Landslide in the UK, Backslide Averted in France
Is It Good News or Just a Reflection of the Blues?
Pundits and historians, pollsters and social scientists and famously, James Carville can claim we vote with our pocketbooks as in “It’s the economy, stupid!” And then there’s also the longstanding and still mostly verifiable “We vote how our parents did!”
I took a government course in college and my professor asked us what ketchup we preferred? The two candidates were Heinz and Hunts. (Was there even a third?) A followup question was which one did you grow up with at home? We used Heinz and I still do. And yes, my parents were Democrats and so far so am I.
This postulate did not apply thankfully in adulthood to my childhood spaghetti— Muller’s —and tomato sauce— Del Monte. As we age, certainly we are capable of changing our past even beyond our pastas. And times change and change us.
It seems to me that at this point in history the countries in the world where people are still allowed to vote without intimidation (and there are fewer now than there were a few decades ago) voters are more often expressing their angst and discontent and even their pessimism and fears and although the first line in the stories about the election results in the UK and France may have the words “The left won”, it’s certainly not the whole story.
I know I’m not showing such nuance in today’s cartoon. Remember, I’m a recovering television news journalist and I always realized my work was sort of adding captions to pictures without the space and time for a lot of depth. A picture may be said to be worth a thousand words but I rarely ever got that many. So now that I have a chance to use them plus express an opinion, I’ll add that these election results don’t really mean there’s been an about face for the future political direction of the UK and France. I don’t think whatever gyroscope that has been balancing western democracies for decades is working now. Equilibrium in many societies is teetering and to adapt the quote that the astute political prognosticator Bette Davis uttered in All about Eve 84 years ago “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy future.”
And what about them Iranians, Peter? Is that a tough little democracy or what?