Lord Sacks, the Emeritus Chief Rabbi, has warned of the dangers of the “politics of anger” following the election of Donald Trump as United States President and the Brexit vote.
In an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph, he instead urged a new politics of hope built on “capitalism with a human face”.
Rabbi Sacks said this year’s events were "not politics as usual. The American Presidential election, the Brexit vote and the rise of extremism in the politics of the West are warnings of something larger, and the sooner we realise it, the better.
"What we are witnessing is the birth of a new politics of anger. It is potentially very dangerous indeed.”
He warned that anger was “a mood, not a strategy, and it can make things worse not better. Anger never solves problems, it merely inflames them. The danger down the road, as it has been throughout history, is the demand for authoritarian leadership, which is the beginning of the end of the free society.”
He said the first step was to recognise “how bad” things were, with many people failing to benefit from economic growth.
A politics of hope was, he said, “within our reach. But to create it we will have to find ways of strengthening families and communities, building a culture of collective responsibility and insisting on an economics of the common good. This is no longer a matter of party politics. It is about the very viability of the freedom for which the West fought for so long and hard.”
