We’ve all heard it before, that jaded wisdom imparted with the sort of confidence I can only associate with a smoker taking a theatrical drag, lifting his cigarette aloft and announcing with almost bored nonchalance, “Politicians and political parties are really all the same.”
It’s a belief that is easily stated and almost always received with knowing nods and mildly exasperated tutting. It borders the edge of edginess and allowable opinion.
It is a sort of cheap drinks round to buy in any social setting – and in that sense, it isn’t hard to explain why no one ever really disagrees. Who, after all, spits out the first sip of a drink someone else has paid for, and says bluntly, “Actually, this tastes quite bad”?
But let me now be the person to call for the spittoon. This glass of cynicism-and-tonic tastes funny. It’s good that I didn’t buy it, because, frankly, I don’t buy it. For the obvious reason that it isn’t true.
Politicians are not all the same, in exactly the way that doctors, teachers, businessmen, journalists, policemen and plumbers are not all the same. Naturally, politics is a very unusual profession, and it attracts unusual people. Who wants to actually make it their day job to professionally disagree and essentially make public judgement the basis of their career prospects?
Nor are political parties interchangeable, distinguished only by logos, colours, and the assortment of rogues currently occupying their front benches. Parties make different decisions because they contain different ideas about what government is for, what citizens should be permitted to do, how public money should be spent, what property belongs to whom, whether appointments should be made according to competence or political allegiance, how much power the state should possess and what limits should be placed upon that power.
Very tangible
Those differences eventually become very tangible things. They become a matter of whether there is water in a tap, whether a pothole is repaired, whether a business can employ another person or whether the police officer who arrives after a robbery has a vehicle that works. They determine whether or not somebody with the right surname or party connections jumps ahead of somebody better-qualified for a job, whether a municipality pays its suppliers, or the electricity stays on, or whether an investor puts money into a factory or quietly decides to put it somewhere else.
Politics has an irritating habit of turning abstract distinctions into concrete consequences. Unthinking political cynicism has a curious moral consequence; if everyone is assumed to be equally rotten, rottenness becomes less important.
The politician who steals and the politician who does not steal are both politicians. The councillor who answers his phone and the councillor who disappears for five years are both councillors. The party that removes a corrupt official and the party that protects one are both parties. All the same, are they?
In that sense, indiscriminate cynicism does not punish bad politicians nearly as effectively as its practitioners imagine. It does the opposite: it protects the worst ones.
Convenient electorate
The corrupt politician would dearly love you to believe that everyone else is corrupt too. The incompetent administration benefits enormously when its failures are dismissed as simply what parties in government do. A party that has governed disastrously could hardly ask for a more convenient electorate than one persuaded that replacing it cannot possibly make any difference.
Accountability requires a bit of mental effort. It requires the voter to say: this was better than that. This person did the job and that person did not. This party in government improved something and that party in government broke it. I expected more from this party. I trust that party less than I did five years ago. This politician deserves another term. That one deserves unemployment.
There is nothing starry-eyed about any of this. Quite the contrary. Politicians should be watched suspiciously, power should be distrusted, and promises should be checked against results, rhetoric against conduct. Governments should have hostile journalists, irritating opposition politicians, independent courts, vigilant citizens, and auditors who ask impolite questions.
But scepticism and cynicism are different things. Scepticism says: prove it. Cynicism says, rather smugly: there is no point in looking at the proof.
Sometimes the distinction will be between excellent and mediocre. Perhaps more often it will be between mediocre and dreadful. Occasionally it may simply be between bad and worse. But those are still distinctions, and when the subject is who gets to spend billions of rand, appoint thousands of officials, write laws, command police forces and make decisions capable of altering millions of lives, distinctions of degree are hardly trivial.
By all means
So, by all means, distrust politicians. Mock them when they deserve it. Assume that every grand promise has an invoice attached somewhere and check who will be paying it. Regard anyone asking for power as someone who ought to be required to explain themselves.
Just don’t flatter yourself that refusing to distinguish between them is sophistication.
The next time someone takes that metaphorical drag, leans back and announces that they’re all the same, perhaps we should all ask the following question: “Are they, really? Do please tell me, would you, how exactly Margaret Thatcher and Jacob Zuma are indistinguishable?”
[Image: Jon Tyson on Unsplash]
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