In seeking to explain the growing apathy about politics, we could do worse than ponder why, in an age when romance is at a premium, the de-romanticisation of politics in being brought near to completion, and this once great art of the passions is losing its capacity to inspire, writes John Waters.
When you scan the Sunday papers to discover what the Labour Party leader, that erstwhile mouthpiece of the anger of the dispossessed, has relayed about the feeling of the proletariat, and discover that his best line is an attack on the leader of government for opening too many pubs, it is surely time to worry about how much longer we can maintain an interest in political discourse.
Once, our politicians did not need to use words like "vision" or "conviction" or "beliefs", because, manifestly possessing such qualities in abundance, the idea of mentioning them would have been like talking about your vocal chords.
Nowadays the speeches of the modern political leader are littered with such epithets, precisely because the characteristics they betoken have all but disappeared.
I am old enough to have been born into politics, a condition becoming unimaginable. I remember spring mornings at the age of 10 or 11, waking full of rage at Fianna Fáil and waiting, on the way to school, for the FF cars to drive through the town scattering election leaflets in their wake, and running around gathering up these dangerous tracts for fear that gullible citizens might be swayed by their passionate inducements.
And there was fear and jealousy mixed in with the rage, for we Blueshirts knew that Soldiers of Destiny were less temperate in their passions. Those feelings caused people to vote early and often, and made of Brian Farrell a pop star.
The idea of becoming impassioned to the point of blind hatred or bedazzled to the point of blindness about a political leader or his vision is now laughable. There is, of course, a widespread belief that this is a good thing, that because such passions were dubious and dangerous, we are all the better off for their being extinct. Once, a politician could, in addressing an audience, rely on the existence of fervour and zeal based on entrenched convictions concerning the unmitigated repulsiveness of the enemy; now he or she can rely only on the hope that people will be swayed by the promise of a cent or two off their taxes, coupled with a wry smile at some sly dig trading off a popular caricature of the other party's weaknesses.
A MAJOR factor has been growing media disapproval of any kind of tribal rhetoric, said to be on account of the alleged dangers of promoting chauvenistic, jingoistic or even racist responses. To valourise your tribe over another is now verboten. The demonological lexicon of politics has been decommissioned in favour of bland prescriptions for managing the economy.
The natural, intrinsic emotional violence of politics has been defused, and rendered safe, the vocabulary diluted to steer a course halfway between the disapproved-of passions and a total surrender to pragmatic technocracy. Political faith, once the lifeblood of politics, now depends largely on interests.
We assume, because the appearance of political gatherings remains ostensibly what it was, that the phenomenon of politics has remained more or less intact, while we, in our sophistication or cynicism, have grown bored by it.
In truth, politics today is not politics at all, but something more like management of a minor company with an uninteresting product, and politicians are no longer politicians, but middle-ranking executives seeking to use the theatricality of what was once a quasi-artform to communicate their dull ideas to a virtually comatose public.
Political gatherings have turned into a kind of shadow-play, in which the rituals of the once great Art of the Possible are enacted in a kind of emotional neutral gear, and the buttons of half-dead passions pressed in a manner which dimly excites the memories of past glories and triumphs.
The heroic, epic, utopian models of politics have been dismantled, and in their place we have a banal mid-afternoon soap opera, with cardboard sets and bad scripts.
THE MAIN reason for this is not, in the first instance, waning public appetites, but the fact that minute media scrutiny of every fiddle-fart detail of public life, together with the constant public polling which reduces public concerns to a thin, recycled gruel, has made of politics a calling in which risk-taking is not advisable and charisma suspect. Political commentary favours the avoidance of daring and celebrates, above all, the safe pair of hands. Our present-day political leaders are distinguished mainly by the fact that they were still standing after the riskier options were eliminated.
Public opinion has replaced communal passion as the new god of politics. The problem is that, even though the version of public opinion on which the political culture recreates and reinvents itself is, in some sense, a true representation of the public political mind, it is not satisfying to those whose sentiments it is supposed to depict.
No pollster has ever asked a unit of his sample whether he or she would like to stand on a chair at a party conference and cry with joy or scream with rage. And so, in its heart of hearts, public opinion is unsettled by its own unauthenticity, and craves the brave and radical public enactment of something it has been taught to fear and disapprove of in itself.
jwaters@irish-times.ie