“Blessed is the status quo” — this is a political beatitude sacred to lawmakers worldwide. While they routinely campaign to the extremes, gleefully abandoning moderation to fire up their bases, if elected most pragmatic political figures resolutely attempt to govern from the centre.

Bermuda’s political class, like its counterparts elsewhere, might preach the need for change while out on the hustings. However, experience suggests the changes they put into practice once in office tend to be more modestly scaled than what might have been originally promised. As it says in the fine print of all those can’t-lose investment opportunities, actual results can differ materially from results suggested in the promotional material.

It has always been thus. Or at least that’s been the case until relatively recently.

These days we are witnessing mounting pressure for demonstrable and sometimes quite radical change in jurisdictions around the world.

For instance, even the outside possibility of a “Yes” vote in the British referendum on whether or not that nation should withdraw from the European Union was roundly dismissed by the UK’s political, business and media elites ahead of the poll.

But on June 23 the referendum played out, in part, as a populist revolt against the leaderships of those same elites, widely perceived to be unrepresentative and cocooned from the day-to-day realities of many post-recessionary voters. And in the US we have watched the once entirely improbable ascendancy of a political outsider espousing incendiary and often incoherent policy positions anathema to the Republican establishment as that party’s standard bearer for the 2016 presidential election.

Donald Trump’s entire primary strategy was predicated on articulating the anger and frustration of those voters for whom the benefits of the postwar US political status quo are either rapidly receding memories or who felt themselves excluded from its blessings, anyway.

The former Trump voting bloc comprises downwardly mobile individuals who abruptly discovered they really were only one or two paycheques removed from the underclass when the economy cratered in 2008.

For them the traditional, social, cultural and political norms were largely wiped out along with their savings, job security and, many fear, they and their children’s future prospects during the Great Recession.

And for the latter group, already disaffected and alienated from the mainstream, their unhappiness was only exacerbated and further entrenched by the recession and its associated dislocations.

Blowhard New York showman and businessman Trump ultimately bested a field of 16 party-approved candidates with almost 40 per cent of the votes cast in the Republican primaries — an impressive tally.

And this was largely because his nonstop raging against the failures of the business-as-usual approach to politics contrasted so markedly with the insipidness of a slate of interchangeable opponents who demonstrated all the sincerity of spam e-mails and the souls of drones.

Trump gained traction — and adherents — precisely because enough Republican voters felt the political status quo and the old way of doing things had failed them in the past and could never appreciably benefit them in the future.

But, as has become increasingly clear in the case of both Trump and Britain’s small but potent cadre of pro-Brexit campaigners, we are dealing with political opportunists, not true believers in the causes they claimed to champion.

In both instances their campaigns were built around indulging and exploiting superheated voter emotions rather than coming up with concrete proposals for redressing these grievances.

Britain may have voted to exit the European Union in June but the underlying causes of voter discontent will not vanish along with the country’s membership in that political and economic bloc.

Stalled growth in impoverished regions of the UK, stagnant wages, a shortage of jobs and long-term job security, and growing pressure on public services and entitlements, are as much products of post-recessionary conditions and the globalised economy as of EU membership: the EU simply provided a convenient target for voter hostility, which has been accumulating for almost a decade now. It provided a focus for populist anger, but was not the root cause.

In the US, meanwhile, Trump has opted for incessant and mindless scapegoating to explain away all of his country’s ills: immigrants, ethnic and religious minority groups, and foreign economic rivals have all felt the lash of his harsh, turbocharged tongue.

But given the global financial model the world signed on for after the Cold War is dependent on the free movement of capital, labour and goods, a relative lack of regulation and oversight, and the largely unquestioning acceptance of free-market tenets, many of the problems being experienced in the economically deprived areas of the US and the UK were predictable. And not all of them were avoidable.

The reality is jobs and factories that have moved to, say, Mexico or Vietnam or Bangladesh in recent years because of lower labour and production costs are never coming back.

Political leaders in the developed countries now need to move to retrench and regrow their economies. Attempting to leverage their constituents’ unease for partisan gain with empty promises about resuscitating dead industries and restoring vanished ways of life will achieve nothing positive.

As countries grow more economically interdependent, it is entirely counterproductive for mercenary office seekers to encourage them to become increasingly inward-looking and nationalistic politically. This can be a potentially combustible combination as events have demonstrated in both the US and the UK in recent months.

In Bermuda, the combined effects of a worldwide economic downturn, globalisation and open-ended public sector spending have resulted in the island remaining mired in an extended period of anaemic economic growth, stagnating incomes and soaring household debt. The technical end of the recession here has certainly not marked the beginning of a period of meaningful recovery for all too many Bermudians.

Local politicians of all stripes tend to be a conservative lot, more interested in making slight tweaks to the existing Bermuda status quo rather than in genuinely reforming it. But recent experiences elsewhere have demonstrated just how much public discontent there now is simmering away beneath the surface of even the most seemingly well-established political orders — and just how quickly it can come to a boil.

Bermuda’s political leadership can no longer afford to respond to the deep-rooted anxieties of those most profoundly affected by our economic implosion with the type of uncomprehending obliviousness and near-indifference that has too often characterised the present government’s reactions. Nor can the Opposition afford to engage in the type of hollow rabble-rousing rhetoric only ever intended to draw votes rather than right wrongs or provide meaningful solutions to the very real social consequences of a protracted financial crisis.

The people deserve better from representatives at both ends of Bermuda’s political spectrum. Yet there appears to be little evidence that our representatives are reflecting on how much the electorate’s views are beginning to diverge from their own, let alone how to respond to this situation.

But respond — and respond constructively — they must because Bermuda’s society and economy are too delicately balanced to allow for any other option. As has been the case elsewhere, an increasing number of Bermudians are beginning to find the status quo less of a blessing than the politicians who do so much to maintain it. And this is precisely the type of impatience that can very quickly give rise to instability and the kind of unfocused and unruly demands for change that benefit no one, least of all those most in need of genuine reform, relief and recovery.