There is a new divide in politics; a cleavage which doesn't tie itself handily to the clean and simplistic "left-right" or even "liberal-conservative" axes that have collectively bounded our political understanding in years previous.
Instead, this fault-line or fissure runs along a far broader front. Whether you wish to delineate the two major oppositional forces as being Globalists versus Protectionists in an economic sense, or Elitists versus Populist-Democrats in an electoral one ... it has become painfully clear over the last year or two of strange rumblings in the politisphere that the paradigms with which we used to broadly conceptualize politics have become painfully inadequate.
New Zealand, perhaps surprisingly, has lead the way and crested the charge on this. Back when the Neoliberal Revolution became truly Institutionalized with Ruthanasia in the early 1990s, it created a situation wherein both the major parties of both nominal Left and suddenly avowed Right came together to jointly uphold our newfound More-Market and Less-Human economic consensus. This necessitated the coagulation of oppositional forces drawn from right across the ordinary political spectrum in order to oppose same - and lest you think I'm talking about New Zealand First, consider for a moment the number of ex-National Party MPs who found themselves part and party to The Alliance.
Something similar has recently become apparent in the gladiator-pit of American politics, too. There, it's the perhaps surprising degree of policy convergence between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in opposition to the economics of globalization that's collectively sold out several generations of American workers - and in joint support of anti-elitist populist politics - which sets the ground for viewing this strange synthesis.
Although it's the forces arraying themselves in opposition to BOTH of them which prove that we really have arrived at a curious place in modern politics. It's one thing to read a semi-snarky piece of principled journalism which (in my mind, correctly) calls out Hillary Clinton as being a "sensible, moderate Republican candidate" on policy and predilections. It's quite another when a figure like Bill Kristol - one of the godfathers of the modern American NeoCon movement, and the man responsible for Sarah Palin '08 - chooses to endorse Clinton over Trump over her economic positioning, hawkish foreign policy, and perceived greater amenability to shadowy elites.
In Britain, too, a similar thing happened recently with #Brexit. You had the combined might of the UK Labour Party shackling itself to the brains-trust of the Conservative Party's arch-neoliberal wing in order to frantically attempt to beat out the populist fires that were burning for emancipation from Europe. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn - the much-vaunted and wildly-popular-with-Labour's-base-but-not-its-Caucus institutionally insurgent Labour leader - found himself agreeing in private with personages such as Nigel Farage about the desirability of Euroskepticism.
All across the world, in other words, politics is re-aligning. But, as is ever the case, the political structures and institutions which we've set up over time to represent the wills and concerns of the masses have become too ossified to meaningfully respond or reflect this transition.
And that's perhaps how we best explain the sudden rise of Insurgent Politics in a plethora of polities worldwide. People got fed up with the aforementioned Globalist-oriented and questionably democratic elites having a near monopoly on real political power through weighing heavily upon the agenda of these parties and institutions. So when firebrands, demagogues, or just pure straight-up socialist reformers started rising to prominence and offering "Another Way", or meaningful projection of the concerns and prejudices of ordinary people into the political process ... years if not decades of pent-up populist rage surged in behind them.
Now to be fair, some might argue that this is not always and unilaterally a good thing. New Zealanders, after all, voted in a referendum to re-criminalize homosexuality in the late 1980s - as but one example of why 'too much' democracy can occasionally seem a bad idea. The other issue, of course, is that a Radical 'march through the institutions' almost invariably winds up coming to a shuddering halt at some point prior to the penultimate immanentization of said populist's agenda. Examples of this include the Democratic National Convention conspiring to keep Sanders from winning a Presidential nomination - or, more darkly, the array of 'Deep State' and other coercive measures used to block Alexis Tsipras & SYRIZA from stabbing back against the E.U.'s harshly imposed and decidedly undemocratic neoliberal Austerity agenda in Greece.
You could presumably file the Western-backed armed coups against Chile's Salvador Allende and Iran's Mohammed Mossaddeq in the same box - and ditto for the more relatively recent overthrow of the popularly elected Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt by the Egyptian Army.
It's not so much that Western Democracy doesn't like competitors. It's that the elites we're talking about aren't very great fans of democracy at all.
We can see perhaps similar trends here at home in our own politics. On a smaller scale, it's stuff like the National Party using an obscure veto power to block democratically passed laws it doesn't like from taking effect - or refusing to put certain controversial globalist concerns like the TPPA to any form of vote in Parliament at all to begin with. Larger efforts include attempts to firestorm certain individual and parties out of further participation in politics in the hopes of keeping populist rage safely WELL away from the actual levers of political power. The efficacy of direct efforts on this front have been somewhat questionable (hence why New Zealand First has been surging in the polls of late) - but due to the peculiarities of the New Zealand national character and political landscape, they do not need to be too inordinately successful in order to accomplish their craven aim.
For here in Kiwiland, the dominant paradigm is not yet one of Globalist-Elite versus Nationalist-Worker - or, for that matter, anything so Romantic in ordination. Instead, we are stuck with a sustained struggle in which the two major players appear to be between the aforementioned Globalists on one hand ... and acrid, rank apathy on the other.
So long as that latter force remains such a piercing colossus within our politics, the emerging realignment which we have so viscerally seen elsewhere (and which New Zealanders have, ourselves, previously flirted with) shall largely remain more chrysalis than crystallized.
Still, that's the thing about seismic movements in politics. The fault-lines upon which tectonic upheaval is fomented can quite comfortably exist concealed from the peaceable hamlets that have been built above them.
The only difference between these and the more obviously visually apparent fissures is the level of energy which is thus built up before being unleashed.
Something similar to this is what gave rise to Trumpamania, Feeling the Bern, and #Brexit across the rest of the Anglosphere.
I can't help but wonder what our own dramatic political insurgency might look like. Or, for that matter, what he smokes.
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