Page 43 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 22

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
and pointless, particularly when, as is routinely the case in Britain, one party
retains power with substantially less than 50 per cent of the eligible
electorate’s support. In the 2005 UK general election, New Labour won only
35.2 per cent of the votes cast, securing with that number an absolute
majority of 67 seats in parliament. In 2010, the Conservatives won 36 per
cent of votes, to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
For Jean Baudrillard, the guru of post-modern nihilism, voter apathy is
viewed as an intelligible strategy of resistance to bourgeois attempts to
incorporate the masses into a ‘game’ which they can never really win. The
‘silent passivity’ of the masses is characterised by him as ‘a defence . . . a
mode of retaliation’ (1983, p. 23). If democracy is, as some argue, principally
a set of rules intended to legitimise bourgeois power, voter (and particularly
working-class) apathy (the denial of mass participation) may be interpreted
as an assertion of the fundamental illegitimacy of bourgeois power. 3

Absence of choice

A further limitation on democracy is often argued to be the absence of
genuine choice, or pluralism. One could reasonably argue that there are more
similarities in the policies and ideologies of the US Democratic and
Republican parties than there are differences. In Britain, where the Labour
and Conservative parties have traditionally been distinct ideologically, the
1990s saw a coming together of agendas and policies on many social,
economic and foreign policy matters. In the 1997 general election, ‘New
Labour’ unashamedly adopted many of what had previously been viewed
(including by most members of the Labour Party itself) as right-wing
Conservative policies, such as privatisation of the air traffic control system. 4
In doing so, New Labour proclaimed itself at the ‘radical centre’ of British
politics, emulating the Clinton administration’s 1996 reelection strategy of
ideological ‘triangulation’ (Morris, 1997). Triangulation in the US, like
Labour’s radical centrism, meant taking what was popular and common-
sensical from the free-market right (such as the reduction of ‘big govern-
ment’), while adhering to the core social democratic values of social justice
and equality of opportunity. In his campaign to win the 2010 election in the
UK, Tory leader David Cameron was marketed as the ‘new’ Tony Blair.
Although, in the post-Cold War environment, there may be good
reasons for the abandonment of long-standing ideological and political
slogans which reflect an earlier phase of capitalist development, in such
circumstances the voter may reasonably feel that a vote for one party or
another will have little or no impact on the conditions and quality of life.
Democratic procedures, in short, usually contain anomalies and biases
which make them less than fully democratic.

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