The problem here is we are witnessing a truly astonishing decline in the quality of mainstream politicians in both America and Europe. It is this that is providing scope for the Trumps of this world to rise and seize power. Unless that changes, and there is little sign of that happening, then the world will continue to face problems for which it will have no solutions …. Writes Mihir Bose
The year’s end provides great scope to draw wide conclusions from what has happened and make equally grandiose forecasts of what might happen.
I have in front of me the annual publication the Economist magazine produces looking ahead to what might happen in the coming year. The World in 2020, written by the editor Daniel Franklin who was leaving after 17 years, was looking forward to the American presidential elections and Donald Trump seeking re-election. It spoke of “febrile politics, faltering economy.” By the time The World in 2021 was written Joe Biden had beaten Donald Trump, which the Economist felt “marked the end of one of the most divisive and damaging presidencies in American history. A once-in-a-century pandemic has created the opportunity for an economic and social reset as dramatic as that of the Progressive era. The big question for 2021 is whether politicians are bold enough to grasp it.”
Four years on we know that the politicians that have grasped that opportunity are just the ones most fair-minded persons would not want in power. Trump is back with all sorts of fears of what this means and, as if to keep in step with Trump, in Europe there seems a wave of right wing parties are gaining control not just in Eastern Europe, which would rightly be considered the babies of democracy, since until 1989 these countries were people’s republics where the people had no say, but in the mature democracies of France and Germany.
In Britain we are also living in a state of great uncertainty. Rishi Sunak, as expected, lost but not many anticipated the great Labour majority on a very small percentage of the vote, 37%. They also did not anticipate that Labour would start its term looking like a Football League championship side suddenly finding itself in the Premier League. Keir Starmer could turn things round as Mrs Thatcher did after a disastrous start in 1979. Then, as now, there were riots in the streets and much unrest about the management of the economy and rise in prices and taxes. But Starmer’s team does not look like it has the quality of Thatcher’s team nor Starmer the leadership capability Mrs Thatcher had.
The greater problem is that 2024 has produced two other worrying developments. One is that increasingly politicians come to power denouncing the officials who are supposed to execute their policy. There was a time in Britain when it was said that the man in Whitehall, and then it was all men, knows best. Now the men and women in Whitehall are denounced as Starmer did, before trying to claw back, as obstacles to progress.
Here British politicians are borrowing from American politicians, who even before Trump, although he has doubled down on such talk, waxed long and hard of going to Washington and draining the swamp. This encouragement of the idea that the government is inherently bad is dangerous. It is what happens in immature societies and struggling democracies which soon lapse into army or dictatorial control. In mature democracies that should not happen. But that it is happening in established democracies shows the disenchantment people feel with politics. Not surprising since think they believe they have been cheated as their living standards, which they expected to rise relentlessly, have not done so. Trump’s victory was due to American voters feeling that four years under Biden made them poorer.
Of course fear of migration also played a huge part and this poses an existentialist crisis for both Europe and America. In America the land of migration the fear, cultivated by the right, is that migration could see displacement of whites who would become a minority. How very interesting as it is the whites flooding into America that made the native Americans, who had long lived there, a minority.
In Europe it is the challenge of non-Europeans flooding into Europe. Europeans make much of how Europe has coped with migration. But that has been almost wholly internal European migration. Protestant Hugemnots from France and Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing persecution. The arrival of huge numbers of non-Europeans from other continents marks a major change.
Europe, historically, has been an exporter of people to all parts of the world. There is no nook and corner of the world where there are no Europeans, having gone there as Europe took over countries like Australia and New Zealand, claiming nobody lived there, and reshaped them into European heartlands. It is over a thousand years since Europe faced large scale migration of non-Europeans and they were Hindus fleeing the arrival of Islam in India.
Here Europe’s record is not a very good one. In Europe they remain outsiders, gypsies or Roma, and along with the Jews were also targeted by the Nazis as people to be destroyed.
The problem here is we are witnessing a truly astonishing decline in the quality of mainstream politicians in both America and Europe. It is this that is providing scope for the Trumps of this world to rise and seize power. Unless that changes, and there is little sign of that happening, then the world will continue to face problems for which it will have no solutions. Certainly not solutions that decent people would want. The extremists look like holding increasing sway and the only question is whether their march to power would follow the dismal pattern of the 30s.
{Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie, Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British)
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