Photo by Jon Tyson

As scribes over here in the UK suddenly ask if the right-wing populist Reform party has peaked, I realise I know almost nothing about politics. Even more so after studying Your Party—the grassroots Jeremy Corbyn-Zarah Sultana construct created with brave enough intentions in July as a new left-wing movement. It wasn’t registered until September, and the name was only agreed on in late November. By then, it had some 55,000 members—not entirely to be sniffed at—plus a small number of MPs and local councillors.

Yet the official launch, as far as I can tell, stripped the party bare, revealing disagreements over how to structure the thing, disputes over membership rules, and complaints of purges of activists linked to other socialist groups—even a public boycott of part of the conference by Sultana herself. Admirable though a movement’s refusal to compromise may be—at least to my eye—Your Party is still fragile and untested. Public trust, unity, and plausible leadership are no small matters when it comes to becoming a serious political force. Even if people admire Corbyn—who sees no vision in the present Labour set-up—and Sultana, herself at serious odds with them—it turns out that not knowing much about politics is sometimes indistinguishable from knowing a lot. Which is not to say we should opt out of politics. It’s just that our understanding of it is invariably limited.

If we tentatively stick our necks out and peer across a politically troubled Europe to Africa and Sudan, we see politics in some places doesn’t even get a look-in. One repeated concern in Sudan is said to be de facto military leader Burhan offering Russia a Red Sea naval base. Meanwhile, the US, albeit long-distance, says it wants a civilian transition without Islamists or former-regime groups and is now considering wider sanctions. And yet, I heard a few times visiting the region, without knowing how accurate it was, that the US didn’t have a policy at all. Its envoy is Trump’s daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, by the way. At the same time, Burhan has blocked the latest peace initiative for a ceasefire, while military rival Hemedti has—at least in theory—accepted one, placing Burhan’s backers, including Saudi Arabia, in an awkward position—especially after MBS’s US visit. The latest word now is that the US is preparing “decisive measures” before the year’s end.

Politics—what is it really good for? Absolutely nothing? As Groucho Marx put it: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” I’m not arguing for abandoning politics. I’m just admitting I understand it no worse than the next person. Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, succeeds precisely because he is not like a politician. I’ve had the odd glimpse into corridors of power. Beyond the hassle of perpetually removing one’s belt and endlessly emptying pockets into plastic trays, I’m always reminded how little we grasp of what’s going on–Polanksi’s point, I guess. I’m also reminded how self-contained political power is. How like a pod in a hostile environment it is—people think they’re safe and informed, but off-site know next to nothing.

Even during Covid, I remember mandarins and bean counters struggling with the uncertainty of the crisis without wanting to get their hands dirty. There were notable exceptions, but even when elected politicians effected change, there was still an obvious over-dependence on civil servants—a third tier of which, including Prof Sir Chris Whitty, were forever trying to shut down ethics advisers warning of the negative effects of the policy. Not to mention fast-track contracts dished out by politicians to friends of politicians. Or £10.9 billion in Covid fraud.

My first glimpse of so-called US politics came as a child in Scotland and the north-east of England. It was the civil rights era. Though too young to grasp any of the details, I recall Lyndon Johnson’s face on my grandmother’s TV. I even marvelled at his long ears. It was only later I realised he would have been talking about the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The notion that liberalism was a force for good was, however, planted superficially in my mind—along with the idea that politics exists to improve people’s lives. But even that early sense of moral clarity feels like just another illusion—one more thing I thought I understood about politics but maybe never did.

By the 1980s, democracy was seen to be—especially in the West—on a roll. It was expanding into authoritarian spaces and gatecrashing murderous elites. This was the Third Wave of Democratisation. It went on to define the post-Cold War era—an ideological battle actually begun in 1974 with the fall of Portugal, Greece, and Spain, and continued through the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America, parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. By the end of it, over 60 countries had moved from authoritarianism to democracy.

So why does it feel—to me at least—impossible to engage in political discourse today without provoking opposition from supporters of authoritarianism or populism? Theirs is a reaction presumably born of the shortcomings and unmet promises of the so-called Third Wave. Perhaps the most surprising element is that this sudden populism is not confined to new democracies. It’s thriving in the old ones, too.

Exposed (apparently) as lacking in flexibility, democracy has proved itself less resilient than still most people like. (Ditto, if I may say so, for the so-called safety checks and balances in the US Constitution.) Hence the rise of Trump in the US, Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, and, briefly, Bolsonaro in Brazil—what scholars call the “reverse wave.” One or two people insist that this signals not the end of democracy, however, but a struggle over its future shape. Meanwhile, Trump’s 33-page political contribution last week—in the form of the ‘National Security Strategy of the United States of America’—was described by historian Simon Schama at the weekend as “one of the great betrayals of the free world.” By aligning itself with Europe’s far-right, it was not only in an unattractive panic over the continent’s “civilisational erasure,” but sounding exactly like Orbán.

Any basic look at politics today has to mention China. Observers say the country is under pressure—though how much of that is visible from the outside is hard to judge—over its continued centralisation of power, a slowing but still significant economy, and rising geopolitical tension. At home, Xi Jinping has clearly tightened political control. Abroad, China’s more assertive foreign policy and naval build-ups in disputed waters are encouraging neighbours to strengthen their own defences. None of this guarantees outright military conflict, I don’t suppose, and China often stresses stability and development, but its ambitions are evident. And as a single-party authoritarian state, where political competition takes—shall we say?—a different form, there is little need for the kind of campaigning familiar in electoral democracies.

If anything, ignorance seems to me the only honest position left—and maybe the only one I’m qualified for—in a system where even insiders appear bewildered. Not that the Take Back Power activists who attacked the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London over the weekend with apple crumble and custard were entirely apolitical. And perhaps there is no point to formal politics anyway when so much of the power out there is brutish, dangerous, and utterly indifferent to entente cordiale.

Maybe the only position is to keep looking—even if all we ever do is realise how little we know. It is like the pebble quote in Fellini’s La Strada, saying the pebble must have a purpose, otherwise everything is pointless. No, if there’s any enlightenment to be had, it is surely the realisation that politics isn’t meant to be mastered. Just minded, questioned, and never entirely trusted.

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