The old complaint about politicians used to be that they campaigned in poetry and governed in prose. Times change and so should our complaints. The problem seems to have been turned on its head.

Politicians are campaigning in prose and so are finding it difficult to govern in poetry. Even though they must if the central challenges of our time are to be met.

To campaign in poetry is the old-style campaign, such as that run by the Nationalist Party in 2003 and 2008, and by Labour in 2013, where we were promised a country that would welcome our better selves.

The PN ran this kind of campaign this year as well. But Labour did not.

For my purposes here, it is beside the point whether Labour did hire Cambridge Analytica, a data mining and strategic communications company that specialises in manipulating voter behaviour. (Many people believe CA did advise Labour; but CA doesn’t say so on its website.) What matters is that it is evident that Labour used techniques associated with CA: a huge database, identifying individual voters and their ‘needs’ (from the economic to leisure), and propaganda techniques designed to target voters and change their behaviour.

These techniques work by fragmenting – the industry word is segmentation– voter groups into fractions of what they usually are. The old-style handful of marketing divisions, based on professional and working identities, now seems a bit like reducing the elements to earth, wind, fire and water.

In the US, CA classifies voters into 32 different personality types and claims to be able to model the personality of every one of the country’s 230 million ‘targets’. At least so said the CEO, Alexander Nix, a year ago. While some of that might be spin, no one contests the capacity of the new techniques to target very specific voter needs, which could bring out and sway the vote.

In short, it is a technique persistently oriented towards individual interests. It is based on atomising the vote, obscuring the sight of larger, longer-term goals. It doesn’t just ignore the public interest and common good. It makes it more difficult to think there is one at all.

Of course, at mass meetings, designed as political theatre, campaigning in poetry goes on. But such meetings are no longer places where specific promises are made. They are staged to generate an emotional effervescence to enthuse large audiences. The promises – the real ones designed to sway the outcome of an election, particularly if it could be tight – are made elsewhere. In prose.

Governing these days, however, has to be in poetry. It is true that governments continue to let voters down. Disillusionment accounts for the way Maltese faith in politicians has crashed over this past year. But there is an increasing functional need for governing to draw on poetry.

A functional need means it’s not an option. I’m not referring to the luxury of grandiloquence permitted by good economic conditions, which allow politicians to wax poetic about progress and vision.

The technique doesn’t just ignore the public interest and common good. It makes it more difficult to think there is one at all

I’m referring to the central challenges of our time, which finds the entire world at the centre of critical, interlinked transitions. They play out in Malta too.

There’s the ecological crisis, which cannot be addressed without key changes to our consumption patterns.

There’s the double demographic transition. An aging society with its demands on the welfare state, medical services and dignified living. And a huge influx of migrants, legal, illegal, and undocumented. There’s the economic transition, which is calling into question any identity rooted in one’s work. Indeed, it’s calling into question the very concept of work, and whether many of us will be able to find long-term stable work in the future.

And there’s profound cultural change, as personal and collective identities need to measure themselves in the context of global culture.

I’ll stop there, even if the list can go on. These aren’t crises that can be resolved. They can only be managed and reviewed. And no matter the state of the economy, they cannot be tackled by appeal to individual interests.

They are simply irresolvable without an appeal to solidarity. Because hard decisions will be needed. Some sacrifices – if only of a transitional kind – will need to be made. And for that to happen, there needs to be social cohesion.

That old-fashioned concept, social cohesion, isn’t possible if people cannot identify with a larger group and transcendent goal. You need a sense of a real public interest and common good.

That is what got us through the transitional pains of Independence and, later, EU membership. Social cohesion is still identified as critical for economic success by certain futurologists. And yet in Malta these notions seem to be eroded by the day.

A few years ago, in an interview with Reno Bugeja, the Prime Minister blurted out that what ‘people’ are interested in is their pocket. He later walked it back, but for once he seemed to be speaking his mind.

We now have a newly minted leader of the Opposition who believes we are, fundamentally, simple people with simple needs. He has been mocked for the particular examples he chose. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say he mentioned tinkering with cars and enjoying song-birds as a non-exhaustive list.

If he really thinks that, in a globalised world, you can talk of simple people and simple needs, he has no grasp of the challenges he expects us to entrust him with.

The fact is I’m hard-pressed to think of alternative politicians capable of speaking of a compelling common good. That just about sums up our predicament.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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