The coincidence of the March for Science and Marine le Pen’s progression to the second round of the French presidential election draws into sharp focus the ongoing battle between complexity and simplicity in Western Politics.
The comfortable delineation of left and right seems increasingly irrelevant in an age where political imitation has gone from occasional flattery into routine plagiarism. Le Pen’s party may still be branded ‘far right’ by journalists and an increasingly jittery European political class but to her dispossessed supporters, she offers something more enticing than an ideological vantage point, she offers clarity in a complex world. The same can be said of many of the current crop of successful, if surprising politicians.
The world got complicated and it did it in a hurry – or, at any rate, that is an easy story to sell. Solutions that are long on nuance and subtlety and short on visceral reassurance struggle to be heard and fail to be understood by many. That is not to say that nobody appreciates them, some do because they understand them but many more do specifically because they are reassuringly complex.
‘Brexit means Brexit’ could just as easily be rewritten as ‘marriage means marriage’, ‘British means British’ or ‘us means us’ and the unspoken ‘and don’t let Them tell you otherwise’ would be all the more powerful for left silent.
In many ways, even the pro-complexity camp rely on simple reassurances - ‘97% of scientists may agree on something- don’t expect me to explain the science but it’s bloody science and that’s got numbers and big words and charts, and that’s good enough for me.’ This team is attracted by the very complexity of their arguments while their opponents hear only Charlie Brown’s teacher droning endlessly at the front of the class.
The gradual collapse of class-based voting gave rise to a generation of technocratic politicians who drew on a growing graduate base in their societies while taking for granted the tribal votes of others who just happened to be associated with their particular rosette. In retrospect it was never likely to be a particularly stable electoral coalition – the brave new world of multilingual, multicultural fluidity had absolutely nothing to offer one group other than their growing irrelevance. However, in the absence of anything else they might as well hitch their wagon to the same star as had steered them right for a generation or two. It would have to do in the absence of any other choice. Of course, if there’s a large pile of votes waiting for someone to pick them up, it’s only a matter of time before someone taps into that need.
How this has worked out varies from one nation to another but the common theme has been that those politicians offering simple, viscerally satisfying solutions have advanced at the expense of those revelling in nuance and detail far beyond the comprehension of either many voters or most of their representatives. Additionally, and regardless of your political disposition, there’s good complexity and bad complexity just as there’s good and bad simplicity. However, we would do well to focus on the simple/complex divide and spend less time worrying about whether we approve or disapprove of either option. Simplicity, after all, may make for bad government but it makes for very good politics.
Imagine a spectrum of views that does not run from left to right but from finding complexity reassuring, even attractive, at one end to intimidating at the other. Now look again at a whole spate of elections over the last three years. Having done that, take a glance at some of the more unusual alliances – very rich candidates and the relatively poor voters being the most obvious one. It works in reverse as well, if someone finds declarative, visceral solutions frightening they will side with technocrats almost regardless of their apparent politics. Left-wingers who sided with Hillary over Bernie were unsettled by his apparently straightforward solutions, they felt that the world must be too complex a place to simply write off college debt or make healthcare free. Instead they were insistent that the world must be more complex than that and she seemed to agree, so they sided with her – routinely against their own indebted graduated interests.
I’m not here trying to say that more complex solutions are necessarily better (they can be but they needn’t be) nor am I trying to equate simplistic with simple. I freely confess to being a chronic sider-with-complexity, regardless of whether I understand it or not but I am fully aware that complex problems can routinely have simple solutions. There are no end of complex problems in the world to which the solutions really are giving up smoking, remembering to turn the lights off or telling the truth. Being blinded by the complexity of the problem to the simplicity of the solution is no less a sin than pretending that all simpler solutions are more likely to be correct.
So, it may well be that the appropriate solution to complex problems are equally complex, or it may be that voters are right to cut the Gordian knot. However, it is worth being aware of the rules of the game before deciding which team deserves to win.