The days after — Brexit, Trump & all that
It’s all been said before. Sophocles said almost 2500 years ago in Antigone: “those the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad”.
In Bart to the Future as far back as March 2000, the Simpsons’ Lisa said as a fictitious Madam President: “… as you know we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump”…
Brexit in the UK five months ago and Trump in the US today were both clarion calls by the disaffected masses. They called into question the very democratic processes that allowed referendums and elections in the first place. Take a look for example at the UK Labour party, pitting Corbyn elected by party members, against Members of Parliament representing that same party! And three days ago on the run-up to this US election, Facebook friend Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk posted it best: “ What is helpful is understanding that what they [disaffected electorate ~ Trump supporters] feel they lost [under the Obama Administration] was the one thing that made them feel like they were “above” someone and “not at the bottom” of societal structure.” #kaching
The universal theme here is, however, the need to heal divisions brought about by said democratic processes. Rarely have 50+% winner sides have so often been facing 50-% loser sides. They say “victors write up history”, but here are a string of cases starting with Bush’s election in 2000, where so much opposition has to be dragged along in the process, that history is not clear.
In a world of nascent democracies in China, Russia and the Middle East, the example is not clearly set by either cradle of democracy in Europe or the United States. And those areas outside the democratic process may choose to remain so.
Granted Europe and North America had roughly a half and a quarter millennium to hone democracy to its current imperfect edge, not accounting for their millennial precedents in Mediterranean Antiquity. Whereas the rest of the world had less than a century to dip its toes in democratic waters.
But no socio-historic process occurred in a vacuum. The Renaissance, Age of Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution all fomented political and economical change in Europe and then in North America, interlocking social progress and political upheaval across Europe and then the Americas, but in a very uneven fashion across countries and social classes. And that century-scale process had backward movements too, like Counter-Reformations, failed Revolutions and collapsed Colonialism. Countries turned alternately outward via political or economical expansionism, then inward via protectionism and repatriation over many, many generations.
Is that not what we’re seeing now, one such inward turn? From UK and other countries questioning the European Union, to Trump calling for less US international policing, both hark back to 1930s isolationism and that leaves open the question: How will the new balance of power and activity in Europe and US affect events in the Middle-East and Africa for example, as well as relationships with, say, Russia and China?
