Julie Bindel reminds me of one of my pet theories - that nobody is much interested in politics. By nobody I don't just mean ordinary Joes and Joannas but also people who think of themselves as political, and even professional politicians.

Let's start by defining politics. Oakeshott called it (pdf) "the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together." Lasswell defined (pdf) it as "who gets what, when and how". Either definition will do for my purposes.

Ms Bindel writes of (some?) feminists:

Instead of attacking the root cause of women's inequality, we've moved towards the vilification of individuals...
The focus on individuals, however vile they may be, signifies a shift away from the more difficult, long-term work of making institutions such as the Crown Prosecution Service and other governmental departments accountable.

What she's getting at here is that there is a turn away from politics - away from "attending to general arrangements" or to who gets what - towards simply calling out specific individuals.

However, Mil is entirely right to say this malaise goes far wider than feminists. For example:

- There's little public demand for serious thought about politics. Book on the subject don't generally sell unless they are written by celebrities. For example, Archie Brown's The Myth of the Strong Leader has an Amazon ranking of 42,328 and Anthony King's Blunders of our Governments a ranking of 15,651 - even though both are on subjects of massive importance by eminent scholars.

- Jackart points out that Ukip's policy on car parking is revealing. It consists in giving people what they think they want ("free parking") whilst avoiding the fundamental political question: how can we arrange our affairs so as to minimize conflicts between different people's desires?

- Even some of David Cameron's allies say he is "aloof" from backbenchers and incompetent at negotiating. He's not good at politics in the sense of being able to persuade people to his viewpoint.

- As I've said before, a theme of this government - from encouraging panic-buying of petrol to its attitude to welfare reform - is a failure to see that individually rational behaviour can be collectively self-defeating. Such a failure misses one of the main purposes of politics - to organize our affairs so as to minimize such occurences.

- When Ed Miliband was confronted by Myleene Klass, he failed to make the case for a mansion tax. In doing so, he was echoing Gordon Brown's failure to defend immigration policy in that ill-starred encounter with Gillian Duffy. Even political leaders are bad at making their case to ordinary voters.

- There is little debate about the question of how to organize society's institutions, and merely an unquestioning assumption that top-down hierarchy with a strong leader is the correct structure. More generally, there is little interest in the key questions of politics: how is power exercised? How should it be exercised?

These examples might seem very different. But they show that the turn away from politics which Julie describes is by no means confined to feminism.

It would be tempting here to say that what's displaced proper politics is mere tribalism. But I fear that underlying this is something else - narcissism. From feminists calling out a guy for wearing a dodgy shirt to Ukippers demanding free parking and a return to the 1950s, we see a demand that everyone defer to one's own wishes. In this sense, what lies behind anti-politics is the rise of individualism. What Robert Wyatt sang 30 years ago is even more true now. This is the age of self - and this suits capitalism just fine.