Petulance Politics

How Western infantilism has radically reshaped politics

A very modern voter

One of the most important changes in the last twenty years has attracted surprisingly little attention. The Twentieth Century was shaped to a significant degree by people voting for things whereas our century is being shaped by people voting against things (or refusing to vote as a protest against things). This is a profound change and it has had profound consequences.

Let’s look at the twentieth century in order to see how stark the comparison is.

In Europe, political Parties tended to divide between those promoting the rights of workers and other under-represented social blocs (such as women, who didn’t have the right to vote) and those promoting the rights of the already-comfortable (industrialists, landowners, the rising middle class). Citizens could vote for enhanced rights and the tax increases that would pay for them, or they could vote for the status quo. Of course, some citizens felt they were voting against granting the proletariat more rights, but the majority of citizens felt they were voting for things they wanted rather than against things they didn’t want.

Likewise in the final decades of the twentieth century in many European countries voters (who by now included all the previously disenfranchised) were seeing some of the…