The Political Psychology of Contemporary Anti‐Politics: A Discursive Approach to the End‐of‐Ideology Era

Abstract

This article advocates a discursive approach for examining political rhetoric. Such an approach is particularly useful for studying contemporary political ideology. The current political climate, especially in Britain, has been described as exemplifying a "Third Way," which is said to have replaced the old ideological division between "left" and "right" by a consensual, non-ideological politics. The discursive approach allows the analyst to look at the continuing dilemmas of an ideology that denies its ideological character. In discursive analyses of interviews with 20 elected local officials in the Midlands of England, the respondents (regardless of party affiliation) tended to give accounts that celebrated the development of consensual, less ideologically divisive politics. These accounts, however, were dilemmatic: As the speakers told of social change, they also stressed their own personal stability, as if they themselves existed outside the previous political climate. They also explicitly distanced themselves from the language of "left" and "right," but in this distancing a further ideological dilemma was detectable. All the local politicians were officially affiliated to a political party. In discursively subtle ways, the speakers used the left/right continuum as they distinguished between the parties, thereby showing the sort of variability that discursive theorists have noted in other contexts. The implications of such findings and of the discursive approach to studying ideology are discussed in relation to the possibilities for developing a critical political psychology. KEY WORDS:The Third Way, rhetorical psychology, ideology, British politics.In the contemporary world, there are political and intellectual trends, especially in Europe, that parallel the period in the 1950s and 1960s when the "end of ideology" was widely proclaimed. At that time, a number of theorists in the United States, most notably Daniel Bell (1960) and Seymour Lipset (1960), declared that the age of dogmatic, or "ideological," politics was over: Old adversarial and extreme politics was giving way to a more conciliatory and pragmatic era. Theorists

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