Persuasion, ideology, politics

One thing I noticed about the most recent election campaign was the real lack of effort to persuade.  My social media feeds were full of people posting political things, but I only remember seeing one serious attempt to persuade people to vote one way or another (and even that was framed in terms of 'if you know anyone who is thinking of voting Tory...' - i.e., it wasn't trying to persuade directly, but on the assumption that all our friends think the same as us was advising on how we might evangelise the heathen).  Why don't we try to persuade each other?

My guess is that there are a number of factors.

One is the resurrection, on the left at least, of ideology.  Ideology, which we might perhaps define as a coherent and programmatic set of ideas which are considered to mutually imply or reinforce one another, makes persuasion more difficult, because you have to buy the whole package.  Now, some of us have considered, for example, socialism, and found that it's not a package we want to purchase.  You could still persuade me, though, if you wanted, of various individual policies.  But there is a sense of this being not worth the while.

Part of that sense is driven, I think, by the winner-takes-all setup of British politics.  If you can't persuade me to come over completely to 'your side', there's not much point in trying to persuade me of particular positions.  At the end of the day, one side or the other will be in power.  Note that this is true even after a very mixed election result like last week's.  The Labour party is not talking about how their ideas need to be taken into account, but about how hard they will make it for the Tories to govern.  Similarly, the chastened Conservatives are not chastened enough to consider a cross-party response to anything.

I wonder also if we've stopped trying to persuade because of a combination of statistics and a sense that people will almost always vote their own, predetermined, interests.  One of the most disturbing things about the last election campaign was the division exposed, and I think exacerbated, between young and old.  The implication was that we all know young people vote left, and old people right, and they do so because the right promotes the interests of the elderly and the left the interests of the young.  The determinism implied in this is fueled by stats: we know that the majority of younger people do vote left.  But the assumption that, for example, your dad is bound to vote Tory because he's drawing a pension, and that he does so without a thought for you and your situation is really quite offensive.  This promotes the worst kind of tribalism.  (Speaking from a Christian point of view, I would also want to point out the many, many passages of Scripture which encourage us to respect our elders as those likely to have more wisdom than us!)

Another thought is that we are all thoroughly caught up in post-truth.  No point trying to persuade people who live in different worlds and have different truths.  This is not limited to just the extremists, nor is it a phenomenon of the left or right exclusively (it is interesting to compare, for example, Corbyn's comments on the 'mainstream media' with those of the Donald.  My guess is that if you anonymised the comments people wouldn't be able to tell the difference).  But here's the thing: we're post-truth, but we aren't prepared to go full relativist.  So we're led into this place where we have to assume conspiracy: we know the truth, and all those who disagree are blinded.  It would take something with the force of a religious conversion to open their eyes, and so we don't bother trying to engage and persuade.

There is, of course, a big chunk of reality in the post-truth analysis.  We do all live in different worlds.  We see things hugely differently.  So my last thought is this: we don't want to try to persuade in the political realm because it is really, really difficult.  It is difficult because we can't assume the same priorities, or the same goals - it isn't as if we just disagree on the best way to get up the mountain.  We disagree about what the mountain is, or whether there is a mountain at all.  Attempts to persuade would take us pretty quickly into hard conversations - do we agree on any aspects of human flourishing?  Do we even agree about what a human being is?  And here we're in trouble, because I'm not sure we do.  So persuasion would have to go behind politics to huge issues of anthropology, ethics, and ontology.  Who, frankly, can be bothered?

I am not convinced the future is bright for our political discourse.  I don't think we can assume that democracy can work in such a fragmented society.  I wonder what happens next.