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Umbria. Twilight. Some summers ago. A social gathering in the hills. I am easing into the evening when a British guest finds out what I do for work.
“What do you think about Boris?”
She means, “Shall I tell you what I think about Boris?” I perform my office, tossing out some thoughts about our then prime minister that she doesn’t pretend to register. When it is her turn, I know what’s coming.
“You know, behind the clown act, I reckon he is a shrewd operator.”
This opinion, which was last interesting in 2001, is the political version of “Arsenal want to walk the ball into the goal.” It is what you say when you care about the subject enough.
In her defence, she is of the times. At the turn of the millennium, the golden age of apathy, of 60 per cent voter turnout, casual political chat was rare, because it was considered naff. It is now ambient. Whether events since — Brexit, Donald Trump — raised public engagement with politics, or the higher engagement brought about the events, we’ll come on to. Either way, social life has changed so much for the worse that it is better to be vague about what I do for a living than risk embroilment in topical, podcast-level jibber-jabber.
There is a misconception that football fans aim to avoid people who have zero interest in the sport. No. The real drag is the casual: the office pest who wonders how “your lot” got on over the weekend. Not discussing something at all beats discussing it in half-measures. Now imagine how much truer that is of politics. A hundred times across 2024, I’d guess, a near-stranger will tell me that “Trump is gonna get back in”. Given the closeness of US elections, how is this worth saying?
If it were just boring, the rise of the political casual needn’t trouble us. But there is evidence to suggest the stakes are higher.
Those who unbalanced western politics over the past decade weren’t, or weren’t just, zealots. Your zealot, being rare, and so eerie as to be spotted a mile off, is containable. On the other hand, if millions of people go from serene indifference to politics to some commitment, that is another kind of test for civic order.
Jeremy Corbyn’s movement wasn’t one of seasoned cadres, steeped in the key texts of the left, but of dabblers who thought him fresh and diverting. (For a sense of how contingent the whole thing was, a discounted Labour membership fee was enough to pump-prime the movement.) Likewise, the feat of the Brexit campaign was to mobilise people that pollsters had considered outside politics. Trump himself is a dilettante, not a life-long politico.
On a 10-point scale of political consciousness, we all know someone who went from one to six out of pique at the Covid-19 vaccines. Don’t mistake a moderate degree of commitment for innocuous outcomes. Don’t mistake apathy for being a bad citizen. Until a decade ago, I’d assumed that some civic engagement in a person was better than none. Multiplied across a nation, though, it means a higher aggregate volume of noise and expectation for a merely human political class.
Next week, Jon Stewart returns to host The Daily Show. Through no fault of his own, he is the father of the political casual. He set off the peculiar trend in which adults treat comedic programming, whether in pod or panel show form, as a kind of news. (Politicised humour was so marginal in the 1980s that it was “alternative comedy”.) The case for all this output is that politics is so bizarre now as to be best handled by comedians. A more honest explanation is that the casually political won’t wade through straight journalism. No offence taken. But a decade of this stuff, which encourages a laughing off of difficult choices, made politics worse.
Napoleon is meant to have said that, to understand a man, consider what the world was like when he was 20. For me, that was 2002. Foreign affairs and terror aside, it might have been the most apolitical time in the west since the dawn of the universal franchise. I considered it normal and right. I was wrong on the first count.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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