Elections, taxing the rich and climate change. This is what I have been thinking about. And about the elections in Brazil and Germany. The era of Donald Trump, and the Andy Burnham bounce. Let me explain.
My starting point is that people vote their real lives. Charismatic leaders matter some. So do good policies and good political adverts. But not that much.
Because when it comes down it, people look around them, at what has happened to their lives, to their neighbour’s lives, to the lives of people they love. And if their lives are in trouble, they vote against the people in charge.
Inequality
That’s why Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) could come back in 2022 and beat Jair Bolsonaro, and then Bolsonaro’s son Flavio could come back this year and beat Lula.
It’s why in the United States Trump could be beaten and humiliated in 2020, when the Democrats all thought he was gone for ever, and yet he could come back and win in 2024.
Partly this happens because when the economy isn’t working, people know it. You can tell us all you want that the economic indicators are looking good and inflation is down and the stock market is soaring.
But when we go food shopping, pay the rent, read the heating bill, we know.
But it’s more than this. It’s the texture of our lives. Living with great inequality puts pressure on all our relationships, at work and at home, and it shreds some of those relationships. There’s stress in the air we breathe.
Material
Even the bullies know this. Even as we take our problems and our anger out on each other, we know things are going wrong. It’s very hard for people to watch their grown children in trouble.
And we can now also see that when the far right come back a second time, they come back angrier and more cruel.
Economic hardship doesn’t make everyone vote for the far right. Many of us are loyal from way back, so we would never vote Republican in the United States or Conservative in Britain, for example.
Many of us are repelled by the far right because we’re Black or Muslim or trans. So what many of us do if our lives get worse is we don’t vote. Then, more in sorrow than in anger, we let the racist, sexist brutal, right sneak through.
To stop the far right we need governments that actually make people’s material lives seriously better.
Spend
That can’t be done without taxing the rich. I don’t want to argue here about whether that means an income tax or a wealth tax or a capital gains tax, whether we tax the one per cent or the five per cent or the 20 per cent. Those are important questions. But here I want to make a simple point.
We have to tax the rich enough that our governments can spend enough to change the lives of the rest of us.
Take Britain, where I live. Burnham, the prime minister, sounds and looks better than Labour leaders have for a long time. He looks like he knows us.