Heed the Normies

Why political parties shouldn't get high on their own supply

I should remember not to send posts out on the day of by-election results. But hey, we’ll forget about these in 24 hours. The good news if you are a regular subscriber to this Substack is that you can use my tactical voting app, from last time’s post, and now make new adjustments including moving Labour, Liberal, and Green voters separately.

The Kingswood and Wellingborough by-elections show us a few things - first that Reform are probably polling around 6 to 8 percent nationally (using UNS from 2015 UKIP votes since neither had Brexit Party candidates in 2019); and second that Labour can squeeze Liberals not Greens. Good thing you have my app really.

Oh and the other thing the by-elections show us is that the Conservative Party are in terrible trouble and will likely worsen things for themselves by pursuing Reform down a populist right rabbithole. And that, conveniently, is the topic of today’s post.

And now for a round in the pub quiz. It’s the missing link section:

Lifeboat guards, Premier League footballers, the National Trust, Disneyworld, the Kansas City Chiefs.

What do these venerable institutions have in common? First, most people like them. Spend money on them. Even draw weird fan pictures of them.

Second, they have provoked the ire of the online and populist right.

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution was castigated by Nigel Farage, who called it a ‘taxi service’ for migrants. Then Home Secretary Priti Patel stuck up for the rights of those booing Premier League footballers for taking the knee, calling it ‘gesture politics’. The National Trust’s alleged ‘wokeness’ has produced the - so far electorally unsuccessful - Restore Trust list of anti-woke candidates, supported by Conservative MP Jacob Rees Mogg.

Across the pond, Disneyland spent a year under concerted attack - including an attempt to remove their local tax privileges - by Florida Governor (and failed Presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis, for having the temerity to oppose his ‘don’t say Gay’ education policy. And the two-in-a-row Super Bowl winners, the Kansas City Chiefs? Well, somehow, they have got sucked into the American Presidential debate because their star tight-end Travis Kelce is dating Taylor Swift, who Donald Trump fears will endorse Joe Biden. Yes, I can’t believe I had to write that sentence.

Let me note something else about all these examples. They have been led by politicians whose great electoral successes lie in their past. Some perhaps more than others. Farage is still hovering about with veiled menace - much like a political Jose Mourinho. Trump of course is a slight current favourite to win the Presidential Election this year. But DeSantis flopped spectacularly and Patel and Rees-Mogg are out of Cabinet and likely permanently out of mainline politics.

And yet, we are still dancing to this tune. In part because it makes good clickbait. See this post. But also because parts of both the media and mainstream parties have convinced themselves of something I think rather unsustainable - that there is real political mileage in attacking things that are clearly popular and well-liked by the public. So consider this some gentle pushback.

Political Hobbyists versus Normies

Christabel Cooper - head of research for Labour Together - had a great thread the other day. The gist of it was that most people don’t care about politics. What do they care about? Nice days out at the beach or a stately home. Saving up money to go to a world-famous theme park in Florida, with great rides and terrible queues. Listening to Taylor Swift. And watching America’s most popular sport (football), or the world’s most popular sport (also, and yet not also, football).

The general public find politics boring, unreliable, disappointing and corrupt. They find people - like me - who are interested in politics to be oddballs and definitely the type of person to avoid at parties, where talking about politics is the death-zone. All that said, most of them do still go out and vote in national elections when the time comes.

And yet, you, the reader of (perhaps subscriber to) this Substack are different. Not always in a good way. You like to read about politics online and in the newspaper. You like to talk about politics to people at parties. Perhaps you are surprised when they keep making their excuses. What’s their problem, anyway?

Now far be it from me, a professional political scientist who literally lectures the public about the importance of liberal democracy, to denounce people who take an interest in how we govern ourselves. This is good! Active self-government requires effort and application. But, as I noted in my first Reith Lecture, democracy is always at threat of entropy - that without collective engagement, things fall apart. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, democracy would be a fine thing but it takes up too many evenings. At least for most people.

Normies are just not that into politics. And that means in-between elections we fall into parallel universes. In one, normies are going about their everyday lives: their jobs, their interests, their families. In the other, people into politics are engaged in a never-ending ‘someone, somewhere is wrong on the internet’ debate.

But when elections come around, the normies will show up. We may complain about contemporary turnout rates but in most countries we still get well over two-thirds of eligible voters to show up and vote. Given the famous ‘paradox of voting’ - that it’s not really worth showing up to vote given its certain cost and the very unlikely chance that your vote will be decisive - I’d say this is pretty impressive. And the number of people who show up to vote far far outweighs the number of people who are more actively interested in politics between elections.

So why does this matter? Maybe normies ignore mad comments from Tory MPs on GBNews, or the whole Trump-Swift farrago. Yes, I’m sure they do. They literally have better things to do. But this kind of weird agitprop cannot be entirely avoided. It’s there every time you look at Facebook, or turn on the radio, and it seeps in. And normies slowly alter their views of conservatives or liberals depending on what they hear.

This is what Mo Fiorina calls this the ‘running tally’ form of retrospective decision-making, albeit in his case for how the economy is going. IMO it also structures how voters looks at parties. Basically two things matter for the judgments voters make about parties - big shocks to perceived competence that ‘cut through’ (this is where the work of Jane Green and Will Jennings is especially helpful) and the background noise of messaging.

It’s very clear in the UK that the COVID parties under Johnson and Liz Truss’s catastrophic ‘mini-budget’ cut through. These were huge salience shocks that permanently shifted the level of support for the governing party. They did so because normies noticed. Let me give you a personal example - I was on a barge on the Thames on a weekend holiday during the mini-budget fallout with old friends, none of whom spend their time tweeting about politics, let alone statements from His Majesty’s Treasury. But all weekend, it was just nonstop jokes and moaning about Truss and Kwarteng. And there I was just trying to get away from politics…

So shocks matter. Probably more than anything else. But then there is the constant creep effect of seeing political debate on the media, even when you have no real interest in politics. Just as some people - sadly not me - try to grimace through the sports segment of a radio broadcast, others feel that way about the front-end. But even when you’re listening to Magic FM, or have ITV on in the background, it’s tough to avoid the news - especially news about politics. So the background hum frames many people’s perceptions about what politics is about.

And oftentimes it just seems weird to people. So many debates beloved of SW1 or the Beltway or Brussels don’t make any real sense in the context of people’s day-to-day lives.

Take the Rwanda scheme to essentially export asylum-seekers. I’m sure that about half of the population genuinely do feel some concern about illegal immigration, but for only very few is it a day-to-day motivation. It stands in for more general concerns about a lack of government control over borders or government incompetence more generally. It doesn’t take on the totemic aspect it now does in Westminster where it’s Rwanda or bust. For most people Rwanda was known as a the location of a genocide (and ensuing Don Cheadle film) or for sponsoring Arsenal. It feels like an odd, picayune choice for solving Britain’s immigration policy dilemmas.

One way to think about whether a political debate has departed the realm of the normies is to think about how long it would take to explain to someone who was unfamiliar with it. Just imagine trying to teach schoolchildren in thirty years what the Rwanda debate was about. Or explaining it to your gran. It’s not a one-liner.

But for another group of non-normies, these very specific political debates - be they on Rwanda, or the precise shape of the Northern Ireland - Great Britain trade border - are absolute catnip. These people are, in Eitan Hersh’s wonderful term, ‘political hobbyists’.

This group - which perhaps includes the author of this Substack - gain large amounts of consumption utility (i.e. enjoyment) from the very act of reading about and discussing politics. As Hersh notes, they often forgo actual political participation because that’s hard work. They enjoy debate, contrarianism, position-taking, signalling, and so forth, for their inherent pleasures.

The problem for politics in Britain, the US, and beyond, is this group often seem larger and more important than they really are - because they are so visible online and at public-focused events. But they are often very very different from the mass of voters. And that’s a problem.

The Hall of Mirrors

Who are ‘political hobbyists’ and when are they more likely to show up? Here’s how Eitan Hersh sees it. He contrasts people who engage in politics because they see it as a duty with those who do so as a hobby. Bluntly, for political scientists, like me and Hersh, participating in politics for rational or instrumental reasons is weird - your probability of affecting electoral outcomes at the margin is almost nil. So even if the benefits to your preferred party winning were HUUUGE, your expected utility of voting (the benefit multiplied by the probability your vote is the deciding one) is basically zero. So something else must be going on.

For generations, political scientists have thought of this something else as duty. We engage in politics because we feel obliged to do so - even though it is costly. Duties are those acts we feel we should engage in even though we don’t enjoy them. As Hersh puts it, duties are like changing nappies (or to be precise, since Hersh is American, diapers). But here’s the thing, for quite a number of Americans, the political activities they participate in most are those they find more enjoyable. Not duties at all but hobbies.

When do we engage in hobbies more? When we have more free time. When participation is low-cost and open to anyone. And when it feels like the stakes are low, so what you say doesn’t really matter. Wealthy countries have combined all of these factors over the past decades. The internet in particular has amped this up because it can be used at any point during free time, or even (sneakily) when at work. And posting on Twitter or Facebook is very low cost and very open.

And then there are the stakes. Arguably since the end of the Cold War the stakes of who’s in charge have seemed lower. Certainly the arguments we saw from the late 1990s onwards that ‘all parties were the same’ generated the perception of low stakes. Hersh wrote his initial foray into political hobbyism in 2017 and I’m less convinced that people still feel this way, though perhaps they did before 2016, partly explaining the level of partisan hobbyism that burst out that year.

The kinds of people who are hobbyists, per Hersh, are those with more time on their hands, or more ability to work autonomously - so retirees and students in the first group, and professionals in the second. And during COVID perhaps everyone.

And hobbyism has had a number of unfortunate consequences - Hersh claims that people regularly confuse issues with low and high stakes - like children playing with their father’s gun (my analogy not his!). What’s more, just as with sports hobbyism, politics is more fun when you hate the opposition. And so it produces negative partisanship - you get engaged because you hate the opposition more than you love your own team (it’s the spirit of Jose Mourinho again…).

IMO, whenever you have supermajority politics - which happens quite a lot in British politics due to our wonderful electoral system - it’s easy for people to slip into the view that it’s a low stakes environment because, well, how’s the governing party really going to lose the next election? Oh…

And so, we end up with political debate where hobbyists dominate the airwaves and the socials. They have lots of time, lots of interest, and no pressing concern that they might be inadvertently confusing low and high stakes. On top of which, there appear to be a group of people with what Michael Bang Pedersen calls a ‘need for chaos’ - for whom destructiveness is the goal. Perhaps also as a form of political hobby (or maybe they really will enjoy the charred corpses of their enemies, who’s to say?).

Unpopular Populists

Hobbyists distort our politics because they have much higher levels of negative partisanship than average citizens and because they seize on slightly odd topics-du-jour, such as Rwanda, with great gusto. They are also more likely to join political parties, and hence choose the leaders of our main political parties. Those leaders have to be elected by hobbyists before the normies get to have their say. And that can end rather badly. See… oh I don’t know <points at everything around him>.

It also leaves high-level politicians and ministers mistaking the obsessions of hobbyists for those of normies. The language of the ‘too-online’ right has very quickly spilled over into the rhetoric of conservative leaders who are going to have to win general elections. And this means so-called populism can very quickly become what Duncan Robinson at the Economist calls ‘unpopulism’.

Take for example last week’s teeth-grindingly awful ‘joke’ about Labour’s transgender policy made by Rishi Sunak in PMQs. The joke was barely comprehensible unless you already knew a lot about Labour’s position on gender self-ID - so was already aimed at hobbyists rather than normies - but its timing was horrendous - as Esther Ghey, the mother of murdered transgender girl Brianna Ghey, was in the House of Commons around the anniversary of the murder. Keir Starmer jumped quickly on the inappropriate timing (and indeed content) of Sunak’s joke in a rather rare display of authentic outrage. And journalists assumed that Sunak would end up apologising.

But he didn’t. Not least because Kemi Badenoch, his likely replacement as Conservative leader post-election, decided to double-down with a tweet of outrage about the outrage. Here’s the text: “Every murder is a tragedy. None should be trivialised by political point-scoring. As a mother, I can imagine the trauma that Esther Ghey has endured. It was shameful of Starmer to link his own inability to be clear on the matter of sex and gender directly to her grief.”

You see? The real shameful behaviour was not an off-colour joke. Oh no, it was Starmer being upset about the joke. Oh and by the way, I’m a mother and so I empathise with Esther Ghey, while in the very same tweet, feeling the need to state my own skeptical position on trans-rights. This tweet apparently dissuaded Sunak from making his own apology, since Badenoch had so clearly amped up the debate.

So what do normies think about all this? Let me be clear. I am not saying that there is a consistent pro-trans-rights or pro-gender-self-ID supermajority in the country. I don’t think that’s true and there is a divide among British people about this issue. But to me, like most political commentators, the initial joke, the failure to apologise, and the doubling down by Cabinet members seemed weird.

And I wasn’t wrong. A poll by We Think found 77% of people thought Sunak should apologise - with even 59% of the increasingly dwindling group of Conservative votes wanting an apology. Now I don’t know much about this polling firm and maybe someone else would find a difference - but these kind of numbers are pretty stark.

In other words, normies think making jokes about transgender people in public is probably a bit weird and especially so around the anniversary of the murder of a transgender girl. This is not complicated stuff. Umming and ahhing about how Keir Starmer is actually the bad guy here if you think about it - also weird. It says more about how trapped you are in the abstract politics of the trans debate and how little you can relate that to actual everyday human experience. Fortunately the British public have much greater empathy and judgment than our politicians or the terminally online.

And then there is Rishi Sunak’s other rival. The princess across the water. The Mary Queen of Scots de nos jours. Elizabeth Truss, ex-PM.

Truss’s brief regnum - shorter than most interregnums - was the apex of unpopulism. I’ve already mentioned the disastrous mini-budget so won’t recapitulate. But in a perfect example of unnecessarily resilient behaviour, Truss is back leading a group of so-called Popular Conservatives, drawing up a list of non entirely obviously popular policies. It’s hard at this point to figure out if this wing of the Conservative Party really just are high on their own supply or if this is deliberate and cynical. Who knows? But if politicians on the right are being bombarded with supportive messages from political hobbyists, you can see how they might become confused. You can see why the Emperor can’t see that they are, in fact, naked.

Liberal Hobbyism

In the UK, over the past few years, I think the domination of national debates by political hobbyists and obsessives has been more pronounced on the right. But it wasn’t long ago that the leader of the Labour Party was Jeremy Corbyn and a large group of political hobbyists on the left convinced themselves that Britain was just an inch away from the triumph of socialism. Some of the more conspiratorial parts of the online left were adamant that every accusation of anti-semitism was a deliberate carve-up, aimed at unseating the leader. And were shocked when normies didn’t agree. And when normies had suspicions about Jeremy Corbyn when he quavered over accusing Russia for the Salisbury poisoning.

And the online left in America is, stereotypically, even more amped up than here. A year or so back, Sam Adler-Bell, a journalist very much on the American left, tried to sum up the hobbyist / norm problem for leftists in a piece for New York magazine. This particular piece was about ‘over-wokeness’ - the danger that American leftists were creating a vocabulary of politics that was too complicated and fraught with potential missteps for average people who largely shared the same overall political goals as the online left. People highly engaged with online leftist debate were raising barriers to getting what they wanted by holding normies to new and harsh standards of communication, that in Adler-Bell’s mind were bound to backfire.

Adler-Bell’s definition of wokeness (which I should note ain’t mine because basically I think it’s a term that people largely use to point at things they don’t like) gives a good sense of this: “Wokeness refers to the invocation of unintuitive and morally burdensome political norms and ideas in a manner which suggests they are self-evident.”

I get what he’s saying here not least because it invokes the problem of hobbyists versus normies. The hobbyists have learned the language and behaviour of the political in-group. They are shocked, shocked that people who spend five minutes of their week on politics have not absorbed these norms. And they take it out on them.

This is a very unhelpful trend for left-wing politicians. Moralism is usually unattractive as a political strategy unless your morals really are very widely shared. Otherwise it’s a great way to turn off normies. As I mentioned above, the negative reaction of the British public to Sunak’s trans joke, or their relatively positive one to footballers taking the knee, suggests that most normies are relatively non-judgmental and concerned about the experiences of minority groups. Liberals should be pushing at an open door. Unless they decide to bar the door to anyone who doesn’t yet understand the code.

In my estimation, at the moment the UK Labour Party are more on top of this problem than the Democrats. In part, this relates to the mores of the young people on the campaign staffs of both parties and also to the relative effectiveness of moralistic claims in the UK (ineffective) and the USA (a core part of American politics). It’s also because Starmer has exerted an iron fist on party communications discipline (screw-ups this week aside).

Now the thing about this strategy, is that it does risk losing the enthusiasm of the hobbyists you need to run elections. But, and this is crucial, it avoids undermining the support of normies you need to win elections. What did Keir Stamer call it? “Shouting slogans or changing lives.” Yeah, that.

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PS: A quick update on the app from my last post. It now allows you to see even more demographics, including education and employment status, as well as to look at how marginal constituencies vary in their demographics. And most importantly you can now separate out Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters in how tactically they will vote. Don’t say I never respond to reader feedback!

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