Why all the populism? A fair take on the political currents of 2019

In the background to these three issues, I noted to my friend, was the decline in social capital – we join less clubs, the Church pews are thinning out, we know less of our neighbours, our circumference of friends is narrowing and so on. Which I sense does help to explain why affinity – that simple idea of at least attempting to know why someone sees things the way they do – seems to be missing from shared civic cultures in the West and, downstream of that, our politics.

The core theme running through the issues I've identified here is that inner-city politics does not bode well the further you get out of the cities. And the unfortunate corollary of this is, at least for many who fail to assess these trends properly, to label people who voted in favour of centre-right parties as "xenophobic" and "backward-looking". This not only misreads but actually offends people's concerns around things that are important to their security and well-being – core tasks of government in a responsible democracy.

How many of us known anyone who smokes anymore? The American DC-based political scientist Charles Murray will often get out of town to play cards in rural Virginia. This, he says, exposes him to perspectives and ideas not represented in the Beltway but also different to his own (and yes – people who smoke). This might be something worth emulating in 2020 and is actually the subject of an older but good book by Labor MP Andrew Leigh.

Would things be better if we could do our bit like Murray? Perhaps. But as long as progressive politics takes people for granted – their aspirations, how much they save, and even how they get to work – then not only will these attempts fall flat but it'll only make centre-left politics more irrelevant in 2020.