Episode 154 - Democracy Rewards Campaign Skills More Than Wisdom

Voting is meant to be a sober act of shared sovereignty, but what if the choice on the ballot is mostly a choice between rival salesmen? We take a hard look at the modern democratic process and ask the question many citizens are never encouraged to ask: what exactly are you selecting when you vote, and what kind of person does the system reliably produce?

We explore why party politics often rewards the skills of campaigning rather than the virtues of governing. Charisma, fundraising, polling, soundbites, and image management can win elections, yet those strengths do not automatically translate into wisdom, truthfulness, or long-term stewardship. We also talk about the relentless personal mockery and “gotcha” culture that shapes who is considered electable, even when those traits have little to do with competence or character.

Then we go deeper into the machinery of the modern state: civil service, regulators, central banks, courts, security services, public broadcasters, and other unelected institutions that outlast election cycles. If real power and continuity often sit there, what does that mean for Christian civic engagement, for our expectations of manifestos and promises, and for the near-religious hopes and fears we can attach to election night?

We finish with Tony Benn’s five questions about power:
What power have you got?
Where did you get it from?
In whose interests do you use it?
To whom are you accountable?
How do we get rid of you?  
We suggest a provocative comparison between democracy and sacral monarchy, not as a slogan but as a way to examine what each system demands of its rulers. If you care about the gospel, leadership, and the moral shape of public life, listen, share it with a friend, and then leave a review or a reply: what should we expect politics to deliver, and what should we refuse to ask of it?

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

What Are You Choosing In Voting

Rev Dr PRB 0:30

Well, welcome to the Christ-centered cosmic civilization as we continue to explore whether democracy is truly consistent with the gospel. We're on chapter three, and I've called this the mob, the manifesto, and the snake oil salesman. I wanna qu I want to ask a question in this chapter that I don't think the modern democratic cis citizen is often invited to ask. What exactly are you choosing when you vote? The standard answer is that you are choosing your representative. You are picking the man or woman who will go to the legislature and vote on your behalf. You are exercising your share of sovereignty by selecting the person who will exercise it on your behalf. But notice something about the actual process. In any modern democratic election, you are not, in fact, choosing among the wisest and most competent people in your country. You are choosing among the people who have managed to get themselves nominated by one of the major parties. The major parties have been pre-screening candidates for years before they ever appear on a ballot. The candidates have spent decades mastering one specific skill, which is the skill of getting nominated and then elected. They are professional politicians. They have, by the time they appear in front of you, won a long internal contest within their party against other ambitious people who wanted what they wanted. And also, I just put this in as a kind of footnote. I've noticed increasingly that anyone in politics, their life before they were in politics is ruthlessly examined by media people, so that anything they've said, they may have said all sorts of stupid things, undone stupid things in the past, and and and sometimes these can be things from 20, 30 years ago, and then those things are brought now and said, This this is look at this. Is this the sort of person we wish to elect? And it's as if anyone who's and I want to say this cautiously because some of the things that people have done in the past were criminal things, veteran evil things. So I'm not talking about things like that. I'm talking where things that people have said or done unguarded things or things while they were a student, or in some cases while they were children at um secondary school and things. But it's things in my mind that if a person by the time they're in midlife have nothing, they've never said or done anything that they're embarrassed by, that's a useless. I don't want a person who's never done something that they never I want people who have done and said things that are stupid in a way that they're embarrassed by, because that's a person who's lived some life and made mistakes and learned from them and and have got have got some life about them, perhaps. And sometimes there was a a Labour MP who was got into enormous trouble because they were tired and they were going home one day on the tube, and they I think they had like a mini bottle of wine or something in a bag and they had a bit of a drink from it. And and and for me, when I saw that, I just sort of smiled, oh, that's what it's like at the end of the day. And and anyway, apparent because apparently you're not allowed to do that on the tube. And I was like, Oh, okay, yeah, okay. Do they have to pay like £25 fine or something? And it became this huge media story. What kind of a person is this? And I'm like, well, it's a kind of a person who's like everybody else, kind of that. But anyway, I don't want to pick, but it would just struck me how absurd that this person had like a rich is a person with lots of life, rich life, things like that. And yet somehow they make a let's say they make they do do something, something wrong, something silly, and yet it's like that's it. We can't that's it, you can't rep you're not suitable to be a demo to be a democratically elected politician. I'm like, what what's good? Something about this just doesn't ring true. Anyway, let's go back to the book. So here's the question: the the skill of getting elected today is a real skill, and the people who have mastered it are genuinely talented at it, and then people talk about being skillful in politics, and it's a particular kind of skill of reading the mood and coming up with the policies that are the ones for the moment and all this kind of thing. But the skill of getting elected

Campaign Skills Versus True Stewardship

Rev Dr PRB 6:10

is not the same skill as the skill of running a country. The skill of getting elected is not the same skill as the skill of running a country. They are two completely different skills, and they actually have very little to do with each other. The skill of getting elected requires a certain kind of charisma, a willingness to flatter the audiences in front of you, and some politicians even adopt different accents and dialects according to the audience in front of them. A politician has to have a thick skin against criticism in the public square, a high tolerance for fundraising, an ability to manage media retention, maybe a willingness to compromise inconvenient principles for political advantage, and a relentless drive to win. Now all of these are the skills of a particularly aggressive kind of salesman. The skill of running a country requires a very different set of qualities. It requires a deep knowledge of history, a long view of consequences, a willingness to make unpopular decisions for long-term good, a character that does not bend in a storm, a commitment to truth even when truth is inconvenient, a capacity for patient technical mastery of the specific problems of governance, a spiritual life that anchors the person against the temptations of power. These are the qualities of a wise steward. Now the democratic system structurally selects for the first set of qualities being a salesman and not the second being a wise steward. Now it this the democratic system will occasionally throw up a leader who happens to possess some of something of both. But the system isn't designed to do this. The system is designed to find the best campaigner. And the best campaigner is almost by definition not the best ruler. We are choosing every few years between several skilled salesmen, none of whom may have any particular qualification for the office they are competing for. Now, I I don't mean this to be cynical. I mean it to be observational. If you watch any modern political campaign with this with this distinction in mind, the salesmanship versus the stewardship, you you see what I'm describing on every news bulletin. The candidates make promises that no rational analyst believes they can keep. I mean, just this last week a new leader has talked about a 10-year plan for the future of Britain, and we all know that they will not be anywhere near where they are now in ten years. It's a dream, it's a fantasy. Again, this leader, new leader in Britain, one of the first attacks on him I've seen is that they feel that he looked he his speech was a bit like a comedy character off a popular show. And it was just a personal attack about his mannerisms and the way he talked. And and there's tons and tons of that. Tons and tons of that from all sides. Just relentless mocking of a person's appearance, mannerisms, choice of food, choice of dress. Relentless amounts of that. And it's got nothing to do with the skills that we're actually hoping to have in a ruler. The person who may be immensely skillful at being a ruler may have silly mannerisms and they may be have poor kind of speech and they, you know, have all sorts of embarrassing features of the of their clothing or all of those things. None of those things are of any relevance whatsoever to stewardship, but all of those things matter a lot to the salesman. So the very fact that they attack each other for the way they appear, the way they dress, the way they sound tells you everything about the agenda of all of them. All of them. And they flip-flop on positions according to the polling, and sometimes without any embarrassment at all, and they invent crises to mobilize the base. And there's this huge kind of syncretism between what news we are presented with and what policies the government talks about and pursues. And that like, what is it that what are the things in that are happening in the world? You know, there's hundreds of things happening in the world, but what is it that the politicians wish us to focus on? Which country do they want us to focus on? It's not necessarily the country where the biggest events are happening or the most people are dying or anything like that. It's why this this huge sense of here's a crisis, this plays into the sorts of things we want to talk about and do and so on. And they retreat from positions when those positions become inconvenient, they craft sound bites for the evening news. Again, the concept of the soundbite. Rather that, because we think to really rule this country or any country requires deep thought and long answers. And anyone who is even attempting a sound bite tells you right away about the level of understanding and competence. So they are doing with great skill exactly what the system is designed to reward them for doing, and what the system is designed to reward them for doing has very little to do with running a country. There's a further problem here that the modern democratic citizen rarely has the chance to consider. The actual machinery of the modern state is not in any meaningful sense controlled by the elected politicians. It is controlled by the permanent civil service, the regulatory agencies, the central banks, the courts, the security services, the

The Administrative State Runs On

Rev Dr PRB 14:04

public broadcasters, large multinational corporations, a long list of unelected technocratic institutions that make up the modern administrative state. All of these institutions outlast every election. They have their own cultures, their own ideologies, their own personnel pipelines, their own institutional interests. The newly elected minister arrives at her department on Monday morning and discovers that she is in many practical senses not in charge. The bureaucracy briefs her. Now she may try to push back, she may even occasionally succeed at one or two specific limited reforms. But the broad direction of national policy continues regardless of which party has won, because the people who actually run the country are not the politicians. The politicians are the visible face for the sake of the public. The actual machinery is somewhere else. And look, I'm saying this, this isn't a conspiracy theory. I'm not at all into conspiracy theories. It's not that, it's the open and acknowledged structure of the modern administrative state. Everybody knows it, right, left, and centre. Everybody knows it. Everybody talks about it with frustration. But it you know, read any honest political memoir and you find the same observation. It doesn't matter what party they were in when they were in power. The politician arrives believing they are going to change the country, and they leave several years later, if they're lucky to last that long, having discovered that the country has changed them. They have become, they've been brought into line. The machinery has its own logic. The voter casting the ballot for the politician has even less leverage on the machinery than the politician does. Really, the voter has, in any meaningful sense, no leverage at all. The political class of the modern democracy, they've been described as snake oil salesmen with no divine authority. It's a stark phrase, but I think it's fair. They are salesmen because that's what the system has selected for, they lack divine authority because the system, by its very logic, does not derive authority from above. The leaders of the modern democratic state are in the truest sense men and women who've risen by the appetite of the crowd to a position they were never anointed for. They're doing their best, in many cases, but their best is the best of a profession that is structurally misaligned with the work they are asked to do. I want to share with you a tradition that's gone on in our family for as long as my children have been old enough to read. Around every general election, we go and collect the manifestos of the major parties and also of as many of the smaller parties as we can find. Even some of the more eccentric independent candidates. And I used to love it when you could get printed manifestos, and they were sometimes joyfully wonderful documents full of the imagery, the fonts, the layout, all of that. I love to pay

Manifestos And The Election Ritual

Rev Dr PRB 18:40

attention to to see, because it gave us a clue to what the vision uh was that they were trying to sell. Anyway, we'd bring all the get all these at home and sit around the dinner table. And I remember for a long time we used to have the children pick a party each. Sometimes we'd do it by lot, so you just got randomly allocated one of these big manifesto documents, and then they would they will be required to read their party's manifesto, summarize its main proposals, and defend its platform against the rest of the family. And we argue, we laugh, sometimes we get heated, but at the end of it all, we just pray together for the country. Wonderful evenings doing this. I remember one year one of our children's defence of the Liberal Democrats was so eloquent that uh we shared it with a campaigner when he came to our door, and then the local party printed an excerpt from it on a campaign flyer, and we were actually on a campaign flyer for the local area. But here's what these evenings have taught us, all of us over the years. The manifestos are sort of interchangeable, the arguments are familiar, the promises are recycled, the branding is sharper than the belief behind it. And whatever we vote for, the country is more or less goes in the same direction it was drifting in before. The machine hums on, the salesmen rotate, the country goes wherever the underlying technical, economic, and demographic forces are taking it, the democratic ritual is performed, the deeper realities are unaffected. And and that's not, I want to be clear, it's not an argument that there are no differences between parties. There are real differences. Some are better than others on particular questions, some are more dangerous than others. The Christian who feels that one option is morally preferable to another and votes accordingly is not doing anything wrong. I've done that myself, I may even do it again. But the question I want to put to you is whether the energy and emotional investment we put into this ritual is proportionate to its actual results. We treat each election as a moment of immense national importance. Well, we used to do. I think that's and maybe that's coming back a little bit now, I don't know. But we treat, or we used to treat each election as a moment of immense national importance, and we invest in it the hopes and fears that in an earlier age were invested in the religious life of the nation. And just pause on that for a minute because people in the past believed that if the country was gonna have righteousness and justice and compassion, that would only happen through church or revival or preaching or sacraments and things like that. That's where justice and compassion and truth and goodness flows from. Now, even my Christian friends, even people who would call themselves sort of evangelical or seriously biblical or whatever, talk as if those things can flow from political sources. Literally, people say it's very important that we take seriously politics and world news and things like that because we care about justice and compassion and goodness. That's a common thing I hear. But then the election passes and the new government takes office, and within a year or two. We're anxious about the next election. The cycle continues. The promises are not kept. They couldn't ever be kept. It was always impossible to keep them. The country drifts, we start again. I want to mention briefly the famous five questions of Tony Ben, who was one of the great Labour parliamentarians of the late 20th century. Tony Ben. If you've never come across him, just look him up on YouTube or something, and you'll get some wonderful interviews with him with this kind of a passion, a contrariness in some ways, but a passion and a compassion and uh and then the Ben Diaries. Anyway, forget that. Anyway, he used to say that there are five questions that

Tony Benn’s Questions And Sacred Kingship

Rev Dr PRB 23:48

should be put to anyone holding power. These are the five questions. What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you? I think these are profound questions. However, the five questions are not in themselves questions that favour any particular political form. So Tony Ben was a very big believer in democracy, and he believed those questions were important for democracy, but I think those questions are good regard whether whether it's democracy or any other form of political governance? They're questions really about virtue, and they could be asked just as honestly of any sacral monarch as a democratically elected official or whatever. So how might a sacred monarch answer Tony Ben's five questions? They might say, I have such authority as the Lord has given me. He gave it to me through anointing by his church. I use it for the welfare of the people. I am accountable to the Lord God and to the bishops who watch my s my soul, and he, the Lord God, can remove me at his will, by death or by removal of his favour. So a godly monarch could answer Tony Ben's questions every bit as faithfully as a godly democrat. The questions reveal the virtue of the office holder. They do not by themselves settle the question of which form of government produces virtuous office holders. In fact, I would suggest looking at actual history that sacral monarchy, with its long apprenticeship of an heir to the throne under the eye of a Christian church, has produced, on average, more virtuous office holders than the democratic system, which selects for the qualities of the campaigner. The Christian historians of the early modern period had a phrase for the kind of king they hoped for. They called him Rex Justus Epius, the just and pious king. That's what they looked for and hoped for and prayed for. The just and pious king. The medieval imagination produced more of those kind of kings than the modern democracy has produced just and pious presidents or just and pious prime ministers. The system shapes the people who rise within it. And we should be honest about what each system has produced. But as we come to the end of this chapter, notice also what each system asks of its rulers. The democratic system asks the elected official to please his electorate, to manage media perception, to win the next election, to manage his party's internal factions. The sacral monarchy asks its king to fear the Lord, to read the law of God daily, to seek the counsel of the bishops and church leaders, to do justice for the poor and needy, to protect his people from invasion, and to prepare himself for the day when he will give an account to the divine emperor of how he has governed. And it is remarkable to read the journals and letters of sacral monarchs who are very aware of that accounting they will have to give. So these two sets of demands, the dead the system the demands of the democratic system are please the electorate, manage the media, win the election, handle your party's factions. The sacral monarch is urged to fear the Lord and to do the good, to care for the poor and needy, to read the law and so on. These are not the same set of demands at all. The audience in mind, on the one hand, is the media and the mob, and on the other hand, the audience really is the Lord God Himself, and derivatively the people as the Lord's people. So these two systems produce predictably very different kinds of people. We should not be surprised when our democratic systems produce people who are good at the things our democratic systems demand of them. And they are not very good at the things sacral monarchies used to demand. The shoe is shaped by the foot, really. And so I want to end this chapter with this with a kind of gentleness I really want to do. I'm not telling you that voting is a sin. I'm not telling you you should despair of the country. I'm inviting you just to notice that the system in which we have been participating may not be doing what it claims to do, and that the salesman we are being asked to choose between may not be the kind of leaders the Bible speaks about, or the kind of leader that

A Gentle Challenge To Our Politics

Rev Dr PRB 30:42

the Lord chooses.