The Right is resurgent! The Left is Back! The Center is on the march!
It’s always tempting to declare, on the basis of a few elections, that a political tendency is on the ascendant. I should know: I’ve done it myself. But the only commonality in the most recent consequential elections—France, the UK, and Iran—is that voters can be depended on for one thing only: their desire for change.
In this age of constant flux—when history turns on a tweet—voters have become increasingly inconstant. They want new, they want different, they want better. Why shouldn’t elections follow the same pattern as iPhones, with a brand-new model every year? We can’t wait to trade in our perfectly good phones for something only marginally better because modernity for the last half-century has been predicated upon planned obsolescence.
Politics would seem the last refuge of the obsolescent. The median age of world leaders is 62. Joe Biden at 81, for many the very epitome of unplanned obsolescence, is not even the oldest leader (eight other leaders are older).
Yet politics, too, is moving away from incumbency. Voters just don’t want the same old, same old. It’s no wonder that U.S. voters recoil with horror from the prospect …read more
Source:: Institute for Policy Studies
