The curse of extremism

We have a taste for the extreme — after all, who is interested in what is just middling? But together with other tendencies, it can produce a result that is rather damaging for good governance

Have you also been getting the impression that politics has gone a bit weird lately? You know, people get fed up with the incompetent governance of one administration, at the next election vote in the opposition that promises change, only to find that ‘change’ just means a different kind of incompetence. This cannot really be just because voters are guided less by the specific policies of the different parties or candidates (or even their specific personality traits and values), and more by tribal, partisan allegiances. There is nothing new about that — many people have deep, long-standing loyalties to certain political groups, and have tended to vote accordingly, sometimes across generations. What is new is that political leaders now seem to float to the top in their own party, and attract votes in elections, primarily because they are not ‘the other lot’. Differentiation with the other party (or parties) is what appears to count the most in political discourse, to the detriment of the characteristics that effective political leadership requires.