A couple of articles about people going too far ...

... really too far. This, on the Trump craziness, and, this on covid cranks (and and this and this, about someone who falls into both categories) are each by people who might be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to such crazies in normal circumstances, and therefore are useful correctives in case you are inclined to give them any benefit of any doubt. 

The link, of course, is that these die-hard Trump supporters and covid sceptics are people who starting out by becoming suspicious of the establishment. And there has been good reason for that suspicion. The old establishment brought China into the global trading system in the expectation that trade would lead to democracy, launched endless wars to bring democracy to the Middle East, brought us the 2008 financial crash, 'deaths of despair' in the US, regional inequalities in the UK, mass immigration without the hosts' consent ... well, you know the list. They have not given the alternatives a fair run, and they have rigged the system against them.

But that does not mean that every suspicion is justified. Covid is a nasty disease with no easy cures; Trump, for all his qualities (I still say that his efforts to bring peace to the Korean peninsular were pretty decent, and his achievements in normalising relations between Israel and its neighbours are not to be dismissed), turns out to be a deeply flawed choice as President. The old establishment was not all bad. 

The problem, I think, is that there has not been a proper reckoning for the complacent errors of post-Cold War, End of History conventional wisdom. There has not been regime change. The people who brought you all the errors I mention above now live in comfortable retirement, occasionally despised for more or less coherent reasons (see: Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton), but still dominating the mental landscape of their successors, who are unsure whether to repudiate or endorse them, while the still-comfortable wider establishments of the West look back on them with barely concealed desire for the ancien regime. We have not yet had a change of thinking at the top, in the way that the 1970s gave way to Thatcherism and Reagonomics, which were replaced in their turn by triangulation, New Labour and the Neue Mitte. Electorates have been casting around for alternatives (Corbyn? Sanders? AfD? Trump?) but without much assistance from the elites. And that is a failure of leadership. It is the job of our elites to provide the officer class for the polity as a whole, not simply to be a Praetorian Guard for itself.

No doubt some respectable alternative to the centrist wisdom of the 2000s will surface at some point. The politicians groping towards some kind of big-state, protectionist, anti-finance, socially-conservative melange will get there in the end. They will avoid the mistakes of yesteryear and make entirely new mistakes instead. But until then, there are a large number of people, in many ways sane and sensible, who have been left rudderless, leaderless and at the mercy of their worst suspicions. Let's hope it happens soon: people have died from supporting Trump too much and fearing covid too little.