The Consumerization of Politics

This post is about how political beliefs have become more about personal identity and profile rather than a debate about the best way to organize society.

By politics, I mean the way that we organize and make decisions in groups and society as a whole, rather than who is going up or down the hierarchy.

Political ‘debate’ is often more about what side you support, rather than discussing various policies or common values. This lead to more polarization in the political sphere, despite the fact that many mainstream political parties or groups now have more in common than they did in the past.

Where once people devoted time to the political project of building a better society, we now express our individual identities in a seemingly fragmented society. Personal identity has replaced any sort of collective identity as the main engagement in wider society. This is why I used the word consumerization in the title, which Wikipedia¹ defines as “the reorientation of product and service designs to focus on (and market to) the end user as an individual consumer, in contrast with an earlier era of only organization-oriented offerings”.

This tendency is similar to the way that consumer products are marketed. With the decrease in the desire to show status due to wealth (partly because real wages are not increasing), products are marketed as a way of showing what sort of person you are. Are you a boring PC user or creative individual that uses a Mac? Are you a good family man who drives a certain car, or an adventurous excitement seeker? You are not told to buy a certain product because it works better, but based on what buying the product says about you.

The Way People Vote

As Daniel Kreiss pointed out in Trump and The Media²:

For over sixty year, political scientists and political communication scholars have consistently found that citizens know and care little about politics. Citizens have little in the way of developed ideological frameworks for understanding politics or consistent policy preferences. (…)
They vote based on their social identities, or how they perceive themselves and others, their partisan identities, and their sense of the group they believe the two political parties represent. (…)

(…) Politics, then, is primarily an identity based phenomenon. One way of thinking about it is akin to sports fandom, albeit with much higher stakes – citizens want their partisan and social group teams to be the “winners” and the other teams to be the “losers.”

The political ideologies or policies at stake are largely unimportant for most Americans compared with the success of the teams they affiliate with”.

It is not just that political figures offer personalities rather than platforms. They offer values and images that the electorate can identify with. Buy the brand that reflects how YOU want to be seen.

All About Me

There are a lot of images going about which are similar to that show on the right. I do not have a great problem with these images, since it does show that you can hold views which some people will find contradictory.

However, it does have ME at the centre. It is about what I want people to think about ME.

One of the problems with the Consumerization of Politics is that it leads to political posturing and personal profile, rather than debating how problems in society can be overcome.

You can get down on one knee, fly the flag, wear the ribbon, however, unless real practical policies are implemented then nothing changes.

The focus on the self is often a great stumbling block when talking about important issues. For example, if you try to talk about reducing plastic use and increasing recycling, many people will talk about how much THEY recycle, why THEY need to use certain plastic. If you try to talk about transport and car use, people will tell you why THEY have to drive. This makes it difficult to get to the underlying problem of how we can create a more environmentally and equitable society.

People demonstrate their ‘political’ involvement by eating organic food, putting up solar panels, buying ethical clothes etc. As I think Naomi Klein said³:

It is not about the brand but about you. You are a good person because you buy the brand.

Taking It Personally

If your politics becomes an expression about your inner-self, then you will defend your politics against personal attacks. You will not see people as disagreeing with you about some policy or other but attacking you for being a bad person. As personal attacks against greedy Tories or naive socialists fly, the problems that politics are meant to solve get pushed to the sidelines.

This is also used as a political tool by both left and right. As Hermann Goering said:

“All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

As I mentioned in a previous post, I think it can be very unuseful to just call someone a racist just because they disagree with you on immigration.

Demonizing the other side and treating them as bad people may be seen as a useful tactic. However, such tactics can easily be used against you. Are you for us or against us? What side are YOU on? In Nazi Germany a good person reported the Jews, in Cultural Revolution China good children reported their parents…

Perhaps more importantly, it is not a good way to change people’s ideas. If you are a Labour supporter, you are not going to win someone over by calling them a greedy Tory bigot.

Morality and Politics

Politics varies from many other disciplines since it is essentially moralistic. Science can tell us what is, but does not tell us what to do about it. We are faced with Hume’s Is–ought problem⁴.

However, when making moral decisions about what course of action to take we should always have a deeper look at them rather than act in a way that we think makes us look good. As the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said in the Tao Te Ching⁵: