Politics Is Becoming an Ant Mill
Without a social base, the political class walks in circles until exhaustion.
I recently came across the phenomena of ant mills. They happen when a section of army ants breaks off from its colony. Losing the ability to track pheromones, they instead begin to follow each other in a circle. Purposelessly, they continue in a spiral until exhaustion and often death.
Some ant mills can be truly massive in size. The largest one ever discovered was some 1,200 meters in diameter. To each ant, the distances traveled must seem substantive enough to appear normal, but they are really just trapped in a vortex. As an onlooker, it is so strange and mesmerizing to watch.
I don’t want to declare that “we’re all trapped in an ant mill” or something like that. But allow me to say, there’s something to that. When political parties decouple from their social bases and become more and more fixated on their own self-preservation, they do start to resemble ant mills.
A historical comparison might help here. In The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981), historian Arno Mayer makes the case that the political state of Europe was caught in something like an ant mill before World War I. Despite mass industrial society giving rise to new forms of social and economic organization, European states were still held captive by the titled nobility and its premodern order. According to Mayer, the premodern regime grew separate from the actual realities over which it ruled. This meant that when an outside element entered the picture, like Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of the Archduke, the old order responded by senselessly following the dictates of its own insular logic and plunged the continent into self-destruction. After two world wars, the titled nobility as a class was effectively no more.
Bringing it back to today’s ant mill, there has been a decoupling of politics and the social bases that democracy traditionally relied upon. In postwar political science, it was taken for granted that politics always had to consider its social bases.1 Yet, since the 1970s, many of these same social bases have undergone a hollowing out in post-industrial democracies. One example is the decline of labor and its share of total economic activity.2 Another is the dealignment of social and economic class with its expected ideological and political preferences.3 The same applies to religion.4 Amid weakened social bases, electoral outcomes can sometimes be more volatile as those identifying as 'independents' become the plurality.5
The impact of these trends is becoming increasingly clear: parties now devote an excessive amount of energy toward short-term ends, especially maintaining their own political power. This started to be apparent in the United States during the 1980s when a record rise of political consultants, pollsters, and the like made Washington their new home.6 The 'permanent campaign,' a fitting term, first entered the political lexicon then. With the hollowing out of social bases, political power obsesses more and more over its own reproduction. It may even confusingly start to view its own self-preservation as a social base in itself. In this environment, state capacity really suffers and it struggles to accomplish even the most basic of policy goals, as many are familiar with.
“It Feels Like Nobody Can Govern”
Just a few days ago, the relatively liberal polling agency FiveThirtyEight came to this sobering conclusion: “Voters Don't Think Either Party Deserves To Govern.” A majority of likely voters said neither party was worthy of their vote, and that was just a week before the U.S. midterms, commonly described as an election where “democracy itself is at stake.” That’s a damning condemnation of the ant mill that is today’s politics.
But rather than reform itself, the political class has atrophied further as it continues to lose authority from the social bases that once legitimized it. Such conditions would normally produce some needed self-reflection. Yet, the public’s general dissatisfaction has only stiffened the political class in its weakened state capacity, now unable to do much other than preserve itself. In my view, one future battleground will be between this increasingly self-interested political sphere and the separate, atomized public underneath it (which I documented in my piece The Social Recession). Something has to break here.
On an unrelated note, the overwhelming amount of responses to my last piece really took me by surprise! It spurred a really thoughtful 300+ comment thread on HackerNews as well as so many discussions on Reddit. It was also the subject of a whole hour-long callers segment for The Elias Makos Show on Montreal’s CJAD800 radio station. I was asked to come on for a few minutes despite having never done something like that before. I hope the people driving and listening to the radio got something out of that. Anyway, welcome new subscribers!
One of the most popular classics of postwar political science is Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960) by Seymour Martin Lipset.
Surprisingly, McKinsey has produced some thorough work on how the labor share of total income in the United States has fallen off a cliff, despite being one of its leading engineers. (https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/a-new-look-at-the-declining-labor-share-of-income-in-the-united-states).
The trends demonstrate “a strong presence of political dealignment and increasing turnout gaps regarding both the class and religious cleavage” in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States (https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1475-6765.12336).
As documented in “Political Consultants, Campaign Professionalization, and Media Attention” (2006) by Costas Panagopoulos, pg. 867.
Loving your stuff so much :) really high-qual intellectual nutrition.
How can an ant mill be escaped?