After the election

Sometimes you are surprised by things that are actually only logical against the backdrop of larger developments. Donald Trump's surprisingly clear election victory in the USA is an example of this. After a neck-and-neck race had been predicted for a long time, the media immediately went in search of the reasons for the election result after the election. In such situations, we have numerous survey instruments at our disposal that help us to recognize which group of voters behaved how and which superficial motives were given for the respective decision. But do such instruments really explain the underlying causes and developments?

A brief digression: movement expert Lawrence van Lingen has been working with professional athletes and others for many years. His method consists of understanding the body as a holistic system and, in the case of problems of any kind, not looking at the symptoms, but at the larger context in which they have arisen. His aim is to start the analysis "upstream". Where the problems begin. He is certainly not the only one to take this approach. This example is merely intended to illustrate the fact that in our Western systems we seem to have developed a method at all levels of wanting to remedy symptoms but avoiding the causes because they are too complex or too uncomfortable. For example, frequent stomach pains are treated with pills and dissatisfaction with migration flows with promises of deportation. Tackling the causes would be more complex, inconvenient and unpopular.

Numerous national elections have already taken place in liberal democracies in 2024, including in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Japan and now the USA. The Financial Times reported in a relevant article that all of these elections had one thing in common: The respective incumbents were punished by the voters.¹ According to the article, the last time there was such a wave of defeats for those in power was 120 years ago. To explain this development, the article refers to an international survey according to which inflation and the rising cost of living are among people's biggest concerns.² Even though inflation has undeniably been an important issue in recent years, it should be noted that such surveys should always be treated with great caution. For example, respondents were given the possible answers and thus their attention was drawn to certain things. In addition, we know how strongly the formulation of the question and the respective answer options can influence the result.³ Furthermore, migration movements and political unrest were mentioned as causes in the article.

Without wanting to dismiss these symptoms as insignificant, there is a possibility that the elections are an expression of a larger development whose causes can be found further "upstream". Historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley, in their recently published book Why Empires Fall Parallels between our time and the critical years of the Roman Empire. This comparison has often been made and may seem overused to many. However, the authors convincingly show that the relative loss of importance compared to other powers presents both the Roman Empire and the Western empire with major challenges that cannot be overcome with backward-looking answers or populist slogans. The historian Niall Ferguson, who teaches at Stanford, recently set a different tone when he proclaimed: "We are all Soviets now."⁴ He cited the bloated military, the elites' adherence to false ideologies and the declining life expectancy in various Western countries as examples of the parallels.

These two highlights are only intended to suggest that we in the West are facing huge challenges and that profound changes are inevitable. The question is whether we actively bring them about or whether we let them happen and then react to them, with everything pointing to the latter. Those in power deny reality and paint a false picture of the situation, hand in hand with the mainstream media. People are aware of this dissonance, even if most of them are probably unaware of it. The deselection of the incumbent parties must be seen as a warning signal of a profound loss of trust in our system. The tragedy is that the respective opposition parties are benefiting from this, but are also ignoring the problem. We still have the chance to prevent the worst through more global cooperation and collaboration on an equal footing. It may sound utopian that a party that comes clean could be elected in the current climate. Conversely, the current path seems to be leading us straight into a dystopia. The paradox is that we only seem to have a choice between different paths. It seems that bar menus currently offer mainly old-fashioned cocktails that are listed under different names.