Global politics in the 2020s is a binary business. It is exceptionally difficult to be an ‘inbetweener’, as most people are generally wont to do. If you are yet to have the misfortune to watch Holyrood actress Selena Gomez’s self-posted social media video on the topic of President Trump’s immigration policy, I’d advise against it.

Looking through the cracks of my fingers at the cringing wailing of another billionaire, my own political ‘inbetweener’ status was hammered home to me. I am dismayed at the election of Trump and the global trend of which he is a part, and yet I am also roundly sick of people who have little or no understanding of normal life slam their moral superiority down my throat.

So are Americans, it seems. Nobody forced them to elect President Trump in a landslide in November. They made that choice all by themselves.

We have brought all of this on ourselves, if you will allow ‘we’ to constitute what we call mainstream politics. Centrist governments all over the democratic world - sometimes leaning a little left and sometimes leaning a little right - have carried on in the 2020s just as they had in the 2000s and presumed their populations would thank them for it. However, the people are not patting their leaders on the back; they are punching them in the face.

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There are two major events to which mainstream, centrist politics has failed utterly to adapt. The first is the global financial crisis of the late noughties. The second is the Covid pandemic of the late 2010s. The global democratic world put in place........

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