Getting more right wing as we age? Not in the West
As we get older, we naturally become more conservative. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. But over the past few years in the West, political shifts have been taking place that turn that idea on its head, as some of the most passionate voices on the radical right-wing of politics have been emerging among the under-35s. This is the phenomenon explored by James Tilley in The Kids are Altright? (Monday to Friday, Radio 4). It’s not a new observation that young people are more likely to swing more extremely one way or the other, ideologically. When I was at university, I remember feeling struck by the nailing of colours to masts all around me, from super left-wing art-kid protestors staging occupations and sit-ins, to suit-wearing young Conservatives delighting in holding cheese and port evenings. Honestly, the stereotypical aesthetics and trappings of each political leaning seemed as important as the actual opinions being shared, if not more so.
This series, which politically contrasts the young and the old – or the “pink-haired” versus the “red-trousered”, as Tilley has it – does spend a little too much time on the wellestablished point that young people are more willing to take risks, and more keen to define themselves, and are therefore more willing to sign themselves up wholeheartedly to a strong cause, whether it’s on the left or the right. Once a bit more life happens to you, all its unforeseeable disappointments, everyday tragedies, mistakes and missed opportunities, shades of grey inevitably creep in.
Much more interesting is the question of how political parties treat their youth wings and exploit their passion and idealism, particularly in an election year – and the series’s more direct, personal explorations of how our political views evolve for each of us individually as we age.
There are some intriguing insights: for example, the suggestion that young people may be tending more towards the left in eastern Europe, but to the right in the west, and the tantalising question of why young people seem to prefer protesting to actual voting. I was particularly interested in Tilley’s discussion with Rob Ford, Professor of Political Science, over Giorgia Meloni’s appeal to young Italians and her passion for The Lord of the Rings – a literary work written, as they point out, by a culturally conservative author – and how its world of radical heroes and villains might map onto the primary-coloured sloganeering of contemporary political marketing campaigns.
The series is ongoing, and I look forward to hearing what firm conclusions, if any, Tilley comes to at the end of the week. For now, it’s hard to escape the relatively bleak assumption that so much of politics is just a show, made to please an audience rather than to serve an electorate.
On the subject of entertainment, however, and another programme with an unanswered question in its title, this week I’ve been captivated by The Essay: That’s Entertainment...? Variety and Me (Monday to Friday, Radio 3), a five-part reflection on the history of variety entertainment and its weird and wonderful performers, as remembered by the poet and playwright Amanda Dalton.
“I don’t know what became of my mum’s top hat,” Dalton begins, recalling her childhood in a family obsessed with variety acts and with performance in the blood. Her father was a performer and impresario at King Farouk’s palace in Cairo during the Second World War, and her mother was an amateur tap dancer. Sunday Night at the London Palladium or the The Good Old Days were essential watching on the family’s TV set. Dalton grew up surrounded by variety, and, as she looked back on it all for these programmes, the memories of some of the acts still enchanted her, while others were more troubling.
It takes a brave writer to admit that, as a child, she enjoyed watching minstrel acts, even if the memory of it now fills her with horror and shame. But it was exactly this clear-eyed honesty and self-reflection that made the programme so compelling. Dalton remembered acts with performing dogs; ventriloquists who, upon their death, were buried with their dummies; magicians and mesmerism; showgirls whose acts became increasingly un-family-friendly.
Fascinatingly, she discussed the fact that, sometimes, acts were meant to delight and amuse, and, at other times, the acts intended to challenge and disturb, and to make spectators feel bamboozled. This was a beautifully kaleidoscopic exploration of the nature of performance and our morally nuanced demands to be entertained.