Window on the new world?

Very strange mix of thoughts and feelings yesterday as I strapped myself in to watch the Trump inauguration on Capitol Hill on BBC1 from 4.00pm UK time.

My original plan had been to take exercise of some sort in the afternoon because I had been confined to my home engaged upon domestic and other duties all morning. But you know how it is – cometh the appointed hour, a combination of unwilling flesh and the possibility that, if I did pop up the hill to attend my Pilates class, I’d return home to discover that in the meantime the new President of the United States had nuked North Korea persuaded me to take up Rust reporting duties on my sofa with a cup of tea and a chocolate Swiss roll bought for the purpose from my newsagents across the road.

So how did it go for me?

My first and constant reaction was twofold. Firstly, that I was indeed watching something historic – after all, if America has had 45 presidents during its history (that’s presumably not counting those who served two, or even three, terms and indeed those who served twice but not consecutively if you see what I mean) it’s something that’s happened only 45 times.

Secondly, that – by its very nature – coverage on 24/7 dedicated news channels has its deep limitations.

I felt I gained a ‘plus’ in the form of a detached participatory ‘sense of occasion’ from the fact that it took an hour to get to the actual swearing-ins of the Vice President and President. This I spent half-reading my newspaper and half-watching the various interviews and commentaries and then the crowd, backstage and wide-shot scenes provided by the television director choosing which ones BBC viewers would see at any particular time.

However, the attendant ‘minus’ was the inherent and inevitable weakness of the ongoing presenters’ descriptions and commentaries supposedly introducing and explaining what was going on.

When nothing much is happening and you’ve already spent twenty minutes ‘filling time’ by exchanging inanities with some supposed expert, or even your own North American correspondent, and then suddenly a door opens – a moment of history potentially occurs and you go on high alert.

Is this going to be the arrival of the Supreme Court judge who will conduct the ceremony …  or one of the phalanx of former US Presidents that are billed to be on hand … or perhaps a group of the Trump family clan … or a straight-backed hit-capped soldier carrying the famous Lincoln bible … or even (gasp) the President-elect himself?

Er no – it’s simply some jobsworth bringing out a transparent sou’-wester rain hat for the use of former Senator Bob Dole who’s sitting in his wheelchair on the left as we look at the scene.

A long-hoped-for brief but intense ‘moment of history’ was over. A false alarm. As the presenter on duty you heave an inner sigh. That’s the fourth ‘excitement build-up’ in a row you’ve presided over and your well of adrenalin-drenched descriptive powers is now running dangerously close to empty.

As for President Trump: well, if you come from a liberal (that’s with a small ‘L’) Western democratic tradition – whether that be in the USA, Canada, Europe or anywhere else – he didn’t disappoint. He played right up to his stereotype.

If you had listed just some of his supposed flaws – the fact he has zero experience of political office, that he panders to (or simply embodies) all the facile assumptions and prejudices of average white working class people across the vast stretches of America that history has left behind, and that he’s an arrogant, boorish, ill-educated, bombastic know-all with little or no self-awareness or ‘light and shade’ – then he exhibited them all.

You have to say that – taking a mid-term view – the global political class has a lot to answer for and some chickens potentially coming home to roost.

Maybe there has indeed been a disastrous disconnect between those who have existed inside the ‘political bubble’ over the past forty years (across the generations who have aspired to join it and then ‘played the game’ their entire careers) without ever really understanding or relating to ordinary people.

Maybe the old days of rotten and pocket boroughs and the weaknesses demonstrated by postal ballots, electoral fraud and gerrymandering weren’t so bad – they were just the rules applying at the time.

Maybe the impact of the extraordinary global proliferation of the internet community, personal smartphones and social media has been misinterpreted. The political class may well have seen it as a potential improvement – a welcome means of reversing the long decline in people actually bothering to vote in elections by getting more young people engaged in political activity at both local and national levels (surely ‘a good thing’ intrinsically?) – but maybe they got that wrong.

Maybe the more that people ‘get involved’ (voluntarily or involuntarily) in the political process, the more they get disillusioned.

Why? Because in the modern world of ‘instant gratification’ in all things, when you are encouraged, cajoled and then enthused enough to become involved and express your opinion via the ballot box … and then the politicians and/or principles you voted for don’t prevail, and you’re told that there nothing you can do about it for the next four or five years (and even then, the result may well be repeated) … it’s not difficult to see how you might be moved to conclude “Oh, what’s the bloody point?”

Maybe that’s why you get protest votes and what the political class call ‘populism’.

The intriguing thing is that, whereas in the UK we got Farage, UKIP and Brexit but precious few ‘populists’ in Parliament with their hands actually on the levers of power, in the United States of America they got Donald Trump.

It will be interesting to see what happens. Who knows whether the old political order is ‘broken (terminally, or perhaps otherwise if it manages to reinvent and reassert itself), or whether the populist experiment, with its ‘back and white’ assumptions and solutions, will sink or swim?

As ever with world history (and, of course, economic theory) it’s always far easier to pick over the entrails of what has happened and explain why than it is to predict the future.