Psychological research has shown that most people don't care about inequality unless it's right in their face. Most people simply can't be made to get too worked up about some billionaire somewhere buying their 10th yacht while they're working a dead-end 9-to-5, no matter how unfair it seems. People focus on their day-to-day lives and their peers, not people far away. So I think that the radical redistributionist angle is a dead end politically, even if some welfare programs may be popular.
It’s true that once people have a certain basic standard of living, they don’t care about inequality, but I would argue that this is, at least to an extent, because they have been deliberately conditioned
not to care about it.
There are a huge number of people who have been ‘left behind’ by the rising inequality of the past few decades (the disenfranchised white working class being one subset), people who haven’t shared the benefits of a richer society but instead have become its victims, with higher house prices and higher cost of living, lower wages and insecure employment terms, poorer pension provision, etc. I would argue that these people
do feel that they are victims and
do want to strike back against their oppressors, if only at the ballot box.
This is where it becomes apparent that the phrase ‘capitalist democracy’ is an oxymoron. Capitalist societies, as we all know, are plutocratic by nature, and ‘democracy’ is a thin veneer. The rich control the traditional media, and are throwing huge sums of money into ensuring that they have effective control of social media, too. Their strategy is and always has been to deflect any blame from themselves, and instead make the common people fight amongst themselves. In the UK, they have been very effective in convincing people that the reason they have bad jobs and no money is not because society is set up so that the rich cream off all the wealth, but rather because foreigners are ‘coming over here and taking your jobs’. Most notably they have used the EU as a scapegoat, hence Brexit. I’m not as familiar with US politics, but I’m well aware of Trump’s wall to keep out those pesky Mexicans.
I
do think that people care about being the victims in an unfair society, it’s just that they are misled as to the cause of that unfairness.
Having said all that, I’m not sure what the answer is, and how we ensure that when people vote, they are actually voting according to their own views that they themselves have developed, rather than as a superficial knee-jerk reaction to whatever the tabloid headlines or curated social media outrages impel them towards. How do we get people to think for themselves? And if we succeed, will we be faced by a new problem – the poor may vote for what they believe is a fairer society, but are they doing so out of self-interest in improving their own personal lot, or because they genuinely care about fairness and equality of opportunity? Difficult questions with no obvious answers.
involvement of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, which should be much more worrying than anything else because suddenly social media platform is enough to manipulate undecided voters to change the outcome of elections.
True, and whilst the rich have always manipulated us through newpapers, TV etc, these are fairly blunt mass-targeted instruments. Social media can be far more insidious. Facebook puts a huge amount of effort into behavioural profiling, mapping individual minds with ever increasing detail. Facebook knows not just how we react to certain prompts, but also why we do so, and this can and is ushering in an age where our viewpoints are being manipulated and developed on an individual level, and with a degree of subtlety that makes it difficult to determine the extent to which ‘our’ opinions are actually our own. It is quite terrifying, and it acts to thin whatever veneer of democracy remains.
