“You talkin’ to me?” One of the most famous speeches of the past half-century is delivered with only a mirror for an audience. Alone in his cramped bedsit, clothes drying on a line in the corner, Travis Bickle dons a green army jacket and practises pulling out a pistol. And so unravels Taxi Driver, the classic film study of isolation and lethal madness. “Well, I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talkin’ to?”
Where does it come from, the paranoia that shrouds Bickle? From steering a yellow cab around and around New York’s concrete claustrophobia. “There is this kind of myth that the taxi driver was this friendly, joking kind of guy who was a character actor in movies,” said the film’s writer, Paul Schrader. “But the reality is that it’s a very lonely job, and you’re trapped in a box for 60 hours a week.”
Alone among random customers, marooned far from civic institutions, obliged to work nights and holidays, Bickle is no accident. He is his society’s creation. Which suggests that our society – the society of Uber, Deliveroo and vast warehouses of cheap goods packed and posted by low-paid temps – is creating many more citizens as isolated as Bickle. Long before Covid, Britons already knew in their bones what it meant to be socially distant.
That thought has played on my mind over the past few weeks as the discussion about the failures of democracy has grown ever-more despairing. Perhaps you too popped into a bookshop, hunting for a Christmas gift, only to find an entire section devoted to the democratic murder mystery, with titles such as Twilight of Democracy, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism and The Road to Unfreedom. The authors of these whodunnits are not Ian Rankin or Val McDermid, but tweedy sorts from the higher reaches of journalism and the more telegenic end of academia. Or maybe you heard last month’s Reith Lectures on Radio 4, in which the Oxford professor Ben Ansell discussed “voter-led polarisation”. Ansell’s latest book is, naturally, called Why Politics Fails.
Run Ansell together with the other pundits, and their reasons for this demise boil down to electorates being too flighty and impatient, addicted to the dopamine of the divisive internet, and wanting Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and other strongmen to rule us. In short, it’s all the public’s fault. Democracy? It was the voters wot lost it. We are utter mugs, hooked on social-media drugs, electing pinstripe thugs.
Well, maybe. But if we’re going to play the blame game, let’s spare a good dollop for the politicians who’ve run this place for the past few decades. The government has not only got the voters it deserves – it’s got the ones it helped make. Which brings us back to the character inhabited by Robert De Niro.
Bickle belongs more to our time than he did to the 70s. When Taxi Driver was released, in 1976, he would have appeared, to British eyes at least, as a complete anomaly. By the end of that decade, more than 12 million Britons paid subs to trade unions, twice today’s number, while more than a million were card-carrying Tories, making it the UK’s biggest mass-membership party. The country was becoming far more equal, prompting Margaret Thatcher’s guru Keith Joseph to warn in 1976: “The pursuit of income equality will turn this country into a totalitarian slum.”
You know what happened next because you’ve lived through it, or some of it anyway. Once in No 10, Thatcher went through big civic institutions like a wrecking ball. Even as she racked up landslide majorities, she effectively ended the era of mass politics. Add to that the economic changes: the outsourcing of work, the offshoring of jobs – and the wild growth in people declaring themselves self-employed. From the great banking crash of 2008 until the very eve of the pandemic, almost half of all the UK’s new jobs were in self-employment. These aren’t the Richard Bransons of some Thatcherite fever dream, but plumbers, roofers, Uber drivers – careering around to get as much work as possible to ensure their kids are fed.
Britain created a Travis Bickle economy. Welfare for those of working age? Miserly. A council house? Nice dream. Come to think of it, your local council? In budgetary collapse. NHS operation? Private surgery is taking off like a rocket. The pundits shouldn’t be so surprised the UK is getting Bickle politics: paranoid, conspiratorial and cut off from the state. A survey this week of Tory activists suggests they far prefer to watch GB News than ITV’s News at Ten. They get their political analysis not from Robert Peston or Beth Rigby, but GB News’s Nigel Farage.
“Here is someone who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit,” says Bickle. “Here is someone who stood up.” What was meant in 1976 to be offensive is in 2024 almost normalised by today’s suit-and-tie politicians getting very close to the same vitriol and paranoia. What is the message from Farage and Richard Tice, echoed by Suella Braverman, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer? That someone is always out to take something from you. A refugee in a small boat, a PhD student from Lagos, someone poor claiming benefits or wanting to not be discriminated against because of their gender. A zero-growth economy has fostered this zero-sum politics. But zero growth for you and me does not apply to those at the very top of society, who just so happen to bankroll the media organisations and political parties best able to channel these resentments.
Around the time Taxi Driver was collecting awards, the US economist Mancur Olson warned that the working class was getting too big for its boots and some “countervailing forces” were needed to tame it. Well, those countervailing forces came along and they conquered, wiping out the opposition. The result is the most politically unbalanced society since 1945, where serious enemies don’t exist so have to be invented – even if they’re junior doctors just wanting a real-terms pay rise. And where very rich ex-public schoolboys such as Tice and Farage claim to be the voices of the working class even while they and their associates rake in all the cash. Meanwhile, somewhere far down below, the Bickles of this new world can see they’ve been ripped off. The question is: who can they blame for it?
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
