Voters have always been consumers

The story in Susan Delacourt’s Shopping for Votes is a familiar one, told well: how politics has increasingly absorbed the language and methodology of consumer branding; how broad thematic campaigns aimed at a mass audience have given way to micro-targeting of ever-narrower slices of the electorate; how the “selling” of politicians like soap, the source of so much angst a generation ago, has itself been supplanted by a politics wholly given over to tailoring the “product” to “consumers’” preferences; how the very process of governing has been overtaken by the permanent campaign. It’s all very true, and all very deplorable.

But while each part of the story is true, I remain in doubt whether the whole hangs together quite in the way Delacourt describes it — whether everything that has happened in politics or government over the last 60 or 70 years can be pressed into the same template: of the decline of citizens (high-minded, engaged, concerned only with the public interest) into mere consum

ers (cynical, disengaged, concerned only with the satisfaction of their baser wants), and of politics along with them.

early on, she quotes the author Gilbert Reid in praise of “The Citizen,” who “had an attention span, was interested in the common good, had some knowledge of history, had empathy for others, was open to debate, and was willing — often — to make individual sacrifices for the good of all.” Unlike, you know.

Reading this, I found myself asking, when was this golden age in politics, when the electorate was of such sterling quality? Was it back in 1919, when Mencken was describing elections as “an advance auction sale in stolen goods”? Was the idea of appealing to voters’ emotive connections to leaders and symbols unknown, say, to the Sir John A. Macdonald Conservatives (“The Old Man, The Old Flag, the Old Policy”)? Is the “tax revolt” really a modern phenomenon, reflecting a new and selfish view of the relationship between citizen and state, or is it as old as, well, taxes? Magna Carta, the english Civil War, the French and American revolutions: all originated as tax revolts.

Modern politics is perhaps better defined, not so much by a change of attitude — politics has always been a grubby business, bartered between pandering politicians and disengaged, barely literate voters — as by the application of more disciplined, scientific methods to the same disreputable ends. The Conservatives who, in the 1911 free trade election, told voters in Orange Ontario that reciprocity meant popery, while others of their party were telling black voters in Halifax it meant they would be sold into slavery, knew all about micro-targeting. Robocalling is in a sense simply returning us to a time before mass communications.

What motivated voters be- fore the age of “consumer” politics wasn’t civics textbooks. It was tribal loyalties. You voted the way your father did, and his father before him. Or you voted the way your region, religion or ethnic group did. The untethering of so many voters from these allegiances may not have given rise to a new age of enlightenment, but it is surely preferable that parties must now at least make their pitch to voters, rather than simply harvest them.

But then Delacourt’s real target, it is clear, is not so much politics as consumerism. I’m as offended as anyone else by other people’s vulgar tastes. I’m just not sure that every policy that allows people to choose how to spend their own money, rather than having other people spend it for them, can be cast into the same pit of scorn. Markets are not the same as marketing (nor does a broad preference for allocating resources through markets, rather than the state, amount to “letting business run things”).

Is it true, then, that politicians treat voters as consumers, rather than citizens? If only. As a rule, consumers tend to be rather better treated. Consider the citizen who cannot get his mail delivered. If he is articulate and connected — if he is educated and well off — and has the spare time to spend organizing others in a similar fix, he might (or might not) be able to persuade his local MP or councillor to take a look, who might (or might not) be able to do something about it. Or, as a consumer, he can take his custom elsewhere: or could, if competition in the mails were not so strictly confined. In the literature, it is described as the difference between “voice” and “choice.”

Indeed, if politicians are so caught up in treating voters as consumers and taxpayers, how is it that so much policy is devoted to despoiling both? It is true, as Delacourt argues, that government is concerned with other things than merely delivering services, that it asks us to decide on broader issues of justice. All the more reason to focus it on those broader questions, and leave the delivery of services to other means: to markets, rather than politics.

At any rate, if politicians are aping the marketers, they’re not doing a terribly good job of it: as Delacourt notes, voter turnout has been falling steadily for decades. Possibly that has more to do with their differences than their surface similarities. Private-sector advertisers, for example, are required to adhere to truth in advertising laws, and have sensibly avoided harshly negative attacks on their competitors, of a kind that would bring the whole industry into disfavour. As she again correctly notes, neither constraint applies to political advertising.

Nor is success in business — or politics — simply a matter of giving people what they want. You think people wanted a personal computer, before Apple brought it to market? Of course not: Nobody knew what to do with them. The company’s founders, like all successful entrepreneurs, started with a vision that excited them, and were able to communicate that passion to others. That, and they made great computers. I’ ll leave you to figure out the parallels there.