The Virtue of Tribal Loyalties

Everyone can agree that blind political loyalty is bad. It is wrong to vote for a party no matter how idiotic or cruel their policies simply because that is what your parents, co-workers or co-religionists have generally done. The good news is that blind political loyalty in the Western world appears to be on the decline.

Recent elections in Canada and for the Scottish parliament have seen historic collapses in support for the Liberal and Labour parties both of which had long been dominant. In Germany the Social Democratic Party has fallen behind the Green Party in many polls while in Ireland, Fianna Fail, the largest party in every election since 1932, lost almost three quarters of its seats in the March general election.

In Ireland, the eclipse of Fianna Fail can be attributed to the cataclysmic consequence of its mismanagement of the economy. However, the decline in party loyalty in Western democracies is a longer-term structural trend. In the UK the percentage of votes gained by the two major parties has declined from well over 90% in the 1950s to just 65% in the 2010 election. In the United States, the two main parties are still dominant but numbers strongly identifying with either party have been in steady decline.

In some ways, this is a good thing. If voters come to a thoughtful and informed choice instead of blindly following the voting behaviour of their parents or socio-economic group, that is surely a good thing.

Sadly, this is not what decline in party loyalty has brought about. Recent election results do not evidence sustained shifts towards particular parties as people reconsider wrongheaded policies of particular parties.

Rather, the fortunes of political parties appear increasingly to depend on the fickle favour of lady luck with voting intentions swinging wildly between them and the results of elections differing markedly from the intentions expressed to pollsters a matter of months and sometimes weeks before. The shift to the SNP in the recent Scottish election, for instance, happened in a matter of weeks, Labour having been riding high throughout the winter and early spring. Similarly, the eclipse of the Liberal Party and crushing of the Bloc Quebecois in the Canadian election was similarly the result of a swing that manifested itself in a matter of weeks.

Of course, the old days of more rigid party loyalty, when people voted largely in accordance with established preferences their group or family, was not ideal. However, those communal and intergenerational decisions to support a particular party had an element of wisdom in them.

These collective political loyalties were at least partly the result of informed, long-term collective experiences that informed ideas of what was best individually and collectively for particular voters.

Working class commitments to social democracy, for example, were the product of decades of experience and reflection of successive generations whose lived experience had taught them the value of broader progressive approaches to law and politics and the power of the state to reduce insecurity and broaden opportunity.

Because public policy is increasingly complex and often tedious in the detail, it is difficult for people to keep abreast of what is in their interest and the national interest.

The current highly fluid political order makes it increasingly difficult to engage the public in the serious task of facing the painful changes that face Western democracies.

In the past parties could rely on loyal traditional supporters to stick with them when they took painful but necessary decisions. That is no longer the case. The parties have to seek to win over all of their supporters anew in each election.

As party loyalties decline but most individuals continue to devote a tiny amount of their time to thinking about politics, their votes will increasingly be determined by whichever party can give them the most simplistic and superficially pleasing slogans.

This is not a context within which it will be possible to take the extremely challenging and painful decisions that are currently necessary. Denial is a powerful force and for people to accept that they may have to consume less, retire later or pay more tax requires sustained debate, truth-telling , political engagement and a degree of historical perspective.

The decline in traditional party loyalty is in fact encouraging encourages parties to play to an ever lower common denominator with voters’ preferences increasingly unmoored from either sustained engagement with politics or the wisdom brought by historic group loyalties. The result is an electorate swinging every more wildly and frequently between parties and growing ever more frustrated at their failure to produce the promised easy solutions.

In its most extreme version we get to the situation in the United States where the landslide repudiation of the Republicans and their policies in 2008 was followed only two years later by an equally crushing Republican triumph in the mid terms of 2010. The US electorate appears to be swinging increasingly wildly between the parties both of which pander to a childish desire for instant and painless solutions.

Falling levels of party loyalty are bound to increase the incentives to treat voters as consumers who are always right no matter how self-serving or irrational their desires. This is especially damaging for issues such as climate change that require short-term pain for long-term gain. It will also mean that the pain of economic adjustment is likely to be imposed on the poor and marginalised as attacks on their interests will be most readily moulded into digestible soundbites and superficially seductive tabloid headlines.

Tribal loyalties are not ideal but without a major increase in public engagement with political debate we may come to regret their passing.

Royal Weddings and Communal Life

Almost all of the British people I know are fairly leftwing and rigorously anti-monarchist. In general their attitude has been highly disdainful towards the royal wedding the values underlying it.

I have a good deal of sympathy for this view. It is not just the Irish who have good reason to remember the abusive and tyrannical nature of the British monarchy throughout history.

Indeed, monarchies in general have benefitted from a significant whitewashing of what has been a shameful history. I have always thought it strange that the persecution that occurred in the early stages of the French Revolution cited as proof of the danger of revolution when monarchies have ruthlessly slaughtered their opponents throughout history.

It is also easy to forget that most members of the British royal family do actually believe that they are qualitatively superior to non-royals. In an increasingly unequal society I can really appreciate how enraging it is for that society’s communal celebrations to be based around highly unequal ideas of heredity.

And yet I must say I enjoyed the atmosphere that gripped London over the days before the royal wedding. Life in this city is generally relentlessly individualistic. People keep themselves to themselves, travel long distances in packed silent buses and trains and work long hours to keep up with an expensive cost of living.

The royal wedding has allowed people to focus on something other than their individual lives for a brief time and to engage in a genuinely shared celebration.

There is something thrilling about watching an event and knowing that thousands of others are both doing the same thing and sharing in appreciating its importance.

That is why it is so satisfying to attend large sporting events in person. You probably get a better overall view of the game on television but there, in the stadium, you have the thrilling sense of connection, the joyous sensation that what is important to you is also important to others.

It is this sense of connection to others that make things like flags and national anthems so important. They allow us to feel part of what the great theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson described as an “imagined community” where we feel connected to people we will never meet.

Communal identities and communal events come out of a particular history. When a team wins an All-Ireland final the excitement of the crowd comes from the knowledge of the teams that have gone before and the importance accorded to that title by Irish society over the years.

Similarly when Rafael Nadal beat Roger Federer in the famous final of 2008 the electric atmosphere on Centre Court was not just because it was a great match, but because everyone watching knew the historical significance attributed to Wimbledon by tennis players over the decades.

Likewise, the traditions and communal celebrations of the British state come from a particular set of historical circumstances. Like it or not, monarchy has been a central feature of British history and what Churchill called “the long continuity of our institutions”.

It is therefore unavoidable that in Britain, national communal events that have any historical resonance are going to be linked to the monarchy. It would be nice if events could be based on something more egalitarian but is not year zero and culture cannot be created from scratch.

Communal occasions that are not linked into some longer historical tradition are generally failures at catching the popular imagination. No signficant sense of togetherness results, for example, from the promotion of “Europe Day” by the EU (it is on the 9^th of May…..see, you had to be told).

In Britain therefore, the alternative to royal communal events is really no engaging communal events at all and fewer chances to feel connected to those around you, in short, a more atomised and lonely society.

In Ireland, Saint Patrick’s day has become a celebration of national identity, culture and a way for us to feel connected through a shared commitment to  society and its cultural tradition.

Yes, it is officially a celebration of the coming of Christianity to Ireland and the churches probably derive some boost from the association. Non-Christians however, are, by and large, are happy to overlook religious bits they don’t agree with in order to join in a celebration of national belonging.

As Giles Fraser said in the Guardian in relation to the royal wedding “sometimes it is worth giving in to a communal sense of joy even when it can’t quite be justified by our critical faculties or political commitments.”

Indeed, those who aspire to remoulding national cultures along more secular and egalitarian lines would perhaps be better advised to join in celebrations with everyone else rather than being labeled killjoys with no sense of the importance of tradition to communities.

The alternative is to allow unsavoury reactionary forces to monopolise these powerful forces and to harness them for anti-egalitarian ends.

Cultures can and should evolve. In both Ireland and Britain the hope is that such evolution will be in the direction of greater egalitarianism.

However, most people need reassurances that such evolution will not involve a complete breach with the past and will allow them to maintain the thrilling feeling of connection with their fellow citizens and with future and past generations that make national identity such a potent force.