Even in our fraught and imperfect world, the idea of the politics of compromise and accommodation – the bedrock of democratic politics – can just about survive. Political compromises are made, negotiations continue, rhetoric rises and falls with the ebb and flow of democratic politics. Barring some extreme examples, legislators from different sides of the aisle can still talk and have tea across most, if not all, democratic countries. While all ideologies regard their views as right, in the politics of accommodation, opposing views are at least considered valid.
This is no longer is the case in several countries, with opponents and opposing views increasingly delegitimised and discarded, and their advocates mocked, dehumanised and even threatened. Recent examples range from Trump’s America to Brexit Britain, from Orbán’s Hungary to Modi’s India, and from Erdoğan’s Turkey to Duterte’s Philippines. When political systems become tolerant of falsehood and deceit on seismic levels, and when they even offer promotion to those who champion lies, democracy becomes vulnerable and highly fragile. And when those who oppose this are ridiculed and cast aside, the politics of accommodation begins to fracture. [...]
There are four reasons for this blockage, or four pathways to gridlock: rising multipolarity, harder problems, institutional inertia, and institutional fragmentation. Each pathway can be thought of as a growing trend that embodies a specific mix of causal mechanisms. [...]
We see such trends across many different kinds of countries. But the anti-global backlash is heterogeneous and rife with contradictions. It encompasses terrorism in the name of Islam, and Islamophobic discrimination against Muslims. It includes leftist rejection of trade agreements, and right-wing rejection of environmental agreements. The powerful tie that unites these disparate movements is a rejection of global interdependence and collective efforts to govern it. The resulting erosion of global cooperation is the fourth and final element of self-reinforcing gridlock, starting the whole cycle anew.
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