Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Great post, @wild greens. I agree that this thing of rather performatively "rejecting the system" doesn't achieve much beyond giving the person doing it a sense of superiority.
Dismissing the only clear route to societal change as a fallacy based around a concept of a "tory country" is an easy way to assume moral or intellectual superiority whilst allowing the current incumbents to run roughshod over the basic human rights of this supposedly "free" capitalist society. I understand the appeal of assuming you know better than the proletariat- oh I won't vote it's pointless, I am intellectually superior- but it's an indicator of a victim's mentality. It's subjugation rather than a supposed radical viewpoint.
You make some really good points and I actually agree with most of what you've written but you miss what I'm pointing at - the way that hatred of the Tories is a kinda high, and that leaves the people so locked into that perspective with a total inability to understand why someone would vote Tory. I can't see circumstances where I'd vote for them but I don't think the people who do vote for them do so 'cos they're fucking thick which is the rhetoric you hear all the time on the Left. The way we talk about Brexit voters is the same.
My dad was from a working class conservative background. The desire for upward mobility is at its weakest in the comfortable middle classes. When you're working 14-16 hours in a felt factory you want to get out of there as soon as possible. My dad wasn't hostile to social democracy per se, he was merely unimpressed with the ownership of industry being transfered to the state. And I think this is an aspect that people in England tend to miss, because of the outsourcing of a lot of manual labour to the third world.
Now- voter turnout where I lived before this gaff was less than 40% in the local elections we were there for. Tory council. So in this scenario, a conservative led system has managed to convince 60% of the borough that voting is pointless and the councillors drew a wage and did very little to uplift the area at all. Ignoring his deep gabber knowledge, a lot of people in that area clearly had the same mentality as third and where did it get them. Personally, I earn a decent wage, had an alright house, there was no direct problem for me there really. But half a mile down the road was a fucking mess. It is allowed to happen.
So- to vote Tory in that area for the directly affected was effectively acting to fuck yourself over, as was abstention. The evidence is on your doorstep that the incumbents have done you no favours, you continue to allow yourself to be fucked, and then theoretically type on the internet that you are aware of the situation but we are all powerless to stop it so why bother. How radical. If you are attempting to do something outside of the system then crack on. But it's all talk isn't it.
Personally, I earn a decent wage, had an alright house, there was no direct problem for me there really. But half a mile down the road was a fucking mess. It is allowed to happen.
Right, because the average voter A) reads manifestos and B) judges them mainly on the correct use of apostrophes...Tories are definitely cleverer than Labouroids: the Tory manifesto always has fewer mistakes in it, among other things.
you can only maintain this intoxication of being righteously anti-tory at the expense of others suffering
Yes but your fallacy here is to see the anti-voting attitude emanate from the tories. Perhaps it didn't? Perhaps more than the tories, it is labour and its false promises which have made people suspicious of voting?
I remember feeling guilty about not reading manifestos or researching candidates and actually trying to do so one year during some sort of local election and discovering none of the candidates had bothered to put any information out there. I couldn't even find what any of their policies were; all I had to go on were name and party affiliation.Right, because the average voter A) reads manifestos...
Schadenfreude has nothing to do with it. Its quite obvious that large swathes of the country are just so apathetic the ruling class can do whatever they want.
Of course you do hear a lot of this sort of thing, and obviously nobody has every changed their mind (or their voting habits) because someone has called them stupid (or evil or racist or anything else). But I think you can distinguish intelligence per se from what you might call information level, or political sagacity, or whatever - or its inverse, call it gullibility or whatever. Because let's face it, a farmer or fisherman who voted Leave because they thought it would boost their business, or someone who voted Tory two years ago because they thought Boris Johnson was going to build dozens of new hospitals, was mistaken - or rather, misled. They were told a lie, and they believed it. That's not a moral failing, but it is an error of judgement. I don't see how you can sidestep that.You make some really good points and I actually agree with most of what you've written but you miss what I'm pointing at - the way that hatred of the Tories is a kinda high, and that leaves the people so locked into that perspective with a total inability to understand why someone would vote Tory. I can't see circumstances where I'd vote for them but I don't think the people who do vote for them do so 'cos they're fucking thick which is the rhetoric you hear all the time on the Left. The way we talk about Brexit voters is the same.
Well for one you have previously said in this thread that we live in Tory country and the supposed opposition is merely a reflection of this. So which one is it
Bit of a tory shout this if you ask me. Oh the country is in the shit, I won't vote- it must be Labour's fault..