Manchester mayor Andy Burnham might actually have a chance of saving Labour from itself, which is exactly why Keir Starmer won’t give him a chance, argues Ash Sarkar.
Only if you make the assumption of a unimodal distribution of voters does that logic hold.
And that assumption clearly hasn’t held. It’s a convenient but wrong assumption that voters follow a left to right distribution centered on a mean. But it’s not realistic and never has been.
People are complex and their motivations are complex, which results in a peaky, multidimensional distribution along separate often orthogonal axis.
If you try and target a “center of mass” in this scenario, you’ll often hit a void of policy positions no one particularly likes, empty space.
It’s like if 50 percent of voter want to go to Brussels, and 50 percent want to go to Paris and you propose Rancourt as a compromise solution, you get no one’s vote because no one asked for that.
But… doesn’t that multimodal distribution of topics/ethics still resolve to a unimodal Red/Blue vote in the end? In the end, it was an overall red-shift no?
No. When looking at a shadow of a bird flying, you can’t understand how the bird is really moving.
In this case, the “centre-left” isn’t engaging on the issues that people face day to day. The right parties engage with them, but give fascist solutions. The fact that the problem is acknowledged attracts some people. Others it pushes to not vote. It looks like the population is moving right, but it actually that the electorate isn’t representable by the options available.
The fact that the problem is acknowledged attracts some people.
The “problems” the fascists claim to address are often fabricated by, or exacerbated by, the very same fascists. Small boats: irrelevant. Sharia-law-controlled no-go zones: fiction. Immigrants taking yer jerbs: a malicious lie. And the underlying reality is that all those “issues” are racist dogwhistles.
It’s a fallacy to assert that gullible, low-information, brainwashed voters believe what they do because of legitimate grievances. They parrot what they’re told, and don’t have the critical thinking abilities needed to realise that they’re being manipulated.
Fascists don’t get in by telling the truth on behalf of underserved groups. That’s their narrative, but like all fascist narratives, it’s a self-serving lie.
Only if you make the assumption of a unimodal distribution of voters does that logic hold.
And that assumption clearly hasn’t held. It’s a convenient but wrong assumption that voters follow a left to right distribution centered on a mean. But it’s not realistic and never has been.
People are complex and their motivations are complex, which results in a peaky, multidimensional distribution along separate often orthogonal axis.
If you try and target a “center of mass” in this scenario, you’ll often hit a void of policy positions no one particularly likes, empty space.
It’s like if 50 percent of voter want to go to Brussels, and 50 percent want to go to Paris and you propose Rancourt as a compromise solution, you get no one’s vote because no one asked for that.
But… doesn’t that multimodal distribution of topics/ethics still resolve to a unimodal Red/Blue vote in the end? In the end, it was an overall red-shift no?
No. When looking at a shadow of a bird flying, you can’t understand how the bird is really moving.
In this case, the “centre-left” isn’t engaging on the issues that people face day to day. The right parties engage with them, but give fascist solutions. The fact that the problem is acknowledged attracts some people. Others it pushes to not vote. It looks like the population is moving right, but it actually that the electorate isn’t representable by the options available.
The “problems” the fascists claim to address are often fabricated by, or exacerbated by, the very same fascists. Small boats: irrelevant. Sharia-law-controlled no-go zones: fiction. Immigrants taking yer jerbs: a malicious lie. And the underlying reality is that all those “issues” are racist dogwhistles.
It’s a fallacy to assert that gullible, low-information, brainwashed voters believe what they do because of legitimate grievances. They parrot what they’re told, and don’t have the critical thinking abilities needed to realise that they’re being manipulated.
Fascists don’t get in by telling the truth on behalf of underserved groups. That’s their narrative, but like all fascist narratives, it’s a self-serving lie.
Trump addressed the cost of living in his campaign. Some people voted for him because he said he’d do something about it.
He’ll make the problem worse, but he won votes because he talked about it.
Bring on direct democracy. If our representives don’t represent us, we should get rid of the position.