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| l3v1ck wrote: "For the last twenty years we've tried to mock and marginalise people who have different opinions to us. In the last year or two, globally, we've seen voters rebel against that. So now we're not going to let elected people take office unless they vow to have our opinions instead." | |
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The first part is definitely true. We've seen an 'uprising' - in a fairly non-violent sense - of people who were previously pretty much ignored, or indeed even ridiculed, by the political establishment. They don't want the people who have ignored them for years to carry on being in power and ignoring them. They want things to change. That's pretty understandable from anyone's perspective.
The problem is they're not actually voting for the changes that will do them any good. They're (in the main) voting for a bunch of charlatans who are actually very much part of the establishment they hate so much but are unscrupulous enough to tell them whatever they want to hear to grab the votes. Because some of the things they want are very hard to do, but when someone tells them that they think 'But that guy said it would be easy, I'll vote for him instead!'
For example, ending immigration from Europe isn't actually going to bring back mass manufacturing & industrial jobs to Sunderland & the North East. Those jobs have gone outside the EU in the main, so us being in the EU or not doesn't matter to that. What needs to happen is we need to train people in lots of new skills that mean lots of new jobs in industries that aren't more easily based in China. But that's hard and it takes years and not everyone will be able to do those things, so people don't want to hear it.
Farage, Johnson and Gove aren't actually any less establishment than Cameron or Osborne. Trump is filling his cabinet with billionaires, who were the people who paid for and owned the American political system anyway, just now they're running it directly rather than by proxy. Trump has put a man in charge of immigration in the US who has publicly stated he's in favour of removing the existing restrictions on immigration from Mexico, let alone build that ludicrous wall. Putin is more or less the kind of person who was running Russia before the wall came down. They're not voting for better politicians, they're voting for better liars - which you might immediately think is the same thing, but it isn't... They might say they share your opinions, but that's all talk. They're actually just as bad as the other lot. In fact in the main, they're worse.
We've got a load of people who are fed up with the status quo. The problem is the alternative they're going for doesn't actually want to help them at all, it's a bunch of people who are entirely dishonest and self-interested. So they're just going to end up EVEN MORE FRUSTRATED.
