Low-maintenance voters

With all the desperate flag-waving and public displays of jingoism, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Boris Johnson's UK is a tribute act to the Thatcher years. But it occurs to me that one thing has changed fundamentally; aspiration. 

Right through the Thatcher years and beyond, the Conservatives and New Labour, made a very conscious electoral pitch to "aspirational" voters. Way into the noughties, pundits were referencing the upwardly-mobile "Mondeo Man" and his ilk as the demographic groups that were key to gaining and maintaining power.

The canny shift the modern Conservative Party and its media enablers have made seems to be to mobilise an entirely different* set of voters. After a decade of austerity and stagnant wages, like Trump, they've identified a new group of voters to woo. People who don't believe in aspiration any more, because they don't see it in action, but are furious and want to punish somebody for what their lives have become. 

Angry people, made too cynical to believe that either own lives, or the lives of their kids will ever get better, but who'll vote for anybody who can turn their anger on an external enemy; migrants, minorities, the "woke."

It makes sense in its own warped terms. In a post-austerity, post-Brexit, post-Covid world, it's going to be tough to appeal to aspiration. If you feed aspirations you will eventually be expected to actually fulfil aspirations. If you mobilise voters with no aspirations beyond seeing somebody else worse off, then you literally don't have to do anything except make the designated hate groups' lives shittier. Which is way easier to achieve than actually making people's lives better.

You have to hand it to the UK's post-Trump Trumpists - by finding angry people with low expectations and keeping them angry they've built themselves the ultimate low-maintenance political base. People so cynical that they no longer expect their lives to get better, but will vote for anybody who'll take their pain out on somebody else.

By weaponising spite, they've brought a whole new meaning to the phrase "the tyranny of low expectations" and come pretty damn close to actual political genius.

 Efficient sadopopulism. Mondeo Man didn't see that one coming.

 

 

* I say "entirely different, but it's quite possible that many of todays angry and disillusioned voters may be formerly aspirational Mondeo Men or Worcester Women for whom the idea of upward mobility has become a sick joke.

 

Update

 Synchronicity:

The Ford Mondeo has reached the end of the road, the company announced today.

The saloon car that became a byword for ‘Mondeo Man’ – the middle-ground voter that could swing elections – has been killed off by the rise in popularity of sports utility vehicles and the push towards electrification, the manufacturer has confirmed today.

More here.