Unheard of, but heard everywhere
About the angry citizen, political simplification and the loss of stratification in society.
There is a broadcaster in the Netherlands who calls himself 'Ongehoord'. The name claims a position: here the people who have been ignored, dismissed, silenced for decades speak. It's a powerful frame. It is also demonstrably false.
Because if there is one thing that characterizes the political history of the past quarter century, it is the permanent presence of the angry citizen at the conference table. Politicians, journalists and scientists have been wondering for twenty years what is bothering him. Every election is explained as his message. Every policy debate opens with its concerns. Unheard, but in fact the only voice that really resonates.
In his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl described a group of children with serious character defects: the greedy, the spoiled, the TV addict, the compulsive chewing gum chewer. They enter Willy Wonka's paradise and, one by one, are brought down in spectacular fashion by the very traits they have never unlearned. It does not take much effort, writes HP/De Tijd, to recognize the contours of part of the contemporary political public in that group: addicted to consumption, chronically dissatisfied, unable to be satisfied, and convinced that everything that goes wrong is the fault of others.
That's a harsh judgement. It is also an incomplete judgment, and that makes it dangerous.
The sociologist René Cuperus, co-author of the influential Atlas of Afgehaakt Nederland, called the Schoof cabinet the cabinet of Afgehaakt Nederland: a coalition supported by the voice of practically educated voters, regional Netherlands, those who felt misunderstood for years by Administrative and Randstad Netherlands. And what happened? An anticlimax. A cabinet that achieved virtually nothing and ultimately fell apart. The uprising ended empty-handed.
That anticlimax contains a diagnostic message. Political representation has not alleviated dissatisfaction, because that dissatisfaction is not primarily political in nature. She has a deeper layer.
Social psychologist Ron van Wonderen, affiliated with the Verwey-Jonker Institute, points out something that is structurally lost in political imaging: the layered nature of what people really think. If fifty percent of Dutch people say they want an asylum stop, that sounds like a clear statement. But further questioning produces a different picture: yes, war refugees should be accommodated; how do you filter out terrorists; what about single men versus families; are they economic or political refugees? The nuance is there, but it disappears in the slogans of politicians and the sound bites of talk shows.
There is a geographical paradox at play here. Dissatisfaction with immigration is strongest in regions where hardly any migrants live. People there do not base their opinions on personal encounters, but on media reporting and social media, which report about migrants almost exclusively during incidents. Political movements then have an interest in amplifying those images. The danger, says Van Wonderen, is that politics will increasingly revolve around identity: you adapt your positions to the party line, instead of the other way around. This has already come a long way in America. Even less in the Netherlands, but the movement is visible.
What all this adds up to is an image of a society that is losing its stratification. Not because people have changed, but because the structures that made this stratification possible have disappeared: the connections in which people are not addressed as voters or consumers, but are known as persons. The sports club, the church, the neighborhood life, the stable workplace with colleagues who you saw year after year. In the void this leaves behind, simplification thrives. And simplification always needs a culprit.
The conclusion that all this leads to is not that the angry citizen is wrong. It is that he makes the wrong diagnosis, encouraged by politicians and media platforms who have an interest in simplifying that diagnosis. The real question is not: who did this to us? The real question is: what has been lost that we apparently cannot live without, and how do we rebuild it?
Asking that question requires something that today's political culture is intolerant to: a willingness to look beyond one's own group and to recognize that the man who no longer recognizes his neighborhood and the woman who has settled in another country both miss something that amounts to the same thing.
Displacement is not a monopoly of one population group. It is the shared fate of a society that has broken down its connecting structures. As long as this is not recognized, politics will continue to revolve in the same spiral: uprising, anticlimax, new uprising.