After speaking with friends last night I’ve decided that the world
needs a little more bushlawyering – the inchoate, half-formed offering of unsolicited,
unqualified opinion. The term dates back to the days of Banjo Patterson when
jolly swagmen camped out by a billabong discussed the relative merits of
defenses to property torts while eyeing off passing jumbucks.
The topic of conversation – as is everyone’s at the moment – is
Trump, and the antiquarian notion that people vote in response to their best interest,
or even their perceived best interest – the political pundit’s favoured
hand waving for disaffected workers in the Midwest shaking up a stable system
with the political equivalent of a couple of paddleboards, a jumper cable, and
50ccs of pure adrenaline stabbed directly in the heart, in return for increased
protectionism.
There is little reason to suspect that people do vote in self-interest, or even misguided perceived
self-interest. An important result from public choice theory shows that ‘rational’ voters
should be indifferent to voting for all ballots except those in which they
might carry the crucial 50% + 1th vote. Taking all other votes as given, this
follows from adding 1 to an absolute majority on either side – in which the
individual’s vote will have no true effect on the outcome. This is known as
Down’s Paradox. The ‘rational’ voter will care about their vote only so much as
they believe they may carry the winning vote by probability (and it is found that
voter turnouts increase in perceived marginal electorates).
The question then becomes: why
do people vote? And why do people
care about how they vote? The answer is often explained as a form of social
signaling: by voting an individual can send a signal to their friends,
families, society in general, and self-identified in-groups on their stances on
certain issues (e.g. marriage equality, taxation, the fiery bob cut of Gillard,
or the pugilistic frown of Abbott). The anonymity of individual votes, and the
necessary homogenization of disparate political issues under two broad camps
(e.g. the social progressive pushing for radical trade liberalization) raises
some doubt on this explanation.
Recent electoral results offer a more interesting reason: people
vote because it is fun. Carl von
Clausewitz once famously wrote that ‘war is politics by other means’, but
politics is entertainment by other means: it’s the one topic of conversation
guaranteed to generate heated excitement in any situation after the weather.
And certain candidates are far more exciting than others.
Take for example:
- Pauline Hanson née Pantsdown
- Clive Palmer (the Titanic building, dinosaur resurrecting, CIA-conspiring, radio-twerking billionaire)
- Boris Johnson (the affable mop of straw-coloured hair mascarading as a Foreign Affairs Minister)
Donald Trump demonstrates this stage-stealing characteristic
perfectly. From the tabloid insanities of the election, one moment stood out clearly: at the first debate, he invited a supposed mistress of Bill Clinton front-row-centre to
Hillary. It could have come straight out of House of Cards. The move was petty, provocative, disrespectful, and unnecessary – but
within minutes it had hit national newspapers around the world, reaching
audiences in the hundreds of millions who read it eagerly – responded to it,
decried it, analysed it – and asked themselves: what will he do next?
Trump is the definition of a walking cliffhanger: an entertainment hairpiece with a Twitter account. Building a wall with Mexico was once a punchline plot-line in Arrested Development. Now, it's a $21.6 billion policy proposal. In a
world where voters are mathematically indifferent to their vote and divorced
from the political process - especially in the electoral college system of the
US that rendered millions of votes truly worthless - is it any surprise that
voters might turn to the quick guffaw that putting ‘Trump’ or ‘Clive Palmer’ or
‘Leave’ for Brexit at the top of their ballot? If everyone else is rational –
if the system is rational – couldn’t the innocent burst of amusement for voting
for the class clown of politics seem appealing? And where a proportion (not necessarily large in percentage terms) of the population vote based on the criteria of entertainment and popular zeitgeist, events once described as laughably infeasible (such as Brexit, Trump, Clive Palmer, the resurgence of One Nation or Front National) can sprout dangerously into reality.
Three episodes from the last week in Australia illustrate the sitcom shift of politics – Turnbull’s simpering sycophant tirade, Bernardi starting a
‘bring your own streamers’ party for one, and Scott Morrison proudly depositing
a lump of coal in the chamber, like the sclerous Santa of parliaments past and
present. None of these actions had a great deal of political substance, but all
were highly entertaining. Each were shared eagerly shared by supporters and detractors; memed, satirised, and hagiofied. In today’s politics, as in advertising, one rule
rings true: there is nothing worse than being not talked about.
ABC screens the current season of politics. The next will be streamed live on HBO.
