" In the United States and the United Kingdom—two of the world’s oldest democracies—national governments are at a standstill. This, for better or worse, could be the future of politics. It will be a system in which things have to get worse before they can get . . . worse. Perpetual political gridlock. It won’t be pretty, and for many it may be painful.
Both the U.S. government’s shutdown and the U.K.’s Brexit have become problems with no exit. Every strategy offered fails for lack of legislative support or national leadership. The American and British political classes look intellectually exhausted and clueless about a path forward.
Something more substantial than routine political frustration may be happening here. Public-policy efforts, such as Brexit or revisions to the U.S. immigration and health-care systems, look like they have become too big to accomplish.
Critics of these failures conventionally say they reflect a lack of political will or courage. Still, we are left with the reality of political structures that are dead in the water. If they lack will, it may be because political willfulness has become a stronger force.
Media has proliferated, so that objectors to any policy’s details have multiple platforms they can use to block settlements. We have the political tools to stop anything we don’t want, but we can’t enable anything we need.
Prime Minister Theresa May overwhelmingly lost the vote Tuesday on her Brexit plan to separate the U.K. from the European Union. No space will be wasted here describing the morass of imagined scenarios: no-Brexit, hard Brexit or a Brexit vote redo. Attempts by journalists to compose flowcharts of all the Brexit possibilities and contingencies resemble Rube Goldberg drawings.
The most likely scenario is that the parties will stumble and grope forward, as they did with the Greek debt crisis 10 years ago.
The EU is starting to look like Bluebeard’s Castle, a complex edifice of nightmares and delights from which there is no escape after entry.The U.S. government shutdown is nominally a fight between President Trump and the Democratic Party over building a wall at the border with Mexico. But the wall, whatever its merits, is a proxy for the broader issue of immigration into the U.S.
Immigration has been an unavoidable factor in the life of the U.S. for centuries. But Congress hasn’t passed a big immigration bill in more than 30 years. All subsequent efforts have broken down because some faction has had the ability to block them. Recognizing the impossibility, Congress today has walked away from the subject.
Minimalist answers like the border wall also may represent the future—a conscious act of self-delusion that sates the emotional needs of contemporary politics but lets the realities fester.
Terry McAuliffe, a former Democratic governor of Virginia and possible contender for the party’s presidential nomination, recently said, “We all support Medicare for all.” Mission accomplished, notwithstanding that Medicare for all has next to no chance of becoming a daily reality in the U.S.
Congress’s intention to take on infrastructure legislation this year likely will repeat its wheel-spinning experiences with immigration and health care to become the next case study of mega-gridlock.
Any infrastructure effort will have to pass through a tangled thicket of environmental objections, Nimby activists who oppose anything, union work rules, public-versus-private financing schemes, the needs of local political actors, the conflicted interests of cities and rural areas or the nation’s competing regional demands.
In August, the huge Morandi bridge in Genoa, Italy, collapsed, killing 43 people. The slow disintegration of something important, such as a bridge, may be the controlling image for aging political systems that fall down on the job. Their default will be to let responsibilities like Brexit, immigration or Nafta collapse, and then, under duress, rebuild from whatever is left.
That won’t be pain-free. This is the Trump model on trade: Tear it down, accept the inevitable casualties, and hope for the best with whatever comes next.
It’s fashionable to deride Mr. Trump’s crude, tanklike strategy of grinding across broken glass. Look past the Trump personality, though, and you may soon see more conventional politicians, out of options, resorting to his political model.
One reason this is happening is that politicians and external factions foment dramatic projects like Brexit without possessing any idea how to execute them. They gave British voters a lot of emotion but no game plan. More than two years later, they still don’t have one.
Another reason is the rise in power of the inconsolables. Political factions are eternal. The new element is that their social-media bullhorn makes them seem larger and more intimidating than they are. Twitter really is the mouse that roars. Unable to figure it out, the politicians have turned themselves into twittering mice on the floors of Parliament and Congress. They look trapped. So do we. "
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Appeared in the January 17, 2019, print edition.
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The nonsense thread - Enter at your own risk! Warning… 100% off topic and full of nonsense inside (Read 895,671 times)
