Page 45 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

Looking at the phenomenon from another angle, it may be
argued that political apathy is an entirely rational, if slightly cynical
response to a political process in which it may appear to the
individual citizen that his or her vote does not matter. While
democratic procedures must include regular elections, it may be felt
that voting once every four or five years for one of two or at most
three rather similar parties is ineffective and pointless, particularly
when, as was the case in Britain over four consecutive general
elections, one party (the Conservatives) retained power with
substantially less than 50 per cent of the eligible electorate’s
support. 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 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 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. Even 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
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policies, such as privatisation of the air traffic control system. In
doing so, New Labour proclaimed itself at the ‘radical centre’ of
British politics, emulating the Clinton administration’s 1996 re-
election 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 government’), while
adhering to the core social democratic values of social justice and
equality of opportunity.

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