Why we need more ‘polarisation’
The real divide is between the people and the elites.
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This is an edited version of a speech Tom Slater gave at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 20 October 2024, in the session ‘The polarisation problem: can we speak across the divide?’.
I’d like to spend the time I have mounting a trenchant defence of polarisation – or at least what is often called ‘polarisation’ by our political and media classes.
The narrative that is constantly being spun at the moment is that, as of about 10 years ago, politics was… perfect.
It was consensual. It was moderate.
Political parties might have disagreed around the edges, but they could come together under some core assumptions – and in their shared deference to technocratic expertise.
Then the populists showed up and supposedly ruined everything.
It’s certainly true that, prior to 2016, political parties only ever seemed to be dancing on the head of a pin, and often ostentatiously dismissed ‘ideology’.
But what has become abundantly clear is that that supposed consensus, that supposedly moderate settlement, was serving ordinary people terribly, and in some aspects was batshit crazy.
After all, it was the ‘consensus’ that insisted that vast swathes of law and policy should be decided by unaccountable technocrats, in Brussels and London, removed from ordinary people and insulated from democratic accountability.
It was the ‘consensus’ that insisted that a combination of mass migration, multiculturalism and a project of national self-loathing was obviously the route to a harmonious, integrated nation.
And it was the ‘consensus’ that, until about five minutes ago, insisted that the best, most caring way to relieve confused, gender-nonconforming young people of their distress was to sterilise them, before cutting off their perfectly healthy body parts.
When they talk of the ‘consensus’, what they mean is a series of self-serving, often deranged things that the elites all agree on, but practically no one else does.
And when they say ‘polarisation’, they mean a large enough group of ordinary people daring to voice or vote their displeasure with these bogus, harmful orthodoxies.
Indeed, polarisation – by definition – should be a two-way street. It means the division of people into two sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions or beliefs.
It implies that both sides have their excesses.
And yet that is never how it is used in mainstream discussion, which seems to be filled with increasingly unhinged ‘centrists’ accusing everyone else of being unhinged and polarised.
Here’s a pretty representative quote:
‘Populism, polarisation and post-truth politics are challenging the very foundations on which we believed our democracies to be built.’
Those are the words of depressingly popular podcaster Alastair Campbell – a man who lied us into a barbarous war and who spent the past few years flatly accusing Boris Johnson of being a ‘fascist’.
The so-called centrists might engage in a bit of throat-clearing from time to time, conceding that both sides have their extremes, but they don’t really mean it.
For this session, I waded through the 2020 book, Why We’re Polarised, by Ezra Klein – who is the founder of Vox magazine in the US and the kind of quintessential Obama-era liberal.
Much of it is a quite dry summary of all the available literature on America’s party-political polarisation. But naturally his conclusion is that, in the end, it’s all the Republicans’ fault.
Or as he puts it: ‘If polarisation has given the Democratic Party the flu, the Republican Party has caught pneumonia.’
‘It’s not polarisation when we do it’ seems to be the message of all this.
Coming back to the UK, I’m often struck by the fact that, when it comes to the issues we’re supposedly so riven and polarised by, there’s actually a lot of consensus.
Among ordinary people, that is.
Take gender ideology – one of the central topics we are supposedly so ‘polarised’ about.
We have a Labour prime minister who has spent the best part of the past four years wrestling with the question of whether women can have penises – and if so, what precise proportion of women possess one.
I think the figure he eventually landed upon was 0.1 per cent. Which means one in every thousand women does have a penis.
Which is still an awful lot of penises, when you think about it.
Unsurprisingly, the public are under no such illusions.
A poll in June found that two-thirds of Labour voters – not just voters as a whole, but Labour voters – reject the notion of the female member.
We’re also told Britain is divided over the issue of migration, even though a clear majority want numbers to come down.
Incidentally, this issue, to a degree, transcends Leave and Remain lines. Ahead of the referendum, 62 per cent told Ipsos that migration should be reduced.
On a sillier note, we’ve often been told that Harry and Meghan are deeply polarising figures, with loads of woke fans in one corner and bigoted haters in the other.
In fact, they are widely disliked. On YouGov’s tracker of the most popular royals, they can often be found battling it out with Prince Andrew for last place.
But enough about them.
Of course there is such a thing as polarisation. There are good and bad forms of it. It depends what you’re polarising around.
In politics, lines need to be drawn and sides need to be taken.
A polarised politics, in which the big questions are on the table, is, I would argue, infinitely preferable to one in which there is no proper democratic choice and voters are shut out of the process.
But my point here is that what is so often dismissed as ‘polarisation’ these days is actually the majority quietly pushing back against an elite that has gone bananas.
Last time I checked, that’s called democracy. And I look forward to seeing more of it.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater
Picture by: Ryoji Iwata.
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