50 ± 1

The trouble with elections and the principle of passive consent.

Like you (most likely), I have been puzzled for at least a decade by the phenomenon of impossibly close elections—too close to call, with winners by the tiniest of margins, yet the stakes seem huge.

How can the electorate be so evenly split? It’s mathematically virtually impossible that almost exactly half the people vote one way and half the other.

One explanation might be that there is little difference between political parties, so how people vote hardly matters. However, that is clearly not the case, at least not on the surface.

In their book Hegemony Now, Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams (Verso, 2022) give a very plausible, bigger-picture explanation: When we vote, we are in effect consenting to things we do not necessarily agree with or believe in. They call this phenomenon passive consent.

For folks on the right, Gilbert and Williams say, the feeling is that those purporting to represent our interests are the best we can hope for. For folks on the left, the idea of overturning capitalism is dead, and the feeling is similar; that the so-called “left” party is the best we can do.

This sad state of affairs does much to explain why the electorate appears to be so evenly divided. We aren’t actually that divided, we’re just not enthusiastic about either party. That’s what 50 ±1 looks like: indifference.

Gilbert and Williams have a lot of interesting things to say about how we got here and how we might make things better in the future. How we got here seems to have a lot to do with consumerism and the managerial classes. As long as most people have what they need and can enjoy consuming, no one is motivated to change the status quo. And to keep everyone rowing more or less in the same direction, we have hierarchies of professionals, semi-professionals and consultants to provide role models and mind the herd as it were.

About the future, I haven’t got to that part of the book yet. With the financial and technology industries having “hegemony” (a fancy word for power), the odds seem stacked against us “common” folks changing anything.

P.S. I’ve installed the free version of an app called Grammarly to help me with spelling and… grammar. It’s interesting because it’s helpful but sometimes a little too helpful. It will “wash” phrasing to clean things up but sometimes you lose your voice that way, the particular way you group words. Also, it is annoyingly always prompting you to buy the “pro” version. It tells you where things could be improved, just not how. Good thing you can turn the damn thing off and on.