Forward to the past

I'm currently reading a new book in which I have a very modest proprietary interest:  "The Lure of Greatness", by Anthony Barnett.  It was crowd-funded, and you can find my name in a lengthy list of contributors in an appendix.  I may say I find myself in some quite distinguished company!

The book originated in a series of articles Barnett, who is the founder of the excellent Open Democracy website, wrote in the first half of 2016, under the umbrella title "Blimey! It could be Brexit!"  When, blimey, it actually was Brexit, Barnett set about crafting the articles, plus his further thoughts, into a book.  While he was working on that, blimey (or maybe FFS) it was Trump, and Barnett went back to the drawing board to incorporate US developments into his book, which delayed its appearance until now.

Barnett's principal explanation for the shocking results of the UK referendum and the US election is surprisingly simple, and rests principally on the central campaign slogans of the two winning sides.  In the UK, the Brexiteers' war-cry was "Take Back Control", while in the US Donald Trump famously pledged to "Make America Great Again".

Barnett suggests that the precise wording of these slogans was the key to their success.  If the Brexit slogan has simply been "Take control", it would have been too vague to achieve anything.  "Take back control" convinced a certain proportion of the electorate that Britain had given something up by joining the EU, and of course appealed in a subtle way to the ever-lingering sense of resentment of (and superiority to) foreigners that can still be felt in British society.

Likewise for Donald Trump.  Simply saying "Make America Great" would have allowed Trump's opponents to respond "are you saying this isn't a great country'?"  Adding the word "again" appealed at a visceral level to voters who felt that something had gone wrong, even if they couldn't quite understand what, and promised a return to a fuzzily-remembered but more agreeable past.

Both slogans, in short, worked because they combined a promise of change with a hefty dose of nostalgia: not back to the future, but forward to the past.  Barnett believes that the ready acceptance of this message in both the UK and the US reflected a loss of trust between a broad swath of the population and its political leaders.  He attributes this loss of trust in the group he denotes as "the CBCs" (Clinton, Bush, Blair, Cameron) to their shameless deceit over the Iraq war, maladroit response to the financial crisis and the ever-rising level of income inequality.

There's no doubt that by 2016, a lot of voters in both the UK and US were so disillusioned with the status quo that they wanted to blow things up, and would vote for anyone who promised to do that.  The irony, of course, is that this led to the triumph of two campaigns that were much more mendacious at their root than anything "the CBCs" ever came up with.  The Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump proved to a large proportion of the electorate, many of whom had never taken much interest in politics before, that their voices could be heard.  Whether those voters will be happy with what their votes delivered remains to be seen.