The Psychotrauma Politics of the West are Getting Old, and Becoming Quite Boring With It.

Politics have become quite boring today. This is not to say that the news is uneventful – five minutes of doomscrolling will quickly put paid to that idea. And the humanitarian cost of it all is mounting rapidly in a crescendo that should alarm us all. But for the most part the politics in the West today continues to conform to a number of routines and rituals that contain little new within them; they are ripples from stones already dropped into the pond.

We can see this in the US and the UK. Anyone might be forgiven for thinking that both are experiencing revolutions today. Take Trump for an example. He is tearing up nearly all of the conventional – not to mention having a crack at a few of the constitutional – rules of the US presidency. Yet this is a project at least ten years in the making now, and though its progress may have reached what people consider an alarming extent, the bells were already deafening a decade ago. 

And Trump’s political support base has not changed much; he still rests atop grassroots backing from a broad mix of worshippers inculcated in the Cult of Trump, that supply him with popular support and free distribution of his propaganda. It is the continuing support from this base that will keep the Trump machine going in public life, even if his popular support across wider American society is on the wane – as happened after January 6^th 2021. And the Republican party remains in a state of complete capture; something Marjorie Taylor Greene may have recently come to understand, but only a long time after it was blindingly obvious to the likes of Liz Cheney – herself very late to the party. 

While much discussion today makes a distinction between ‘Trump 2.0’ and ‘Trump 1.0’, this does not deserve to be heavily emphasised. We should not forget that Covid interrupted Trump’s ambitions during his first term and boosted Joe Biden towards an election victory he was hard pressed to win. Thus, the temporal break between Trump’s terms has added to the effect of two distinct periods of politics, but in many ways Trump and his administration are treating it as a continuity of mission. 

All his political actions correspond to the same simplified notions about American strength as he always held. Trump pulled the US out of the multilateral deal which put constraints on the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, but remained just as strongly against the notion of an Iranian nuclear capability, declaring in 2018 “if the regime continues its nuclear aspirations, it will have bigger problems than it has ever had before.” Brute force and ignorance were therefore always going to have to do what Trump stopped diplomacy from doing.

So much for across the pond, in the UK new political forces appear to be dislodging the entire political establishment from its pedestal. For example the Conservative party – purportedly the longest continuously active political party in the world – is on the brink of irrelevance and possible eradication as a political force. 

Yet in truth the Conservatives had scraped right through the bottom of the barrel years ago and have been scooping up the stagnant water lying underneath it ever since. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were each elevated to the office of Prime Minister and the party was unceremoniously purged of many of its grandees and stalwart political figures who could be trusty hands on the tiller, even if not in the position of leader.  

And what of the challengers, these newly emergent political forces – the Greens and Reform? Neither may in fact come to make up the next government, but it is pretty clear that if they do, they will not escape the central questions of the UK’s political puzzle. For example, as a party the Greens appear unsure on their Nato and nuclear weapons stance. But the realities of the existential threats that the UK faces, combined with its declining clout and the long path dependencies involved in security policies for Europe and the North Atlantic, do not allow for a great deal of feasible alternatives. Perhaps begrudgingly, they will find supporting both is essential to any UK government. 

And Reform’s desire to cut taxes and achieve more for less in government while bullishly increasing the machinery of the state – for the purposes of increasing military entanglements, beefier domestic policing, and creating new deportation agencies – will quickly be found to be fraught with big obstacles. Successive chancellors (not to mention Nigel Farage himself) have admitted that the UK has almost no room to play with – financially speaking – for big innovations in the institutions of the state.

The UK is stuck in the productivity doldrums and has maxed out on borrowing. The economic corollaries of Covid, Brexit, and the fallout from the invasion of Ukraine form the hard walls of a restricted fiscal cell for any UK government. No new party in government – even if it rides the crest of a wave of popular support as some are predicting Reform may do – will be able to simply dictate its will to the machinery of government and see it realised. 

Future historians will note how the middle years of this decade conformed to predictable patterns and were bound by circumstances already ossified in place; not to mention how publics have grown weary of the disappointing features of their political landscapes.

Image: Flickr/House of Commons

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