I’ve recently been reading ‘Meditations for Mortals’ by Oliver Burkeman (which I highly recommend). In the book, Burkeman recounts the story of Erik Hagerman who, following Trump’s 2016 victory, gave up all news and current affairs, right down to listening to white noise on headphones in his local coffee shop to avoid overhearing anything unpleasant. Apparently he was slated in the press and on social media – though if they were hoping to get him to change his ways then I think they’d rather missed the point.
I had my very own Hagerman moment last week when, despite being an avid podcast listener, I deleted dozens of episodes from my feed because I couldn’t face listening to endless rehashes of Trump’s inauguration and all the accompanying psychodrama.
The truth is it’s been coming on for a while. Over recent months I’ve found myself deleting episodes that mention Nigel Farage in the title. Elon Musk ditto, and even Kemi Badenoch gets my finger hovering over the delete key.
Of course I know that what Trump, and those around him, actually do will affect us all. The same goes for the Conservatives and Reform. But it all comes down to the theory of circles of influence versus circles of concern. If I let them, Trump et al will simply swamp my circle of concern. And, despite how important I think I am, nothing they do falls within my circle of influence. I can’t do anything about them. Filling my time consuming endless footage and commentary of their latest antics does nothing but increase my blood pressure.
Worse, it stops me from focussing on all those things that do fall within my circle of influence. It turns me from an active doer into a passive, and very depressed, consumer. Which, of course, is exactly what they want. This is what populist politicians do – and the good ones are really good at it. Trump, Farage, and those like them are experts at grabbing attention, and they will do it in any way they can. They want to fill our screens and our airwaves. They want us shocked, and on the back foot. They want us reacting, because if we are constantly reacting then there’s no time left for the proactive job of coming up with new ideas, doing real work, and generally making our little corners of the world better for those around us.
I’m not advocating the hermit life or listening to white noise in coffee shops, but there is something to be said for the view that if a story doesn’t make it into the weekly magazines then it was probably not worth knowing in the first place. If your job is party comms then you have to follow all this stuff – and I feel for you. But folks like me should be focussing on what we can change, then getting out there and doing something about it.
Returning to Erik Hagerman, apparently he devoted his time to his pig farm and his art projects. That sounds preferable to hyperventilating over Trump’s latest executive order. Meanwhile, with no politics podcasts in my queue, I listened to a local Bromley podcast instead. Through it I discovered a local sweet shop, called Lollies, gave it a visit, and rediscovered my love for treacle toffee. It might not seem like much, but it made my week a whole lot better than it otherwise would have been, and is undoubtedly going to be extremely positive for Lollies takings going forward.
* Allan Tweddle is the Diversity officer for the Bromley liberal Democrats and was the Parliamentary candidate for Orpington in the 2019 election. If you want to find out more about him then check out his website www.allantweddle.com.
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22 Comments
I’m not into pigs or treacle toffee but since Allan is a Diversity Officer I will state that I am happy to live in a world where others espouse such enthusiasms. I didn’t watch The Inauguration although I was at home in front of a television retrieving something from the previous day, secure in the knowledge that anything I really ought to know would be in tomorrow’s paper. Allan is quite right. We need to cultivate a creative disobedience, refusing to watch what the likes of the populists tell us we must not miss.
“ If your job is party comms then you have to follow all this stuff”
I am not convinced they do have to follow all this stuff.
The aim should be to follow issues that LD voters and potential LD voters care about and focus messages and responses on those issues.
There is no point in the LDs trying to out UKIP Farage (or out Trump Trump) since the people who vote for Farage (or Trump) are never, ever going to vote LD.
It appears that Democrats in the USA are equally split on how to deal with Trump’s victory. Some Democrats have chosen to back the Republicans in passing the Laken Riley Act that mandates the detention of illegal immigrants who are accused of violent crimes and theft. Meanwhile, democrat controlled cities are distributing information to those at risk of deportation about how they can resist the process.
Do we in the UK not have a similar problem? The public appears more to the right on the issue of illegal immigration than is the House of Commons. This is not a good position in a democracy, so deciding how we should respond to this disconnect is a crucial question.
It is a very nice privilege to be able to do this – unfortunately if you or people close to you happen to be (say) LGBT+, disabled, a woman (particularly a pre menopause cos woman), a bit too foreign or a bit too brown, a journalist, a scientist, or an artist of any kind, doing this runs an unacceptably high risk of discovering one day that you or they have been put on a list and are going to be fired, arrested, deported or denied medical care. This is already happening in the US.
I agree with most of the article and the area of concern/area of influence approach, but doing this as written is something all too few of us can afford to do fully. We must absolutely stay sane and happy, but we must also make sure that we and our loved ones are safe.
‘Elon Musk gets my finger hovering over the delete key.’
I disagree. Dictators develop when we ignore the early warnings. We are at that point NOW.
Mary. You either have an immigration system backed by law, or open borders. The Dems, hopefully, have learnt a painful lesson. The immigration debate across Europe is overwhelming progressive politics , they have no answers , and none are prepared to make difficult decisions.
@ Craig,
“You either have an immigration system backed by law, or open borders.”
Well, yes, obviously. The United Kingdom has the former rather than the latter, despite everything that is said by Conservative and Reform politicians. Conservatives know this to be true, because they oversaw the highest rates of inward legal migration in our recent history whilst pointing the public towards a small minority of that group. As they’ve demonstrated, you can have firmly applied laws AND high migration – that’s a decision of government and a reflection of the reality of the UK jobs market.
Difficult decisions? Well, yes, because the questions are complex. We have a high rate of inward migration in this country because there are jobs to be filled that the locals either don’t want, or are in places that have low unemployment – people are understandably unwilling to uproot themselves for minimum wage jobs, assuming that they could find somewhere affordable to live even if they were willing to.
And yes, you can fix this, but it takes time and investment, neither of which were priorities for the last Government. You also have to acknowledge that there are certain sectors – agriculture and social care, to take two examples – where the only way to fill the gap is to bring in workers from elsewhere in at least the short term.
It’s so much easier for non-progressive politicians, who generally don’t have to worry about solving problems, but can simply point and shout. But, funnily enough, they never seem to have an answer which actually makes anything better.
@John Waller – No, we had the early warnings in the 2010s. The alarm bells were sounded then and were ignored or dismissed as hyperbolic. The point we are at now is the continuation of finding out what the consequences are.
How to cope with populists… Welcome to a World where people have all sorts of wildly different opinions. Liberals find it frustrating when conservative viewpoints are given prominence, just as just as conservatives will find it equally frustrating when the situation is reversed. Allan has evidently found a solution that works for himself – to simply not pay attention. That’s great to the extent that we each have to figure out the best way to look after our own mental health. But I would question the implicit assumption in the article that people on the right are ungenuine. For example, the statement that Farage et al want to stop us “ coming up with new ideas, doing real work, and generally making our little corners of the world better for those around us“, which implies that people on the right don’t want to make the World a better place. Actually I be very confident that most people on the right do want to make the World a better place – they just have a very different understanding of how best to achieve that than most liberals do. (And yes, there is the question of the lies that Trump constantly tells, which do call his own sincerity into question, but that’s not generally true of conservatives).
To my mind, trying to understand the beliefs of people who disagree with us, rather than just switching off when they speak, is one of the marks of true tolerance.
Well done Mark for your comment on immigration. Populists play on people’s fear of open borders and if we forget that fear it will grow and turn more people towards Reform UK. The latest ONS report about population growth being due to immigration will be a great recruiting message for that party.
Many people still think Liberal Democrats believe we should ‘let them all in’ whereas we should be saying (as we actually have in our policies) we believe in controlling immigration. Nick Clegg said in 2010 we should improve border control though it seems that did not happen. Even the EU policy was that after 6months people should be made to return to their home EU country; we did not try to do that and although it was difficult some EU countries applied that rule.
Michael Heseltine said soon after the Brexit referendum result that it was based in people’s fear of immigration and the EU’s freedom of movement policy. Whatever the arguments for and against that, the growth of populism cannot be ignored, even though it is often based on prejudice, and narrowmindedness; the basic fear of no borders combined with fear of those who are different from us, has to be taken into account and positively addressed.
Mary: the problem is the deliberate conflation of illegal immigration with seeking asylum and indeed all non-Anglo-Saxon immigration. Those who cry against illegal immigration as if it were the biggest issue, are mostly actually against the whole lot; and of course, the Conservatives made it almost impossible for an asylum-seeker to arrive without breaking the law.
Simon R: the article is about populists. That is different from Conservatives, who do indeed want a better world, but in many ways a different one from the one we want. Read Christopher Wylie’s “Mindf*ck” about Cambridge Analytica and the first Trump victory to see how populists distort and sow hatred.
Sadly Mark, there has been a significant disproportionate dispersal of Asylum seekers into post industrial towns that have suffered years of lack of investment in infrastructure, transport links, and all the other local amenities that have been declining over the years. Communities do not mix as much as we like to think or believe. Ultimately, the immigration figures are not sustainable in the long term , and the debate regarding positive economic benefits is looking a bit worn if you happen to live in such a town. People can’t see it or feel it. You only need to look at Sweden to realise that diversity and inclusion hasn’t been the success it’s made out to be. European Social Democratics are slowly paying a price for the lack of honesty in regards to the immigration debate. It will dominate politics across the West in years to come.
@ Simon Banks. “ indeed all non Anglo Saxon immigration” ?
Are you suggesting visa checks at Berwick, Gretna, Wrexham, the Severn Bridge and Liverpool, Simon ?
Just to clarify, and as Simon Banks pointed out, I was writing about populists rather than conservatives. I had absolutely no intention of questioning the motives or intentions of anyone simply because they hold different views to mine. My point was that I do think populists, whatever their political persuasion, adopt a campaign strategy designed to capture the daily narrative in order to demoralise their opponents and keep control of the agenda. Trump deftly illustrated this yesterday with his comments on the air crash over Washington. What he said was appalling, but I suspect his only motive was to turn the story into one about himself and his project – which he absolutely did. Ignoring the comments is problematic, but wasting time and brain space on them is worse since it comes with a massive opportunity cost of all the other more productive things we could be doing.
Some on the progressive left understand why populists have had rising success across the West in recent years. Sadly many lack that insight. Dan Carden Liverpool MP is spot on with this ..
“We must question and challenge the orthodoxy of progressive liberal multiculturalism”….
@Simon Banks
There is a conflation of illegal immigration and asylum seeking for the simple reason that a proportion of those who apply for asylum are actually economic migrants. While I believe there is widespread support for immigrants who are genuinely fleeing persecution, there there is widespread opposition to the misuse of the asylum process by economic migrants who enter the country illegally.
Sympathy for the ‘Just switch them off!’ reaction rose in me this evening, when for a few minutes I found the BBC and Sky news programmes offering me a choice between Donald Trump and Nigel Farage! I did reluctantly listen to Farage for a little while to try and understand what his arguments to an enthusiastic local audience might be, to think how they might be refuted. He was as plausible as ever, a speaker who must win audiences by his conviction and articulacy. But I did think he was on shaky ground in repeating that Brexit in allowing us our sovereignty back continues to have been the right policy. The last I heard of polling on the issue, more than half the population have now decided that Brexit was in fact a mistake, cutting the economic growth this country so urgently needs, and harming many businesses faced with so much extra cost and delays through red tape in trying to continue exporting to the EU;
@ Craig,
So, as you can’t answer the points that I made, you’ll move on to another “outrage”.
You’d almost certainly complain if asylum seekers were put up in areas where hotels are more expensive, so I’d have thought that locating them somewhere cheaper and thus better “value for money” should be welcome to you.
And then you go back to the failure of social democracy in terms of immigration. Would you like to comment on the Conservative policy of telling people that there’s too much immigration whilst simultaneously allowing more legal migration into this country than ever before? In doing so, perhaps you’d like to outline what makes the Conservative Party “progressive”?
Katharine,
“Brexit was in fact a mistake, cutting the economic growth this country so urgently needs”
The popular (or Populist?) feeling is that Brexit hasn’t delivered what was promised but lack of economic growth isn’t anywhere near the main issue. At least this is my understanding having listened to certain of my family members and acquaintances who have switched from supporting the Tories to Reform. I always think Lib Dems are somewhat out of touch with “populism” even though the rise of parties like Reform should give us all lots to be concerned about.
Have you seen the polls recently? Some even have Reform in the lead!
Lib Dems would be on stronger ground if they could point to how well the EU was doing in comparison to us. However, the figures don’t look at all compelling. GDP increased by 0.7% in the euro area and by 0.8% in the EU
Whereas the GDP in the increase K is expected to come in at around 0.9%.
All i can suggest is that Lib Dems should get out and about more to get a better understanding of what we are up against.
Peter (Martin), a general discontent with the cost of living, the Health Service deficiencies, and the inability of recent governments to improve personal welfare doesn’t seem likely to be met by the Reform Leader continuing to demand that Brexit be fulfilled. What do your family and acquaintances imagine that Reform can achieve which the new government can’t or won’t? Prompted by the Lib Dems, this government can achieve much, despite the terrible situation the Conservatives left the country in.
@ Katharine,
You ask a good question, but of course it should be directed at all who are expressing a preference for Reform. The OP is titled “How to Cope with Populists”, however, the following text isn’t that useful. Unless retreating into our bubble is helpful. It should titled be “How to Defeat the Extreme Right”. That has to be the best way of coping with them!
Few share your semi-optimism for Starmer’s Labour party, with or without any LibDem involvement.
Political cynicism is widespread. The popular view is that the established parties are all the same, but people want change. I don’t believe they necessarily want, or even know what, sort of change Reform is offering but they do know they don’t want more of the same.
@ Peter Martin. I seem to remember, Peter, that Labour was also proposing CHANGE in a big way, and indeed they are clearly better than the last government and proposing some good reforms. I think the hollowness of what Reform has to offer will show itself up before long – such as their apparent intention of imitating Lib Dem excellent community activity, built up patiently with years of hard work by our councillors. The proof of the pudding, etc.!