Sour Times

Why Our 'Age of Extremes' is Far From Over

   

Like the Jacobeans, the 21st century likes its dramas dark, but even the grimmest entertainments tend to end with evil thwarted if not vanquished.  This is what happens in Breaking Bad and The Bridge, and in so many of the Scandi noirs that have accompanied the 21st century’s descent into political hell.  

No matter how terrible the protagonists, we expect them to receive some kind of comeuppance by the time the series ends, and the restoration of a semblance of order with at least the promise of  justice and redemption .

These endings might look good from the average sofa, but those who consume such dramas should be very careful not to confuse television with the ‘interesting times’ that millions of us have been living through these last years.

Because in the world that we have, there is no guarantee whatsoever that the rightwing populists and assorted authoritarian nationalists who have corrupted and co-opted so many democracies across the world can easily be expunged, or that the normality we once took for granted can ever be restored.

If our populist era were a Netflix series – let’s call it The Age of Extremes -, the likes of Trump, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Orban, Modi, Duterte, Netanyahu and Johnson would see their personal and political ambitions thwarted and their grandiose charlatanry unravelled  by voters who finally see through their dishonesty, malfeasance, destructive incompetence and divisive ideological extremism.

Imagine the final sequence, in which the scene moves from one country to country, as the people who once supported the likes of Trump and Bolsonaro fall silent or stare in open-mouthed disgust at the politicians they thought were their salvation, or listen solemnly and repentantly as someone like Joe Biden or Keir Starmer delivers a moving speech about national unity, the triumph of truth and democracy, and how we have more in common than the things that divide us.

In this grand finale, the beasts would all be vanquished, and the politicians who once followed in their toxic wake would be driven from public life even as they fled from those who one time did they seek, and we would all go to bed with a warm, glowing feeling. 

Goodness would be restored, however flawed.  Wise, benign government would prevail; battered democratic institutions would recover from the authoritarian onslaught with a renewed sense of common purpose. 

The political conversation would turn away from inane ‘culture wars’, hating on immigrants, ‘wokeness’ and other shibboleths, towards the basic nuts and bolts that hold societies together,  and which should be the basis on which all governments stand or fall.

In this happy ending, bitter enemies would make up and turn their wrath on the Pied Pipers they once followed, instead of each other. Rather than act as a vehicle for weaponised lies, conspiracy theorising, and a general incitement to be the worst people and the worst society you can be, politics would coalesce once again around a new notion of the common good, and how that might be achieved.

Liars, charlatans and demagogues would no longer get airtime in order to achieve a false ‘balance’ or generate a few minutes of angry television.  Voters would turn away in droves from the networked engines of destruction that have helped the likes of Trump and Bolsonaro to propagate their clamorous and hateful messages.

National elections would be decided on the basis of evidence-based arguments, and realistic and achievable proposals rather than nationalist fantasies.   In country after country, rightwing extremists would lose their seats and tumble humiliated from power.  In some cases, their leaders might even find themselves in court or even behind bars.

Mainstream conservative parties that allowed themselves to be hollowed out and taken over by their more sinister fringes would purge themselves of their most extreme elements and re-learn the rudiments of political decency, such as tolerance and loser’s consent.  

Having weathered the storm, 21st century democracies march together in a renewed search for justice, equality and decency.

The Beast is Back

Needless to say, we are a long way from any of this, despite the more positive developments we have seen over the last month or so. Watching the US midterm count unfold, it’s striking how many results were decided by the narrowest of margins that came down in some cases to a few thousand or even a few hundred votes. 

As welcome as they are, these results should certainly remind us that every vote really does count, but they are still way too close to suggest a comprehensive turning point, let alone a decisive rejection of right-wing extremism in which the firewall between the far-right and mainstream conservativism has ceased to exist.

Faced with these results, no one should be surprised that losing Republicans have talked about ending mail-in votes or raising the voting age to exclude a new generation of ‘brainwashed’ young voters.  

Now, a weakened but still dangerous Trump has now made his long-expected pitch, and regardless of its lacklustre quality or its impact on Republican Party unity,  there are still dozens of election-denying MAGA members of Congress who will use their narrow majority to undermine Biden and drag his administration into multiple legislative black holes in order to protect Trump – and themselves.

In Israel, Netanyahu is back – another leader who should never have been allowed even the sniff of power again, at the head of a far-right coalition that includes the political descendants of the racist Meir Kahane, and an admirer of the mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein.

In the UK, a failing Conservative party that bet everything on Brexit and then staggered out of the casino with nothing to show for it, refuses to even acknowledge that its own attempt to ‘Make Britain Great Again’ has been a national political and economic calamity.

Faced with the prospect of losing their slender majorities and their new-found careers, a number of Tory MPs have made statements about the Channel ‘migrant crisis’ that would not be remotely out of place in a BNP chat room.

Some of them have taken to publicising the names of hotels where asylum seekers are staying, in a brazen invitation and incitement to hate that should have no place in the governing party of a self-respecting democracy.

But this is precisely the point - politics is no longer ‘self-respecting.’ The rules of engagement have changed, the expectations placed on politics have been lowered, and the moral threshold has all but disappeared. Instead of trying to do the best they can, Trump and Johnson & Co have shown that politicians can say and do whatever they can get away with.

And while the Conservatives seek to crawl out of the whirlpool that they jumped into, the ghastly reactionary Richard Tice and his Reform Party are watching their vote share creep up – a development that one can’t help thinking might have something to do with the election of an Asian-heritage Prime Minister.

Tice and Farage – the Burke and Hare of post-Brexit disenchantment – are still looking to bring political corpses to interested parties dreaming of sovereignty and ‘controlled’ borders. 

Tice rails at a failing ‘globalist’ (ahem) Tory Party, and serves up a toxic Trumpy brew of climate change denial, anti-lockdown sentiment and migrant criminals-at-the-border rhetoric with empty promises to Make Britain Great by lowering taxes and not much else.

Farage, meanwhile, is clearly itching in the black uniform that he wears under his suit, as he rants on Twitter about Albanian gangsters, not trusting Zelensky, and foreigners taking our bodily fluids after two world wars fought for freedom or whatever.  

These developments have a potentially hopeful dimension; A resurgent Reform Party with Farage at its head could make just enough inroads into Tory marginals to help Labour. 

But it could even win a seat or two - if only to get Farage into the House of Lords. And even without winning any, its rise in vote share could push the Tories even further to the right than they already are.

Right now none of these outcomes can be discounted. And just because Trump is weakened now, he - or someone like him could still become president. 

And even as these processes unfold, Orban, Erdogan and Modi remain in place and there is nothing to suggest they are going to be leaving soon. A fascist has just been elected in Italy. The French far-right will be waiting for Macron to fall. Even the Tories might navigate their way through the next two years to another victory. 

So we are very far from that satisfying denouement and reversal of fortune that so many of us want to see, and even after so many plot twists, it’s clear that the reversals of fortune of a few high-profile individuals do not in themselves mean the end of the movements they represent.

The Trumps, the Netanyahus, the Johnsons, Orbans, and all the others are there because millions of people want them there,  and either don’t care about their lying and authoritarianism, and actually approve of the behaviour that most people to the left of the political spectrum and even many to the right find totally abhorrent.

How to defeat, weaken, divide, and marginalise these movements – without becoming like them – and even win over some of their supporters, remains the key challenge in 21st century democratic politics. 

It’s a problem that can’t be solved by any single party or ideological tendency, or by a simple return to politics-as-they-were.   Though the left must be part of any solution, the left by itself cannot defeat these movements.  Nor can the centre and the centre-left simply hope to cruise to power because it is not as bad as its opponents.

If we are to have a chance of a new and more hopeful era – we need coalitions and alliances of voters and parties, based on the common recognition of our serious the threat to democracy these populist-nationalist movements really are.

Because these movements are not playing the game that too many of our politicians think they’re playing. And if there is one thing our Age of Extremes have taught us, it’s that no matter how low we think we have sunk, there is always another rung to descend.