A Portrait of the Start of an Election Year


It is a cliché to say that elections are like wars – of course they are. They, like a civil war, divide the country up into regions, and interest groups; and pitch interest groups one against the other, making them compete not directly for land or strategic towns, so much as popularity, and the land masses it brings. The result (as with a war, is then a government, thrown up by struggle, and by chance, a government that then has as its first task to settle the ‘war-torn nation. The struggle might be not that physical, but the basic format – the struggle for support, for finance, and ultimately for land (constituencies) is pretty much the same.

  At which point of course something else enters the picture. This parallel is a trite one. It is something which we are all too aware of. In a sense, elections do not make any sense unless they are defined akin to a war. If one thinks about it in the round (and from outside) then the entire enterprise of electing a government is weird. I mean why should two (or three political parties feel that they are the ones who ought to be able to form government? Why are they so special (or better, given that they are not, and cannot even choose effective leaders!) why should they portray themselves as the only choices? More than that, why should the ability to court success lead one to government? Is being able to persuade and bully or bore a group of people in a district to vote for you itself a qualification for governement? If so, how does it qualify one for success in running a highly complicated technocracy?

  At which point two further analogies for war kick in. On the one hand, we are all caught up within the Churchill dictum: Democracy might be a dreadful and daft system, but it is sill better than all the others. By which of course we mean that it might be dreadful at governing, but at least it is better than war and at least it has a proven track record (in the West) of containing the violence and horrors that living en masse with other can provoke. Violent feelings are effectively sidelined in the blandness of policies (as they are in the market) and all is well. Democracy then slips from being less about a system of government and more about a system to stop or repress anti-government. It is the antidote to war. This doctrine is of course one that has recently propelled the West into numerous wars, in the cause of freedom (a real irony of course; we are warring on the behalf of the antidote to war….). More than that we have sold to other nations the belief that as long as they are a democracy, then everything will be fine. Elections might have been rigged or stolen, violence or poverty might be endemic, and yet if they are a democracy or there is a semblance of government (with prime ministers and presidents and whatever) then everything ought to be alright.

  We then sell democracy instead of giving bread or aid or structural reform. Here of course the picture becomes rather more muddied. For democracy is confused at this point not merely with civil war, but also with wider colonial or to give it its fig leaf, post-colonial struggle. We like then, those democracies which we have fostered or foisted on others, and actively despise those which we have not. We might allow (in the name of the United Nations) corrupt regimes or frankly stupid compromises to flourish in the name of democracy (Kenya or Afghanistan); whilst distrusting the ‘democratic status’ of those democracies that reject us (Venezuela), and condemning those democracies that form their own highly corrupt stitch ups (Iran). The trouble here of course is that we are not at all subtle about it. We assume that our take on freedom (as our take on global warming) is all too accurate and all correct and all the rest should hang; and so we mix political freedom, with our own dominance in a new and obnoxious way. (We are incidentally playing the same games with global warming and the free market).

  What is more we then lose sight of that other analogy here. We think of what we are doing as ‘nation building’, and so in a very real sense, every bit as good as aid. We then worry about other nations, say China, who are giving aid or helping economies without foisting on them ‘political freedoms’. We therefore assume that they are being corrupt in some way or buying influence, whereas we are merely being the apostles of Western values…That is, we are the apostles of the word ‘freedom’, and the ability in a mature country to talk about things, and discuss matters as a democracy, whilst they are merely offering squalid bribes.

  Well maybe – this claim of ours theoretically might be right, if that other feature of democracy did not kick in here. On the face of it, we claim it (our version of democracy) is better than the rest because it allows one to discuss matters. Problems are highlighted, reviewed, worried at, and perhaps solved. Governments claim then to offer rational alternative solutions to certain problems. Opposition is all about finding problems to critique government with, and to solve. The very stuff of the everyday bread and butter problems of the world, ought to become the concerns of the politicians; they are meant to be waging war for our happiness. Well theoretically. But of course wars never work like that. A war is not won by following laws, or obeying a series of conventions. It is only won by whatever means, and however, and that is enough. One triumphs, one does not moralize. The point of an election campaign is then never to air grievances so much as to mould all existing grievances, all bugbears and problems, real or perceived, into a series of stale arguments, and then through them, into the support or the rejection of a political party. The stuff of everyday life, and the real problems of a society are then themselves sterilized and contained. They become merely another chit in the battle, another stake, which political parties bid for. They want the votes of whole groups, such as the wealthy, or the single mothers or the racists, or the immigrants: they do not care about the votes of the bankers or the travellers who are not allowed to vote or…

  The role then of elections is not really to solve anything, or even to have a debate about anything (it is all too stagey, and too warlike for that). It is rather to sterilize problems, by capturing them in the gauze of the campaign and cod solutions or warm words, which appear to trap them, and prevent them from appearing too frightening. Problems then allow one to create in the other side a bogeyman, and in oneself a redeemer (the current Tory move), which then allows one to recruit all the more voters to one’s war effort. In short the needs of the campaign, or the struggle, cut across rhyme, reason or sense and becomes merely about bodies and the count, and nothing about what is promised or dreamed or hoped for; the entire enterprise becomes militantly barren. It wages a war of barrenness - that is of cutting things down to size, and containing problems within other problems and within warm words (and the kind of jargon which every recruiting sergeant can spout). It is no wonder then that the country at the start of every long campaign merely wants it all to go away (or be buried under the snow).

  However at this point, another aspect of that war as election simile comes into play. The point about a war is that it is defined not merely between sides, but also within them. Those who become used to killing and to struggle in terms of death or betrayal become used to that method as a way of dealing with their fellows. War breeds war. Or rather, war is an affect, a way of being caught up in that which is pitched between people. The wars which we fight together, do not preclude then the wars which we fight between one another. (The War of the Roses are the paradigm here: one side, the Yorkist one, then destroyed itself by not being able to distance itself from the paradigm of war, and so pulling its party apart, in internecine struggles.) The election as war is a very dangerous paradigm. Once one takes it as a model, or a mind game, it as easily applies within a party as without.

  The result is of course that just as the country is being (somewhat unwillingly) cajoled into another election, that the Labour Party itself wobbles, and wonders about having a coup of its own.

  The very notion of elections, then, and the wars which they promote becomes itself a focal point for all the dissatisfaction in a party. It makes some feel that this must be the moment one has an election – or better themselves have an election. As the election might solve the country’s problems, hence it might solve their problems too. And so they in blind optimism (and career mashing folly) act, happy in the belief that others ought to share their concerns. The problem of course is that others are also bound up in that other script, the one about the general election, and do not want to consider anything else, and so the plot fails.

And yet its very existence is so instructive. It is always the problem with parallels to the set paradigms (elections as wars); that they are not contained within the paradigms which they create, but can, at any time (and always) spin off elsewhere, and involve one in other struggles. The logic in the one sphere, becomes then applied to other situations, creating God knows what.

  It is fitting then at the last days of New labour, that this mock coup occurs, as in a sense it defines what was really so wrong about the government in the first place. They were too fond of legislation defined not in the general but rather the specific case. They passed then anti-terror laws, or laws of human rights or of policing with gay abandon, and as if they were only ‘doing something’. The problem was, that these pieces of law, defined often enough in the light of an example setting paradigm (9/11 or some horrific murder or abuse of powers), then became able to be taken and spun elsewhere, across other areas. Anti-terror laws became then what they theoretically always were, a way to police a people; human rights laws defended the just and unjust; while policing laws increased the rights of one group (the paranoid about crime) at the expense of rhyme or reason. This is of course why pictures and portraits are so very dangerous. The model which captures a situation or a way of proceeding, ‘election as war’, or legislation as guarantor of life and freedom, might be, in another situation an instrument of idiocy and oppression. A fact that is certainly true of elections. 

  This last fact, then explains why our attempts to export democracy as a war containment device is so problematic. Behind it is an assumption of what a war looks like. We imagine a civil war, with its regions and its interests. To vote in an election is to re-run Western struggles, English, American, or French etc.. The paradigm is then set. But take this system to other countries where war was rather different (say Africa) - smaller scale, or endemic or not destructive, or bound up with a patronage system of a system of segmentary opposition – and the war paradigm will do different things. The war is not the struggle between parties, but the struggle between local interests and patronages. One person’s vote becomes then merely anther thing to sell.

  Here one needs caution: It always was the case that the vote was bought and sold in the West. MPs do well if they are good constituency MPs. That is, good at fixing local problems - or better at using their patronage for the good of their population. But the corruption in the West is always understood (for right or for wrong) as merely a part of the wider system. Local interests then allow one to assemble the army, while ‘the cause’ remains distinct; one then marches off to war (and then the fight is in the terms of big battles and major regional interests). If however, one simply does not have this model for war; if war is a local concern or something to be waged between neighbours (at certain times or in certain places) or formalized or whatever, this story of local corruption in the name of higher principles will not wash. It becomes merely about localism. Elections then slip straightaway into a patronage and an auction, and nothing can stop them.

  In short in the election war, we are all portrait painters. What we are painting is the colours of parties, and across the blood and thunder of name-calling and argy bargy, is a mock war. We are all caught in the painting of this war, in the feeling of it and behave accordingly. This war, which is always our war (we are re-fighting our own civil wars) forms the implicit assumption to democracy. It is what makes it work (or not) for us: it is the pretext we use for it, and the way we feel it. The only problem of course is that when we take the portrait of this struggle, and foist democracies in other places or countries or histories, we forget this backdrop. The result is that they then paint their own democracies in terms of their own recent local struggles, a result (as good critics or artists must), we either condemn or patronize; whilst they of course merely see that they are doing just the same as us…