The Politics of Dancing

  Democracy is fragile, and more important perhaps, democracy has turned out to be much more fragile in the older anglophone democracies, especially the UK and the US. This casual statement really needs emphasising, since it conflicts with long held assumptions it can prove incredibly resistant to being absorbed. George Orwell set 1984 in a country clearly identified as England precisely because he sought to shatter the complacency that was conviction that the UK was somehow inoculated again totalitarianism and totalitarian modes of government and, more importantly for Orwell, totalitarian modes of thinking. It is consequently difficult to downplay the significance of the events of the last half-decade both here and in the United States. From Brexit and the election of Donald Trump a highly toxic populist wave, hostile to liberal democracy, swept across Europe but also, for once, across both the channel and the Atlantic. Now, of course, both American and British democracy hardly repr