“Even by British traditions of political failure, this prime minister’s brief tenure has been a spectacular disaster.”
Article by Tom McTague in The Atlantic, here.
True, and one looks underneath the bonnet / hood of cultural life in an attempt to discern the increased tolerance for rank stupidity which facilitates both the rise to power of these numpties, and the willingness to try out their daft policies.
Always, I keep coming back to the Internet – specifically, its simultaneous democratisation of people who are not cool-headed but who are governed by their emotions (akin to being ruled by a cabal of racist taxi drivers), and, as a medium, the Internet’s social-media wing’s twin tendency towards bias-affirmation and its vulnerability to mendacious, industrial scale astro-turfing.
Truss’ cabinet is distinguished primarily by one thing – the number of its members who are extreme ideologues. The kind of people who will say to themselves: “never mind about it working in practice – does it work in theory?“
Brexit, for instance, was an exercise in self-delusion on a national scale.
It’s the spirit of the age. Instead of keeping religious beliefs inside churches or in one’s personal life, so that the only inform one’s macro ethics, in the age of neo-puritanism and rampant oppression Olympics and rigidly self-pitying identitarianism (from BLM through MeToo through Brexiter nationalism), religious fervour has infected domains previously animated by rationality, level-headedness and a spirit of compromise.
Or, in other words, most people nowadays are nuts, and it’s only an aging cohort of people who came of age in the 70s and 80s who still remember what it was like to be level-headed, and to have necessary doubts about anything.
Disjecta 