The dialectic of generosity and paranoia: How swing voters work and why political moderation doesn't work

The oldest argument in the electoral book goes like this: We must appeal to swing voters in order to win, because elections are decided by swing voters. Since swing voters ‘swing’ between the major parties, they are centrists. Ergo we must move in the direction of centrism.

And the above image shows why this doesn’t work so well. The swing voter isn’t halfway between the major center left party and the major center right party, they are off to the side- as shown by issue polling on matters ranging from crime, to immigration, to welfare, to education, to the NHS. Thus going to the middle won’t work- swing voters in somewhere like the UK are actually to the left of the major leftwing party in some ways and to the right of the major rightwing parties in other ways. It’s why media centrists like Yglesias’s electoral argument for their form of centrism doesn’t hold up. In fact, when it comes to media centrists, it’s substantially worse than if they’d just suggested going towards the center of the two major parties. The ‘centrist’ policies often they push are often, for want of a better term, soft-libertarianism, which is the opposite of what the swing voter wants.

An interesting exemplification of these trends is recent European elections. See the attached graph from the Financial Times- the populist right does better when it moves left on economic issues

I suggested in a recent post that the political program of the swing voter looks something like this:

1. Abolish immigration (this is an exaggeration, but only slightly).

2. Greatly increase NHS funding.

3. Greatly increase education funding.

4. Raise the minimum wage, at least by a bit

5. Cut taxes on people who earn as much as me.

6. Greatly increase taxes on people who earn more than me.

7. Greatly increase social spending.

8. Punish criminals more! (But give them a chance) But punish criminals more! (But give them a chance)…

9. Give people on benefits Stern Lectures on the importance of Work Ethics but don’t actually cut them off or let them starve to death.

10. Greatly cut back on affirmative action

11. Solve unemployment by directly creating a bunch of jobs.

12. Solve inflation by punishing profiteering.

13. Find the bad people and hurt them.

You can find this general pattern in the data from just about any anglophone polling agency. It seems to extend much beyond the Anglophone world, but how far I have not verified.

What’s going on here? Why is this politics- approximately economically left, approximately socially right- popular? How do these ideas form a conceptual unity, if at all?

One way to frame it, I think, is the politics of are you havin’ a laugh mate? Or the dialectics of generosity. We should be generous, we don’t want to be mean. We don’t want to punish prisoners too hard. We don’t want anyone to starve. But some people, some people- well they’re havin’a laugh aren’t they mate? Sicko criminals let back on the street because of soft magistrates gaming the system. Benefits scroungers have got soft social workers wrapped around their thumb. Immigrants coming here and living off the successes of our society. We don’t want to be mean like the Tories, but we can’t let ourselves be exploited, this is a priority.

Very roughly speaking “generosity with a heaped side order of paranoia about exploitation” leads to economically leftwing, and socially rightwing policies- with some major exceptions. On the social side, gays are, for the most part at least, alright, because there’s no plausible theory according to which they’re having a laugh at our expense. Straight-up old-school racism- unlike opposition to immigrants, is also unattractive for this reason. On the economic side, welfare policy is complex because it is the most direct clash between these priorities. On the one hand, there is a real fear that the genuinely disabled and job-seeking will be left wanting. On the other hand, there is a deep fear of various kinds of fraud, exploitation and “faking it”.

The left, of course, could respond by adopting a culturally rightwing position, especially on immigration, crime DEI, trans issues etc. I reject this. Largely I reject it because I think a leftwing position on these matters has intrinsic ethical importance (although I very much disagree with a lot of the ethical chest beating that passes as wokeness). But even if you were only concerned with winning I still think moderating on these matters would be a mistake. In the long run, ‘economically left, culturally right” formations are rarely stable- probably because while they make electoral sense they don’t make sense at the level of ideas- especially when one is well informed about how public policy works in practice. It’s the politics of those who are not paying a great deal of attention, largely because politics is designed to repel them from paying close attention, to confuse their generous instincts and pepper them with paranoia.

I grant we should make a point of disavowing some of the sillier stuff one sometimes sees coming out of identitarianism, which I suppose could be seen as a concession to this view. but I think wokeness is relatively politically minor in its actual importance. and even making a huge deal out of disavowing it would be a mistake- drawing attention to it. We should lead by example and talk about other things instead. We should parry the rights attacks on “wokeness” by pointing out their own little theological absurdities.

If the solution is not to go right on cultural issues, then what is it I think, when people are closer, personally, to what’s going on they tend to see through the bullshit. A number of studies have found, for example, that when people are thoroughly acquainted with the details of particular criminal trials- e.g. because they have acted as jurors- they tend to say the sentences handed down are just- if anything a little harsh- whereas when you ask people in the abstract whether judges are too harsh or soft, they say soft. The same is true of immigrants, knowing immigrants (NOT just living around them, actually knowing them) seeing their contributions- this all helps.

A lot of the dialectic- between generosity and fear of exploitation- works like this.

1. People are generous by nature. Humans aren’t, in the main, cruel, especially to those they see as part of their community - and the typical modern subject sees at least their fellow citizens as part of their community, even if only marginally.

2. Newspapers and TV run, day in, day out, stories about society’s generosity being exploited

And so you get the dialectic- basic decency (leftwing) in combat with outrage at norm violation (rightwing). [Incidentally, this is why I agree with Mark Fisher on the dangers of individualistic outrage politics- even if one tries to reappropriate it for the left].

Political education, then, is a big part of the solution. Also, civil society organizations so people aren’t just blasted with “SICKO SCROUNGER IMMIGRANTS WANTED FOR NASTY CRIMES” 24/7 with no way to process it except becoming hard, cynical and individualistic.

I’m scarcely the first to propose these strategies, but I hope the ideas I’ve outlined here about the nature of the swing voter put them in context.

And of course, there is always the reversal. What if all the outrage you are being induced to feel at the exploitation of society’s kindness is itself a strategy for exploiting society? A way of making you strain out a gnat while you swallow a camel?

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Pictured: A bear resisting Tabloid journalism