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 their ability to track pheromones, they instead begin to follow each other in a circle. They continue in a spiral until exhaustion and often death.

Some ant mills can be truly massive. 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’re just trapped in a vortex. As an onlooker, it’s mesmerizing to watch.

Would it be a stretch to say politics today resembles something like an ant mill? When political parties decouple from their social bases and become more and more fixated on their 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.

At the start of the 20th century, mass industrial society gave rise to new forms of social and economic life. Yet, European politics was still held captive by the old regime and its titled nobility. According to Mayer, this old regime persisted despite the actual society under them undergoing great changes. They were also slow to realize the ground below them was not firm like it once was. When an outside element finally entered the picture—like Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand—the old order responded by following its own insular logic to suicidal ends. By the end of the two world wars, the titled nobility was a shell of its former self and its power was effectively no more.

The aristocratic old regime before World War I was something like an ant mill. Bringing it back to today, 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 social bases have hollowed out in post-industrial democracies. One example is the decline of labor’s political power along with 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 become more volatile as those identifying as 'independents' become the plurality.⁵

The U.S. context, taken from Are Our Parties Realigning? (2018)

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 is because they do not have social bases to rely upon and “deliver the goods” like it once did. This started to become 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 It was also when the term “permanent campaign” first entered the political lexicon.

Under such conditions, who is politics for? With the hollowing out of social bases, political power obsesses over its reproduction, almost exclusively. It becomes more afraid of the voting public and unknowns. Its legitimacy is perceived as always under threat. Political parties may even start to view their own self-preservation as a social base in itself (i.e. “society cannot exist without us”). In this environment, state capacity really suffers as it struggles to accomplish even the most basic of policy goals.

“It Seems 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 public. 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. It’s now unable to focus on much else other than preserve itself. In my view, one future battleground will be between this increasingly self-interested political sphere and the atomized, separate public underneath it. Something has to break here.

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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!

1. One of the most popular classics of postwar political science is Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960) by Seymour Martin Lipset.

2. 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).

3. 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).

4. See 3.

5. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/are-our-parties-realigning

6. As documented in “Political Consultants, Campaign Professionalization, and Media Attention” (2006) by Costas Panagopoulos, pg. 867.