argue that they, and they alone, can best govern in the interests of the nation’s majority.
No successful party ever defines itself as representing “the few”.
Gordon Brown himself duly lost, in 2010, the only general election he ever contended as Labour leader: the party of the few took 306 seats, to the party of the many’s 258 (neither side, as it happened, gained an absolute majority in Parliament, so the Tories entered a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the party of the floating signifier).
It is impossible to explain any such victory within the many/few paradigm, except by resorting to the desperate argument that the many have somehow been hoodwinked by the few’s canny operators into voting against their own interests. This argument has long formed part of a particular strain of patronizing leftism. The right, even in its populist mode, is less prone to resort to it, preferring to explain non-elite support for the left as ignoble clientelism. In truth, all parties seek to build a base of clients, but the right’s privileged mythology has it that they are merely paying back what is deserved for hard work and time served, whereas the left is happier framing itself as the munificent protector of the vulnerable against the cruelties of the world (and of the right).
Are you one of the many, who don’t want to take it any more from the blood-sucking few? You’re certainly not one of the few, but perhaps you’re a rational, compassionate person who doesn’t want to see your country handed over to the whims of ignorant, backwards mobs. Or perhaps you’re a decent, hard-working person, who doesn’t want the hordes of layabouts and migrants put first. Are you vulnerable and in need of a helping hand? Or are you just asking for what’s coming to you, after all your years of service? Choose your mythology, choose your myth-makers, and vote accordingly.
Choose your mythology, choose your myth-makers, and vote accordingly.
Or better still, don’t bother. These myths and their purveyors are stupid and repulsive. Tune it all out, and stay home on election day. Or vote as you always have, with the dogged, depressed loyalty of a sports fan for a terrible team. You decided long ago, for reasons you can barely remember, that these guys are your guys, at least when they’re up against those other guys. Life is too short, and politics is too disgusting, to review that decision now.
Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.
“The mountains shall give birth, a laughable mouse shall be born”—So Horace on bad epic poems that fall pathetically short of their grandiose preambles. So also the epic myth-making of electoral politics, versus its paltry outcomes. The nation, if not the globe, is on the brink of ruin. Only a monster, a traitor or a cretin could vote for the wrong party. Democracy itself is on the ballot. If the wrong side wins, you will wake up a slave tomorrow. All this, and much more, to give birth to nothing bigger than those small swings in percentage points, in the few areas ever truly in contention, that determine who will actually win.
Almost no one likes any of it. Every party is in truth the party of the few, if we are counting genuine enthusiasts. The many play along, one way or another, because elections are the only game in town. One of the worst aspects of the game is having to be lectured by the winning team of the few, every time the pendulum swings, about how wrong has failed and right prevailed, how a shining new future will now arise. The many know better, and will put the other team back in charge, for a while, soon enough.
