Jamie Bartlett and Steve Richards and John Banville
Mark Smith
AS with pretty much any conversation these days, the question is: how long will it take before someone mentions Donald Trump? The president of the US has demonstrated the spread of liberalism and intelligence is not an inevitable trend and that an idiot, a demagogue or an extremist is just as likely as anyone else to rise to power. Trump is always on our minds.
And think about this and worry: it is probably more likely now than it has ever been that the extremists will continue to rise, and win.
Speaking at their event at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Steve Richards, the author of The Rise of the Outsiders, and Jamie Bartlett, a social media analyst for the think tank Demos, said a number of inevitable, and visible, trends led to the rise of the extremist in politics – and mostly they are trends that are unlikely to fade soon.
Richards’ hypothesis is that Trump, as well as Corbyn, Macron, Farage and the SNP are all part of the same thing: an extraordinary reconfiguration of politics, which has happened for four reasons: the financial crash, the behaviour of the traditional left and right, the Internet, and most interestingly, boredom.
“Globalisation and the financial crash is the background to it all,” said Richards. “Mainstream politics has been hopeless at dealing with it.” But he also blames the traditional left and right in politics – the left for being too timid and the right for being too confident, thereby creating a space in the middle for extremists to thrive.
For Bartlett the pre-eminent explanation for Trump and other outsiders is the internet and in particular social media. Sites such as Facebook, suggests Bartlett, create the impression you can get what you want and you can get it quickly. And social media is so good at telling you how right you are, isn’t it?
Bartlett’s theory on boredom is more interesting – could we be seeing the rise of the outsiders for no reason other than people look at the current political system and yawn?
“It’s a boredom with current politics,” says Bartlett. “There’s a terrible graph that you can find asking people whether they think it’s essential to live in a democracy. Among people born in the 1930s, about 80 per cent think it is. But among people born in the 1980s, it was about 30 per cent. A lot of people have taken the democratic system for granted.”
The good news is that the outsider is not always to be feared, as the great Irish novelist John Banville, pictured, demonstrated at his event. Growing up in the small community of Wexford in Ireland, Banville was very much an outsider and made a pact with a childhood friend to commit suicide. All he wanted to do was escape and even death would do.
The solution to extremism, Banville says, lies with women, lies with women. The Catholicism he remembers from his childhood was run by men and nothing will change in Islam either, he believes, until the women say they’ve had enough. That’s what Banville said to his mother: demand change. And that was his message to the women: rise up, rise up.
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