Whatever the result of the United States election, politics has been “changed, changed utterly,” to use the words of the poet W. B. Yeats on Ireland after the 1916 Easter Rising. And not just in America. Across the Western world, there is a rising anger at “the system.”

This anger is implacable and spectacular. It is causing long-established party systems to dissolve; trust in elites, experts and even basic science to collapse; and overt racism to rear its ugly head again. Democratic norms and institutions are openly disdained; illiberal and authoritarian ideas from the alt-right and far left are moving from the fringe; and everywhere, truth and civility are squeezed out amid rancor and conspiracism.

The center is struggling to hold. Welcome to what The Guardian commentator Jonathan Freedland recently called “the new age of endarkenment.”

Establishment politicians, economists and policy makers know something is happening but, rather like Mr. Jones in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” they don’t know what it is. Perhaps that is because the truth is so very inconvenient: The source of much of the anger is the very social system that they have created these last 40 years — globalized, neoliberal and destructive of the social contract between governments and peoples on which the political center rests.

Read the full article at New York Times.