Up until just a few days ago the the overwhelming consensus would have been that political parties on the left were in a tailspin. Blasted from the sky by right-wing populists and their unassailable arguments, pitting good common folk against a liberal elite which has slyly sought to ease its own existence through open borders and immigration.
Demagogues such as Trump, Farage, Johnson and Orban have peddled narratives such that only by voting for them can the man on the street be freed from the wicked spells cast by the faceless bureaucrats and intellectuals who are portrayed as running the world purely for their own ends. In the UK this has manifested itself in a pervasive and almost irrational distrust, verging on hatred, by some sectors of society towards public figures such as civil servants, judges and scientists. People who’s only crime was to question or point out inconsistencies in the political arguments have been pilloried and frightened into submission by the government’s attack-dogs in the popular press and the media.
That was all easy to do from a position of strength. It is easy to whip up anger and hatred in a population which has always believed in its undeniable rights. It is easy to hate strangers for wanting to escape their situations in poor and war-torn motherlands when there is no concept of what real hardship or strife is actually like. But that isn’t the case any more. People in the West are threatened and frightened in a way they haven’t been since the Second World War. And unlike terrorism, which is largely an abstract threat for most people, no amount of bombing is going to make the coronavirus go away.
At the moment borders are closing and communities are becoming more isolated and for the next year or two we will be a less inter-connected world than we have been in decades. But these new barriers are subtly different to those we have seen be put up at the edges of Europe and the USA recently. Those closures were to keep an identifiable threat out. Now when we slam the door shut, we can’t tell whether we have trapped ourselves inside with the monster.
The expert too is having a renaissance. They cannot be portrayed as an enemy of the people when their experience and knowledge is keeping you alive. No longer will our civil service be seen as an irritant, stealing our hard earned money and wasting it on the feckless and undeserving. Instead after decades of parsimony governments are suddenly spewing fountains of cash in a desperate bid to stop the world from crashing around us. This time the money they are spending is to save all our souls.
It is hard to predict what the world be be like after all this. Will we stay isolated and fearful and slowly drift into nationalism and war like we did after the Spanish Flu pandemic or will we unite in recognition of our common weakness against a threat which understands no national identity or border? Will neoliberalism manage to reassert itself or will the electorate decide that for a while at least, there are some things that are more important than saving a few pounds in tax?
phil rogers 