Texas shooting is the result of fantasy politics – it’s time to get serious

#EnoughIsEnough is trending… again… just as America attempts to come to terms with a body count that might yet eclipse the last body count it came to terms with.

It’s difficult, at times like these, not to descend into cliché. Life increasingly feels like it is lived in shorthand. Even if the details change, the fundamentals stay the same. This time it is elementary school children shot dead in their classroom alongside their teachers. The body count stands at 21, though from the public’s point of view there is a distinct lack of bodies. Americans are again protected from the true horrors of an atrocity because, of course, civilised nations don’t show the victims except via the usual wholesome pictures taken in more innocent times: children proudly showing off new school uniforms, grinning at sports events, and relaxing in their family homes. America doesn’t get to see small bodies lying on large mortuary slabs. Nor does it see the grievous wounds caused by hollow-point bullets or any of the other by-products of a nation fetishistic about high-powered guns. It instead gets talking heads saying what they always say in the aftermath of every spree shooting.

Yet this isn’t another article condemning “thoughts and prayers”. We did that last time and the time before that. It’s perhaps time we just accept that these events are impossible for most people to conceptualise, and we shouldn’t be too critical if some choose the comforts of spiritual escape, just as others flee into the welcoming arms of rationality. The last time an atrocity happened on this scale was the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting back in February 2018. The talk at the height of the #NeverAgain movement was that those students would forever change America. It made too much sense that reasonable people wouldn’t do something. The truth is that they never stood a chance.

They never stood a chance because the problem back then was the same as the problem right now and that’s the ongoing disconnect between politics and real life. We haven’t yet solved the problem of political will and ensuring there is an impetus for change. It might take one day or a hundred days, but the grief, anger, and outrage will eventually give way to something even more powerful, which is institutional inertia and a type of politics that has little bearing on “ordinary” lives. There comes a point in every tragedy when the story is no longer about a date, a place, or a people, but about bureaucracy, politics, and some “grand” ideology. That is when the Great Disconnect happens; when politicians forget that politics has a purpose higher than simply “winding up the other side”.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz exemplified the problem on Wednesday when he noted: “When there’s a murder of this kind, you see politicians try to politicize it”. To which one wonders: if this isn’t a matter of politics, then what is? The memes, protests, and partisan bickering all feel real until events happen to remind us that what came before was merely an affectation of our cosy democracy. Politicians then opine about change for a while before they fall back into the old patterns of behaviour, leaving many to wonder, if politicians aren’t here to make a difference, then what is the point of politicians?

Much the same is true here in the UK. What Partygate has proved is that even people elevated to Number 10 Downing Street can still forget important matters such as duty, honour, and responsibility. They forgot that their work was never political as much as it was social as well as moral. That extends to the Prime Minister who wears the weight of the office far too lightly. Teddy Roosevelt once said that “to educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society”. Boris Johnson increasingly feels like that menace, educated with brilliant linguistic tricks but devoid of depth or understanding.

It was rumoured last week that the PM would tell the UK public that work is the solution to the cost-of-living crisis. Johnson repeated this glib banality in this week’s PMQs. It is another example of the Great Disconnect: a prime minister who has never had to negotiate life outside the context of affluence where jobs came easily, alongside a chancellor, now listed on the Sunday Times Rich List, who doesn’t seem to understand that most tax cuts don’t benefit those hurting the most.

Does he or the Prime Minister genuinely believe that people caught in the benefits trap can simply work their way out of it when every extra penny they earn is taken out of the benefits they receive? It’s suddenly not so simple as asking the sick, the low paid, or full-time carers to earn another £100 a month when £100 will be taken from them in other ways. Suddenly, earning many hundreds more is the only way to escape their poverty, which is not so easy for people who can’t write a column in The Telegraph to help make ends meet. Hard too when you can’t live on the advance of the book you show no inclination of finishing. But this is where our politics has led us, to a notoriously workshy man telling the hardworking to work even harder.

Life, to people such as these, appears to be a game of fantasy politics in which the poor are unanimously workshy, every business a virtuous player, and each citizen a prospective fighter in the culture war. Even the media are complicit, too often confusing the politics with the real purpose. True journalism, meanwhile, struggles to be heard; increasingly banned from social media if it dares highlight the true nature of the world. Only occasionally does reality break through, as it did with the publication of the famous photograph of Aylan Kurdi, the young Syrian refugee whose body was washed up on the beach in Greece in 2015, or when Sky News changed the debate around Covid when they first reported from Italian hospitals as the first wave of the pandemic struck. Or when Susanna Reid interviewed the Prime Minister this month and forced him to look at a splinter of real life in the form of Elsie, a pensioner who rides the buses to keep warm every day.

There is, in this, a hint as to how we could fix our politics and our media, even if the answer is as simple to explain as it would be hard to achieve. We need politics that gets back to the roots of its meaning; the “affairs of the cities”, the business of the people, and the actual matters of living. Who is meant to make a difference in the US when much of the Republican party is screaming about a stolen election and many Democrats are burying themselves in a quicksand of identity? Whether it’s gun laws or a cost-of-living crisis, these are not abstract puzzles requiring ideological purity, strong messaging, or even a big personality to dull the pain. We need quips from the Prime Minister no more than the gun problem can be solved by another Twitter movement or a charity single. These are hard problems requiring a commitment to making a difference for real people, such as the 21 unfortunate people now lying cold in a morgue in Texas. It’s time we started to expect more from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic and time too that they started to deliver.