Has politics driven us all insane?

How did we get here? Political assassination in the US, Trump threatening to jail political opponents, a nationalist march through London addressed by a ketamine-addled US billionaire who told the crowd to prepare for violence. The Reform Party are surging in the UK opinion polls, just as their fellow nativists dominate in Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, Czechia, Georgia, Argentina and perhaps soon also France.

Something has happened. We have left behind one era and entered another.

As a measure of the degree of political change, consider Trump’s wavering policy on Ukraine. The military historian Antony Beevor told me that his initial decision to cut military aid to Kyiv was “the first time that a major power has actually changed sides in the middle of a war in the modern era”.

The president’s supporters, both in the US and elsewhere, accepted that u-turn as just another example of the politics of the new era. And in a sense, they were right. The idea of the gradual, the subtle and the consensual has gone from world affairs, replaced by the sudden, the belligerent and the shocking.

Which makes the liberal promise of the Blair-Clinton era feel even more like a faraway dream. The violence of the civil rights period had receded, inflation on both sides of the Atlantic was under control and economic growth was steady. Clinton’s “Third Way” and New Labour’s determination that “Things can only get better” both intuited that it was possible to pocket the economic benefits of the Thatcher-Reagan era while accepting that the politics of that time may have been a bit uncaring. The confidence of those days was in part down to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and as Beevor says, the fall of the Iron Curtain was “our moment of greatest hope.”

“But what we failed to understand,” he said, “was that the Cold War had actually kept the world together, in a sort of straitjacket.” When the USSR collapsed, the ideological superstructure of both east and west fell away, and was followed by a rapid period of global change, most significantly a surge of economic globalisation.

“No society is really capable of changing very rapidly,” said Beevor. “And when it does change very rapidly, you get a backlash.”

That backlash began to emerge when the idea of economic liberalism grew into the belief that liberal values could be imposed by force. It worked when Nato intervened in the former Yugoslavia. Not so in Iraq.

Governments, spies and sections of the press, sent into a frenzy by 9/11, had been convinced that Iraq had WMD and assured voters across the west that everything was in hand. It was not. The promised evidence to justify the invasion never materialised and the US-led war on terror descended into the moral anarchy of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

In the minds of western voters, Iraq awakened the old paranoid idea that politicians were not to be trusted and when the global financial crisis of 2007-9 came along, it only deepened the sense of political mistrust and disillusionment. One of the most unsettling characteristics of that crash was that it was almost impossible to understand, not just for people outside the world of finance but for many within it. People’s lives were being destroyed for reasons that were beyond them, and the liberal politicians who had once argued in favour of global free markets could do nothing to help.

The outcome, however, was simple to grasp and perhaps best expressed by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times in remarks he made before a Commons committee. “A great many institutions were saved by taxpayers around the world and in this country,” said Wolf. “If they had not been saved by taxpayers they would have collapsed and their creditors would have lost money.”

In other words the bankers blew up the world and everyone else picked up the bill – a very clear assessment that also had the benefit of being true. Despite the shiny buildings, the shiny suits and the Randian posturing, it turned out that the City and Wall Street had been underwritten by the taxpayer all along.

While the banks received huge infusions of capital through Quantitative Easing, a kind of monetary blood transfusion that restored them suddenly to health, the public got recession and austerity. It was a case of “heads I win, tails, you lose”, and voters don’t like being shafted, especially not by the rich and powerful – by elites.

It was in this atmosphere of growing anti-elite disgust that a new tendency took shape in the United States, and of all the strange places for it to emerge it did so live on CNBC television in January 2009 (full disclosure – I used to work there). The man responsible was an excitable reporter on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange named Rick Santelli, who was sounding off about the US housing market, which at the time was in a state of calamitous free-fall.

“The new administration’s big on computers and technology,” Santelli shouted to camera. “How about this, president of the new administration – how about you put up a website, to have people vote on the internet, as a referendum to see if we really wanna subsidise the losers’ mortgages.” Hearing this, the dealers on the trading floor behind Santelli began to whoop and applaud.

“President Obama, are you listening?” Santelli asked. And then he said this: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July.” More whooping and applause.

One of the dealers leaned across and shouted something about “moral hazard” into Santelli’s mic. The anchor back in the studio looked a little shocked. “This is like, mob rule here,” he said. “I’m getting scared.”

Santelli had given the new post-crash, ultra-conservative movement its name, “the Tea Party”, its radicalism driven not by outrage that Wall Street had nearly destroyed the US economy, but by a fear that the new Democrat administration planned to trap and crush the American people through higher taxes and big government spending. In their view, that plan was embodied in the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the Tarp, the bailout scheme that was intended to offset the worst effects of the crash.

It was not surprising that people were worried about the long-term effects of the crisis, and wanted to defend themselves from its monstrous consequences. But the old Nietzschean adage, “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster” came true for the Tea Party.

Most of them were against Obamacare and the tax rises that they assumed would be introduced to pay for it – but on the fringes of the Tea Party were people who were opposed to president Obama himself. One of those was Donald Trump (“The Tea Party people are incredible people”), who in March 2011 let it be known for the first time that he had “real doubts” that Barack Obama was an American citizen, a claim that, in Trump’s mind, meant Obama had no business being in the White House.

On the face of it, Trump’s insinuations about Obama’s birth certificate reflected the growing alarm within the US over immigration. Another way of looking at it was that Trump was engaged in straight-up race baiting. But beneath that, his fixation on the “birtherism” scandal was a demonstration of another shift under way in the US.

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Trump told lies – outright lies. When it became clear that he was lying it didn’t seem to faze him, or any of his supporters. He simply repeated the lie. Even when Obama published his birth certificate, Trump stuck with his insinuations.

In the same way, when the campaign to take Britain out of the EU began, the individuals who led that effort made claims that turned out to be nonsense – and you can read the history of those claims and how they fell apart elsewhere in these pages. But those same people still make those claims now, even as the failure of Brexit stares them in the face.

Something very strange was happening – the right was beginning to take on a new, post-modern form, in which outlandish lies became a new kind of political tool. The advice was that it was important to take a politician like Trump “seriously, but not literally”, which meant accepting that what he said wasn’t always true. But it also suggested the possibility that a deeper, unspoken message was buried somewhere in the great Trump word-salad, just waiting to be inferred.

In a political culture where trust in politics had been shattered by Iraq and shattered all over again by the financial crisis, voters were surprisingly susceptible to this new, flexible attitude towards truth. They lapped it up.

This post-modern swerve was all the more remarkable because until then the idea of truth as a subjective variable had been associated with the left. But now it crossed over to embed itself in the radical right where an all-new breed of po-mo populist was beginning to say ridiculous, idiotic things that were self-evidently not true, for example: that there were no parties; that US drug prices had been reduced by “1,500%”; or that immigrants were eating all the dogs, the cats, the swans.

These new, obviously false pronouncements were amplified by hordes of bots and fellow travellers on Twitter/X and other social media platforms. As those lies came under attack by leftists and liberals, it only cemented in the mind of populist-sympathetic voters that what they were being told by their political heroes had to be true, because – well – just look who’s against it.

With its emphasis on short, anonymous, provocations, social media turned out to be the perfect vector for the populist wave – but then new technologies have often driven societal and political change, and not always for the better. The printing press was central to the wars of religion that tore Europe apart for over two centuries, just as the rise of fascism and Nazism was hastened by the mass-broadcast power of radio.

One of the west’s current failings, the thinker and Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum told me, was “the way in which we have allowed the social media companies to dictate and run our political conversations, without any awareness of how that was changing politics, and also how it made possible the spread of authoritarian narratives inside our politics.”

“We have managed to regulate many other things,” said Applebaum. But when it comes to social media, “we have really, as a democratic society – ‘we’ meaning the US, UK and Europe – have failed.”

That failure is, in part, intentional. “The American right has pushed back against any effort to crack down on conspiracy theories, or foreign influence operations online,” said Applebaum, “because those conspiracy theories and foreign influence operations are operating in their interest.”

Covid was the perfect fodder for those online conspiracy theorists, particularly in the US. Just as populists in the US attacked the authorities over the pandemic response, so too did the new British right, which broke out in a flurry of lockdown scepticism which veered dangerously towards a rejection of the science of vaccines, where it slotted neatly alongside their rejection of the science of climate change.

The Italian writer Umberto Eco once wrote that “Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism”. Vaccine scepticism was evidence of precisely that irrational impulse. But the modern populists have gone beyond Eco’s definition, and pushed into a new landscape where the very idea of holding any extended system of beliefs – no matter how irrational – has broken down.

This can be seen in the mess of outright contradictions that now characterises the new populist view: they believe in freedom, but argue that governments may intrude in the private lives of citizens; they believe in the free market, but also that the government can distort markets using tariffs.

They believe in law and order, but regard judges and the courts as enemies of the people; they believe in free speech, but want TV presenters sacked and books banned in schools; they believe in the rights of individual US states, but that the president should deploy the national guard on city streets.

They believe in Christianity, but think loving thy neighbour and the forgiveness of sins are for the weak; they believe in patriotism, but express their love of country by attacking it; and all across Europe, they believe that the EU is a sinister body that interferes in domestic politics, while simultaneously arguing that nations should subordinate themselves to foreign autocrats such as Trump – and also Putin.

If, as Eco said, fascism was irrational, then this modern movement is anti-rational, in that it represents a type of ideological dementia that does away with all coherence. It offers no system of thought, because intellectual consistency is the mark of the people they detest.

As for why they hate their opponents so much, there is no reason for it, because reasons are no longer necessary. Reasons become arguments, which form the basis of political positions and worldviews, and the new Trumpists aren’t interested in any of that. When Trump told the American people at a recent press conference that paracetamol caused autism, he offered no supporting evidence. Instead, he remarked simply: “This is based on what I feel.”