The curse of conformity is not peculiar to America’s educated liberal class. In one way or another, the technocratic mindset has gripped political elites across the Western world. The late political scientist Peter Mair called it ‘ruling the void’.14 The more the established parties detached themselves from the societies in which they had once been anchored, the greater the indifference they generated. It is no accident that the heyday of stable Western party politics coincided with the post-war golden decades of the rising middle and working classes. Political parties were embedded in the
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