Who's Powerful Now? A Vision of the Anti-Political

One of the contemporary issues that the neoliberal world have been facing is the growth of the anti-political sentiment in the societies. The United Kingdom is no exception, where surveys and audits have been made to keep a track of the anti-political sentiment over the past decades. The last Audit of Political Engagement 12 by Hansard Society proves that the growth of anti-political sentiment in the British society is continuing to expand. According to the Audit, only 49% of the people are certain to vote in the event of an immediate general election; only 16% of the people between 12-24 year old say that they are certain to vote in an election and 30% say that they are certain not to vote; only 61% say that “parliament is essential to our democracy”, which was 67% in the previous year; and most importantly, 58% of the respondents think that their “democracy does not address their interests or those of their family.” It is clear that we need to understand the common tendencies in the British society and explain them with a detailed analysis of the core underlying complications rather than merely theorising the possible causes behind the growth of the anti-political sentiment with a top-down approach.

The academic inquiry into the issue has extended its scope and analysis only at the turn of the century. There has been much argumentation about the disengagement of people from formal politics and many of those arguments address the growth of anti-political sentiment as a problem, a trouble that the political agenda must immediately unfasten. I will rather address the growth of anti-political sentiment as an issue, a puzzle that needs to be constitutively understood so that the possibility of a better political platform for everyone can be taken into consideration.

            In the following, I will take Gerry Stoker’s article entitled “Anti-Politics in Britain”, written in 2011, as an example of the primary discourse on the discussions about people’s disengagement from politics, since his approach to the issue exemplifies the general lack of critical inquiry in the conceptual reach of the discussions about anti-politics. I argue that Stoker’s argumentation, representing the general moral imperative in the approach of the elite democracy builders, is based on the premise that we need to come up with a solution when identifying a problem. However, this approach leads the rampant literature on anti-politics to the ignorance of the potentially essential causes of the growth of the anti-political sentiment in Britain since the 1950s, since it anticipates the evaluation of an ontological problem as an empirical one and hence tosses out what has been conscientiously avoided by the elite in the political sphere. Adversely, I argue that the growth of the anti-political sentiment in the British society is a result of people’s utmost realisation that democracy cannot be attained in the current system of governing in which the understanding of democracy is reduced to the idea of having an election in every five years by the politically powerful elite itself. I claim that the political institutions cannot be analysed as if they were machines that were inquired and claimed having a problem in their workings, but rather, they can be revolutionised in a way that would lead the whole society engage in politics actively, which is to be managed by a comprehensive consideration of the reorganisation of the social world and achievement of social emancipation.

One of the essential problems of the discussions about the growth of anti-politics is the fact that the discussions lack of a terminology that the great many would agree on. It is indeed quite difficult to describe what anti-politics is and what the reasons behind it are. When we inquire into the previous literature written on the issue of anti-politics, such as Colin Hay’s Why We Hate Politics and Matthew Flinders’ Defending Politics: Why Democracy Matters in the Twenty-First Century, we encounter the fact that the terminology is determined by a top-down approach, which makes it quite difficult to render a clear portrayal of the issue. This approach is also adapted by Gerry Stoker in his article “Anti-Politics in Britain” since it is only when he comes up with potential reasons to explain anti-politics that he is able to describe what anti-politics is. In his article, Stoker lists five possible broad causes for the growth of the anti-political sentiment; power, process, partisanship, performance, and proficiency, with utmost importance given to the issue of power.

Gerry Stoker explains the political disengagement in the British society primarily by the issue of power as he problematically and vaguely states that “one common explanation of alienation is that citizens have been made to feel powerless.” On the one hand, Stoker’s statement lacks a clear description of power, which leads his argument to an uncertain comprehension of anti-politics, and on the other hand, the statement implies that citizens have never had the power but felt powerful at some time in the past, which is now lost and can be evaluated as the essential cause of the growth of the anti-political sentiment. That is to say, Stoker’s description illustrates the main problem with the discussions about anti-politics in the academic and public spheres by not inquiring deep into the understanding of power and unknowingly accepting the fact that people have never had the power. Thus and so, an effective analysis of the sources and control of power is precluded.

The attitude of the theoretical arguments towards the issue of power is the key that could unlock the issue of the anti-political sentiment. Laura Jenkins argues that the prevalent publications on anti-politics are not “explicit enough about the relationship between politicising and depoliticising dynamics, or the conception of the political on which it draws”, of which Gerry Stoker falls into the trap when he states that there are two different approaches towards the issue of power as a cause of anti-politics, namely liberal and collectivist variations, “with the former placing greater emphasis on individual empowerment […] and the latter concentrating more on greater opportunities for collective engagement in decision-making.” However, the 58% of the respondents in the 2015 Audit says that their “democracy does not address their interests or those of their family” and this hints the fact that the issue of power is not on the surface that can be easily overcome by the empowerment of individuals or collective engagement in decision-making. Stoker’s argument is looking at the issue of power from within the tower of power, from where it becomes impossible to see and identify it. On the other hand, the French scholar Pierre Bourdieu makes a deeper analysis of power, which can be useful in analysing anti-politics in the British society. Bourdieu acknowledges power as a structure that is culturally and symbolically constructed and perpetually re-confirmed through the interaction of agency and structure. It is through what Bourdieu calls habitus that “the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways." According to this, I would argue, it is not as Stoker claims that the government, with the arrival of news media and internet, is more open, engaging and participatory, but it is more powerful in constituting habitus for the society to be conditioned to follow. That is to say, the issue of power is better to be explained through the analysis of the current workings of the instruments of the government and their structures’ relationship with people, rather than the citizens’ contemporary tendencies themselves.  

It seems the dominant understanding of politics is actually the cause of the growth of the anti-political sentiment, from whose point of view the anti-political sentiment cannot be explained. Stoker concludes the issue of power by saying that “we have become more educated, informed and demanding” and therefore, “politicians need to accept that citizens are more demanding and more capable of challenging them and their slowness in accepting this reality is the main cause of anti-politics”, which brings the accusation against politicians rather than the organisation of political instruments themselves. However, I argue that citizens have not become more demanding, but developed an awareness of the impossibility of becoming a part of the power and hence the active politics in the current system of governing. As Alen Toplišek puts it,  Stoker’s argument and similar views, “taking a moralistic ‘blame-shifting’ approach to diagnosing the problem of people’s disenchantment with established politics fails to critically interrogate and engage with their own conceptions of the political.” Therefore, the dominant methodology of deciphering the power constitutes and sustains the power itself, frames its scope, emblematises its supreme precedence and problematise the anti-political Other in and out itself. Stoker proposes that “the solution to anti-politics […]  is giving people more power”, a claim with which I strongly disagree since it implies that the authority holds all the power and now it is time to share some of it with citizens in a way that not only protects but also approves the current hegemonic structure of politics in which the growth of the anti-political sentiment seems inevitable. As opposed to that, I suggest we, first of all, need to achieve social emancipation in order to analyse the growth of the anti-political sentiment and establish more engaging politics that would erase the feeling that democracy does not address our interests. What Bourdieu holds forth is the necessity of “a critical objectification of the epistemological and social conditions that make possible both a reflexive return to the subjective experience of the world and also the objectification of the objective conditions of that experience” through which we can distinguish our own prejudices, beliefs and pre-determined conjectures in the way of revealing the sources of power. It is, as has always been, the approximation of our construction of the conceptual world to our self-critical cognizance that ascertains “the reasons that explain social asymmetries and hierarchies", which can then be utilised to achieve social emancipation, that is, I believe, the only solution to create a political ground in which the rule of all is the hands of all and anti-politics is not a danger.