Most of you will recognise the Curley Effect, even if you haven’t heard of it.
James Curley, also known as the ‘Rascal King’ was a four-time mayor of Boston from 1914 to 1950. He used wasteful redistribution and electoral largesse directed to his poor Irish constituents and populist rhetoric to cause wealthy establishment Bostonians to leave the city, thereby shaping the electorate in his favour so he would be re-elected.
Boston’s economy went backwards and municipal problems such as crime and corruption arose. Investment and productivity plummeted, but Curley kept winning elections. Sound familiar? There’s abundant commentary on Curley available for those who don’t know his story and his impact on modern politics.
This modus operandi has been used effectively by many political leaders since.
The general strategy of dolling out electoral bribes to reinforce or grow a political base at the expense of the genuine welfare and economic health of the electorate has indeed become a depressingly central feature of modern politics.
Increasingly, the apparent mission of most politicians across the globe, including here in Australia, is to stay in power by cultivating voter support by causing voters to believe they need to keep voting for them lest the public teat be taken away, and they lose the wasteful benefits bestowed upon them.
The strategy can involve importing unskilled and poor immigrants into marginal electorates and actively encouraging welfare and state dependency or making strategic and usually flawed spending decisions. Cronyism, control of the mainstream media, heavy-handed regulation, fomenting class and generational envy, and suppression of dissent are also integral parts of this playbook.
There have been conspicuous exponents of this political strategy locally and throughout the world.
Indeed, industrial-scale Curleyism is now evident throughout the anglosphere with political leaders using big government, regulation, mass immigration, public welfare spending and fostering increased state dependency as a means of swelling electoral support and retaining power.
This is not solely the province of the left-leaning parties. Ramping up middle-class welfare and the use of electoral bribes has also been engaged in by centre-right parties.
Whereas Curley drove primarily wealthy Bostonians and industrialists out of the city, the modern adaptation of this strategy is driving more disparate and less electorally homogenous groups away from the incumbent parties, including poor and middle-class working people who aren’t dependent on state welfare and who distrust the state. Donald Trump managed to mobilise this large alienated, but politically apathetic cohort, and Nigel Farage and Pauline Hanson have similar plans.
Resources are increasingly scarce and economies are stagnating. Not everyone can be the beneficiary of electoral largess and there are inevitably winners and losers. The calculus and finely tuned political antennae required to keep the voting numbers in your favour is very tricky to maintain, and dolling out electoral bribes requires a hell of a lot of money and/or debt. Sooner or later the money dries up, or the debt is called in and the entire body politic collapses under the weight of it all.
Some of the alienated Bostonians who fled Curley’s fiefdom found safer havens in other US cities, but most citizens won’t or can’t readily leave their cities, states or countries and can be squeezed extremely hard before they decide they’ve had enough. Canny politicians know this and will push the envelope to the absolute limit.
By way of example, plenty of Victorians will say they have had enough of massive spending, Covid levies, Work From Home mandates, usurious taxes, industrial-scale union corruption, unfixed potholes, a swollen public service and high levels of urban crime, but it takes a lot to pack your bags and move to another State. The same can be said of New Yorkers or Londoners who have watched their quality of life recede under more modern forms of Curelyism.
Typically, even the most resilient disaffected citizens simply give up in despair or at least wind back their efforts rather than seek to find greener pastures, leaving the relevant body politic in poorer health.
Ultimately, the electoral reckoning comes when the numbers are miscalculated and the balance tips. It’s only possible to stay in power by constantly directing resources in favour of some groups over others if there are sufficient resources available. The control of the media and narrative is also hard to maintain forever, and a few scandals and serious mess ups can cause sentiment to rapidly shift. This is usually when alternative populists emerge to provide a protest option. This is no great solution as protest parties can’t effectively govern because they lack the necessary machinery and depth of experience.
Creating a loyal electorate through cynical vote harvesting is a fraught task and at some stage it can be expected that the willingness of those citizens who produce the bulk of resources within a society to see those resources being used to fund electoral bribes so an incumbent can maintain power runs out.
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