Donald Trump is not a patient man. Even his inaugural address lasted for only 16 minutes. Still, the message was clear enough: ‘The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.’ The slow-burning chit-chat of the Washington elite is the stuff of the past, a hangover of the ‘American carnage’ that came to an end last Friday. In fact, to save time altogether, Trump could have simply condensed his address into a single tweet: Americans are as mad as hell and they aren’t going to wait anymore!
Brexit voters will know what he means. They, too, are tired of playing the waiting game. A few weeks back, when Sir Ivan Rogers revealed that a UK-EU trade deal could take a decade to finalise, several prominent Brexiteers went into a tailspin. His crime was temporisation. His resignation, which followed soon after, was welcomed as a sign that things were full steam ahead.
The populist wave sweeping western democracies is being fuelled by this impatience. Voters have become unaccustomed to waiting – for anything. We live in a world of same-day delivery and instant messaging, where gratification is available to us at a second’s scroll of a smartphone. And yet Brexit is going to take ten years? Populist politicians have achieved electoral success by pandering to this collapse in our collective attention span.
Consider the messaging of Trump’s campaign. Every promise was underlined by extreme urgency. Eleven million undocumented migrants would be deported, ‘day one.’ His ‘top generals’ would have ‘thirty days’ to submit a plan for defeating Isis. America would begin building a border wall ‘in my first hour in office’.
Triumph has not changed Trump. At his raucous, pre-inauguration press-conference, he promised that the ‘simultaneous’ repeal and replacement of Obamacare – a 1,000-page bill that took three years to pass Congress – would happen ‘most likely on the same day, maybe the same hour’. For Trump supporters, something – anything – must happen. And it must happen now. The details be damned.
It is worth remembering that there is only minority support for these policies. Trump nevertheless resonates with the electorate’s impatience with politics-as-usual. Almost 80 percent of Americans are frustrated with the way the federal government functions – a higher level of anger than for any other single issue, including the usual populist grievances of immigration and political correctness. Indeed, two-thirds of Americans view globalisation as ‘mostly good’ for the United States. It is not economic anxiety, but congressional logjam – the slow-motion game of compromise and complexity – that most vexes American voters.
The problem is that this need for speed is irrational. Theresa May has not delayed Brexit negotiations, as the pressure group ‘Invoke Article 50 Now’ argues, because she wants to buy time for a sneaky second referendum. She rightly realises that the simple errors of haste could render our withdrawal a catastrophe.
In America, meanwhile, impatience could yet prove dangerous. As a Trump administration collides with the sluggishness of congressional debate, we can expect the President to start blaming the institutions that safeguard democratic values for impeding his progress.
President Obama addressed these perils in a recent interview. ‘What I worry about in our politics is people getting impatient with the slowness of democracy, and the less effective Congress works, the more likely people are to start giving up on [our] core values and basic institutions.’
He’s right. But he’s also culpable. Pandering to voter impatience was always Obama’s favourite way of circumventing Congress (read: talking to Republicans). In his State of the Union address in 2014, he scolded representatives for their inaction. ‘America does not stand still, and neither will I.’ He later added that with a pen and a phone he could easily legislate by executive order. Trump take note.
Obama never tried to defend the protracted process of good government. And today pleading for time only strengthens the populist position. Making the case for patience is unpopular. But it is also vital. In this age of acceleration, we need to take the time to make slowness a virtue.
Rhys Jones is an historian, writer and fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He tweets @rhyshistorian
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