Discontent Is a Global Disease America’s perceived partisan rift is actually a manifestation of the global gulf between elites and discontents.By Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-07-12/the-2016-presidential-election-reflects-a-global-wave-of-discontent
“As the people become ever more fed up with being treated as impediments and afterthoughts, the ruling elite will find themselves with only two options.They can stop telling people what to do, how to think, how to live and whom to accept as their countrymen. In short, they can stop acting like the soft despots they have become. Or the elite can double down. They can continue down the same path of growing and glorifying the state that has led to the present point of massive mistrust.If they choose to double down, all that lies ahead is more discontent. The world has changed. Typical partisan rifts no longer define the political universe. Any politics that turns a blind eye to the new reality is likely only to stoke a smoldering fire. Because as things now stand, the great unwashed have not yet spoken their full piece. And that should be enough to make any of the governing elite think twice.”
As election season rolls around, prepare to be subjected to near-endless analyses of how America has divided into red and blue camps. There will be hand-wringing about the growing rift and about how people on the left and the right barricade themselves in echo chambers, unwilling to engage with the other side except to cast aspersions and call names.
The pundits who will worry over these things will all have a point. But it won’t be the right point.
We forget that partisan rancor has been much worse in our history. The election of 1800, to pick just one example, demonstrates the point. One of Thomas Jefferson’s surrogates accused President John Adams of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams and his friends were arguably worse. Both sides threw thick mud for months.
So partisan rancor is nothing new, and it has rarely reached the depths seen in 1800. Yet, there is a lingering feeling that some kind of gulf is widening in the American electorate. But when future historians write about it, they will place the phenomenon in a global, not a particularly American, context.
Because what we perceive to be a widening gulf between the right and the left is really just the American manifestation of a global disease. And that disease is the widening gulf between the governing elites and their supporters on the one hand, and those they consider the great unwashed on the other.
The Trump and Sanders candidacies rode this wave in the United States, and there was sufficient anger on the part of the unwashed to lock one into the Republican nomination, and carry the other to within striking distance of the Democratic nomination. How palpable is the anger? Donald Trump may well become president of the United States of America for one thing, and he may win that office precisely because of his unwillingness to show a shred of class, not in spite of it. How better to differentiate himself from the spit and polished elites with their carefully constructed, globally acceptable, politically correct attitudes? For his part, Bernie Sanders was cut from the same cloth, though with a slightly higher thread count. He differentiated himself by playing the part of the aging, cranky member of the proletariat.
This is hardly an American phenomenon. The recent Brexit decision proves as much. Globalist elites on both the left and right in Great Britain found themselves on the wrong side of the vote to leave the European Union, stunned by the anger of their low-brow opponents. And as if on cue, questions immediately began to arise in the Netherlands, France, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Germany about exit options in those countries. It is too early to say whether there will be more EU exits, but that such conversations are being held should shake globalist elites to their cores.
This is not even just an American-European phenomenon. There is presently a small movement afoot in four western provinces to separate from Canada. While a real long shot, the very thought of secession in Canada should be raising red flags for everyone.
Neither is this even a Western phenomenon. In fact, it appears not to have started in the West. The Arab Spring of 2010-2011 is part and parcel of the same movement. This movement began with a civil uprising in Tunisia and quickly spread throughout the Middle East, ultimately resulting in major insurrections in Syria, Libya and Yemen, uprisings in Egypt and Bahrain, and street protests in a number of other countries. Not even Saudi Arabia was immune.
Everywhere one looks, one sees discontent percolating. People who previously resigned themselves to being on the losing side of their nations’ politics are becoming emboldened. They are angry, they are finding their voice, and they have just gotten started.
From the Middle East to Europe to North America, each of these various movements shares an impulse toward decentralization. The discontents don’t distrust government. They distrust large centralized government that blurs local forms of authority to the point of meaninglessness. Seeing these as nationalist, or even nativist movements utterly misses the point, even if there are such elements contained within each. As these movements become increasingly self-aware, the people will become increasingly emboldened.
As the people become ever more fed up with being treated as impediments and afterthoughts, the ruling elite will find themselves with only two options.
They can stop telling people what to do, how to think, how to live and whom to accept as their countrymen. In short, they can stop acting like the soft despots they have become. Or the elite can double down. They can continue down the same path of growing and glorifying the state that has led to the present point of massive mistrust.
If they choose to double down, all that lies ahead is more discontent. The world has changed. Typical partisan rifts no longer define the political universe. Any politics that turns a blind eye to the new reality is likely only to stoke a smoldering fire. Because as things now stand, the great unwashed have not yet spoken their full piece. And that should be enough to make any of the governing elite think twice.
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