Society and politics are forever changed as indeed we should be
WHAT was ‘normal’ is now exceptional.
Yesterday’s speech by Theresa May and next Friday’s inauguration of Donald Trump, are a new age. In truth, it has been partially in progress since the economic crash of 2008.
A longer view might see it — and a particular perspective does — as a culmination of the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan.
Here, visceral discomfort at the arrival of what is referred to, usually snidely, as ‘new politics’ is hankering after a bygone age.
It is never returning.
A mildly liberal, and slightly social democratic nexus between politics and media, implicitly subscribed to by the mainstream of business and the public service, is permanently disabled.
Its stalwarts are frustrated and bewildered.
There is a creeping sense of nervousness, among many who assumed self-assurance was their natural lot.
Last January, a forthcoming general election and subsequent commemoration of the Easter Rising, was assumed to herald a return to normalcy.
Certainly, the then government would be clipped.
It might require some independent support.
Even after the results, foolish assumptions of a grand coalition between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil clouded minds.
Instead, what had in theory been sought for years in politically correct circles, happened.
A government accountable to the Oireachtas, instead of one effectively controlling it, arrived.
But the loss of control is proving to be deeply disconcerting, for the mildly liberal and slightly social democratic consensus.
They now realise it is the slap of firm government they wanted all along and this is just too much democracy.
A raucous unleashing, of those they presumed to speak for, but too seldom visited, has unnerved them.
That the street is a new mainstream for public debate, is truly shocking for a superannuated class of former student protestors.
Domestic disorder could be side-lined so long as all was well with the world.
In one of the most globalised economies, what happens in Brussels and Washington is at least as important.
But all is not well with the world.
This is not just the case of a country, prone in its public conversation to disparagement, letting down its own better thinkers again.
No; we are midstream in a deeper flux.
2016 began with the improbability of Brexit and the impossibility of Trump.
Now they are the premise of what is to come.
If Easter 2016 was once looked forward to as an end of and resolution of crisis, by the centenary of the foundation of the state in 2022, practically all assumptions on which 2016 was once surmised, will be consigned to oblivion.
Thus far, our conversation on what is foundational change has been constipated by the discomfort of its digestion.
In ruminating repeatedly on the alleged horrors of what is happening, there is too little consideration of why and how.
There is certainly too little thought given to the underlying formation of society which is never returning to familiar patterns.
The dislocation of the economic crisis crystallised long-masked but accumulating disconnection with established and tribal parties.
Globalisation, secularisation, and apparently infinite new streams of information via information technology, mean all is utterly changed.
We are not yet at peak-dislocation; far from it.
The tension between shifting tectonic plates will be exacerbated by Brexit and Trump.
A swathe of the population has no stake in society, and little feeling except resentment for its institutions.
Arguably, the unrealisable promises of social democracy, are as much to blame for failed expectation, as untrammelled capitalism.
But the reality has dawned that upward mobility, is unlikely to be a permanent mass movement.
In this scenario, government is locked into acute conflict between meeting the expectation of services at halcyon, Scandinavian 20th century standards, in a 21st century where a viable economy requires far tighter fiscal management.
Our aspirations are an amalgam of 1970s Swedish socialism and our own noughties boom.
We refuse to recognise the unaffordability of the former, or the unsustainability of the latter.
The hard Brexit that is arriving, and the harder Trump that may be coming, will further polarise political choice.
The Government in partially front-loading public service pay increases is attempting to configure a subsequent deal — albeit at a cost to public services and economic competitiveness — that at least ensures industrial peace.
That calculation is critical to the aspiration Paschal Donohoe articulated on budget day, of ensuring that the centre can hold.
Looking to 2022, the issue is in fact, whether the centre can hold, or not.
Industrial dislocation and water charges, offer a historic opportunity for the left, to advance.
I do not include either Sinn Féin or Labour in that attribution.
Sinn Féin is simply ambiguous; Labour, of course, is clear cut.
In industrial unrest, one cannot be depended on and the other simply wouldn’t be expected.
But dislocation if it comes, will be the next best opportunity for the left.
Whatever gains they make, whatever pressure they create, is, in turn, felt acutely from left to right, or at least from left to centre-left, across the political system.
Ultimately, it is as much about who makes the running, as who makes up the numbers.
The open terrain of public service pay negotiations, important elections in Siptu and its biannual conference this year, are the field on which battle will be joined.
If user charges and potential strikes are tactical means by which the centre can be holed, the aftermath of the next election is another.
Very wisely Fianna Fáil stayed out of government, and I doubt if any sensible people in Fine Gael really regret it now.
A coalition will immediately make both parties less than the sum of their constituent parts.
The corrosive prospect is that the next Dáil will see a repeat of either the current arrangement or its reverse.
While not a grand coalition, this would be the spectre of it.
Over time, probably not a lot of time, this would signal to a disgruntled electorate that, ultimately, there is too little choice in the Irish electoral system.
The centre has probably one more election left to imagine a new narrative, based on contribution and community, or find itself torn apart by expectations that were impossible, and are now ridiculous.
There is a semblance of that narrative, based on enabling communities and citizens, in initiatives for water metres being a tool to allow people exercise control and make savings.
Similarly, in the as-yet aspirational Creative Ireland initiative, or at least in the political language surrounding it, there is belated appreciation that the sum of politics is not all about economic statistics.
There must be an imaginative, gripping narrative.
The answer to dislocation is to be smart tactically, and not exacerbate it.
But that won’t be enough.
Disbelief, must be matched by new wonder.
Commitments must be credible. Surprisingly, there is an audience willing to hear a vision, where in return for real engagement, as distinct from righteous expectation, positive change can come.
People need to be challenged, as well as pandered to.
