The Lunatic Mainstream

Well, they may be Little Englanders, but they're getting bigger, and the big parties are getting littler. In Sunday's results, the only two governing parties most Britons have ever known couldn't muster 50 per cent of the vote between them.>

In a functioning party system, you're never going to agree with your party on everything. You might, for example, be opposed to wind farms or in favour of toppling Robert Mugabe. But, even if you are, it's unlikely to be the big political priority in your life. So you vote on the economy and Iraq and healthcare, and accept there'll be a few disagreements by the time we get to page 73 of the manifesto. That's why parties like to talk about themselves as "big tents".>

But, as Peter Oborne pointed out in last week's Spectator, poll after poll shows that up to half the British electorate wants out of the EU - i.e., their disaffection goes a little deeper than mixed feelings about insufficient subsidiarity in sub-clause XXIV(b) of the new constitution. This isn't a peripheral issue, but the central question facing Britain today - and the views of 50 per cent of the voters are not reflected in the country's big three parties.>

By "big three", incidentally, I'm referring to last week's rankings: when Charles Kennedy says that next year's election will be all about "three-party politics", he's overlooking the fact that in England and Wales on Sunday he didn't win, place or show. On Europe, the three parties failed to notice their big tents are half-empty and there are tons of folks milling around outside with nowhere to go. That's when UKIP pitched up.>

In the East Midlands, UKIP was in a statistical dead heat for first place. The "lunatic fringe" - UKIP, BNP, Greens, Respect, etc - won 40 per cent of the vote. And the so-called looniest of the lunatics, UKIP and BNP, pulled 32.6 per cent. Between them, Labour and the Lib Dems got 33.9 per cent. What, other than the blinkers of the media-political Westminster village, makes 32.6 per cent the fringe and 33.9 per cent the mainstream?>

Indeed, the real problem in Britain would seem to be a lunatic mainstream, set on a course of profound change for which there is no popular mandate whatsoever. In that sense, what happened last week was not a Little Englander spasm but, alas, quintessentially European.>

In the late 20th century sur le Continent, politics evolved to the point where almost any issue worth talking about was ruled beneath discussion, beyond the bounds of polite society. In Austria, year in, year out, whether you voted for the centre-Left party or the centre-Right party, you wound up with the same centre-Left/centre-Right coalition presiding over what was in effect a two-party one-party state. Then Jörg Haider came along.>

In France in 2002, the presidential election was supposed to be between Jacques Chirac, the Left of Right of Left of centre candidate, and Lionel Jospin, the Right of Left of Right of Left of centre candidate. Chospin and Jirac ran on identical platforms, both fully committed to high taxes, high unemployment and high crime. Faced with a choice between Eurodee and Eurodum, the French electorate decided they fancied a real choice and stuck Jean-Marie Le Pen in there. Same in Holland until Pim Fortuyn got gunned down by a crazed vegetarian, the first fruitarian to kill a fruit Aryan.>

In much of western Europe, on all the issues that matter, competitive politics decayed to a rotation of arrogant co-regents of an insular elite, with predictable consequences: if the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain issues, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones. If Britain's historically more responsive politics is now on this characteristically Continental track, well, happy the land whose foaming demagogues are as benign as Robert Kilroy-Silk and Joan Collins. For the moment.>

Yet already Britain's lunatic mainstream is lapsing back into its customary condescension on this issue. If your views on Europe don't fall between the broad parameters from, oh, Neil Kinnock to Chris Patten, you must be barking mad and we need pay you no further heed. The political class has refined Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death my right not to have to listen to you say it. Are you still here?>

This is unworthy of a democracy, and more to the point deeply unhealthy. One reason why the Eutopian dream has fizzled across the Continent is because the entire political class took it for granted no right-thinking person could possibly disagree with them, so they never felt they had to bother arguing the case and, now they have to, they can't remember what the arguments were. Those who subscribe to inevitablist theories of historical progress often make that mistake: the lazy Aussie republicans did in 1999, for example.>

Almost every Europhile argument is weaker now than it was a quarter-century ago, when the EU - or whatever it was called back then - had a stronger economy, healthier demographics, and the devastating implications of the Continent's social costs were not yet plain. Yet pro-Europeans remain wedded to their ancient arguments: for a good decade and a half Edward Heath in his tetchier moments has airily waved the interviewer's question aside and said all these things were decided in the 1970s and we need to get on with it. Otherwise, Britain will be "isolated in the world" and unable to survive unless it allows its relatively buoyant economy to be yoked in perpetuity to the FrancoGerman statist gerontocracy.>

That's why Labour's decline to its pre-Great War vote share is as telling as the hit the Tories took. Neither of Britain's two main parties reflects the real division on the critical issue of the day. In a less diseased political culture, we'd have one party that argues honestly for a highly centralised European superstate - that's the only one on offer - and one party that wants to keep a flat in Spain, sell Scotch eggs and saveloys to supermarkets in Slovenia, saunter along the beach at St Tropez flaunting its wedding tackle to adoring frauleins, and doesn't see why any of these economic and cultural ties require a European public prosecutor or foreign minister.>

But the respectable parties aren't honest on this subject, and so a frustrated electorate has loosed strange new forces upon the land. Thus the paradox: in its rejection of Europe, the British electorate was never so European.>

Is there some statistical reason for this? Or any other reason?

The Illuminati rig all world elections to come out that way... < /sarcasm>

Seriously, I don't know. It might be as simple as children always voting the opposite way from their parents, out of spite, with no real consideration of the issues one way or the other.

Why does it always seem to be the case that the liberal/conservative percentage of the electorate comes down to a 50/50 split, regardless of the country? Is there some statistical reason for this?

I've noticed this too. IMO, it happens too often to be coincidence.

I've observed that, in control systems that have a discontinuity in their "transfer function," the operating point will often tend to settle into a "limit cycle" around the discontinuity. A simple example is the system comprising a household thermostat and furnace. After the system comes to equilibrium, it will tend to "cycle" around the setpoint, with the furnace kicking in and out and the temperature wobbling around the desired figure.

I think it's possible that political systems operate the same way.

Our system of government interacts with our economy and with individual citizens in numerous ways, but these ways have become pretty well defined, and therefore stable. Each of the two major parties has settled into a set of positions that tend to cause voters to pull us back and forth between Democrat and Republican to make incremental changes in all the different parameters of life (economic, education, morality, personal freedom, security).

Neither party has to win more than 50% + 1 vote in any given election. Therefore it makes no sense for a GOP candidate to be any more conservative than he has to be to win, and it makes no sense for any Democrat candidate to be any more liberal than he has to be in order to win. Of course, that is only true in the aggregate; individual politicians make "chaotic" choices that are driven by all kinds of consideration, including personal ideology.

(steely)

Why does it always seem to be the case that the liberal/conservative percentage of the electorate comes down to a 50/50 split, regardless of the country? Is there some statistical reason for this? Or any other reason?

Good question. I think it's probably because the basic parameters of government have been long ago decided, and the only remaining question is one of tinkering around the edges. Parties are pretty much pointless in those cases, and peoples' choices end up being based on personal preferences.

This is OK, so long as all sides are basically committed to maintaining the status quo. The EU stuff in Britain has upset that balance, though, and Steyn's underlying point is that the powers-that-be there have not recognized it. That's a danger anywhere, including here. (The Democrats are ripe for such a fall, BTW -- it's impossible to hold a party together that has such wide extremes, and the cracks are beginning to show.)

I would say it's a sort of natural selection. If one side is consistantly getting a majority of the vote, the other is going to either start altering it's position to fit the mindset of the voters, convince voters to change their mindset, or eventually disappear. With both sides fighting to appeal to the most voters, they will eventually find themselves in a 50/50 split, and unable to move much from there - unless someone on the other side does something stupid or one side has a particularly charismatic candidate.

That's just my theory. And keep in mind that Liberal and Conservative don't always mean the same thing in Europe that they do here. There may be some agreement on some issues between conservatives here and in Europe, but for the most part they are to the left of us.

Factions are characteristic of representative government. In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned of the divisiveness of factions, but no doubt he also recognize that factions were inevitable, since they developed even before he took his first oath of office as President. If by some act of God, all liberals, socialists, and Communists were to disappear from the face of the earth, there would develop another two party system: perhaps one of country club Republicans and neo-conservatives and a second of paleo-conservatives and the Christian Right.

That being said, American election laws so favor a two party system that a full fledged third party will almost certainly never succeed.

I agree with your main point, and wish to move it to the next step. Polictical parties are not immortal, that is they can die. I believe that the far left has such firm control over the Democratic party that it is losing moderate Democrats to either to Independant or Republican (as the Republicans move to the left).

I would leave the Republican party today (for a more conservate party) if I did not believe the Democrats would gain by my leaving.

Once the Democrats implode, the next polictical party will be more conservative, and the old moderate Democrats will be welcomed into the big tent of the Republican Party, and those of us that are concerned that the Republican party is moving too far to the left will form a new party.

It has happened before, and it will happen again.

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