Tag: election

Trump’s epic disdain

Trump the innovator is back on the campaign trail, diagnosing and mocking his audiences. And they love it.

I can’t stop watching this video. It’s a random tiny clip from a much (much) longer one. One of Trump’s fund-raising dinners. People at tables in a school gym or a hotel ballroom in Greensboro, North Carolina.

He starts by setting up a culture wars segment with something that sounds like it’s from his regular script (the clip starts in the middle of a sentence):

…critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children…

Speech at North Carolina Republican Party Convention, 11 June 2023

He’s reading this part from what might be an autocue. But then he does an interesting thing, something he does all the time. He stops the speech to reflect on its reception:

It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that [mimes polite clapping], I’m talking about transgender, everybody goes crazy.

There’s something disarming about this. He’s stopped to share an insight he’s acquired while making these speeches – that the culture wars material does better than the tax cuts material. That’s interesting in its own right, of course, but there’s more to this. There’s something in his mode of address.

It’s remarkable, and it must tell us something about his charm for the MAGA crowds. I can’t think of another political speaker who can manage this kind of easy switching between levels of address. It may be unschooled – of course it’s unschooled – but it’s a profound skill. To be able to step in and out of role in this way, to turn on a dime, to offer a kind of simultaneous commentary on his own speech. It’s high rhetoric – and no wonder it’s hard to counter.

Still from a video of Donald Trump's speech at North Carolina Republican Party Convention, 11 June 2023. In the audience in the foreground there is cheering and waving and one person is waving a walking stick
Trump’s audience cheers – one person is apparently waving a walking stick

But there’s more to this. Something about Trump’s relationship to his audience revealed in his manner. He’s showing them a kind of disdain. He goes on to say, as they’re sitting down after the big ‘transgender insanity’ moment, “…five years ago you didn’t know what the hell it was” and it’s an observation on the speed of contemporary politics, on the rotation of issues in and out of salience, but it’s also a put-down. The audience responds. There’s a hesitation, a murmur of uncertainty in the crowd (watch it again, it’s amazing). They’re absorbing Trump’s verdict, as if he’d just said: “you guys, you’re so shallow, I understand you better than you understand yourselves.”

And it’s another fascinating, uniquely Trump moment. He offers the audience nothing. He’s literally mocking them. They take a second to absorb it and they come back for more. It’s gripping, but quite hard to watch. You feel for the audience, you wonder how they’ll adjust to this tough message about their own motivations. But of course we know how they adjust – they soak it up and they keep coming back for more. But to do this I feel sure they have to somehow swallow or suppress what must be an instinctive rejection. It seems almost like the dynamic of bullying – where the bullied has to shrug off the insult, to show no injury, to laugh and proceed as if unhurt. Does Trump bully his audiences?

As a lesson in political speech-making, in campaigning more generally, it’s bewildering, disorienting. It’s probably ungeneralisable, uniquely Trump. What could another politician learn from this? Could a Sunak or a Starmer try this? Can you imagine it? Sunak pausing one of those odd, sixth-form lectures he gives to reflect on the contingent passions of his audience? “You know, two years ago, you didn’t give a damn about the boats. Now you’re all over it.” You know the answer.

There may be other politicians who use this approach, this chaotic, provocative mode of address but I can’t think of any. It exists in sharp contrast to the obsequious mode available to other contemporary politicians when speaking even to the most supportive audiences. These conventional politicians – even the populists – try perfectly to reflect the room’s mood, to offer nothing that does not confirm or reinforce, to build approval. Persuasion for these more ordinary speakers proceeds via recognition, identification. The politician must visibly connect, understand, share the audience’s feelings. Politicians can be lofty, inspiring, even a bit cool but there can be no distance. And certainly no disdain.

Trump’s genius is to have somehow short-circuited this standard, careful way of speaking, the “I’m just one of you” mode. He seems to give so little – there’s no generosity, no concession of any kind in this speech. He’s connecting directly with some some other part of the brain, a rarely-spoken-to part of his audience’s psyche. I’m beyond diagnosing this. But I’m intrigued. It’s bleakly impressive – undimmed by nearly a decade of exposure and now we’ve got another opportunity to see it deployed, in earnest, in the 2024 Presidential campaign. Conventional politicians, weak rhetoricians, pay attention!

End of the line

The Conservative Party is, famously, the most successful political party in history.

The party is a shape-shifting cockroach that’s survived the whole industrial era, the expansion of the franchise, the growth of the cities and the urban middle class, revolution all across Europe, secularisation and the erosion of the power of the gentry. It shouldn’t be here – it should have died in a country house in Hampshire in about 1920. The Tory party is obviously indestructible. But it has its moments – usually right at the end of a long period in power. Like now for instance.

I’m a bit geeky about the fantastic Nuffield Election Studies books; fat retrospective reference books, full of data and scholarly description, published a year or so after each election since 1945. For many editions, the books were very much the domain of celebrity psephologists David Butler and Anthony King. I’ve got a pile of them, going back to 1966.

The data’s mostly redundant, of course, since you can get it all on Wikipedia now but the essays are the main thing anyway. And often a useful reminder that there’s not much that’s new even about the present political polycrisis (clusterfuck? Imbroglio?).

I was looking at the 1997 edition, mainly because I was getting all sorts of weird deja-vu vibes from the conduct of the present government. The same kind of end-of-the-line feeling that haunted the Major government swept away by Labour in 1997 clings to the current lot. Sunak and his crew of millionares, spivs and bullies seem to have got stuck at the tawdry end of the conservative policy spectrum, much as Major and his awful cabinet did.

For years now it’s been all VIP lanes, complicated tax avoidance schemes, highly-remunerative second jobs, huge secret loans and preferment for old pals: the whole shopping list of cheesy political misbehaviour. It won’t have escaped your attention that we’ve even got a full-blown ‘cash-for-access’ scandal brewing.

So let’s catalogue some correspondences between the end of the Sunak period and the end of the Major period:

Sleaze, sleaze and more sleaze

Photograph taken at a party held in Number 10 Downing Street during the pandemic lockdown. Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds up a glass in a toast.
“Hold my beer“

To state the obvious, Major’s five years in office were marked, like no other government of the modern era, by scandal and impropriety (enter Boris Johnson from stage right: “hold my beer”). Major’s government was beset by domestic, sexual, financial and propriety scandals – and they kept coming. It seemed that every time Major sought to reset the government’s standing with electors, there was another one. Cash for questions, Jonathan Aitken at the Paris Ritz, David Mellor’s holiday in Marbella, Asil Nadir’s watch… So many scandals that they’re now literally on the curriculum in British schools.

Of course, in comparison with the record of the current Tory government – especially over the last five years or so – the offences of Michael Mates and Neil Hamilton and Alan Duncan begin to look almost quaint, especially when you consider just how difficult it has become to dislodge an offending Minister or MP. Surely time to update the A-level Politics sylabus.

The chicken run

A still from the animated film Chicken Run showing a terrified chicken n close-up
A chicken, running

As the Major government ground on, Tory MPs – conscious of the polling and of their already-dwindling majority – began to seek safer seats to stand in. Boundary changes announced earlier in the Parliament that were hitting smaller, Tory-held constituencies, contributed to the spectacle. Today’s polling, even after the Rishi bounce, continues to look grim for the government – the Tories could be reduced to an all-time low of 113 seats in 2024 (or worse). Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat certainly can’t be considered safe, and, although his constituency party reselected him last month, it must be likely that he’ll be switched to a safer seat in time for the election (Johnson must be regretting that he didn’t become MP for Hertsmere – 172 places further up the table of safer seats – when he had the chance). The thoroughly Darwinian shuffling and selecting and deselecting has already begun – and they’re calling it a chicken run again. It will certainly be unedifying but probably quite entertaining.

And a public health crisis

MP and Conservative Minister eats a hamburger made from British beef with his daughter Cordelia during the BSE crisis in 1990
“Hold this burger“

It was no pandemic – less than 200 people in Britain have died from the human variant – but the BSE crisis was a classic of the genre and now looks spookily like a preview of the Covid-19 catastrophe. It was very much a Conservative creation – first when the Thatcher government loosened regulations on animal feeds, permitting the feeding of infected brains and spinal chords to beef cattle, and subsequently when the Major government first ignored and then played down the nasty effects of BSE before being finally obliged to admit the grim connection with human CJD in 1996. The impact of the crisis rattled through the UK economy for years – over four million cattle were slaughtered and the final international bans on British beef were not lifted until 2018.

It’s not just the Tories who seem to be re-living the early nineties. Starmer’s Labour party has made a close study of the successes of his party while in opposition and hopes fervently that he can reproduce them.

  • The Nuffield books are textbooks and they’re often, obviously, out of print, so they’ll usually be stupidly expensive. Amazon has the 1992 edition for over sixty quid, for instance. But if you dig a bit you’ll usually find a second-hand copy for cheap. Here’s the same book for £16.95 on Abe Books, for instance.

School governors. Representative or professional. Choose one.

Last week I spent a few hours floor-walking at a Fair Field parents’ evening, drumming up interest in our parent governor vacancies (I’m chair of govs and a parent myself). I love this bit of the job. You learn a huge amount and there are always surprises and insights. Thinking about it afterwards, the parents I spoke to fell into four groups:

  1. Instant enthusiasm. Done it before, already doing it somewhere else, definitely think about it.
  2. Curious. Aware of our existence, considered it before but never tried it. Might have a go.
  3. No idea. A handful of parents didn’t know we existed, thought we were some kind of external body or had no idea parents could be represented. Some communication to be done here, evidently (makes note). In this group, also, were parents from foreign education systems or with English as a second language.
  4. Most interesting group: parents who knew the governors existed, knew that parents were represented but had ruled themselves out: “left school too early”, “not good enough for that.”, “you wouldn’t want me” (actual quotes). One parent thought her dyslexia would rule her out. Included here are parents who think they don’t have time: “I’ve already got two jobs” was common, so was “I’m a single parent.” Difficult to argue with that, knowing how much time is needed.

We’ll get enough candidates to fill our two vacancies later this term and I hope this bit of outreach will have helped people understand what we do, who we are, why we exist.

There’s a tension here, though, which can only get worse, as the latest round of reforms takes effect. We want to broaden representation, get a wider range of stakeholders involved, make the governing body look a more like the parent body. But we also want to tighten things up, make things more professional, make our contribution more strategic, more effective. When filling governor vacancies, we instinctively want to recruit the kind of managers, lawyers and marketing people we’re going to need if we decide to go for academy status, for instance. And we want governors who need minimal support to get going, who know about how committees work and so on.

So can we do both? Can we bring in inexperienced governors who may lack confidence and the skills we need and hope they can make a strategic contribution? Or should we try to shamelessly target the people we need and worry a bit less about being representative? Either way, the current way of doing things doesn’t seem ideal: there are hundreds of thousands of governor vacancies in Britain and there’s a shortage of strategic skills almost everywhere. These are serious questions: Mr Gove wants governors to lift their game and Ofsted are paying more attention to governance than ever.

So could we try a different approach? If trying to be both representative and professional is too much, how about separating the two functions, concentrating on beefing up the strategic usefulness of the governors and handling the representation of parents and community differently? What if we set up an elected ‘parent panel’ of perhaps a dozen enthusiastic parents whose job would be to voice parents’ concerns, examine the governors’ decisions (and the school’s data) and bring the school’s leadership new ideas? (Google suggests that some schools already have parent panels…).

We’d still have to provide for the statutory representation of parents, of course, and our ‘panel’ couldn’t take on any of the legal responsibilities of governors but I think this approach might actually expand representation, make us more transparent and quite possibly improve our decisions. This is a half-baked idea, not a finished proposal. And I haven’t tested it with my fellow governors or with anyone else for that matter so I’d welcome your thoughts on this in the comments. Have you tried something like this? What have you learnt?

Shiny floor democracy

I expected little of the debates. I thought they’d slot into the campaign like all the other more-or-less artificial election media gewgaws and gimmicks: like party leaders going on kids TV or trying to skateboard or shear a sheep or whatever. I expected a slightly embarrassing, highly stage-managed performance. Something a bit cheesy and certainly not a source of information.

So, like everyone, I was surprised when the debates turned out to be:

A source of comparative information about the candidates and their positions. Honestly, we’re so accustomed to the idea that you can’t derive useful information from a politician’s raw discourse – that it’s all spin and that you have to pass it all through some kind of media-provided filter to get to the truth – that we all assumed the debates would be like that, only more so. And they weren’t. Something about the format, something about putting the three of them up against each other, something about hearing their statements together, seems to provide more genuine understanding. As a viewer, at the end of the first debate, I felt I’d been able to hold up and compare both the substance and the presentation of the three leaders’ positions in a way I’d never done before. Blimey.

A genuine alternative to a monstering from Paxman. The debates, in fact, seem to make the grillings dished out by Humphrys, Paxman, Boulton et al seem clumsy, unproductive, old-fashioned – just as Robin Day and his 1960s school of combative interrogation made the old, “anything to add, Minister?” deference seem old-fashioned in its day. If the three-way debate with its strict rules actually catches on, I think the broadcast bruisers are going to have to update their technique: being more systematic, less arbitrary, less keen on the sound of their own voices. This might yield an improvement in the heat:light ratio, if nothing else.

Real democratic events. Appointments with the democratic process, made voluntarily by unfeasibly large numbers of willing electors. In the three debates British electoral politics got its Dr Who moment – millions gathered round the TV, popcorn and beer at the ready. And if these media milestones are going to become regular occurances (a bit like Harry Hill’s fights). And if the whole electoral process is going to pivot on these shiny floor democratic events and the frenzy of concurrent chatter on the soc nets, then the shabby, stage-managed electoral communications of old (the pressers, the back-of-the-bus briefings, the clunky daily ‘narratives’) will have to be modernised sharply.

Genuinely Influential. Can you think of an election media event from your lifetime that has moved the polls and changed perceptions so sharply? Jennifer’s ear? The Sheffield Rally? Chicken feed: irrelevant by comparison (although I guess I ought to wait for the result…). The liberals are in the race in a way that no one could possibly have predicted. All bets are off.

Panic inducing for the media. Even from the outside, the last-days-of-Saigon hysteria in the newsrooms and boardrooms of some of Britain’s national papers after that first debate was obvious. For the election to run out of control, to jump the rails in the way it did would have been hard to bear in a good year but with the print media’s relevance already tumbling faster than ever it must have been a cruel few days for editors. The lucky few journalists who could boast a handful of top liberals in their speed-dials jumped in prestige over night and decades of deliberately ignoring the party began to look less wise for the others.

I don’t want to overstate this. An election result and a week or two of elapsed time will put the debates in their proper context. They might turn out to have been a gimmick after all. I honestly can’t wait to find out.