For the many voters who dislike confrontation and feel that democracy should be about dialogue and compromise, the new political disorder is frightening. Even the most self-assured political veterans are horrified and baffled. As Tony Blair put it in a 2016 interview: “I’m not sure I fully understand politics right now.” The adjective commentators repeatedly use to describe it is “toxic”. Yet not very long ago, western politics was not like this at all. For much of the 90s and the 00s, our politics was – by historic standards – extraordinarily mild, orderly and stable. There was broad agreement about what made a good government. Most mainstream parties were led by consensus-seeking, seemingly pragmatic, not obviously ideological figures such as Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder and Blair himself. Many voters seemed satisfied by them: all four premiers won re-election. Political life moved slowly and predictably: most western democracies seemed much the same from one year to the next. This undramatic politics, moreover, was rooted in what seemed to many a persuasive analysis of the modern world. One of its key early texts was a 1994 essay by the eminent British sociologist Anthony Giddens. In Brave New World: The New Context of Politics, he argued that most societies were becoming more cosmopolitan, less traditional, less tribal, more individualistic. This more fluid, interconnected world, with its linked capitalist economies and common environmental crises, he argued, needed a politics that was calm and not divisive, “a public arena in which controversial issues … can be resolved, or at least handled, through dialogue”. Conflict, whether between ideologies, social classes, political parties or other interest groups, ought to become a thing of the past.
Andy Beckett, The death of consensus: how conflict came back to politics.
