Why Corbyn is so popular (2)

Pic c/o @henbell via @guidofawkes

Another day, another attempt to post-rationalise the rise of ol’ JC.

Sadly, this time it’s Cory Doctorow falling into the trap of assuming that – after the fact – there’s something inevitable about a thing that looked very unlikely. His authenticity, his ideological stances, his ideological consistency, his lack of spin etc etc

Let’s get it clear:

Voting behaviour is very rarely a rational thing – it’s shaped not by consideration of the policies (as activists would have us believe) or the “ishoo’s” (as the late great Tony Benn was keen to argue). Hence the (frustrating) example of voters voting against their own interest (as political theorists might put it). And all the apparently “evil tricks” of contemporary spin doctoring (which acknowledge the emotional nature of the “political brain”).

Voting is a social thing – it’s about social identity (Who are we and who are they?) and about popularity (What do other people think? What will other people do?

It’s very rarely about the thing (the policy, the politician, the party). But about what others are up to (which is why US politicians are so keen on “momentum”). For most people, politics is too hard (which is why we default to easy choices, habits and borrowed opinion).

Put all this together and it’s not hard to see how “Why an obscure left-wing MP won the UK Labour leadership by the biggest margin in history”. It’s a cascade of people responding to other people’s responses to the responses of those who were there in the first case.

Here’s the test: if you rewound the tape of Labour Party history (as Steven Jay Gould puts it), it’s very VERY unlikely that JC would win again.

Now of course, it seems inevitable. But that’s the post-hoc bias we can’t escape.

So instead we pretend it was somehow inevitable but the causes were obscure or hidden from us in someway; we repeatedly try to make sense of it in terms of him, his policies, his ideological purity or his opponents, their policies etc etc.

JC’s supporters point to the thing and the man stuff; his opponents ditto likewise.

And still almost nobody involved is bothering to accept it’s got b***** all to do with thing stuff. But everything to do with the network of people who spread the enthusiasm of early Corbyn adopters…in the absence of anything competing for the attention/enthusiasm of the network.