LONDON — Whatever the result of the United States election, politics has been “changed, changed utterly,” to use the words of the poet W. B. Yeats on Ireland after the 1916 Easter Rising. And not just in America. Across the Western world, there is a rising anger at “the system.”
This anger is implacable and spectacular. It is causing long-established party systems to dissolve; trust in elites, experts and even basic science to collapse; and overt racism to rear its ugly head again. Democratic norms and institutions are openly disdained; illiberal and authoritarian ideas from the alt-right and far left are moving from the fringe; and everywhere, truth and civility are squeezed out amid rancor and conspiracism.
The center is struggling to hold. Welcome to what The Guardian commentator Jonathan Freedland recently called “the new age of endarkenment.”
Establishment politicians, economists and policy makers know something is happening but, rather like Mr. Jones in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” they don’t know what it is. Perhaps that is because the truth is so very inconvenient: The source of much of the anger is the very social system that they have created these last 40 years — globalized, neoliberal and destructive of the social contract between governments and peoples on which the political center rests.
Continue reading the main storyMany people — enough to transform politics as we have known it — feel this system to be simply intolerable. Despairing that the sunlit promises made to them will ever come true, they now seek to turn the whole thing upside down, however they may.
It is no longer a question of the anger moving the “Overton Window,” the concept developed by the researcher Joseph P. Overton to describe what is seen as politically reasonable at any given time, as smashing it. The rapid, deep and relentless waves of creative destruction that have crashed over people’s heads have made some into winners — most spectacularly, the gilded 1 percent. But many others have experienced change as a profound and traumatic loss.
The neoliberalism that has been the economic orthodoxy since the Reagan and Thatcher era has hacked away at what would once have cushioned the fall of the new dispossessed. The decay of the welfare state, in Britain at any rate, has reached such a pitch that its agencies have become — as portrayed in Ken Loach’s latest film, “I, Daniel Blake” — institutions of conscious social cruelty.
The angry feel left behind as they have seen inequality explode. In 1950, top executive pay in Britain was 30 times that of the average worker; in 2012, it was 170 times. In their study “The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone,” Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrated that extreme inequality is associated with rising illness, family breakdown and crime, mental distress and drug use — as well as a general fraying of what policy makers call “social cohesion.”
The angry feel the old parties no longer represent them. In truth, they don’t.
A global crisis of working-class representation is causing traditional party identification to plummet and voter volatility to skyrocket. In Greece, for example, Pasok, the country’s dominant party since the 1970s, secured all of 4.7 percent in an election last year, while the far-left Syriza party took its place in government.
In “Ruling the Void: The Hollowing-Out of Western Democracy,” the political scientist Peter Mair pointed out that even political parties of the left no longer really aimed to represent people, but to govern them. Rather than champion the interests of their base to the system, they manage the integration of their base into the needs of the system, by means of trade deals, tax cuts, welfare reform and more restrictive labor laws.
“We are all Thatcherites now!” Peter Mandelson, the guru of New Labour in Britain, once declared ahead of a global gathering of “Third Way” leaders.
The result? Between 1997 and 2010, New Labour lost nearly five million votes. By 2015, soulless and bankrupt of ideas, the party was routed in the general election, and its leadership went to an obscure far-left member of Parliament.
The angry feel locked out from growth. They are. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that in Denmark, from 1975 to 2007, 90 percent of income growth went to 90 percent of the population. Contrast this with the United States, where, over the same period, more than 80 percent of income growth ended up with 10 percent of the population.
The striving middle class is pushed into the ranks of the poor as well-paying jobs, and the social mobility they bring, disappear, sometimes overseas, sometimes as a result of trade deals the establishment parties insisted were in the popular interest. Communities have been devastated, as the civic ecology on which a politics of the common good depends for most folk has been shattered: stable work on which to build a home and a family, pride in identity and place, and a network of supportive institutions and relationships cultivated across generations.
Sometimes, when I tell London friends that my working-class hometown in the northeast of England was doing better when I was growing up there in the 1960s than it is today, I see their eyes glaze over. Some even roll their eyes and tell me to stop being “prolier than thou.” Borrowing from Tony Blair, they admonish me that no one can say, “Stop the world, I want to get off.” And with that, we are back to the world of Dickens: two nations invisible to each other.
Little wonder that 58 percent of voters in northeast England supported Brexit. A left-behind working class lashed out at decades of deindustrialization, blighted communities and high levels of immigration. The elites have long dismissed those voters’ concerns about the downward pressures on wages and the strain on public services as the backward prejudices of the “bigoted,” as the former prime minister Gordon Brown was famously caught saying in an unguarded moment, as he campaigned for Labour’s re-election in 2010.
Brexit also happened because 52 percent of Britons, after being told by almost all those experts and mainstream politicians that they must vote Remain or the sky would fall in, voted Leave. This collapse of deference is key to understanding why politics is being turned upside down in the West. The British political theorist Ralph Miliband called it “de-subordination,” and he believed that political movements would eventually work out how it “can be turned into support for radically different arrangements.”
So it has proved. The mood of de-subordination has fueled left-wing insurgencies: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Corbynism in Britain and, of course, Bernie Sanders’s “political revolution” in America. But it has also fueled the right-wing nationalist movements of Donald J. Trump, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen (in the United States, Britain and France, respectively). Once loosed, the negative energies of de-subordination can be diverted into the ugliest channels: racism, anti-Semitism, conspiracism and misogyny.
And they are not going away after the election on Tuesday. These swamps cannot be drained by economics alone, any more than they were created by economics alone. But without a return to an economics of the common good — not some impossible utopia, but what the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “commodious living” — anger will continue to express itself as hate.
Everyone noticed Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark, but few paid attention to what she said next. Most Trump supporters, she said, are not deplorables. Rather, they “feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” These are people, Mrs. Clinton said, who “hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with, as well.”
Constructing a new politics of the vital center after this tumultuous period will require so much more than understanding and empathy. It will take trusted governments, democratic social movements and a reforming zeal to give “radically different arrangements” a stable institutional form. We need to give people a reason to believe again that, in Bruce Springsteen’s words, “Wherever this flag’s flown, we take care of our own.”
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