We need good politics, not only good politicians

摘要

Even by the poised and collected standards of the best Anglo-American political thought, the very title of this book sounds alarming. That is because it investigates an equally alarming-if somehow unsurprising-state of affairs which, in the liberal-democratic West, is looking increasingly like the most complete bankruptcy of representative democratic politics since the Second World War. It also sounds involuntarily ironic, setting out the quest for what is now best described as a quasi-oxymoron. Looking for the good politician, whatever that elusive species may be, is a complex and complicated task, because it has to establish the right connotations of its candidate before even starting to search for one; and it has to do so at a time when class divisions-never completely dormant in the once prosperous West-are fuelling with discontent and anger the not exactly crypto-fascist winds now blowing in much of continental Europe. Apocalyptic tones? Maybe a good look at the rise of so-called anti-politics-a term whose now relentless use, like that of several others, would make a politically charged new edition of Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas quite apposite: entries such as populism, confusion, globalisation, elite-just to name a few-across Europe and North America will help to better contextualise the urgency of the times. If in the US a real estate tycoon and TV personality president is throwing out of the window over half a century of NATO-centred foreign politics, while (un?)wittingly waging war on contemporary neoliberal capitalism via a rather surreal embracing of sixteenth century mercantilism, the EU is shaken at the seams by an increasingly disgruntled, cynical and yet energetic front of dissent-quite arbitrarily, and somehow hypocritically, labelled populism-that has pulled the rug from beneath the feet of traditional party politics in the name of concepts-nation, race, sovereignty, family and volk-that are unashamedly right-wing nineteenth century. That both phenomena have been set in motion by war and poverty-driven global diaspora, for which these very same disgruntled citizens are responsible by proxy, is entirely another matter (but always worth remembering).