"Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left". Clint Eastwood
What unites such disparate figures as Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Marine Le Pen and Jeremy Corbyn is in fact a total disrespect for the workings of modern democracies for the past six decades. The need to compromise, negotiate and find common ground. It is the same discourse against the establishment, of the pure outsider that will come to clean the rubbish of centrist sell-out politics. No matter that these pure white knights are anything but. It just requires a complete suspension of disbelief to associate political revolution to Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn that have been living out of politics for the past 40 years. Or that Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump can in any dimension represent the common working class voter.
On the left, the heritage of modern social democracy represented by the centrist policies of Blair and Bill Clinton is being ripped apart mercilessly. And on the right, pure parochial nativism reigns untrammeled. And on the left and right, social media and cable TV just allows everybody to live on their perfect bubble of ideological purity. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once said that everybody has the right to its own opinion but not to his own facts. What he did not anticipate was that we would reach a time where facts would be a superfluous accessory to opinions. This is the brave new world of politics we seem to live in.
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