Political Weirding - by James - jdemeta
Stating with a slightly ominous tone that ‘Things are getting strange…’ or ‘Everything feels different right about now…’ is, as far as I’m concerned, a tautology of human experience. This is to say, if one suddenly is made aware of the present moment then, generally speaking, one realizes how odd existence is, and quickly offloads that feeling onto any current societal or political overhauls. With that said…things are getting strange. Or, more specifically, socio-political realities are starting to get weird.
In the realm of the environment and climate change, there is a play on the term global warming called ‘global weirding’. The term was coined by Hunter Lovins, a founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, it describes the consequences of the rise in average global temperatures, which are expected to amplify the abnormal: hotter heat spells, longer and sharper droughts, more violent storms, and more intense flooding [ link]. More abstractly, then, when one thinks of global warming, one may think of a linear progression of warming wherein said cause (warming) has an equally linear progression upon its effects (the environment). However, ecology is anything but linear, and as we know that every action has an equal or opposite reaction, we can also understand that as the world linearly warms, the incremental effects of its warming will have equally and opposite non-linear effects of that which it warms, or, as the world warms, it weirds. Weirding, as defined by Wiktionary as various weather-related extremes, including both hot and cold weather, to become more intense. It is this process of weirding that I feel (as above, so below), is not restricted solely to the ecological sphere, as per general universal laws are spilling over into anything and everything, most notably, politics.
If we are to tweak that prior definition to various politics-related extremes, including both the left and the right, to become more intense, then I don’t imagine I would be stating anything we’re not all seeing. The pendulum of political history isn’t necessarily broken or stopped, but swinging so fast that human comprehension doesn’t appear to be able to keep up, leaving us with a multitude of eroded centers. At one and the same time we have the evident rise of multiple right-wing parties (AFD/Germany, Reform/UK, National Rally/France, Party for Freedom/Netherlands), the beginnings of applied Libertarianism (Libertarian Party/Argentina), and the continuation of various strains of left-wing politics both culturally and politically. This is all to say, there appears to be no center for the pendulum, and each is acting as its own island. Equally, we (speaking with regard to the UK) are witnessing the absolute decimation of an age-old party with the death of the Conservatives and the utter bastardization of another age-old party with the increasingly center-leaning stride of Labour. Conservatives have had nothing to do with conservation for decades, and Labour has had nothing to do with the labour of the working classes for decades. Nothing is what it is and everything is dying.
