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Appearances Don’t Matter
Why voter anger rarely makes any difference in politics
As wildfires rage across Australia, social media is replete with clips of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison being chased away from photo ops by angry citizens, screamed at by irate fire-fighters, and generally having a difficult time with his “personal space” as voters express their discontent with his performance.
This is a more extreme version of what was seen in the UK during the last General Election campaign, when voters across the nation insulted Boris Johnson and told him to f*ck off. Poor Boris spent the remainder of the election campaign hiding in a broom closet and self-soothing by endlessly practicing his pre-photo-op signature hair-mussing.
Which in turn was a more dramatic version of many Republican voters’ attitude towards Donald Trump during the US Presidential election of 2016: they found Trump to be an utterly repugnant person with policies abhorrent to their fundamental beliefs whose mere existence as a candidate made a mockery of everything they thought they believed in.
Yet… in the end, these expressions of distaste, anger, and outright hostility don’t matter at all. Brexit is happening and Johnson is Prime Minister with an overwhelming Parliamentary majority. Trump is President and almost certain to win re-election in 2020. Morrison will only…
