This series of posts will examine myths or tropes that I hear progressives repeat in order to make sense of the "New Dark Age" that is our fragmented social reality. Conservatives likely have their equivalents but I don’t feel as qualified to offer critiques. If you have an idea for a trope to address, contact me at anthony.skews@gmail.com or on Twitter @Askews2000.
One of the classic paradoxes parties of the left seeks to understand is why so many economically- and socially-disadvantaged voters, who would have the most to gain from challenging the status quo, ‘vote against their own interests’ in supporting conservative parties. The quixotic quest by politicians to reach out to ‘working class whites’ (in the US) or ‘Western Sydney’ (in Australia) reflects profound, and justified, confusion by progressive leaders about why such a large pool of potential votes is so politically unreliable. The technocratic instinct in response to right-wing policy proposals is often therefore to try and demonstrate why those specific proposals would be bad for the hip pockets of certain categories of voter.
"Politics for the New Dark Age" offers an alternative analysis: those with the least opportunities and facing the most day-to-day risk are pre-disposed to rely on coping strategies which lend support to leaders who offer to ease their anxieties and (re-)impose a sense of certainty and order. The right is extremely adept at exploiting fear and insecurity (often of ‘the other’) for their own ends, a solution progressives cannot (and should not) credibly employ. Instead, I argue, we should tackle the root causes of voter anxiety by levelling inequality, socialising risk and opportunity, and guaranteeing a decent quality of life for all.
But what I often hear from well-meaning progressives in response to this paradox is that ‘educating voters is the solution’. It’s the catch-cry of Vox.com wonk types, former Obama administration officials, and the West Wing generation. Since policy-making should be done on the basis of the best available evidence and our own policy positions are so obviously correct, the reason people disagree with us is they lack the evidence or the training in critical thinking necessary to make rational political decisions. It is a strategic outlook that orthodox Marxists have criticised as educational dictatorship, and it is shared by “communist authoritarians, philanthropic do-gooders and bourgeois liberals” alike.
As examples, the left appeals to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to marshal the world’s most sophisticated evidence in response to widespread climate denialism. We commission social research, hire think tanks and consultants to accumulate data and package it for the masses. We also go to great lengths to expand access to tertiary education, at least in part so that the next generation behaves more like us: the urban-dwelling recipients of a liberal arts education. We are less consistent on supporting other, non-university based forms of tertiary education because elites struggle to relate to the graduates of trade schools.
My argument is that, though education is a good in its own right, as a political strategy this approach is not only objectively wrong, but also actively counterproductive. The net response of most voters to contrarian facts is to ignore them. Exposure to inconvenient facts and evidence only hardens prejudices. Humans (including progressive intellectuals) use our reasoning capabilities to build arguments that support and rationalise our pre-existing biases and positions: we’re not endlessly flexible utilitarians, who change our minds based on the best available evidence. We are complex moral animals, whose behaviour and prejudices are shaped by our genes and our social circumstances in ways over which we have very little daily control.
The reason why the ‘education-centric’ approach is actively counter-productive is because it establishes a hierarchy of knowledge which emphasises the inequality of social position between those setting policy directions (with ‘education’) and those we are asking to support it (without). Since education thus becomes a marker of virtue, those without it stigmatised as morally flawed and unfit to take part in the decision-making process. Often progressives can be condescending and undemocratic elitists - and voters know it. Not only does reinforcement of social hierarchies tend to increase authoritarian and conservative sympathies amongst voters, but it has incited the backlash against elites that has so roiled Western democracies. Expert opinion against Trump or Brexit failed to convince voters to support the status quo, and a silent majority also actively rebelled against those (in London and Washington) who set themselves up as their social and educational betters.
To be fair, when pressed on this point, most progressives I know will concede that when they say ‘education’ what they really mean is ‘diversity of experience’. This is a better approach. Tertiary education (in whatever form) has value because it exposes us to diverse viewpoints on our societies and economic, and on race, gender, class and sexuality. Exposure to contextual diversity leads to greater tolerance of complexity in social identity, and more tolerance of out-groups. Such exposure calms anxieties about difference and reduces uncertainty (although it occasionally also has the opposite effect), creating positive effects for political and economic behaviour. Thus fears of immigration, famously, are not correlated with the number of immigrants in a community, but rather the exact inverse.
LGBT+ rights have advanced similarly: the war for marriage equality (still unfortunately stalemated in Australia) is not going to be won by converting educated people in cities. Social change occured in the hearts and minds of rural and suburban voters who discovered that (contrary to their expectations) LGBT+ individuals were just regular people who wanted the same things – home, family, relationships – as straight or cis- couples.
So next time you hear a politician or activist say ‘educating people is the solution’ or that voters just ‘need educating’ or 'more information' about a particular social or political problem, stop them and ask how, precisely, they envisage that happening. We don't need to offer better facts, we need to offer better stories. And rather dismissing and devaluing the concerns of those who haven't been socialised to instinctively agree with us, we should instead listen to what they have to say.