The situation is not entirely normal in Northern Ireland.

Sligo, Irish Republic ... 1985.

"Parliament Buildings, often referred to as Stormont because of its location in the Stormont Estate area of Belfast, is the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the devolved legislature for the region."

Forced remarriage: Northern Ireland gets a government again, at The Economist

Both big parties fear the alternative even more than they dislike each other

NORTHERN IRELAND’S devolved government has been reborn. After many months of hard-fought negotiations, the biggest unionist and republican parties agreed on January 10th to go back into government together, creating a new element of hope in the often unforgiving politics of Belfast. Under heavy pressure from both the government in London and their own voters, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein have agreed to revive the Belfast assembly, Stormont, which has been inactive for three full years.

I suspect that insofar as Americans think at all about the outside world, which is seldom, "divisions" pop into the conversation only with considerations of North and South Korea, and maybe vague recollections of East and West Germany.

Islands can be divided, too, as with the existence of two governments on Cyprus, one Greek (internationally recognized) and the other Turkish. Somehow I haven't heard this topic arise at the pub lately.

Or, in Ireland, where Irish independence a century ago came at the cost of losing Ulster, one of four traditional Irish provinces as well as the one dominated by Protestants rather than Catholics, and which has remained under British control.

I'm not sure that many Americans, even Irish-Americans, are fully aware of the potential for unexpected consequences from Brexit, one of which is the British effectively reneging on decades of promises of eternal support for the Protestants in Ulster.

The most alarming development, from the DUP’s point of view, is that Northern Ireland’s union with Britain looks increasingly insecure. Mr Johnson’s withdrawal bill, which returned to Parliament on January 7th, draws a dotted line between the province and the rest of the country by providing for different customs arrangements in the two areas. The latest poll in Northern Ireland showed a tiny majority in favour of the reunification of Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to the province, mandates a referendum on reunification when it is clear that a majority in the province wants one.

Social, economic and political conditions are weird everywhere, not only here in the USA. Is this why the planet is burning, or is the causation the other way around?

Must read: "There is an antidote to demagoguery – it’s called political rewilding."

Monbiot is onto something important here, although his notion of "rewilding" -- devolution from top-down government -- begs a question: How do local and regional groupings wrest this power away from bigger government, or by extension, biggest capital?

Moreover, as we've seen in New Albany, it still doesn't mean we'll get devolution to the neighborhood level. You really don't think Jeff and Adam are in favor of THAT, do you?

Click through and read the entire essay. There's no paywall at The Guardian.

There is an antidote to demagoguery – it’s called political rewilding, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

This form of radical trust devolves power away from top-down government, often with some very unexpected results

You can blame Jeremy Corbyn for Boris Johnson, and Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump. You can blame the Indian challengers for Narendra Modi, the Brazilian opposition for Jair Bolsonaro, and left and centre parties in Australia, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland and Turkey for similar electoral disasters. Or you could recognise that what we are witnessing is a global phenomenon.

Yes, there were individual failings in all these cases, though the failings were very different: polar opposites in the cases of Corbyn and Clinton. But when the same thing happens in many nations, it’s time to recognise the pattern, and see that heaping blame on particular people and parties fixes nothing.

In these nations, people you wouldn’t trust to post a letter for you have been elected to the highest office. There, as widely predicted, they behave like a gang of vandals given the keys to an art gallery, “improving” the great works in their care with spray cans, box cutters and lump hammers. In the midst of global emergencies, they rip down environmental protections and climate agreements, and trash the regulations that constrain capital and defend the poor. They wage war on the institutions that are supposed to restrain their powers while, in some cases, committing extravagant and deliberate outrages against the rule of law. They use impunity as a political weapon, revelling in their ability to survive daily scandals, any one of which would destroy a normal politician.

Something has changed: not just in the UK and the US, but in many parts of the world. A new politics, funded by oligarchs, built on sophisticated cheating and provocative lies, using dark ads and conspiracy theories on social media, has perfected the art of persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich. We must understand what we are facing, and the new strategies required to resist it.

If there is a formula for the new demagoguery, there must also be a formula for confronting and overturning it. I don’t yet have a complete answer, but I believe there are some strands we can draw together.

In Finland, on the day of our general election, Boris Johnson’s antithesis became prime minister: the 34-year-old Sanna Marin, who is strong, humble and collaborative. Finland’s politics, emerging from its peculiar history, cannot be replicated here. But there is one crucial lesson. In 2014, the country started a programme to counter fake news, teaching people how to recognise and confront it. The result is that Finns have been ranked, in a recent study of 35 nations, the people most resistant to post-truth politics.

Don’t expect Johnson’s government, or Trump’s, to inoculate people against their own lies. But this need not be a government initiative ...