Why Jeremy Corbyn is so popular

There’s a lot of bemusement in British Political circles at the moment at the rise of this chap, Jeremy Corbyn, as a prospective leader of the Left of Centre Labour Party.

On the one hand, there’s the point of view that he is seen by a large number of people to represent an anti-politics politician (as UKIP’s Nigel Farage does and perhaps also the one and only Donald Trump in the US). While he’s been the member of parliament for Islington North for many years, he’s rarely crossed into public consciousness and certainly has never enjoyed office in government or in opposition, either.

Another point of view is more ideological: some see Corbyn as ideologically pure in a way that the Centre Left can never be (“Blairite” is a term of abuse nowadays). Sure, he has a long history of rebellion and refusal to compromise his old-fashioned (unchanging) socialist principles in exchange for power or popularity but the important thing, his supporters say is that his programme is based on rejecting the political and economic consensus of “neoliberalism”. This represents the kind of political alternative to austerity, his advocates argue, that is sought across  Europe.  Look, they say, see how the SNP got so successful in the recent election: by being explicitly anti-austerity, they won the day big style.

Well, yes maybe to both these and other explanations like them although it’s quite hard to build a case for example that the Labour Party failed to win because it was insufficiently socialist – most evidence-based post-mortems point to the Tories’ stronger economic reputation, however ill-founded, as being the critical difference for those seats which built their majority. While there are many left-wing policies (nationalising the railways and energy companies) which are popular with the majority of UK voters, so there are many objectionable ones (to left-wingers), too (strong immigration controls and capital punishment to name but two). As Matt D’Ancona pointed out in his warning to the newly elected and very surprised Tory majority, the UK population has not been transformed into a right wing mob overnight; nor, is it hungry for revolution.

Is there a better explanation of why JC is riding this wave of popularity then? 

It’s a shame we don’t spend as much time thinking about how people vote (or say they will) as we do opining on how they should do and why.

For most of us, voting is a people-thing, whatever we tell ourselves. By that I mean that its appeal lies not in the act of voting itself but in the social identity it represents: we vote at all because that’s what people like us do.

Ditto whom we vote for. Most of those of us who vote would never dream of voting for a party other than the one we have always voted for. Why? Because again this is part of a social identity; a marker for tribal membership. Admittedly over the long-term, the social structures which used to reinforce these tribal behaviours so strongly have loosened their grip and in some cases disappeared altogether, but the choices live on, zombie-like (not least because it is generally hard to make such decisions in a thoroughly rational way, whatever the economists tell us).

Of course, there are those who do change their minds – floating voters – but these are relatively small in number, despite being critically important to electoral success, especially under First Past The Post. And they in particular can be influenced by social proofs of different sorts. Hence political rallies, fundraisers, Facebook campaigns and lapel badges. And scare campaigns with a strong word-of-mouth bent, which propose a threat to a specific social group (such as 2015’s “man in the pocket” campaign from M&C Saatchi for CCHQ).

Remember Cleggmania? Then as now, almost overnight. a hitherto unknown (to most) politician was bestowed with all our wishes and dreams of a different, fresher, fairer kind of politics. He drew in voters from all corners, prompting the defeatist acknowledgement from the other 2 party leaders, “I agree with Nick” (just as Nigel Farage managed in 2015)

That said, Clegg didn’t do it TO us: the polls only started to move when we were able to see each other’s reaction. He got popular and did so rapidly because we were able to see other people’s enthusiasm; to see other people responding to him and to other people’s take on his ‘freshness’. Not his ideology in itself or his Hugh Grant impersonations. But remember how fast this popularity evaporated?

Most human life, suggests the great social scientist Thomas Schelling, consists of individuals responding to a context of other individuals responding to a context of other individuals. This creates highly volatile conditions – what is popular today can crash and burn tomorrow. As the the MP for Sheffield Hallam discovered (even before the 2010 election, his polling was down).

Could it be that Corbyn-mania is just the product of this kind of mechanic?

That he’s popular because he seems popular? 

Anathema, I know to politicos of all sorts.

We like to imagine that popularity is a thing-thing: that it’s something about the person, the product or its intrinsic characteristics that makes it popular.

The truth is that popularity tends to be a people-thing: it’s rooted in what other people think/say/do (other people think/say/do).

If all of this is correct, then probably the last thing you’d want to do if you were one of the other 3 candidates, is to draw attention to JC’s popularity. It’ll only make him seem more popular and we all know where that leads…