It’s scary – in the US and Britain political idiots are challenging for the top jobs

The likes of Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith don’t seem to understand the implications of their words

Politics has passed through many epochs. There have been eras of isolationism, or imperial conquest, or egalitarianism, or nationalist aggression. Now, in the transatlantic sphere at least, we seem to be entering a new historical phase: the Era of Stupid.

American and British politicians at the highest level appear to be engaged in a competition to see who can utter the most defiantly illinformed, aggressively ignorant statements about precisely the issues that governments have traditionally regarded as life-and-death matters. Somehow, this brazen guilelessness – the shameless display of the failure to understand even the basic meanings of significant words – seems to be offered as a bond with the common man, as if not understanding complicated things was a measure of authenticity.

Donald Trump produced a national shockwave in the US by asserting as fact (several times, as he is inclined to do in his stream of consciousness monologues) that Barack Obama was the “founder of Isil” and that Hillary Clinton was its “co-founder”. Under normal definitions, this means that the president of the United States and his former secretary of state deliberately undertook the establishment of a terrorist organisation whose aim was to destroy the West. In other words, he was apparently accusing them of the worst form of sedition. Well, I have another interpretation, which is almost as shocking: Mr Trump does not know what the word “founder” means.

What he thought he was saying was that the policies of the Obama administration in Syria and Iraq had created the opportunity for Isil to emerge – which is, of course, a plausible contention. But this reasonable assertion was utterly undermined in its effect by the absurd illiteracy of his language. So even if you are inclined to think that Trump might be on to something in his critique of Obama foreign policy, you should be alarmed by the prospect of a potential American president who might address foreign leaders, and deal with global crises, with so little grasp of the consequences of what he is saying. (By the end of last week, Trump had expressed uncharacteristic regret for sometimes saying “the wrong thing”. He didn’t offer particular examples.)

Here in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn created an almost equivalent storm by refusing to say that he would uphold the Nato principle of collective defence in which an attack on any member state is treated as an attack on all. In his sublimely mild tone, he insisted that he “did not wish to go to war”. (I doubt that any of us actually “wish to go to war”, Jeremy.) He then outlined his dream: “What I want to do is achieve a world where we don’t need to go to war, where there is no need for it. That can be done.” Of course, the Nato defence treaty is designed precisely for those circumstances in which all the nations of the world are not willing to join hands and sing Kumbaya – what then?

But most relevant to our purpose here is that Mr Corbyn seemed to have no understanding of the significance of what he was saying. Without an undertaking to come to the defence of treaty partners, the Nato alliance is null and void. As the former first sea lord and head of the Royal Navy, Lord West, said, Mr Corbyn’s remarks showed “a complete lack of understanding of what Nato is”. In other words, a mutual defence treaty is meaningless without an accepted commitment to mutual defence.

If Mr Corbyn really wants to abolish Nato, with all the global ramifications that would entail – as he apparently once declared that he did – then he should say so. But of course he will not do that. Instead, he will continue to mouth mystical pieties about “a world where we don’t need to go to war” and hope that his followers are as oblivious as he is to the implications of what he is saying. Only days before, his leadership rival, Owen Smith, had suggested that we should negotiate with Isil, which seemed to indicate that he knew nothing of the deliberately non-negotiable nature of its goal – which is to destroy Western democracy.

What we are seeing, at the highest levels of national political life, are degrees of naivety and irresponsible witlessness that used to be confined to the student union or to late-night conversations in the bar-rooms of redneck America. You may be taking comfort that, at the moment at least, there seems little possibility of any of these clownish figures being elected to high office. But how has it come to this? There are, after all, considerable proportions of both electorates – minorities but not inconsiderable minorities – of the citizenry of two of the most powerful and influential countries in the world, prepared to support party leaders who would once have been laughed off the stage.

After generations of free, compulsory schooling, the political literacy and sense of civic responsibility of two advanced democracies seems to have gone backwards to a level that would have shocked my parents’ let alone my grandparents’ generation. I don’t think that the usual explanations suffice. Yes, there is certainly a great deal of cynicism about professional politicians and a widespread alienation from “governing elites”. But none of this is unprecedented: in fact, for as long as I can recall suspicion of those who hold office has been commonplace. A degree of scepticism is in any case a healthy thing in a free society, providing a safeguard against undue deference and the arrogance of power.

Within living memory, this reached what seemed at the time to be an explosive peak during the 1960s and 1970s when the Vietnam War produced an organised resistance arguably more justified than the campaign against the Iraq war. But even in the midst of that mass revolt against government policy, and even when extreme ideologies were resurgent and dominating public discourse, the electoral scene was not peopled by leaders who talked outlandish gibberish. This really is quite new and startling. Something must be going very wrong with the way populations are being instructed in their civic responsibilities. A casual disrespect for politicians is not the same thing as contempt for the historical processes which guarantee the right to throw those politicians out of office.

To support the wilfully stupid and the perversely ignorant just because you want to flip two fingers at the predictable types who generally dominate public life is more than puerile. It is very, very dangerous in a world that is more volatile and unstable than at any time since the end of the Second World War.

Perhaps there is a clue to the mystery here. Maybe the end of the Cold War, with its imminent threat of mutually assured destruction, has induced a kind of frivolous complacency. The “free world”, as it used to be called, can muck about now with reality television stars for presidential candidates and Leftists who never grew up leading major parties. What does it matter? Politics has become too tedious, too managerial, and too technical. So let’s bring it down to simple slogans and vague promises: “Make America great again”; “…achieve a world where we don’t need to go to war”, blah-blah.

But this assumes that people actually know what the Cold War was. Apparently, most of those under 30 or so have scarcely a clue what the collapse of communism meant. They have been left as ignorant of it as they seem to be of the history of their own great democratic institutions – which may be why they are prepared to vote for idiots.