We have in the White House a man who says with absolute conviction different things on different days because the thing that it is in his own narrow-minded self-interest has changed. He boasts that he is the best at almost anything you care to name. One minute he is telling someone how he grabs women by the pussy and they like it because he is rich. The next he is threatening to lock up his political opponents. He thinks it fine to come over to London and insult the Mayor of our capital city because he is a Muslim by attacking him for being weak on knife crime murder rates. At the same time he presides over a horrible plague of gun crime murders that have reached such a pitch that school and college massacres have become a commonplace. He tells us with pride obvious lies such as that his own inauguration had the biggest crowd in history when it was pathetically badly attended by comparison with Obamas. He dumps wives when they become too old or too strong minded for his liking. He tries to bully people and does the same to entire nations and then tells us all that he has struck the best deal ever with the leaders of those nations. He then behaves with such clumsy inconsistency and arrogance that those deals break down and leaves us with the spectacle of the North Korean leaders who negotiated the deal with him being taken out and shot. Meanwhile he cancels every single piece of government spending on climate science that he can and signs off on drilling for oil and gas in national parks as if there is no tomorrow.
All of which might be easily dismissed as an aberration. One person’s own bizarre flaws being echoed by a nation’s pain at discovering that it is no longer unquestioned top dog and needs to face up to some uncomfortable truths about the unsustainability of its lifestyles. Yet it is unfortunately not a one-off bizarre episode of history. We now have horribly warped personalities leading countries like Hungary, Brazil and Italy and seem destined to get a British Prime Minister who is a liar and a cheat on a scale that dwarfs anything the country has ever previously known. Which takes some doing in the world of politics.
Consider for a second some of the things we know about Boris Johnson. He has dumped two wives and shacked up with a woman 20 years his junior. He has had a string of affairs. He boasted to GQ magazine about his cocaine taking when he thought it would promote his image as an interesting politician. Then he told us it was an insignificant event that didn’t really happen when that version of reality became more convenient. He held a conversation on the phone with a friend about bumping off a journalist who criticised him. He wrote two articles about Brexit, one in favour and one against and then discarded the one that was less likely to further his career. He proudly proclaimed that the UK would get £350 million a week back from the EU long after he knew it wasn’t remotely accurate. He openly told fellow journalists at the Daily Telegraph that the truth shouldn’t get in the way of a good story. He casually destroyed the only defence a British citizen had against internment as a spy in Iran and then equally casually failed to deal with the consequences and get her out. He told the voters in his constituency that he would personally lie down on the runway to stop another terminal at Heathrow. Then dropped the pledge as soon as he was elected.
Leave aside for a moment the horrible reality that all this means that the UK looks to be going into one of it most difficult ever political crises ever under the leadership of a lazy arrogant man who has no regard for the truth or for loyalty to those who have helped him in the past. What does it mean about the current state of the Western world that it is throwing up such dangerous personalities and lapping up their leadership?
I think there is only one possible explanation. Something fundamental has changed in Western societies and it is increasingly obvious to one and all that the old realities cannot be sustained. We no longer live in a world of secure economic domination by a few wealthy nations. Instead we live in a highly competitive global economy where the old secure factory jobs that many people relied on have largely gone. Hollowed out towns and regions have been left without pride or hope and are looking for someone to blame and someone, anyone, who will lead them out of their every day humiliations. At the same time, it is also obvious that consumer lifestyles are running into the buffers. It isn’t easy to discover that we can’t keep on drilling for fossils that took millions of years to make and are being consumed in such quantities that they have started to wreck the climate that we depend on. Nor is it easy to adapt to a world where plastic has started to clog up the planet and can no longer be treated as a simple source of wonderful new products.
When the old certainties start to break down there are two main ways that human beings tend to react. One is to try desperately to cling on to the old ways of doing things and to indulge in nostalgia about how good everything was under those old certainties. In other words, the necessity to change produces a reaction. Fear of the future dominates. Anyone adopting this mindset is easy meat for politicians who will tell them what they want to hear regardless of reality. It is comforting for some to cheer Donald Trump as he tells them that America can be great again if only they will place their faith and their vote in him. It is rather less comforting when the factory jobs continue to leak away, the wild weather continues to cause havoc across their states and the mid-west farmers who voted solidly for him face bankruptcy as their crops wash away or frazzle up.
We are therefore fortunate that a second option exists and is massively more healthy. When you are faced with the need for change you can embrace it and try and turn it into a positive. We can try and rebuild neglected communities around the concept of a Green New Deal. We can turn away from the empty lifestyles of competition and consumption that have so hollowed out the souls of people like Donald Trump and we can focus instead on building more secure societies. If we are losing jobs to technology and to foreign competition we can create jobs in health and in care and in new forms of technology. We can invest in a better way of doing things that doesn’t depend on fossil fuels and which can genuinely be sustained. And I mean sustained not just ecologically. I mean can be sustained in terms of the personal pressure that we put people under to compete and succeed and consume at the cost of medicating over a tenth of the population at any one time.
We have been living through a phase of very nasty reaction which has thrown up people who have ridden to power by exploiting fears. The time now has come for the reaction to the reaction. Every time our morally corrupt leaders try and take us down a route of empty nostalgia for a non-existent past we need to adopt the simplest strategy that has ever existed. Tell people the truth.
There is a lot of hope for a better society. But it has to be a different society. We can follow the liars and the cheats into a world of increasing bitterness and division. Or we can try working together and adopting different values. Ones of collaboration and forward thinking.
Freedom, equality and community are the things that express humanity at its best. The sad empty souls of the politicians of the reaction should be a warning to us all. And the way to beat them is to offer the exact opposite. The politics of optimism needs to defeat the politics of corrupt selfishness.