The Politics of Belonging

The cluster introduction identified several structural enemies of happiness: the cognitive burden of modern complexity, the gap between rising expectations and stagnant wellbeing, the psychological damage wrought by the attention economy, and the rupture of the world order that had provided at least a framework for collective action. To this list it added a further enemy that operates in a fundamentally different register — the structural failure of mainstream democratic politics to address the emotional and identity-based needs that drive a large share of political behaviour. This essay attempts to elaborate that argument more fully. It draws on political psychology, on the history of fascism as the extreme historical instance of what emotional politics without policy coherence can become, and on the uncomfortable question of why political science has not more effectively equipped the practitioners it trains to understand the phenomenon they are now confronting at scale.

The Rider and the Elephant

The conventional account of democratic political behaviour is broadly rationalist. Citizens encounter information, reason about its implications, weigh competing policy platforms, and arrive at conclusions about who to support and what outcomes to prefer. This model is comfortable for liberal democracies because it implies that better information, more transparent debate, and higher levels of education are reliable correctives to political pathology. It is also, as an account of how most people actually form political judgements, largely wrong.

The political psychologist Jonathan Haidt has spent much of his career documenting a more accurate and considerably less comfortable picture. What his research shows — and what a large body of subsequent work in social psychology and behavioural economics has confirmed — is that moral and political judgements are made rapidly and intuitively, driven primarily by emotional responses, and that the reasoning process that follows is largely post-hoc: an exercise in generating justifications for conclusions that the emotional system reached first. Haidt names this the elephant and the rider. The elephant is the intuitive, emotional system that determines the direction of travel; the rider is the reasoning faculty that sits on top and constructs a narrative for why this was the correct direction to go. The elephant is not irrational in any simple or dismissive sense — it is processing vast amounts of social and contextual information, drawing on systems shaped by long evolutionary experience. But it is not amenable to persuasion through evidence and argument in the way that the rationalist model of democratic politics assumes. When the rider and the elephant are in disagreement, the elephant generally wins.

Haidt further identifies six moral foundations — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty — on which political intuitions are organised. The finding with the most direct implications for contemporary politics is this: progressive and centrist political movements primarily activate the foundations of care and fairness, while nationalist and conservative movements activate all six, including loyalty, authority, and sanctity — the foundations most directly concerned with group membership, social hierarchy, and the felt integrity of a community. This is not a strategic deficit that can be corrected by better messaging or more relatable candidates. It reflects a genuine difference in the range of human moral concerns that different political traditions engage with. A party whose entire appeal is organised around economic competence and social fairness is addressing two moral channels. A nationalist movement organised around belonging, tradition, and the defence of a community felt to be under threat is addressing six.

What Fascism Knew

The deliberate subordination of rational argument to emotional resonance is not a discovery of contemporary populism. It was a central, explicit, and celebrated feature of the fascist movements that devastated Europe in the first half of the twentieth century — and their theorists understood what they were doing with considerable precision.

Mussolini’s fascism drew directly on the work of Georges Sorel, whose Reflections on Violence (1908) had argued that revolutionary movements required not reasoned programmes but powerful mobilising myths: vivid, emotionally compelling visions that could move masses to action in a way that rational deliberation never could. Sorel’s contribution was to theorise the political myth as an instrument of power — not as a lie to be cynically deployed but as a form of truth that operated at a level deeper than argument. Italian fascism also absorbed the vitalism of Henri Bergson, with its insistence on the primacy of lived experience and intuition over abstract reason, and the aesthetic politics of futurism, which celebrated velocity, action, and sensation as values in themselves and dismissed contemplation and analysis as symptoms of decadence. The result was a political movement that explicitly and proudly located its authority in feeling rather than argument — in the visceral solidarity of the crowd, the intoxication of the rally, and the mythology of national renewal — rather than in any coherent account of how the promised transformation would actually be achieved.

Hitler was more explicit still. In Mein Kampf he wrote with clinical precision about the psychology of political persuasion: that the masses are moved not by argument but by feeling; that propaganda must address itself to the emotions and “almost ignore” the reasoning faculty; that the great lie is more effective than the small one precisely because people cannot believe that any political actor could distort the truth so completely. This was not cynicism in the ordinary sense. It was a consciously developed theory of political power, tested against the experience of mass mobilisation and applied with devastating effectiveness.

The lesson that history draws from these cases is not simply that demagogues are dangerous — that much is obvious. The structural lesson is what happens when political movements built on emotional resonance and identity consolidation reach power without any policy framework capable of delivering on the material promises that accompanied the emotional appeal. The economic nationalism of the fascist movements — protectionism, autarky, the subordination of markets to national will — produced neither the prosperity nor the restored greatness that had been promised. The gap between what had been felt and what was delivered was filled, in both cases, with escalating external enemies, internal scapegoats, and ultimately with catastrophic military aggression. The emotional engine required constant fuel; in the absence of genuine achievement, the fuel was conflict. Movements that rise on the power of what people feel, without the discipline of what is actually true and workable, do not remain static when they fail to deliver. They tend to escalate.

This is not a prediction about contemporary right-wing nationalist movements, which differ from historical fascism in important respects: they are operating within democratic systems, do not celebrate violence as a political instrument, and have not produced totalitarian ambitions of equivalent scope. The comparison is instructive at a different level — as a demonstration of the structural instability of politics built on emotional identification rather than substantive programme, and of the kinds of dynamics that instability tends, under pressure, to generate.

What Political Theory Taught — and What It Missed

It would be inaccurate to say that political science has simply ignored the emotional and identity dimensions of political life. The study of fascism has been a serious academic subject since 1945. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, and Umberto Eco’s analysis of what he called ur-fascism — the recurring syndrome of attitudes and intuitions from which fascist movements grow — are canonical texts. The sociology of nationalism has been extensively theorised: Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Anthony Smith gave political science sophisticated tools for understanding how collective identities are constructed and why they command such powerful loyalty. The communitarian philosophers — Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel — mounted a sustained challenge within political philosophy itself to the individualist assumptions of the liberal tradition, arguing since the 1980s that the self is constituted by its communities and that a politics which ignores this will fail to engage with what people most fundamentally care about.

The gap, then, is not between political science and the emotional and identity dimensions of politics. The field has known about them. The gap is between what political science knows and what it trains practitioners to do with that knowledge.

Politicians educated in economics, law, and public policy — the dominant professional pipelines into mainstream politics — emerge equipped with strong frameworks for thinking about policy design, institutional function, and the management of competing interest groups. They emerge with relatively underdeveloped frameworks for thinking about the emotional and symbolic dimensions of political life: the needs for belonging, for a shared account of who we are, for a politics that speaks to identity and not only to interest. The post-war tradition of liberal democratic governance in which most mainstream parties are embedded is essentially technocratic: it treats government as an exercise in rational administration, responsive to evidence and measured against material outcomes. This tradition does not have good instruments for the question of what people need politics to be — emotionally, symbolically, and culturally — as distinct from what they need government to deliver.

Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (2012) is less a discovery than a synthesis: a clear, accessible framework that connects findings accumulated across social psychology, moral philosophy, and evolutionary psychology to the practical question of why rational political argument so consistently fails to move people whose emotional and identity commitments are already settled. Politicians who completed their education after this framework entered university curricula have, in principle, the intellectual tools to understand what they are confronting. The evidence that this understanding is being translated into how mainstream parties actually operate is limited. The dominant response to the surge in populist right politics across the wealthy world has been to argue more vigorously, produce better policy, and wait for the appeal of evidence-based argument to reassert itself. This is the rider, trying harder.

The Implications for a Politics of Happiness

The argument of this essay is not that politics should abandon reason or evidence. It is the more uncomfortable claim that a politics genuinely oriented toward sustainable human flourishing must take seriously the full range of human needs — including those for belonging, identity, and cultural coherence that the rationalist tradition tends to treat as pre-political or as something to be managed rather than engaged.

The longing for community, for a shared story about who we are and what we value, for a politics that addresses more than the optimisation of measurable outcomes — these are not residues of ignorance or the manufactured products of demagogic manipulation. They are legitimate expressions of what the evidence on human flourishing consistently identifies as among its most important conditions: the quality of relationships, the sense of belonging, the experience of meaning in a shared life. Populist governments are unlikely to create the conditions that the evidence associates with durable flourishing. They instead provide emotional relief that substitutes for it. A politics that addresses the needs effectively, grounded in the evidence of what actually produces durable wellbeing, is a very different project from a politics that exploits them. But it begins in the same place: with the recognition that the elephant is real, that it cannot be argued into submission, and that it deserves a serious answer. The mainstream’s persistent failure to provide one is not merely an electoral problem. It is an enemy of happiness in its own right — and one that, as the historical record shows, tends to become more dangerous the longer it goes unaddressed.