Vote, or else

Today's Grauniad reported :

Voting should be compulsory in Britain as a way of ending political alienation, restoring community and addressing the dangerous issue of "serial non-voters", Geoff Hoon will say today."

Hardly surprising, given the liberal authoritarian nature of the NuLabor regime. A central feature of liberal democratic ideology is "democratic legitimacy" - that is, a government is in power by the "democratic will" of "the people", and thus has a "mandate" to govern. Without this "mandate from the people" the government is increasingly exercising power without authority, ruling by dictate and coercive force, not by consent. That this "consent" is effectively a fiction in what used to be known, accurately, as "bourgeois democracy", is immaterial: from the State's viewpoint, if the people believe in the fiction (and you most certainly can fool most of the people most all of the time) they will concede the government's "right to govern". Even if many of the people know it's a fiction, if they believe in it as a necessary fiction that's still enough to keep the consensus alive, a bit like Santa Claus.

After a while, though, with steadily falling turnouts at the polls and non-registration on the Electoral Roll, it becomes increasingly hard to maintain this consensual fiction, and at some point it wil catastrophically collapse. As the Situationists might have said, The Spectacle inadvertently exposes itself. This is what liberal democrats (no, not the piss-poor political party) most fear - once authority to govern is lost, then all that's left is power, and the more the State wields power without authority, the more its authority is weakened, and thus the more it has to depend on power, and so on in a positive feedback loop that ends in authoritarian government without any "popular mandate". This is what keeps liberals awake at night, hence the increasingly nervous and shrill calls for "inclusion", for every citizen to become a "stakeholder" in the "political process".

Unfortunately for liberals, the NuLabor project is between a rock and a hard place. By moving so sharply to the Right, NuLabor has so drastically narrowed the range of legitimate political debate that there really is little substantial difference between the main political parties and the voters have no real choice - whoever they vote for, a racist authoritarian capitalist party gets in (see a previous weblog entry: "Election Day"). Worse, for those who believe in capitalism, it's the same type of capitalism on offer - 'neo-liberalism', or 'if it moves, privatise it' - so even Keynesian social democrats no longer have a choice. You can only choose between Thatcherism (smiley shiny teeth style, "with added Social Inclusion!"), Thatcherism, and Thatcherism Lite. Any political view outside this 'consensus' is at best "left field" (a horrible US import that the NuLabor regime is so fond of), at worst "dangerous extremism", but usually just excluded from "mainstream political discourse".

The usual liberal culprit for this "lack of faith in the political process" is, as ever, personalities: politicians either being venal, corrupt, or just plain liars, or "failing to communicate" with the public. However, bent and/or uncommunicative politicians have been a constant for as long as I've been alive, as has been the periodic call for politicians to "clean up their act" and "get themselves across" to the population. Voters have known that your average politician is at best a cog in a party machine doing what s/he's told in order to climb up the greasy pole, and a worst a venal lying hypocrite, but for the past 30-odd years they've piled down to the polling stations anyway.

(That, though, was in the days when socio-economic class was a recognised fact, unlike today when, although class divisions are stronger than ever, socio-economically, class consciousness is virtually non-existent. In the days when you could talk of the working class without being derided as a Stalinist throwback or a historical curiosity, and you identified yourself as a member of a class, you would vote for venal lying hypocrites on the grounds that they were your venal lying hypocrites who may line their pockets but would at least, or so we thought, advance your class interests.)

The major intractable problem for liberals, and which is likely to spell the end for "parliamentary democracy" in the "Mother of Parliaments", is that Joe and Jane Voter only have Hobson's choice come election time. Zero choice at elections is a good reason for voters to get narked, and not to turn up at the polls. It's like being given the choice between syphilis, gonorrhea, and HIV: you know you're going to get a STD anyway, but at least you can choose which one - hardly a positive reason to trek down to the polling station, or even to register as a voter in the first place. Add to this the increasing centralisation of political and economic power to the State and large corporations, so that we have less and less control over our local environment and our daily lives, and you have a structural and intractable "democratic deficit".

You can clean up the political act as much as you want, and use increasingly sophisticated means of communicating with voters, but if we've a) got zero real choice, and b) sod-all control over our lives, then what's the point in voting? Because both a) and b) are products of irresistible underlying economic and geopolitical forces, politicians can do bugger-all about them. It would, for instance, be very much in the interests of "liberal democracy" to have a strong party on the Left, as the Labour Party once was, as that would certainly bump up voter turnout and thus the legitimacy of the government. Unfortunately, such a force would do its best to scupper the neo-liberal consensus which so many careers and fortunes depend upon, and would cause some quite severe damage to corporate bottom lines. So it's not going to come about.

Hence Geoff "Warmonger" Hoon's call for compulsory voting, which is plainly a kite-flying exercise which has been ok'd by the Dear Leader himself (you can't imagine Mr Chinless doing anything other than follow orders). There's no chance of giving voters what they want - a decent choice and local self-management - so the only way to sustain "democratic legitimacy" is to force us to the ballot boxes on pain of fines. Ok, Mr Chinless, we'll do that right enough, and it'll give you and your masters the appearance of authority, but neither you nor we will actually believe it.