Making sense of the rush of news

There is a lot of news and there is a lot to take in: Serbia, Brazil, United States, Israel, France, and so on. At home we have a Budget, an event which seemed to once mean more than it does now, but is not yet altogether meaningless.

For once the supply of news is keeping up with the demand for news in our current media environment. The attention market is being cleared, as economists would tell us.

What can we make of all this data? Is there any general opinion we can form from the all the particular information with which we are now being currently provided?

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Here we need to be careful of affirmation bias.

There is a strong tendency for any of us to take new information and use it to support views which we already hold.

Even news which we did not predict.

Even news which is different from which we predicted.

“It all goes to show that…”

(I like to think that any new news affirms my view about how the ongoing Birmingham bin strikes should be dealt with.)

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This is a liberal constitutionalist blog.

As such, it will go “Hurrah!” for any liberal shift by constitutional means.

Hurrah! for the results in Serbia, and in Brazil, and (it seems ) in Israel.

(Though with Israel, their constitutional arrangements mean that there may be nothing as cathartic as a clean break – and Netanyahu may still hold on with a new coalition.)

One hopes we can go Hurrah! with the impending United States mid-terms.

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But.

This is also a realistic, practical blog.

(Or it tries to be.)

Liberal constitutional Hurrahs! are not inevitable.

Every close victory over the illiberals is a close-run thing, which easily could have gone another way.

That the illiberals will be defeated is certainly not inevitable – and even the removals of (say) Trump or Netanyahu does not remove the political and cultural forces which support them and enable them to take and keep power.

There are always Trumps and Netanyahus, and so on.

The key is how they gain power and are not checked when they abuse power.

And as we have seen over at least the last decade, a liberal approach is not inevitable, anywhere.

No news is affirming the inevitability of liberalism.

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But the news is also not affirming the inevitability of illiberalism.

The turn towards nasty politics is not bound to succeed, and it can be checked. Cruelty may well be the point of a lot of illiberal populism, but it is not necessarily a guarantee of political success.

The news from Serbia and Brazil, and perhaps from Israel, and maybe soon from the United States, is that cruel populism can be contested, even under democratic systems which are straining.

We saw this with Hungary, and we may be able to see it elsewhere.

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In essence, nothing in the news affirms the inevitability of either liberalism or illiberalism.

The only thing which is affirmed is that the battle continues.

And for that we need to brace, brace.

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(All this also goes to show how we really should be dealing with the ongoing Birmingham bin strikes.)