The outcome of the British election portends a political shift within the United Kingdom comparable to the ascendancy of President Trump in the United States. With a margin of victory close to that of Margaret Thatcher’s in 1987, Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party now have free rein to remake the country. With five years of majority control, Johnson can easily deliver the long-promised separation from Europe – however ineptly – and he will likely accelerate the unravelling of the Kingdom’s faltering Union. (The Scottish National Party eclipsed its rivals and Johnson’s proposed solution to the Irish backstop, has made the prospect of a United Ireland likelier than ever). Acknowledging her party’s disastrous showing, and conceding a narrow personal loss to the SNP candidate in East Dunbartonshire, Liberal Democrats Leader Jo Swinson memorably captured the gloom of the defeated opposition: “[F]or millions of people in our country these results will bring dread and dismay and people are looking for hope.”
In a New York Times Op-Ed, James Butler notes that the Tories ran an election campaign “distinguished by evasion and mendacity” in which Johnson repeatedly dodged serious scrutiny and continued – abetted by the British newspapers – to play up his image as a charming buffoon. The echoes of Trump’s 2016 campaign are unavoidable, as will be the probable consequences. What makes the repetition of this political farce harder to bear is that despite the personal failings of its leader, the Labour party had published a thoughtful and engaged manifesto which candidly assessed the cost of austerity, the threat to the National Health Service, and the need to address climate change.
At a similar moment, in 1939, the English poet W. H. Auden famously wrote about feeling “Uncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” Nowhere did this decade’s hopes burn brighter than in the Arab Spring. Three years after the financial crisis heralded the end of neoliberal economics, the Middle East uprisings promised a remaking of the region and the advent of a more inclusive and progressive global politics. But eight years later, the dream lies in ruins, next to the forlorn hopes of the Occupy movements and other campaigns against economic austerity, climate change, inequality, racism, and war.
Reflecting on the tattered legacy of these protests, Guardian journalist Gary Younge writes that they were: “Caffeinated through social media [with a] tendency to burn brightly only to fade, making space for whatever came next. They involved mostly the same people, shifting from one protest to the next … which lent the culture of protest an itinerant quality.” In many ways, this transience was inevitable as we shifted both news and political activism onto digital platforms. In addition to sowing strife – social, cultural, political – wherever they displaced traditional media, the platforms also empowered a wave of reactionary leaders who recognised how useful they could be to spread misinformation and targeted propaganda. As Younge notes, in the wake of the 2008 downturn, “when those responsible for the financial crisis remained out of reach, more visible targets – religious and racial minorities, migrants, refugees – were identified by opportunist populists.”
So a decade that began with popular resistance to tyranny, and dreams of global democracy, is ending with resurgent authoritarianism and widespread acceptance that we now live in a ‘post-truth’ culture. Many local factors contributed to the decline, but the total effect is unmistakable. In America, for instance, the Citizens United ruling – which removed limits from private funding of political campaigns – quickly produced a situation in which 40 per cent of all campaign contributions in the 2016 election were made by that 100th percentile of America’s top 1 per cent: 30,000 extremely wealthy people. This asymmetrical politics, the ongoing agony of the Brexit crisis and the looming political confrontation in the United States is likely just a foretaste of the mendacity and manipulation in our near future, a glimpse of the upheaval that lies ahead.
