It’s the nuance, stupid

Binary thinking has broken our politics. Is there a way back?

Fissiparous is not a word I’ve ever used lightly. In fact, it’s not a word I’ve ever used at all. It means the tendency to cause division or to sub-divide into separate groups, and it’s the best word I can think of to describe where we’re at today. “Apocalyptic” seemed too final, and “unreal” too vague. “Fissiparous” feels right: an odd word is needed for these odd times.

After 30 years or so of walls coming down, rainbow coalitions being constructed, and even the harshest of economic measures such as austerity being ushered in under the mantra of “we’re all in this together”, the collective party seems to be over. We’re now told to define ourselves by what separates us, and deploy a language of domination and exceptionalism rather than one of community.

We’re encouraged to look down on elites, and up at authority, and are told globalism is out and exclusion, ironically, is in. Truth has become relative, science must bid alongside dogma for our attention, and facts are on a par with hunches and blatant madness. Life, it appears, is no longer a quest for meaning but a demented race to be the last one standing.

If professional scholarship ever manages to survive, future historians will ask if there was a single identifiable cause behind this lurch into the fissiparous era. Did we exhaust the possibilities of democracy till there was nothing left? Did we stare so long at our screens we just forgot to go outside? My feeling is that when tech stopped being a means by which we could learn from others, and prioritised stories about what we already knew, we slipped into a new way of thinking, a kind of singularity, where both intellectual and emotional satisfaction came exclusively from a confirmation of the self. Witness Elon Musk, formerly a universalist hero bringing clean energy to the auto industry and opening the heavens to everyone. Now, by self-radicalising on X, he’s turned into a corporate autocrat who feels he has the right to buy opinion, ignore regulation and call anyone who criticises him a “retard”. His radical support for a president ripping the world apart is marching us towards a stark binary choice for civilisation, namely that it can have either Earth or Mars but not both. That’s the problem with the digital tech bros; they’re so used to dealing only with ones and zeros, they’ve left no space for nuanced values in between.

Hence this current zero-sum existence, where the possibility of compromise, or just agreeing to disagree, is regarded as nonsensical. Putin defines Russia as not-the-West, and Trump’s tariffs define the US as not-the-Rest-of-the-World. If this is the noise of the present era, we should remember that noise comes from the loudest rather than the most numerous. The elections in Australia and Canada, the swelling opposition on the ground in the US states, and the beginnings of a more united purpose in Europe, tell us that other values are still available. We need to keep reminding ourselves of this, since it’s the most potent route out of the madness.

Reality will help, for what the zero-sum language can’t do is pretend reality doesn’t exist. Trump may say he has done an amazing peace deal with Putin, but until there actually is one, the brutal facts of war will still be televised. And he may exalt the power of tariffs, but images of American businesses going under will continue to wash up on his screens.

The UK’s most prominent user of the zero-sum lexicon is Nigel Farage, with Kemi Badenoch performing a Farage tribute-version in a smaller venue. Farage’s shtick is that most terrible things in Britain are either the fault of others outside its shores, or of supine elites within them. You’d think, then, the most potent way to neutralise Reform’s message is to challenge it rather than go out of your way to have it confirmed. Which is why it’s so puzzling that the government seems to prefer the latter.

A significant majority now recognise Brexit has been a disaster, and want closer ties with Europe. So, to say Brexit must stay, but be done better, is simply to reinforce Farage’s current argument and let him off the blame for bringing Brexit about in the first place. The same applies with immigration: those who feel strongly will vote for the party that most strongly opposes it. Aping their position won’t bring them back, but will help confirm their switch.

Most polls show that those voters driven to Reform are among the country’s most marginalised and forgotten. They feel left behind by the main parties, and abandoned to fend for themselves in an increasingly hostile economic climate. The social impact of poverty in the UK is outlined throughout this edition of the New Statesman, so I’ll confine myself to one headline. The Trussell Trust charity, which runs many of our food banks, recently published data showing that recent cuts to welfare will lead to a missed £38.2bn in output and £18.4bn in tax revenues each year. Statistics like these show there’s a profound economic argument for tackling poverty. But there’s a strong political one, too. If Labour really wants to neutralise Reform, it can best do so by helping those most marginalised in our country, rather than identifying them as easy targets for cuts.

In the end, reality can’t be avoided, and economic self-harm can’t be ignored. The best argument against those who repeatedly chime that nothing can be done will be the demonstration that some things can.

Armando Iannucci is the creator of “Veep” and “The Thick of It”

[See also: Can you ever forgive Nick Clegg?]