Eusebius McKaiser
“Isn’t it childish to expect a political party to make you fall in love with it, Eusebius?!” asked Antony Altbeker of me, in his characteristically incisive and playful style as moderator.
The occasion was a dinner and conversation in early 2014 at the Troyeville Hotel in Johannesburg. We were in conversation about my second book, Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma.
I chuckled at the question that Antony had posed because, knowing just how beautiful his mind is, I immediately saw the detail lurking in his deceptively casual wording.
In one sense, political parties just are institutions that we lend lawful powers to for a few years, asking them to effect changes in and on society that we legitimate through elections.
It’s possible, as Antony was alluding to with his question, to have a somewhat detached attitude towards political parties, seeing them as instruments to help bring about changes each of us desire individually, and which the electoral process aggregates so as to maximise our collective voter preferences.
If you adopt something like this view, then you don’t necessarily give an Alex rat’s ass whether or not you have affection for a party or its leaders. You should – or hope to – simply assess the prospects of each party bringing about changes you desire to see in society.
This conception of politics is one that tries to drive a wedge between emotion and voting procedure. It also imagines voting decision procedures to be about means-end calculations concerning your rational interests. Let’s call it the non-affective conception of politics.
In terms of this framework, you wouldn’t give much, if any, consideration to whether or not you’re in love with a political party or its leaders. Love is something you expect of friends, family and of course lovers.
There are obviously different kinds of love. But all conceptions of love pick out a certain kind of intimacy that you wouldn’t expect of political parties.
What’s seemingly attractive about this non-affective conception of politics is that you focus on the material conditions of society when deciding who to vote for, and your rational self-interest.
And so, in the South African context, it might usefully lead a voter to ignore the histories and identities of parties and party leaders, focusing instead on who can do what for you, if you were to lend them lawful powers, for a few years.
Obviously, how we actually behave and how we wish to behave aren’t always the same thing. So some neat little theory about the best way to think about our voting might be idealistic and yet never actually change our behaviour.
It’s still interesting and important, I think, to nevertheless puzzle through our attitudes towards political processes, including voting. Because reflective attitudes can, over time, influence our behaviour, even if it takes time and effort to form new habits.
So then, if you were able to control what you take seriously when deciding how to vote, should you keep emotions out of the equation? Is it childish, or at least imprudent, to give a damn about your feelings towards political parties? Should you just be a cold, calculating machine focusing on assessing parties’ ability to help promote your interests?
I don’t think so. I don’t think we need to even understand completely how voter psychology actually works before rejecting a non-affective conception of politics.
Our feelings towards political parties matter, and that’s not something to be embarrassed by and to think of as childish, nor to regard such feelings as imprudent. Here’s why. Our lives are messy, complicated and indivisible. Academic and intellectual inquiry often pretend otherwise. We even set up universities in a way that treat academic subjects as complete, self-standing disciplines that do not need to speak to one another. Interdisciplinary enquiry is still too rare.
Well, life is interdisciplinary, because humans aren’t able to escape complexity in our make-up and how we live. The implication for politics is that we cannot simply leave emotion at home when going to the voting station. We’re not wired like that.
Affect is a normal feature of our humanity. That includes the ways in which we reason, talk about and relate to public institutions like political parties and other institutions that make up our democracy.
This is all sensible stuff too. Participation in political processes is a constitutive part of daily life. This is especially true in a country like South Africa where our appetite for talking and engaging politics is very high. It is a way of life, as is voting, judging by our impressively high turnout to vote, habitually.
And any activity that takes up so much of our headspace, and which affects our lives so materially, will be an activity about which we learn to care for deeply. A lot is at stake for us personally and collectively.
This means that voting isn’t a detached activity devoid of emotions. And needn’t be that. It’s a reflection of our best wishes, deepest fears, imperfect and messy calculations about our interests. Politics is an extension of other aspects of our lives just as watching a soccer derby is a very involved social activity that cannot be reduced to a mere momentary passing of time.
Political parties like the ANC know this instinctively. And that’s why affect is a crucial aspect of ANC supporters’ ways of talking about, and relating to, the party. The DA still pretends, to its detriment, that a detached politics is possible and even the mark of voter maturity.
That is why they continue to throw data at us rather than also showing us some love. An underperforming ANC benefits from such elementary misunderstanding of how personal the political can be.
Fortunately for our democracy, the EFF gets this, thereby keeping alive the nascent culture of competitive democratic politics.