2016 the year of politics

You can’t avoid it now

(NB: this article was written in the summer of 2016 for a book published by Somesuch Stories)

2016: the year of bad news, the year we lost the legends that moved us and inspired us. Prince, Bowie, Ali, Harambe: all gone now. Then there’s the other news. These are turbulent times. The Brexit vote, the rise of Donald Trump and terrorist attacks of various kinds across the globe being just three illustrations of the febrile political climate we live in.

If some of us who grew up in the West during the 1990s and the first decade of this century once thought that politics wouldn’t play an active role in our lives, we’d have to be very foolish or very lucky to think that now. It can be hard to measure the impact political decisions have on our lives — a good rule of thumb being that they tend to affect you more the less insulated you are by wealth and power — but the effect of these decisions and the neo-liberal ideology that shapes our world is felt by more and more people, year after year.

Having been absent for much of the last 20 years, real ideological difference has returned to political discourse in the United States and Europe. That’s a cause for celebration and a cause for concern. Celebration because it could lead to profound change for the better; concern because it could lead to profound change for the worse. Either way, on both the left and right, new ideas are emerging and old ideas are being revisited; nations that were gripped by apathy have woken up again and people who had stopped caring have started screaming. A line of Antonio Gramsci’s has drifted back into the discourse: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.

It has become all too clear that neo-liberalism works only for a lucky or malevolent few. One of its great champions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has admitted as much. “Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardising durable expansion”, wrote three economists from the Fund’s research unit, in an essay entitled, Neoliberalism: Oversold?

The consensus is breaking apart. Salaries have flat-lined. Jobs have moved to where labour is cheapest and workers most easily exploited. In the U.S. and UK, communities that founded their identity upon and prospered through industrial work of one kind or another, have seen those things erode. Vast swathes of people feel as though they have been screwed. That feeling is backed up by statistics. It is not, as some would have us believe, the whining or raging of an uninformed mass who don’t know what’s good for them. They grew up expecting something and now it is gone and it turns out a life lived in a society powered by the selling of useless crap — a society that has given up, for the most part, on providing things like houses, jobs and free time — is no kind of life at all.

Pandora’s political box has been opened. In the month before the 2015 general election, Private Eye’s cover featured a picture of a sleeping David Cameron with the headline, “ELECTION CAMPAIGN COMES ALIVE” and the caption, “Passionate Cameron captures national mood”. Cameron may well still be sleeping like a baby, but things could hardly be more different. And besides, beneath the calm surface of 2015’s sleeping Cameron, the waters were already disturbed. The country voted that year to hold onto what it had and then, when given a chance to vent by the EU referendum, it vented.

For most of the summer of 2016, a normal news day contained more news than most people can process in a week. On the right and left of the political spectrum, leaders and movements have emerged. On both sides of the Atlantic, old democratic socialists, in the form of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, have inspired large numbers of young people who want something other than the centrist, neo-liberal ideology that has formed the political consensus since the 1980s. There is a small irony and a natural reaction here: having grown up with a nauseating amount of choice when it comes to consumer products — only to see that amount to nothing particularly nourishing — young people in the West are choosing to get behind politicians who rail against the capitalist system.

Populist, anti-establishment movements have emerged on the right, as well. In the U.S., Donald Trump provides a parallel story to Brexit. He causes justified outrage with racist comments about Mexicans, Muslims, the “great border wall” (that Mexico will pay for) and the “founders of ISIS” (Barack Obama and “Crooked” Hillary Clinton), but there are times when he hits on truths that strike deep in the hearts of Americans who feel as though they are the losers in a global economy that has sent their jobs abroad. His speech at the Republican National Convention included this powerful bid for the support of the American heartland, the last line roared straight down the camera lens:

“I have visited the laid off factory workers and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. And they are forgotten. But they are not going to be forgotten long. These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice”.

Whether he actually means them or not, many of Trump’s pronouncements make him the most cartoonish representative we have of the potential dangers of a return to real ideological difference in politics. A brief glance at his career suggest that his bid to be the voice for the voiceless is lacking in any sincerity and besides, right now it also excludes refugees, Muslims, Latinos, black Americans and other people of colour.

Much of Trump’s support (as with the support for Brexit) will come from wealthy white voters, but it can still be noted that his rise is a symptom of the political establishment’s failure to tackle the problems faced by people who know that life in the richest country in the world is set to be much more of a struggle than it should be. Of course, he’s also a famous guy and a social media troll, two things that make him just so very made for our times.

In 2013, an Oxfam study of the effect of austerity policies in the UK, noted that, “economic stagnation, the rising cost of living, cuts to social security and public services, falling incomes, and rising unemployment have combined to create a deeply damaging situation in which millions are struggling to make ends meet”.

In London, New York and other global cities, the benefits of globalisation can be seen, alongside the pitfalls. In the post-industrial towns and benighted rural communities of Europe and the U.S., globalisation is something that has taken much and given nothing. While freedom of movement inside Europe was seen almost as an inalienable right by some Britons, it means nothing to someone who has no means of living or working in Europe anyway, and who has been taught — by politicians and the media — to fear the arrival of workers from across the continent.

There is a cultural element here too, of course. Even as someone who grew up in a middle-class family, in the centre of multi-cultural London, the way in which my neighbourhood has changed can seem disconcerting or even infuriating. This is not because of immigration; it is because of the monoculture enforced by global capitalism. Independent shops are replaced by corporate chains. Anything with a perceived element of danger is removed. Local idiosyncrasies are erased. Places begin to look the same. In areas where this is coupled with a lack of money and jobs, cultural dislocation and economic impoverishment form the breeding ground for racism.

Having ignored such people for too long, the Remain campaign could not make a compelling enough case for the benefits of remaining in the European Union and so the Brexit campaign, fuelled by anti-establishment fervour, cultural exceptionalism (both British and white), bare-faced lies, and spearheaded by (mostly) right-wing populists and opportunists, won the day. Its message, like Trump’s, was a nationalist one: it’s time we looked after our own. While the populists of the left are (mostly) avowedly anti-racist, the populists of the right stoke the flames of ethnic and national resentment. America is going to “win” again, says Trump. That means the others are going to lose — not just ISIS, who Trump will “knock the shit out of”, but ordinary working people in other parts of the world, who feel the same pressures Trump supporters feel, and ordinary working Americans who aren’t white.

This is the political climate millennials — those born after 1982 and before the year 2000 — will have to shape and work in. It is the political climate that those born in this century will come of age in. It is a political climate in which the dominant battle is between nationalism and globalism, localism and internationalism (there is perhaps more room for common ground between internationalist and localist outlooks than there is between globalist and nationalistic perspectives), and in which there are many competing visions for how the problems we face can be solved.

We are also in a political climate in which perhaps the biggest issue hanging over us all — the climate, and how it is changing — has been relegated to the sidelines, a serious concern that has no hope of grabbing the attention of the media and the population at large while a perma-tanned billionaire is dominating the news cycle.

In the face of such upheaval, a common charge thrown at millennials is that we (I may not like the term, but I do count as an elderly millennial) are unbearable narcissists who are too busy swiping left / right to think for more than 10 seconds about the state of the world. Recently, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Arlington National Cemetery requested that Smartphone users refrain from “catching” Pokémon when they visit. Instead of considering the horrors of history, visitors were pursuing virtual treats in a fantasy world.

The capitalist system is “for children”, says the psychotherapist Adam Phillips. “If people are not given time to find out what they want, they tend to grab things”. You’d be hard pressed to find a better description of Pokémon Go. Everywhere you look, you see adults being treated like children. Websites break their articles into easily manageable lists and bombard their readers with cute, unthreatening content. In London, there’s even a playpen meant only for adults, not to mention the cereal café. With the “adult” world a larger, harder place to break into, the easy comforts of an idealised childhood are proving to be too strong for many to resist.

That it is a harder place to break into — and that we are in a particularly dangerous political moment — is not the fault of younger people. Millennials have come of age at a time of financial uncertainty, following the recession of 2008 and its continuing aftermath. Talking about the United States, the economist Richard D. Wolff says this:

“We have a recovery in this country — we refer to it every day — that has really only affected about 10% of people. The other 90% of the people look at each other every day and ask — ‘What recovery? Has nothing to do with me’. To be told there’s a recovery that you’re not participating in with the implication that maybe it’s your fault, makes you want to vote for a Trump just to push back against the system”.

Millennials may not be supporting Trump in any great number, but if they aren’t politically active, they may still be hiding from — and deeply affected by — the economic circumstances they find themselves in. “There is a combination of joblessness and educational debt that has disproportionately harmed young people. They are in many ways responding rationally (in light of their upbringing) to a bad set of economic and political circumstances”, says W. Keith Campbell, a psychologist specialising in narcissism.

Housing is unaffordable. Higher education is increasingly expensive and leaves you debt ridden. But if you don’t go to university, you have far fewer options. Nonetheless, the job market does not offer a great deal of secure employment. More and more of us are self-employed, some by choice, some because that is simply what is available. Short-term and zero-hour contracts have become more and more common. A feeling of precariousness is increasingly normal.

“There’s no such thing as society”, Margaret Thatcher famously said. The struggle for those of us living with her legacy is to look out at the world and try and find something other than corruption and misery; to try and move beyond the platitudes of a smug establishment to a new set of ideas that restore a sense of hope and purpose to people who feel as though the best life has to offer them is Pokémon or the political stylings of Donald J. Trump. Politics is going to affect us deeply, whether we like it or not.