Politics & Power Quote by Bernard Levin

Levin’s sting is aimed at the comfortable fiction that democracy runs on reasons. Voting, he suggests, is treated like a team affiliation: easy to declare, socially legible, even faintly performative. The moment you ask “why,” the performance collapses into fog. Not because voters are stupid, but because the modern political self is built out of hunches, inherited loyalties, resentments, and vibes that don’t translate cleanly into argument.

The line works because it reverses the expected hierarchy. We assume the “what” (a vote) is downstream of the “why” (a considered rationale). Levin implies the opposite: the vote often comes first, and the justification is assembled afterward, if at all. “Vagueness” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s not total silence; it’s half-explanations, slogans, and borrowed talking points that gesture at reasons without committing to them. Vagueness protects the voter from scrutiny and protects the relationship from conflict; specificity invites debate, and debate risks social cost.

As a journalist writing in a Britain where party identity long functioned like class shorthand, Levin is also skewering the media’s obsession with surface-level polling over political literacy. The quote anticipates our current age of “low-information, high-confidence” politics: people can tell you their side instantly, but not the chain of evidence that got them there. His intent isn’t to sneer at voters so much as to puncture the idea that democratic choices are naturally rational. If you want better politics, he implies, you don’t start by demanding louder opinions; you start by demanding better reasons.