"America Never Stopped Being Great"

So exclaimed Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was a rare moment of sincerity and passion, and her audience roared its approval. She went on to lose. To Donald Trump.

America now has two political phenomena of any real importance, the people for whom America stopped being great a long time ago, and the people for whom America never has been great. America has been not great for those latter for a very, very, very long time. But that those have become the two options is a source of bewilderment, anger, and genuine hurt to the kind of people who thronged to Clinton's banner.

As happens far less often than most people seem to think, something similar is also true is Britain, where there is profound disbelief and incomprehension in certain circles at the matter-of-fact statement by working-class and BAME communities that the Blair and Brown Governments, like the Clinton and Obama Administrations, had been no better than their predecessors or their successors, and in some ways a great deal worse.

The Democratic Party and the Labour Party, the Clintons and Tony Blair, the Never Trump Republicans and the Conservative Remainers, Joe Biden and Keir Starmer, the Liberal Democrats and practically the entire official media, find themselves beset by Trump and Brexit, by Sanders and Corbyn, by the fall of the American Blue and British Red Walls, by the rise of Black Lives Matter, by the possible return of George Galloway to electoral politics, and by the possible entry of Nigel Farage into the House of Commons at his eighth attempt.

They truly do not get it. Why are so many people this angry? Why is anyone this angry? Why is anyone angry at all? What is there to complain about? My fellow complainants, we need to forget about these silly people. There is a world elsewhere. And it is a world with plenty going on in it.