Lee Anderson's promotion to deputy chairman of the Tory party highlights an under-rated fact about politics - one which perhaps the right understands instinctively better than the left.

Defenders of his elevation claim that Anderson represents interests and ideas that would otherwise be underweighted in Westminster politics. Matt Goodwin points out that Anderson, unlike an increasing number of Labour MPs, had a "working class" job before entering parliament. Dominic Lawson says he "speaks for millions". And Dan Hodges says:

It's important we have voices like Lee Anderson as part of the political mainstream. 52% of voters support the death penalty in certain circumstances. You can't just say to half the electorate, "sorry, we're excluding you lot".

Even if we allow for the tendency for some posh rightists to project their own reactionary attitudes onto a partially-imagined "white working class", there is a germ of truth in this.

But it inadvertently reveals a bigger truth - that politics is not a matter of rational debate about issues we agree to be important, but rather is a struggle for what gets discussed; whose ideas are represented; and whose interests are given mainstream voice.

The thing is that there are hundreds of interests, people and ideas which are underweighted in mainstream politics. I don't just mean identities: women and young people are under-represented in parliament, though less so ethnic minorities and gay people. I mean people such as the disabled, those with special educational needs or others who are dependent upon dwindling local government resources; low-wage workers; tenants facing lousy landlords and exorbitant rents; people with mental health difficulties; those who need probabation services; those dependent upon public transport; or single parents. The recent Dilnot-Blastland report (pdf) showed how the BBC's coverage of the public finances was distorted because it neglected interests such as these.

What's more, there are countless ideas which are under-weighted in Westminster in part because MPs and journalists are selected not to have them - such as the importance of emergence; the fact that work is for millions futile drudgery; the importance of bounded knowledge and rationality; the fact that capitalism constrains policy-making; or that top-down managerialism is not the only model of decision-making. Ideas as different (and I think important) as Oakeshottian conservatism, Ricardianism or free market egalitarianism don't get the attention in politics they should. Nor do many important questions such as why the UK is such a poor country, or why our politics is so anti-intellectual and philistine.

All of which poses the question. Why are Goodwin and Hodges (and Sunak and most of the Tory party) so keen that reactionary older people get a voice and yet so unconcerned that countless other voices are not being heard in Westminster? To put this another way, why is it so important to hear from ex-mining communities now when it was important not to hear from them in 1984-85?

The answer is that the right are not interested in the democratic ideal of equal representation for everyone. They want the likes of Anderson to have a voice precisely so that other voices are not heard. If we are debating the death penalty or immigration or travellers we are not debating other things such as falling real wages, stagnant productivity, the social murder that is austerity or the failure of British capitalism. And guess who that suits?

The right is engaged in a Gramscian war of position, wanting to promote reaction and silence the left, the powerless and (a more recent development) intellectuals. Of course, many on the right don't want to appear so oikish as to actually express Anderson's views themselves. For them, Anderson is a sort of ventriloquist's dummy, a comic entertainment saying what they cannot bring themselves to.

Herein lies the danger. In taking Anderson at face value the left risks being sucked onto the battlefield the right wants - that of culture rather than economics. But then, to quote Orwell out of context, "so much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."