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We live in unique times, in a political environment without precedents, the definition of an extraordinary era. Am I describing nowadays? No, you’ve just misunderstood. The politics of ever are extraordinary politics. Even with one certain President of the United States Donald Trump.
What happens in the world doesn’t cease to surprise, politics too
A lot is said about the increased risk of conflict with Donald Trump leading the richest and militarily strongest country in the world. This doesn’t cease to be the truth, but, what’s more pressing is the idea that it represents a profound divergence from the status quo. To a greater or lesser degree, the risk of world conflict has been a constant since the end of World War II, lest we forget the Cold War and the many conflicts of the 20th century. Even the fear of nuclear war due to some regime’s instability, thus, is nothing new. In our world, we have lived through the same tensions that today are brought up with such force.
Politics can be resumed in the action and reaction to events in history. The Cuban Missile Crisis was, in its moment, the moment of greatest political tention in the world, with the highest risk of nuclear war, in a climate of many points of potential conflict at a similar scale. Politics surprises us as much as the summary of the events it provokes.
The political climate transforms itself according to these events, making each moment the most uncertain and risky ever
One of the fundaments of politics is that the actors—politicians, regimes, countries as monolithic entities—respond according to their own interests. That is, they act based on what they consider to promote their own well-being. Simple. Right? It’s complicated.
The balance of power in the world depends on continually smaller balances of power. Two countries maintain peace or enter into conflict depending on the overlap or not of their internal interests. A country maintains a stable regime if it achieves a balance between the interests of civil society and the military and political classes. And so on. At every scale, a different balance. Politics responds, at its core, to all of these balances, making decisions on how to resolve them.
That is why each moment, especially with advances in technology, is and always will be the riskiest moment in history. Yesterday seems stable when tomorrow is not guaranteed, setting aside that which may have negated yesterday’s guarantees.
We live in an evolution of ideas that are not at all new
Trump was not a genie in a bottle that came out of nowhere. He is, in truth, just the evolution of thoughts and ideology that already existed for decades in the United States. Bill O’Reilly was cancelled now in 2017 after 21 long years spitting the words of the ideology that now dominates in the White House. The Republican Party tried out shutting the government down in 1995, 18 years before the same act would cause an unthinkable scandal of instability. And so on.
The only thing there is is an evolution, on all parts, of old ideas and thoughts. It’s true that we’ve never had a person of such inexperience, with such a temperament, with such conflicts of interest in the White House. What follows, however, has a history from which we ought to learn better.