Robert Buddan - POLITICS OF OUR TIMENo political race has attracted as much attention the world over about class, race and gender in politics as the Obama-Clinton and then Obama-MaCain/Palin contests in the United States, with the Hillary Clinton factor still an important one. At our own local level, the Portia Simpson Miller-Peter Phillips contest does the same.
Attempts at using models of politics to understand public behaviour based on calculated self-interest and to understand political governance based on technical management have failed to account for the deep and persistent emotional and personal factors in politics. Every single thing we know about politics should tell us that the Republican candidates should lose and should be way behind the Democratic candidates now. But the one thing that makes the contest in the US so close is the personal and emotional level at which politics is conducted there and everywhere else.
Politics still remains very personal. The public remains divided on sometimes cross-cutting, sometimes overlapping values of religion, race, gender, class, colour, speech, perceived intelligence and such personal characteristics of their candidates. One scholar once described politics as the 'mobilisation of bias'. This description was premised on the view that human bias is fundamental to how people behave, and the side that most successfully mobilises bias in favour of its candidates is the side that wins. This view probably makes the best sense in explaining why people like George Bush and Dick Cheney get anywhere. It is the successful mobilisation of bias that explains why rich minorities can get their candidates elected over the candidates of poor majorities; why men can prevail over women as political candidates by such large proportions; and why racial and religious minorities can succeed against the tide.
LIFE-POLITICS
Money, media and PR are important to get or reinforce bias so that people believe ridiculous things like war is necessary, hate is all right, the rich need a tax break, women should not get equal pay for the same work as men, private property is sacred, and a range of myths that make no logical or scientific sense.
Politics is personal in another sense, in the sense of 'life-politics'. Politics becomes a means through which people realise themselves, especially those who belong to a group (women, blacks, gays, the poor) that has been marginalised for many years. Successful women politicians and blacks, for example, are models of inspiration because those who are like them can see their own dreams of self-realisation through them and can hope that these politicians will in turn lift up people like them. People see themselves and their life stories in those with whom they can identify. It is a politics of self-actualisation. This form of identity is important for these people because they feel that the power structure had always excluded people like them, and if people who look like them can make it, then others will do so and the power structure or structure of opportunity will change. This is what Obama calls the audacity of hope.
In many countries, politics has indeed favoured those with elite characteristics - male, middle class, educated, and who otherwise bear the status markers that society shows a bias towards. But politics does not exclude others. Grass-roots people and party delegates will vote for people who are like them if they are given a wide enough choice.
PNP DELEGATES
The best indication we have of how PNP delegates voted in the 2006 leadership contest comes from an unpublished study by Daphne Clarke, a graduate student in the Department of Government at UWI. Ms Clarke wanted to see if there was evidence that party delegates voted on the basis of their gender or social class. First of all, she found that almost 90 per cent of the delegates said they made their decisions free of the influence of anyone, including their MP. This is an important finding. It shows that the 'super delegates', like the party's elected members and top officials, did not have the final say in how 'their' delegates voted, meaning that there is an independent space for the party's grass roots to make itself heard.
Ms Clarke also found that most men and women voted for Portia Simpson Miller but, surprisingly, a higher proportion of men did so. The woman candidate, in the end, got by on the basis more of class support than of gender. However, gender mattered. A high percentage of both males and females thought that Jamaica would benefit more from having a woman as prime minister, and ten per cent more women than men thought so. (They probably had Portia Simpson Miller specifically in mind when they answered). Also, about 60 per cent of both men and women did not believe that men necessarily made better leaders than women.
More than two-thirds of both men and women delegates did not believe that Portia Simpson Miller's social class was the reason she failed to win the leadership contest to succeed Michael Manley in 1992. That loss probably owed more to her competitor's seniority. Both men and women were split evenly about whether social class helped her to win the 2006 contest. However, more lower and lower middle class delegates voted for her than those who voted for Dr Phillips. In fact, the weight of the lower class support for her was greater than that of the women's vote. Social class was marginally more important than gender in her victory.
obvious differences
There are obvious differences now. Two years have passed, the PNP is out of power and the race is down to two contestants. Forces would have realigned and leadership abilities reassessed. But the mobilisation of bias would again be a factor in both campaigns, because that is essentially what campaigns are about. Canvassers would be trying to convince delegates that the personal characteristics of their candidates matter to their 'life-politics'. Delegates, for their part, would be looking at the candidates from the perspective of life-politics, among other things, to see which candidate means more to their lives and the lives of people like them, and which better represents the self-actualisation of these categories of people. But delegates are also members of the political organisation. They will be thinking about who can better unite the party, lead it to an election victory, make it relevant to the needs of the nation and realise its historic mission.
Those who believe it is enough to play on gender and class bias should realise that these are not enough with which to mobilise for victory. They need to identify with the life stories of the delegates and the people for whom the delegates will vote.
The growth of apathy, disenchantment, and disconnect between people and their political systems suggest that it is not enough to appeal broadly in terms of class and gender, but to do so at a more personal level, where people live out their daily lives through institutions and social practices that embed power in a way that is discriminatory and insensitive. Delegates exist at a crossroads between party politics and the real-life problems people encounter in their communities. This is where politics must make sense to them.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona campus. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.
