One of the curious effects of the extreme polarisation of politics in the post-Trump and Brexit era is that people do not only disagree with current policy but extrapolate wildly from it. Colourful rhetoric is interpreted as a precursor for extremist policy and minor changes to policy making is exaggerated and the effects magnified in extremis. In the case of the controversial American President the phenomenon is so widespread that it has come to be known by its own name: “Trump Derangement Syndrome”; here in the UK we call those who oppose Brexit “Remoaners” in reference to their penchant for disaster scenarios.
And this, then, is how a tightening up of immigration policy ends up being compared to Nazi death camps; a view on gender neutral bathrooms is equated to racial segregation policies; a comment on racial tensions is interpreted as condoning white supremacy; and so on.
No doubt the election of Donald Trump and the result of the Brexit referendum were seismic political events. But neither has had, or is going to have, an extreme effect on actual policy making. Neither heralds a new paradigm of politics. The modern western welfare state is going to continue in both the US and Britain. Witness how British politicians are falling over each other to emphasise that current EU-mandated legislation on everything from food standards to labour markets won’t change after March 2019 – in effect promising that it is not the nature of decisions that will change, but merely where they are made. It’s the same on foreign policy: Trump may be a bit better (read: less interventionist) than his immediate predecessors, and Britain may dodge unpleasant pressure to join an upcoming European army by having left the EU, but the general post-WW2 consensus of western foreign policy making is not about to change in any drastic fashion.
The facts are that the extreme visions of Trump’s America and post-Brexit Britain are wild extrapolations which are not based in the real world. And it seems that people like the American left and British Remainers are simply not able to handle that reality, because of their frustration at having lost in the democratic system – so to justify their anger they extrapolate to make Trump’s White House and Brexit into breeding grounds for increasingly extremist policies with increasingly disastrous consequences.
But Trump is not a Nazi and Britain won’t sink after Brexit. Were it not for the medias constant barrage of reporting and the way social media brings politics much closer to us all through the direct interface with friend and foe alike, most of us would probably not have detected that either had happened – because the real-world effects are simply not felt outside a few groups which are affected by specific policies. We may attribute this to what some call “the deep state” and Milton Friedman described by the term “the tyranny of the status quo”: that there exists a powerful group of beneficiaries, politicians and bureaucrats who fight to maintain their positions of privilege in the existing paradigm, and even a renegade like Donald Trump or a political bombshell like Brexit will not be allowed to upset the fundamentals of the present state of affairs.
We are constantly told to anticipate Armageddon as a result of major political developments, but post-WW2 history reminds us that individual events rarely, if ever, have the power to make any material impact on the general direction of travel. It is, of course, also a sad reminder to those of us who long for a real shakeup of politics – leading to a much reduced role for the state – of just how difficult it is to change things.