Another year whipped by, and it turned out to be a year like no other. Rulebooks are being burned and ripped up and rewritten, and what’s deemed acceptable has become a game of trial and error. The Overton Window has been stretched, but perhaps only for those with the most vocal following. So what’s in and what’s out? The Fallen in Public look at our politicians, newspapers and netizens - What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...
IT’S OUT!
Experts: “I think people in this country have had enough of
experts.” Michael Gove, 2016.
Give me your academics, your economists, your huddled central
bankers yearning to speak free, the wretched refuse of your teeming think tanks.
And bind and gag them and throw them out to sea. If 2016 was anything, it was
the year that people stopped listening to people who know more about things
than they do, and this distrust – this victory of blind gut instinct – has been
celebrated. This is a victory of the
little people, said Nigel Farage, self-appointed king of the little people.
It’s been a long time coming. Experts have been ushered onto
news panels next to politicians and pundits for some time now, and as the
latter two’s trust has waned over the years, it’s no surprise that the third
has been condemned. Digital media has done its part by making everyone a
journalist (read expert) and most analyses condensable into 142 characters. An
entire thesis can be cast in to the bin with one comment below the line: “What
is this shit?”
After two years of surprise results in the UK and the US,
pollsters were the first to look daft. If they can get it wrong, pundits
wondered, maybe all experts are wrong? And maybe, just maybe, the opposing position to that of experts is
correct by definition. Yep, find out what experts think, and choose the
other option – that’s where we’re at. “Experts built the Titanic,” noted an insightful
caller on Radio 2.
Economists have been making bad predictions for all of
eternity; it’s not their fault if politicians have presented them as cast iron
guarantees, rather than a collection of estimates within set parameters. But
economic orthodoxy, faith in the neoliberal model, has no doubt blinded
economists to failures: the IMF, the ECB and central banks in the West have
been peddling neoliberal economic policy (austerity, privatisation,
deregulation, etc.) regardless of evidence contrary to its expectations, and
evidence of poor results. The reason? Too many rich people are doing too well.
You’d expect the cynics of economic experts to be crying out
against neoliberalism, right? Well, curiously enough Michael Gove hasn’t gone
this far, perhaps because the economic consensus, the one he’s been telling
people to ignore, is largely based on policies made possible and popular by one
Margaret Thatcher, and are rather close to his heart.
The depth of the anti-economist jibe is this: they didn’t see
the financial crash coming; they haven’t fixed the euro. And look at Greece –
eeww. Who could argue with that? A child can understand it.
The distrust extends to the high reaches of academia, charged
with being left-wing brainwashers by a McCarthyist press, the judiciary,
labelled ‘enemies of the people’ by the Daily
Mail for making judgements on constitutional law, and international
organisations like NATO, the UN, the International Criminal Court. These post
WW2 organisations are a pain in the ass for Russia, China and Israel, and now
America has a president who’ll finally sympathise.
Against the experts are pitted the people, the real people. "There's only one expert that matters, and that's you, the voter," Gisela Stuart of Vote Leave puked into a microphone earlier this year, in a wonderful celebration of 2016, the year when truth and knowledge went relative.
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