Brave New World

Yeah, we get it. So what? 03/10/2025

I have noticed recently that I have become increasingly disengaged from the news. More specifically, I choose to turn away from the most important development, or “story”, of my lifetime- namely the advance of authoritarianism and its existential threat to liberal democracy. Perhaps it’s a sign of battle fatigue that is most acutely seen in the United States in the second Trump term. The outrage and protest, on the streets and on the thousands of column inches across most US media, is now muted if not altogether absent compared to 8 years ago, although in the case of the media that comes from naked self-interest rather than exhaustion. However, tiredness doesn’t cover precisely why I am shunning my liberal outrage podcasts- Quiet Riot, Behind the Lines- of this world now. I am beginning to feel that focusing on this is now just a colossal waste of time.

Most people are not into politics. My recent foray into Premier League football, cricket and- weirdly- golf has opened my eyes to the amount of time and thought that goes into commentary from millions of my fellow countrymen into sport. By contrast, politics only engages about 10% of the population. Either Plato or Aristotle pointed this out using roughly this percentage. Instinctively, this seems a little on the high end, and I honestly believe this historic level of engagement took a dip in the 1990s and never recovered. When there is no longer an existential threat to the world- a situation peculiar to the 1990s- and the economy is more or less OK, why bother? I was deeply frustrated in those days as I believed then and have been proved right since that it is important for every citizen’s duty to be politically engaged, otherwise the institutions that form the backbone of our civilization weaken.

By 9/11 too many citizens’ muscle memory had weakened or had never had the chance to fully form. Howard Stern side-kick Robin Quivers said that event drove her to lose weight and be fitter- at the time she reflected that she would not have been physically capably of walking down the stairs of the Twin Towers if her life depended on it. Unfortunately, no-one took the other lesson- one that I dearly hoped at the time- that people would be driven to understand the geopolitical world a little better. There was no chance of that happening, particularly in the US, as the Bush administration drove through a war march against Iraq. No time for thought, reflection, analysis- just red meat Us versus Them rhetoric and bomb, baby bomb. Fear, reaction, disillusionment from left and right about the war, following by the global economic heartattack of the 2008 GFC smothered any chance of becoming interest in world events, other than through the prism of doom.

In the meantime, those of us who have been fascinated by geopolitics have a had our plate full of historical, game changing events. Although almost relentlessly negative, we have been glued to this TV program, too far in to not see it through its (gulp) conclusion. Like the TV show Lost- non-watchers, most of whom gave up after Season 1, think us weird obsessives should get a life as the thickening plot is absurd and is cranking its remaining watchers’ stress levels up to new highs. We have so many access points to commentary, analysis, with the added benefit that we are in a permanent series of weeks where decades happen (HT Lenin). The result has been that the gap between followers and disengaged has never been greater. As events are no longer fun to cover, and the future looks really fucking terrifying, we hyper informed political obsessives are being primed for the arrival of a potential catastrophe. But we are left only talking to each other and we are too small is numbers to stop what could easily happen. We need the disengaged but have forgotten how to talk to them, and they have long since forgotten how to listen. Even more worryingly, it is the far right who have figured out the language to deploy to engage them.

Browsing through my podcast feed I thought to myself, “I really don’t need to listen to Anne Applebaum or David Frum warning that the US has entered authoritarianism” or Andrew Harrison warning that Farage could easily destroy UK democracy. I know that to death. I know it backwards. I could sit down and write in one go an entire book about how we came to reach this destination and how dreadful it would be if Farage gets in in 2028, along with a Trump third term! What difference does it make if most people shrug their shoulders, say the world’s gone mad and you can’t trust any institutions any more. Me listening to more of the same Cassandras isn’t going to change anything. Nothing I have done in the last nine years has.