This is a really good long read [FR] by @sderoyer on the “ghost ship” that is Macron’s party. The thing that really struck me, picking up @ccastaner in the article, is that you can’t make an ideology out of a set of disconnected ideas. lemonde.fr/politique/arti…
Thinking further about this, the practical experience of LREM is a strong argument for the synthesising model of political parties – that they exist to adapt and make coherent a broad set of ideas that cluster around a political common core.
If there’s no common core, you can’t synthesise and so you end up temporising, just saying what seems like a good idea at the time and squashing anything with a clear political position (for fear it will turn off some people).
Particularly interesting is the disillusion of the well-meaning non-political types. It almost reads like the local-politics version of when a business leader is brought into government and flames out.
And at @demsoc we think about this sort of thing all the time – how can citizens be made more active without being forced to take sides? How can citizen voices be synthesised into governing platforms? What’s the balance of power between party leader, member & public?
I would be the first to say that we don’t have all the answers, but this is another confirmation to me that these are some of the right questions.
Originally posted as a thread of 6 tweets on Twitter on 5 July 2021. View the original thread.