From the gulf between rich and poor, to welfare reform, old arguments are failing to find answers for a world in flux
Politics has never been so fascinating. It drips from the ceiling. It oozes up through the floor. It reeks across the internet. Reading politics, being informed about it, participating in it, should be the compulsory national service of the 21st-century state. Yet never can the toolkit of political debate have been so empty and the task of understanding the world so titanic.
America has just undergone a monumental exercise in democracy. But no one can now tell whether the result means that the country will decline into "singularity" or soar to a new supremacy. Nor can anyone say whether America has "turned left", merely by sticking with Barack Obama and rejecting Mitt Romney. All that happened was that the Democrats persuaded more minorities to come out and vote, while an awesome debt remains.
Across the Pacific, China is progressing its epic experiment in non-democratic revolution. The outcome must have huge significance for other "half-free" states in Asia and Africa. Western visitors moan, with more than a touch of hypocrisy, about China's civil and human rights. But it is like Britons complaining about the Paris streets during the French revolution.
Elsewhere in Asia, the Muslim world is no less engrossing, enmeshed in a cultural upheaval with which few westerners can sympathise or engage. The only certainty is the fragility of reform and the counter-productivity of outside interference. We do not know what we should do, but feel some ancient "white man's" urge to do something.
In Europe, the political agony is no less acute. The continent seems fated to resume the turmoil between nationalism and supra-nationalism of the first half of the 20th century, albeit on an economic rather than a military plane. As in China, a grand experiment in sub-continental governance faces its greatest test. The refusal of the Brussels elite to see danger in federal union, notably in imposing a single currency on disparate states, is subjecting Greeks and Spaniards to a savage and punitive poverty. One more attempt to create a pan-European empire is turning into the financial equivalent of "bombing them back to the stone age".
Most Britons still respond to these issues by turning to some "blue remembered hills" in their political upbringing. They fish about in their pockets, take out an ancestral slide-rule and read off the answers from left to right according to taste.
This no longer works. Tories and Labour may bang the antique drum in parliament and print, but they have no idea how to drag the economy back from recession. Standing Keynes on his head, both parties went along with deficit expansion during the boom, and now champion deficit reduction in recession. It makes no sense, yet appears immune to its failure to work.
The welfare consensus may hold, but austerity has denied both left and right any coherent policies on pensions, families, housing, schools, planning, energy or law and order. Not even badgers and ash trees are spared the resulting hesitancy. The right has no answer to the widening gulf between rich and poor. The left has no answer to the chronic need for welfare targeting and means testing. When the right makes changes to health policy, housing subsidies or deregulation, the left howls. When the left proposes higher property taxes or fewer prisoners, the right howls. These are mere tribal grunts.
The one industry to benefit from all this is global risk aversion. America's defence and security establishment, now employing one in five US workers, seems to be the tail that wags every dog, foreign as well as domestic. No presidential hopeful in the 2012 election dared advocate a cut in defence, despite America facing a big deficit and no conceivable threat to its security or integrity.
Risk aversion in Britain has a more imperialist tinge. A craving for a "world role" echoes in the interventionism of David Cameron and Ed Miliband, both platitudinising about "what we want to see" and "punching above our weight". Bereft of the old lodestars, politicians of left and right become the "useful idiots" of sectional groups and commercial interests. Across Europe the game is now going to those who know exactly what they really want, to separatists, racists, tax evaders, securocrats and lobbyists. In the kingdom of the blind the beady-eyed are free.
For all this, I do not find the collapse of an ideological route map depressing. I rather find it exhilarating, difficult and important. The world's great conflicts may be of unprecedented immediacy, but they are not immovable objects facing irresistible forces. They are part of the churning cauldron of human affairs.
I believe – through some rational gene – that these conflicts are best resolved through the creaking mechanism of democracy. But, as China apologists such as Martin Jacques are writing with growing plausibility, this is neither a complete answer, nor one likely to be adopted everywhere. When this week Obama implied that God is an American, I felt very uncomfortable. It was the sort of claim made by the pre-Reformation church.
The right response is not to surrender to the complexity of it all. It is not to agree with the Zen master who said, "The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind's worst disease." It is to lie down with a cold compress on the head and plunge ever deeper into the struggle. That is what America's voters have just done in all their craziness. Whatever the society and whatever the risk, the citizen's one duty is always to argue the toss.
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