As a young man, I would occasionally (read: always) bore people at parties with political chat. I’d see glazed-over expressions as I espoused on the economic inefficacy of austerity, at least before mercifully being cut-off as someone suggested a game of beer-pong or ‘chin your pan’. By 22 I was a card-carrying member of the Labour Party, I wrote for the University paper about Putin’s Russia or Gove’s education reforms, I devoured the Economist weekly in order to fuel my arguments in the debate soc, I spoke at public rallies on campus. I know, I sound like I was a real hoot.
But no one else was really interested in politics. It was a niche interest. At the time, I used to bemoan people’s apathy somewhat, I wished they were more interested. But I understood that people had lives, hobbies, drinking. One of the main reasons I went to debate society was to purge the urge to discuss ‘boring’ stuff, to argue about politics, to talk about ‘relativism or economic efficacies’ in a contained space, so that I could return to the normal world, hold normal conversations with normal people. To talk about football, or what the plans were for the summer.
But that hope that more people would become interested was always there.
What a fool I was.
My word it’s tiring how politics has washed over every inch of society to the point where you can’t escape it. Every social media platform, every tv show, every news article filled with it – even if I watch Dr Who I just know in the back of my mind there’s people arguing about it online. There are twenty think-pieces about Strictly in the Guardian on the neo-colonial undertones of Blackpool tower. There are video essays from Russell Brand banging on about how licking the back of stamps will lead to the Great Reset. In my last workplace, something would happen in the US and because it was big on Twitter the CEO just had to wax lyrical about it in a companywide email over 2000 words – hey pal, save it for your blog no one reads, like me (meanwhile the company was failing to deliver on contracts – not many companywide emails on that).
People are obsessed with politics in 2024 to the detriment of everything else. Now I know how those people I cornered at parties felt. Bored af. Every inch of the public square is fucking rife with this cliched and tedious culture war.
The reason it’s infuriating is because politics has never been so wide ranging, but never has it been so wafer thin. And that’s why so many people feel like they can chirp up about it. Politics has always been a refuge for many talentless people. I learnt that in my early forays into the politics – rarely had I encountered as few genuinely skilled, talented, and gifted people. That’s because on its surface, politics is easy. It’s just talking. It’s about who you know, not what you know. And that’s where we’ve got ourselves stuck.
This doesn’t surprise me. There are a few books I’ve read in my life that have profoundly changed the way I view things. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of those. Not just because John le Carré’s prose is utterly oozing with subtlety and style, but because of something one of his characters said. When Bill Hayden, the double agent, is finally revealed as a spy for the USSR, he articulates why he turned traitor: “It was an aesthetic choice as much as anything else. The West has become so terribly ugly.”
‘An aesthetic choice as much as anything else’. I’d always assumed that political people had these deeply held beliefs about the causes they espouse, but in reality, most of the time it’s whether they like the look or sound of something. It’s as vacuous as choosing what colour to paint your bedroom.
More and more people are less and less concerned with the substance of something political, and more with the surface aesthetics of it. In an era where our focus and attention are so cripplingly brief, the moral and political compass people do have is whether it looks and feels right, what is safe to say, or what the people they aesthetically align with think. Politics in the 2020s is all about the vibes.
And it’s tedious because it’s so predictable. For most people, they can tell you one view they have on one topic, and you can predict the rest. People will read a couple of tweets from Zarah Sultana, or an Instagram thread from MattXIV and they feel informed enough to blast a political opinion out into the world. It used to be that most talentless bores stuck to topics like soaps or sports. Now everyone is on the politics train.
So please, I beg you, let’s all take a break from politics. Let’s have a new vibe.
Gin Lane 