Is One Week A Long Time In Politics?
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Berlin wall falling. Other members of the Roosevelt Club and I have been reflecting on this momentous event, and on what has happened since then. In searching for parallels between the geopolitical tensions of the ‘a week is a long time in politics.’
To anyone following Brexit this adage would seem as applicable as ever. But if we look under the surface, at the content of political ideologies, this impression begins to unravel. Everyone is familiar with Donald Trump’s famous wall — the one that doesn’t even exist yet, and may never exist. This proposal has been a corner stone of his election campaign, but it really isn’t a new concept. Would Trump have learnt about Hadrian’s wall at school?
More seriously though, it is easy to be engrossed in the short-term, fast-paced nature of politics, forgetting that there is a longer context within which these issues fit. This is partly the fault of journalism, an enterprise that wishes to distil issues to their bare minimum, but it is equally attributable to our own need for news to be open-and-shut, with clear causes and consequences.
Anyone who has watched Yes Minister will have been (perhaps not so-) shocked by the similarities to political issues and personal dramas of the present day. The series’ politicians may have lived 50 years ago, but we are both talking about trident, budget cuts, national security, and strife in the nation’s political leadership.
It may be tempting to brush off the current political trends for populism and the rejection of expert opinion as new faces for old problems. I have been pondering this for some time, but I can’t say it is as simple as that. Populism pitches people against elites; conflict between the two is deep, and in some cases well-founded. The process of globalisation and trade liberalisation initiated in the 1980s has been great for big business, but it has left behind some (rather large) segments of society. Even a glance at some basic economic indicators will tell you that these problems have been brewing for a while. Who knows how long populism will last? What we do know is that it has already had longer than a week.
It is not surprising that such a simple adage is not applicable to current political reality. But this mantra does still have value. It serves to show is that even though we are in uncharted territory, there is a rhythm to politics. There may be significant political events occurring, which can make even a day seem like a long time. For the most part these are interspersed with smaller, repeated, and benign problems that politics has been dealing with for centuries. Workers rights, civil unrest, budgets, these will always be the bread and butter of politics.
Political commentators try to make our present situation a soap opera. Rolling news stories, and click-bait headlines — it is all too easy to be drawn into this thinking. It is much harder to see events in a longer view. Wilson may have been right, but perspective and distance seem hard to come by right now. This is something we should bear in mind.