Only the few win in 'deeply broken' politics

In just over two years America will vote to give President Trump a second term, should he stand, or to replace him.

The search to find an opponent who might win the day for moderate, largely centrist, inclusive politics — old-fashioned social democracy — gathers pace.

One day Senator Elizabeth Warren — derided as “fake Pocahontas” by the leader of the free world — seems a plausible option. Then the next Texan “Beto” O’Rourke seems capable of slaying the dragon.

That searching, that yearning played out on this island over the weekend when Ulster Unionist leader Robin Swann told his party’s annual conference that politics is “deeply broken”.

He lamented how “unionism has been dragged into the gutter by the DUP”. He warned, all too plausibly, that “Sinn Féin, whose main game-plan... seems to be to run the place into the ground in a hope that people will submit and limp into a united Ireland.”

Trump may be a figurehead for a neo-extremism but Mr Swann reminded us that it is not an exclusively American problem.

Extremism is a way to dominate rather than win consensus so only the few win.