Leaving GroenLinks 1: what is a political party for, anyway?

29 november

There has been a break in the continuity of my writing. For first time in my adult life, I am not an active member of a political party. I quit the dutch green party, GroenLinks. So I needed some days to think and take stock. I suppose that in our days of repulsion to politics in general and political parties in general, many of the ones that read will shrug their shoulders, or smile for me and think I’ll be better of.

Well, I do think that I’ll be better off.

Nevertheless, after all the water that has passed under this bridge, and many other bridges of my past, I am sailing into the unknown. How do I work out the duty of building a better society, now that I believe the dutch greens are not helping? Lacking a reliable future direction, then, in the coming days I’ll write to work out a sort of backward compass, a collection of waypoints that brought me to today, the day that I’m party-free. To begin somewhere, I think in Vasudeva, the ferryman of Hesse’s Siddhartha.

Years ago, the (outgoing) political editor of De Standaard (a prominent belgium newspaper) described politics as a ferry. On one shore there is the people and at the other the governmental apparatus, civil servants, politicians, ministers and the rest. The one thing that keep the two shores in contact is politics, ferrying ideas and needs and wishes -and people- from one side to the other. In that sense a political party is a boat, forever sailing between those two shores. In Hesse’s tale the ferryman Vasudeva is the one that finally allows Siddhartha to be enlightened, by once selflessly bringing him across the river and years later inspiring him to look at the river itself. In doing so, Siddhartha realizes the transient nature of life, and becomes a ferryman himself.

Interestingly enough, the political metaphor assumes that there is an intrinsic distance between the government and the people. If the metaphors holds, ferrymen are important -most important indeed- actors of our society, the ones that allow the elite, the small group of people that govern us, to know us; and by knowing us, serve us. Political parties prevent that monarch to tell us to go eat cakes, political parties keeps alive the idea of by the people, for the people. The thing is that between Marie Antoinette and today some things have actually changed.

What if those ferrymen are not needed anymore? What if the society that was effectively split between elite and mass, where very few could ever dream of acquiring the skills and the knowledge to help run a country has become flatter, egalitarian? What if the average citizen is as capable of being a parlamentarian as any other…parlamentarian? Actually: what if the average citizen have better understanding than the average parlamentarian on the matters that the parlamentarian decide? What if the elite has been rendered meaningless by the success of mass education? What if governors do not need the filter of an ideology to understand the world around them? Let alone ideology: what if a governor does not need a political team to inform her of the world outside? What if she could just tune twitter and read some newspapers and be as good -or better- as the communication team provided by her party?

In GroenLinks, the party that used to be my party, that has been the situation since long time ago. There are some groups -in the formal structure of the party- designed to connect members and politicians, but they are hardly used. In general, the party is a machine, (a disfunctional machine some would say, but that is another discussion) to get people elected, and let them do their thing. GroenLinks is a ferry that bring people to the government, but brings very few people back. I will write specifically about GL later, but now: can you name a single party that actually connects members and politicians? Of course not. Parties have become machines of producing votes, the fuel that move the ferry in one direction. But since long ago parties are not ferrying ideas, are not fostering real creative debate. We all know that. Political debates are not to elicit thinking: they are to be won or lost. Accordingly, they have lost meaning. Look at the numbers of people that change their vote after a debate. Nihil. Now think in a political party, any political party: Could you really use it to access decision makers? You know that the answer is no. Not without becoming a decision maker yourself.

It is possible that the river is not an obstacle no more: it is really possible that politicians knows no better, or actually worse, than the people they take decisions for. It is also possible that the river is there, but our existing parties are no ferries no more. One way or another, we need to think anew. The system that we have got is disfunctional. The boats are loaded going there, but empty when coming back. They are old and rusty. And we trust no ferrymen no more.

I think we need to look at the river anew.