Trumpkins, Brexiteers and the missing middle

It's been a year since that dread morning when I awoke, and in a replay of 24 June 2016, discovered that the Wrong Side Had Won. President Trump? The words sounded like an oxymoron and still do.

It now looks less and less likely that Trump will make it to the end of his first year as president let alone to the end of his term - for all the reasons we were being warned about during the election campaign. Trump's past is coming back for him - and in particular his campaign team's complicity with Russian meddling. And we can see more clearly today how the social media, an effective amplifier for social discontent, was hijacked by an unfriendly power which could see its potential in magnifying social division.

And the same in Britain. The same phenomena - advertising, comments, Twitter trolls and Facebook campaigns instigated or amplified by the Kremlin and its band of 'useful idiots' forced an issue that few Britons really cared about before 2004.

Putin and his fellow KGB-related kleptocrats are failing to deliver social or economic progress to ordinary Russians, who instead look West to see how society could be organised - as a network, rather than an authoritarian hierarchy. Rather than deliver the reforms Russia needs, Putin instead is using sophisticated propaganda to diminish the west, by attacking the very roots of its success.

Strength and progress through teamwork, through trust, through the concept of win-win (as opposed to adversarial dealings), the superiority of the committee over the hierarch, of delegation, of bottom-up initiatives within a civil society, have proved more successful than totalitarian command-and-control. Just compare North Korea to South Korea, or Estonia to Belarus.

And the network model relies on balance, on compromise, on accepting diverse points of view, of moving two or three steps forward and maybe a step or two back, but generally moving in the right direction.

With the political discourse in the US, UK and indeed Poland being moulded the way it is, the middle ground is losing ground. I used to be sure that if you had a life in balance, acted pragmatically, shunning extremes - and indeed being attacked by ideologies from both sides - you were moving along the good path from barbarism towards civilisation, from the bestial towards the angelic.

But the Putin doctrine of dividing to rule makes this more difficult to achieve than ever. Take the Brexit debate. I have yet to hear any Brexiteer tell me how Britain's membership of the European club these past 43 years has made their life miserable (in the way that communism in Eastern Europe really did make people's day-to-day life awful). And I have yet to hear any Brexiteer offer a cogent plan for how the UK will become more prosperous after leaving the EU.

Brexiteers have become infused with an ideology - something quite un-British. It has become a matter of faith that somehow, free of the shackles of Brussels, Britain will once more achieve global greatness. Faith, belief - but no firm evidence-based proof or roadmap of how or when this will come to pass. Brexiteers spit on the EU using terms like 'unelected bureaucrats' (which bureaucrat was ever elected?) or 'EUSSR' (where's the EU's Gulags, Holodomor or Katyn? Where's its KGB?). Brexiteers rarely have the slightest inkling of how the EU works other than what they read in a newspaper published by some tax-dodging non-UK domiciled media baron.

On the other hand, there's Jeremy Corbyn, by normal standards a students union Trot who's failed to grow up. In a normal world, he'd stand no chance of ever taking power. Today, his Labour party is ahead of the Brexit-riven Tory party in the polls. [Though as Tony Blair notes, under such circumstances, Labour should be 15-20 points ahead of the Tories, not 2-3.]

The middle ground is shrinking. Being reasonable no longer seems to be a viable strategy, rather like (invoking Godwin's Law) being reasonable towards Hitler was not reasonable. Once I could comfortably sit on the fence. Once I could style myself an extreme moderate.  Once it was: "The EU? Well, it has a lot of faults, I'm against the federalisation of Europe blah blah but all thing considered, better to have an EU and be in it..." But today I've become a fervent supporter of the European ideal from all the idiots and Russian agents of influence who wish to break up this force for stability and civilisation. Once I'd think of Barack Obama as a well-meaning by wooly-minded liberal who's dangerously naive about Russia. Today I see him as a Great Leader and Beacon of Humanity. Nuance has gone. The middle ground has dropped out of arguments.

The evil genius at work in the Kremlin has pushed the West to this pretty pass. By using the very mechanisms that make the West an open society, Putin has forced in voices intended to disrupt our way of life, to feed dismay, distrust and disbelief.

Rank-and-file Trumpkins and Brexiteers (not their organisers) are generally the less intelligent section of society. Their lives are full of discontentment; they have taken many wrong life decisions (beginning with not taking education sufficiently seriously) and are looking for someone or something to blame. Scapegoats include 'the elites' and immigrants - "the other".

To stir them up, Russia is using a sophisticated blend of propaganda. It is not saying (like it did in Soviet days) "look at us, we are the future, we have the answers". Rather, it is deflecting the world's gaze from Russia, and saying "look at you - the West is in decay, liberalism has failed". It does so by espousing right-wing and left-wing arguments at the same time, and using the targeting tools of the social media to spread dissatisfaction within different social groups.

When Ukraine was kicking off, the Russian trolls were simultaneously saying 'Ukrainians are fascists' and 'Ukraine is led by Jews'. the fact that these statements were entirely contradictory was irrelevant - they were targeted at entirely different target groups. The aim was to get the West's far left and far right to take an anti-Ukrainian stance.

If mankind has learned anything in these dark years - the darkest I've lived through since the end of the Cold War - by far - it is that Truth, Facts, Scientific Evidence are crucial. We can all spin narratives one way or the other, but we should cast aside ideologies and press on towards a search for forensically verifiable evidence, that stands up in a court of law, that stands up to peer review. We should strive for the highest standards, and question everything until we are sure it is right.

We should close our ears to moral relativism ("well you bomb children's hospitals too") and stick up for the right way - shunning pessimistic, defeatist voices.

There is a march of progress. Mankind is slowly, inexorably moving away from the reptilian, from the simian, evolving slowly towards a more beautiful future. Our way there will not be paved by voices of hate or jealousy.

I can only hope that the reign of Trump will be swiftly cut short by legal measures, and that the people of Britain turn their backs on Brexit. Neither Trump nor Brexit will do what they promised voters.

This time six years ago:
Bad news for Jeziorki's rat runners

This time seven years ago:
Death on the tracks

This time eight years ago:
From Łady to Falenty