Porter’s Pensées

That Theresa May should feel it necessary to use a speech at the Bank of England today to ‘defend capitalism’ is remarkable in the context of the history of the past 30-odd years. It shows how dramatically the political climate in Britain has changed more recently.

In one way it may be thought surprising that it has come so late. The financial crisis of 2007-8 ought, it seemed to many of us, to have turned people against capitalism right then. (Shortly after it, my son bought me a wonderful t-shirt, with a picture of Karl Marx, saying ‘I told you so’.) Instead, of course, it simply turned the capitalist screws even tighter, with ordinary people being made to pay for the banker-induced catastrophe, while the bankers themselves returned to their ill-gotten remuneration – and still dodging their taxes – within a few months. On a more popular front, many people reacted not leftwards, but by turning to the anti-immigrant and sometimes even proto-fascist Right. It’s the impact of all that, together with stories of nurses needing to use foodbanks, rising homelessness, well-publicised corruption in some large businesses, and the Grenfell Tower fire – widely interpreted as the outcome of a market-driven system – that seems to have finally driven the anti-capitalist message home. Plus, of course, the startling rise of Jeremy Corbyn, and his major re-casting of the Labour project, returning it to its socialist roots, which were celebrated so enthusiastically and joyfully in this week’s Labour Party conference in Brighton, ending with an inspirational ‘Leader’s speech’ yesterday afternoon. And, last of these causal factors, there is the egregious mess Theresa May and the Conservative government are currently making of everything. That must be a sign of a certain lack of confidence on the traditional pro-capitalist Right.

All of which would appear to bear out Corbyn’s bold claim in his Brighton speech that the ‘centre ground’ of British politics has now shifted to the Left. This would not be a new phenomenon. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries we can see similar seismic shifts in public opinion and the terms of the contemporary political debates. In the 1900s they were turned Leftwards: just look at the newspapers and journals of the time, where ‘socialism’ was debated far more rationally, intelligently and sympathetically than today. That continued during the interwar period and after, where it transmuted into a widespread acceptance, even by the Tory Party, of social democracy and the welfare state. That was the ‘centre ground’ then; until Thatcher came along, determined to erase this, and re-situate the ‘centre’ where she thought (mistakenly) it had stood in Victorian times: unrestrained capitalism overriding all. Remember ‘TINA” – ‘there is no alternative’? We believed it for a while, even some of us on the Left, cowed by the seeming inexorability of the impersonal, material forces that were driving international capitalism, and which lay behind Thatcher, Reagan and then later Blair. (I’m reluctant to give them any personal credit, even for evil. But that’s the Marxist in me.)

The government’s response to the financial crisis – banks unreformed, more privatisation, austerity for the poor innocent proles – seemed to indicate that Thatcher’s capitalist ‘TINA’ could weather all that. And that the juggernaut would lumber on, undiverted, until, probably, finally collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions; just as Marx had predicted, but without the proletarian revolution he had hoped for, and so too late to save the world. (Because climate change is a result of capitalism, too.)

However, if Corbyn is right about the centre’s shifting – and May’s desperation to defend the old capitalist centre may be a symptom of this – we may be in for a pleasant surprise. It will be interesting to read her speech. (As I write, it has still not been delivered.) I imagine it won’t go the whole Thatcherite hog, but will accept the need for pragmatism when it comes to ‘privatisation’, for example; and some restraints on market forces. We’ll see.

Which is, let us be clear, no more than Corbyn is proposing. No-one on the British Left, so far as I’m aware, wants to put everything in the hands of the State. We all recognise the innovative and dynamic role of ‘market forces’, properly regulated. The difference between Labour and more moderate Conservatives is mainly one of degree. Which would return us to the 1950s and ’60s again; which is the ‘centre ground’ that I was brought up on.

EM Forster’s early and uncharacteristic novella, The Machine Stops (1909), describes a future community living underground and getting all its wants supplied by a great global machine that feeds them to it – food, communication, entertainment, etc – while they’re sitting comfortably, and getting fatter, in their comfy chairs. The plot begins when the machine suddenly stops working, and the main character – a woman, if I remember rightly – has to clamber up on to the surface to see what’s happening. She finds it inhabited by a sub-race of serfs dedicated to keeping the system going for the benefit of the subterranean privileged elite. (Political bells ringing here!) I can’t now remember how it ends; badly, I think. I do recall that Forster wrote it to counter HG Wells’s more utopian versions of the future.

I thought of this while suffering from the after-effects of my recent burglary (see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/09/20/burgled/), one of which was my being more or less cut off from the internet, and particularly from the site that allows me to blog here. Hence (again) the hiatus; and my non-response to comments. I can’t say I didn’t already know how reliant I was becoming on ‘the Machine’, but this drove it home. It also nearly made me mad; not the disconnection itself, but my (electronic) conversation with WordPress’s ‘Happiness Engineer’ (sic), sitting somewhere in California, I imagine, who was trying to help me put it right. I won’t go through the excruciating twists and turns of this dialogue – they might make you mad too, consisting as they did mainly in circularities (‘I don’t know my password’; ‘to retrieve your password, enter your password’….); suffice it to say that it all seems to be fixed now. (The test will be if this post goes up.)

In the meantime I’ve been living in a kind of limbo, unable to do any useful work, but, worse than that, shocked by how dependent I’ve become on a very clever but still inanimate device. And on the clever young people I need to help me with it. Are they Forster’s surface-dwellers? I must read the book again. It seems extraordinarily far-seeing. But of course this – the 1900s – was the great age of predictive Science-Fi.

INTRODUCTION

I’m an Essex boy through and through. But I’ve always been mildly embarrassed by that. Essex has never been a highly-regarded or ‘proud’ county, even before the emergence of ‘Essex Man’ (vulgar) and ‘Essex Girl’ (promiscuous) to sully its reputation in the 1980s. It was a non-county, with no special identity or pride compared with others like (especially) Yorkshire, where I live now. I realised this when I went up to university, meeting and envying people from much more attractive counties or cities than Essex; and particularly than London-suburban Essex, which Hornchurch was then. (It’s now part of Greater London.) This hybrid identity posed problems. Asked where I came from, I was in two minds whether to reply ‘Essex’, which sounded dull, or ‘East London’, which was more interesting, and which I would have preferred, as a bit of an inverted snob, but which implied eel pies and whelks, which wasn’t Hornchurch at all. (Simple ‘Hornchurch’ would have drawn a blank.) Besides, I knew the ‘proper’ or rural Essex far better, spending most of my summer holidays as a boy cycling over it, photographing and sketching churches and other historic buildings, following Essex County Cricket Club around, and visiting my father’s family in Chelmsford.

One of Essex’s problems is its place on the map. It’s quite a large county, as it happens – tenth out of 39 of the ‘historic’ counties; but lying under the great East Anglian bulge which is Norfolk and Suffolk, stretching down to the mudflats of the Thames river and estuary, and broken up more and more as you go south by further muddy estuaries and seeming nothingness. It sort of peters out to the east, boringly if you don’t like sea birds, sky-scapes or sailing, with no firm defining boundary around it. On the map of England it looks a bit like an armpit. To the south-west, of course, it has been extensively encroached upon by the ‘Great Wen’ of London, which has significantly changed the county’s character today; and all over by the ‘stockbroker belt’, on the lines to Liverpool Street (convenient for ‘The City’), taking over and converting many of the picturesque older houses, which has made it virtually unaffordable to live in for locals. You won’t find many Essex accents in the county today; only London (‘cockney’), ‘Estuary English’, and tight-arsed upper-class. For the sort of ‘Essex’ my father and grandparents used to speak – warm, rural, richly musical – you now have to venture into Suffolk or Cambridgeshire. Of course that’s a source of regret for nostalgic oldies like me.

But that’s ‘progress’, as they say. Nostalgia has its tearful pleasures, especially later in life, remembering (in my case) the bike rides, the leafy lanes, the quiet towns, the lovely little churches, the solitude, sitting in cornfields sketching and painting, resisting the advances of the cycling paedophiles (oh yes, we had them then), and those fun nights at the Youth Hostels (no cars allowed), crippled with cramp after a hundred miles a day of peddling. I’ve always resisted nostalgia; but I guess that, at my advanced age, it can’t do me much harm now. And I can put it in its place. Of course things have to change. And in the case of Essex, the changes of the past seventy-odd years have – in my view – added to the richness and certainly the fascination of the county; even the much-derided arrival, from the slums of East London, of Essex Man and Essex Girl.

Imagine what it would be like now without them. Actually I don’t need to imagine, living as I do presently in the East Riding of Yorkshire – or North Humberside, if you want to be up-to-date – which is similar to Essex in many ways, especially its landscape and wonderful old churches, but without Hull, on its southern border, being able to infuse it with the new blood and liveliness that the East End of London imparts to Barking, Brentwood, Billericay and all places north-east. The East Riding really is dull – and comfortable. (I love living here.) OK, it doesn’t have the clogged-up roads and railways, the (very) nouveaux riches in their pretentious ‘stockbroker Tudor’ homes, the concentration of ugly petrol stations, McDonald’s eateries, and snobby golf courses that blight the ‘home’ counties, all of which is to the good; and it is undoubtedly just as pretty as Essex. (Ask David Hockney.) But where are the life and vitality that you find in Essex, only partially compromised by their less salubrious sides: the Jamie Olivers, Bobby Moores, Graham Gooches, Russell Brands, Maggie Smiths, Grayson Perrys, Sandie Shaws, and (I’m afraid), David Irvings: to name but a few, most of them from the London side of the county. And where in the East Riding is the political radicalism that has been a great feature of Essex historically, deriving to a great extent from its proximity to the filthy metropolis next door? Or the New Town architecture – those great experiments in social living? And what can compare with the peculiarly attractive, semi-rural quality of Essex cricket?

What I hope to do in this book is to make out a case for Essex’s being at least interesting. I’m aware that I don’t have all the proper credentials for this task, not being what is called a ‘local’ historian; though I did write a book about Essex, illustrated, at the age of about fourteen, now lost (my mother kept none of my juvenilia), but, as I remember, mainly plagiarised from other books, which is how I thought history was written at that age. (Some of the students I later taught at university seemed not to have moved on from there.) My professional expertise is in more nation- and indeed world-wide history, plus a little foray into the history of architectural theory; but as I’ve found in my own writing in the past, an outsider’s perspective can often inform the most specialist of disciplines, so long as one is prepared to learn, respectfully, from the specialists’ work, and retains one’s own scholarly – that is, sceptical – discipline. Besides, I may be better placed than more parochial historians to properly appreciate and describe the place that my county and its inhabitants have played in Britain’s broader national history. As a non-specialist I feel fortunate that Essex, despite its low esteem, offers a plentiful specialist literature for me to plunder: stretching from the huge multi-volume Victoria County History of Essex, edited for a time by WR Powell, whom it so happens I knew as a boy when he attended the same Methodist church that my father and I did in Harold Wood; through to gazetteers, guide-books, archaeological reports, popular publications of the Essex Record Office, an early ‘Pevsner’, romantic travel-books, and even a novel or two. These, and my memories, especially as a boy brought up at the very meeting point between the two cultures whose intermingling has contributed so much to present-day Essex, are my sources. On top of that will be spread a layer of I hope intelligent speculation, which should be easily distinguishable from the ‘facts’, and so easy to discount, if it’s considered untrustworthy.

This book will not be the first to try to rescue Essex’s reputation. Many authors have written in ‘praise’ of Essex, albeit struggling against what they represent as almost impossible odds. If Essex hasn’t got a unique reputation for awfulness, it is certainly thought to have one by those several writers who have sought to defend it. ‘It’s arguably the most-maligned 1,300 square miles in the UK’, claimed a BBC documentary in 2010, before going on to give its own contrary view. ‘Yes, everyone knows about Essex’s reputation,’ writes another. ‘People from Essex in particular are well aware of that reputation, thanks to the knowing looks and smirks we frequently get when we confess our roots. In order to avoid this, less hardy locals will respond to the innocent enquiry with ambiguous statements like “near London” or “in the South East.”’ That’s my experience precisely. Its reputation as ‘flat and uninteresting’ goes back at least a couple of hundred years. No wonder then that, as the very first issue of the Essex Review put it as long ago as 1892, ‘it has often been said that there is less county pride in Essex than probably any other British county’. More recently – and partly because of the influence of ‘Essex Man’ and ‘Essex Girl’ – it has been described as ‘the dustbin of London’, ‘the golden turd of England’ (!), and plenty more in the same style. That’s what its defenders claim; which makes their task of rehabilitating the wretched place, of course, all the more heroic. I salute them.

The present book, however, won’t exactly fit into that pattern. I don’t see it as an ‘in praise of’ kind of book. It certainly isn’t intended to engender pride in Essexites’ Essexness – ‘Essexite’, incidentally, is a neologism, there being no other collective noun to describe the county’s inhabitants – as I don’t believe in the logic of any people’s feeling ‘pride’ in the mere accident of their birth. Besides, Yorkshire folk have enough of that for all of us. (They can keep it.) It won’t, I promise you, be too nostalgic, starry-eyed or honeysuckle-scented – though the smell of honeysuckle on balmy summer days is, as it happens, one of the things I recall most fondly about my cycle rides in the Essex countryside. Needless to say, the book won’t pretend to be comprehensive, or a ‘last word’. It will have worked, if it stimulates some interest in, and maybe a little affection for, an unjustly neglected corner of England.

It will begin with some very early prehistory, before cantering through the recorded history of the county, at quite a lick. The subsequent chapters will explore various ‘themes’ arising from all this, and some theories. You’ll see.

The recent hiatus in posting has been due to the fact that I was burgled a week ago, and my laptop stolen. I thought my house was pretty secure, but they threw a brick through a window-pane, stuck an arm in, and snatched it away. This at 5 a.m: my neighbour heard the breaking glass but I – at the front of the house – didn’t. The police think they know the perpetrator, just out of gaol. Whether I get my laptop back I don’t know, but with the advice of the police I’ve ‘immobilised’ it, whatever that means. My insurance company (Lloyds Bank) turned up trumps and delivered a new computer five days later. I’m now trying to get into ‘iCloud’ (is that right?) to see if my ‘stuff’ is there. It’s mainly the work I did in Sweden, which wasn’t very much. I was just about to back it up on my desktop, with everything else. Hey-ho. I’m beginning to reconsider my opposition to capital punishment, when the victim is an academic.

In the meantime I’m starting on another book, encouraged by some of the feedback on recent posts. (They’ll be acknowledged.) It will be on ‘Essex.’ I may post drafts here, for comment; starting soon, with my draft Preface. Please remember, if you do read them, that my first drafts are usually unrecognisable from the final versions. And that I may not persist in this anyway.

It was wonderful to see Essex winning the County Cricket Championship today, and not only for partisan and nostalgic reasons (see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/08/15/cricket-nostalgia/). Essex CCC are different from most other county teams, and from all leading soccer teams, in being home-grown; recruiting nearly all its players locally, apart from its foreign captain, Ryan ten Doeschate, a Dutchman (but born in South Africa), who has nonetheless declared himself to be ‘Essex through and through’; which is what we want, isn’t it, for an immigrant to be fully accepted. It’s the team’s deep attachment to my own beloved county of origin that makes them worthier of my loyalty, I think, than a mere batch of highly-paid soccer mercenaries like West Ham. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2016/05/13/old-west-ham/.)

Anyway, Essex deserves it. For years the county has been traduced. At the start it was for being ‘flat and uninteresting’. Latterly it has been because of the rise of ‘Essex Girl’ and ‘Essex Man’: the former characterised as ‘thick, promiscuous and lacking in class’; the latter defined by Simon Heffer as ‘young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren;… typically self-made and [who] had benefitted from the policies of Margaret Thatcher’. (See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-39125171.) Of course – as we genuine Essexites repeatedly protested – these were not really characteristic of the county of Essex, but were mainly polished-up East Enders pushed out of London during the war and made to settle in its dull suburbs. (I explained in an earlier blog how my father was brought in to teach them: https://bernardjporter.com/2017/08/22/dad/.) They’ve also produced some sterling people (I listed a few in that article). But the ‘Essex Man and Girl’ stereotype has now sullied all of us, and blinded non-Essexites (that’s not a common term, by the way; I’ve made it up) to the delights and riches of the county.

To mention a few – I got to know the county intimately as a youngster, cycling around making sketches of scenes and churches, so I could be very expansive and boring if I wanted – there are the hills of the north-west; the ‘Constable Country’ along the Stour valley; impressive castles (Colchester, Hedingham…); beautiful churches (Thaxted, Saffron Walden, Greenstead: its nave made of oak logs and pre-Conquest; Little Maplestead; the Willingales – two churches of adjacent parishes sharing a churchyard; Waltham Abbey… and so many more); fine mansions, almost palaces (Audley End); delightful villages (Finchingfield, Newport); and then, out to the south and east, the fascinating marshlands, with one of the oldest English churches (7^th century) at Bradwell-super-Mare; the site of Earl Byrhtnoth’s heroic battle with the Vikings, celebrated in the contemporary old-English poetic fragment ‘The Battle of Maldon’ (https://lightspill.com/poetry/oe/maldon.html); and of course fine popular watering places like Clacton and Southend… But I won’t go on. I have a library of books celebrating the Essex countryside, mostly written before the last war, when Essex was still delightfully rural – and radical. (The Peasant’s Revolt started there. William Morris was born there, or nearabouts, in Walthamstow. Thaxted had a communist vicar for many years.) It was full of leafy lanes, half-timbered and thatched houses, and people speaking Essex (like Suffolk). But no longer, of course. Well, that’s only to be expected.

The beginning of the end came, I think, when the rich – not the East Enders – moved out of London to villages from which they could easily commute, first class, to their posh jobs in their banks and the like; or developed a taste for country cottages dressed up as ‘holiday homes’, which pushed the house prices up far beyond what the yokels could afford. The same thing happened in all the ‘home counties’. And, of course, it was when ‘modernisation’ in a broader sense took hold.

So I’m unlikely to go back now. But it’s good to see a team of local lads winning the County Cricket Championship again, after 20-odd years; and – moreover – with a new young fast bowling discovery leading the charge, with a typically Essex name. It’s Porter. (We Porters were common around Colchester.) He even shares my granddad’s initials – JA. It was my granddad, in fact, who took me to my very first Essex games in the 1950s, at the Chelmsford ‘Rec’. Bonds like that are not easily undone.

(Temporarily withdrawn, while the LRB Blog takes it up. Back again shortly.)

Apparently a copy of this book, published a few days ago, has been sent to the White House. Its aim is to counter the ‘fake news’ that Trump and others on the American Right are currently peddling about Sweden, in order – basically – to boost their view that social democracy and internationalism don’t work – simply because neo-liberal ideology teaches they can’t. See a number of my earlier posts on this: search ‘Sweden’ and ‘Trump’.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Night-Sweden-Petter-Karlsson/dp/9171264302/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505296424&sr=1-1&keywords=last+night+in+sweden

I can’t imagine Trump actually reading it. Apparently he never reads books. But it does have some nice pics in it, apparently. Maybe it will include some of the curvacious blondes he obviously goes for. I’m looking forward to receiving my copy tomorrow (but not for that reason), from Amazon Prime (I’m afraid).

Sweden really is important; virtually the only remaining concrete proof in the world that there is an alternative, and a better one, to unrestrained capitalism.

For the situation I described in yesterday’s post – the widespread denial of obvious truths, and dismissal of ‘expertise’ – I blame four factors in particular. The first is the general rise and popular fascination of ‘conspiracy theories’, from the grassy mound (Kennedy) to David Icke’s shape-shifting royal reptiles. The second is the actual conspiracies that have been revealed over the last few years  – I’d include the ‘Wilson plot’ as one of these, albeit in a watered-down form, and all the recently confirmed revelations of institutional paedophilia – which give some credence to all the rest. The third is, of course, the internet, spreading ‘fake news’, unmoderated, at a rate unimaginable before. I imagine much of this as being the preserve of pimply adolescents tapping away in their bedrooms when their mothers think they’re asleep; but I may be wrong. (And in any case it’s a slur on pimply adolescents, the poor dears.)

My fourth factor is the least likely one, because it would only apply to educated people, which these adolescents generally aren’t. That’s ‘post-modernism’, in its extreme, relativistic form. (There is no objective truth.) I’d like to be able to place some of the blame on them, because – in the form of ‘post-colonial theorists’ – they’ve been the bane of my recent professional life. But as members of the hated intellectual ‘elite’ they’re unlikely to have had much influence on the poor suckers who swallowed Boris Johnson’s ‘£350 million a month’ – or was it a week? –  for the NHS’ lie. I didn’t find many of them citing Foucault and Deleuze.

One solution might be to teach – by some means or other – simple ‘logic’ in schools. I’ve suggested this before: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/10/23/logic-lessons/. In other words, critical thought. Mathematics obviously does this. History can, if taught well. Literature very rarely does . Conservative educationalists have generally shied away from that, in case it encourages the young to be critical of the status quo. But at least it might give them the tools to be rationally and constructively critical; not simply against the status quo, and ‘elites’, and ‘experts’, because that’s what or who they are. I wouldn’t even mind if they were taught postmodernism. But critically.

The American Right still seems to be convinced that Sweden is in, or very close to, a state of ‘civil war’ through its generous asylum policy, and its admission of hundreds of thousands of inassimilable Muslims hell-bent on Islamicising the country through terrorism. I’ve commented on this before, after a false claim made about Sweden by Donald Trump in the last American presidential election: https://bernardjporter.com/2017/06/27/sweden-on-the-brink-of-civil-war/. The latest version is this very recent article in Frontpage Mag, edited by David Horowitz, a well-known Right-winger: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267764/shooting-messenger-sweden-bruce-bawer; which cites the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby as evidence of this kind of thing. I’ve been to Rinkeby; it was a fairly fleeting visit, which I described in another post: https://bernardjporter.com/2017/02/24/rinkeby/; but I was there long enough to allow me to positively contradict a number of assertions made in the Frontpage article – such as that there are ‘grocery stores that have signs only in Arabic’. Other more shocking ones, such as that there are ‘no-go’ areas there, or that women are stoned or ‘set afire’ for wearing the wrong clothes, I can’t disprove absolutely – I might have missed them – but my general impression of the area, and what I’ve read in the Swedish press, which doesn’t usually block such news, made me highly dubious about them. As I was, incidentally, of the signs that were pictured on Right-wing blogsites purporting to demarcate ‘sharia-only’ areas there – not in Arabic or Swedish, but in English! But we all know about this kind of ‘fake news’, don’t we?

Ah, ‘fake news’. We see plenty of it on Right-wing blogsites. But it’s mainly a charge made by them the other way. Only the other day the Right-wing ‘shock jock’ Rush Limbaugh claimed Hurricane Irma was fake news, put out by Democrats in pursuit of their climate change agenda; only to be forced to flee from his Florida home – not, he insisted, by the hurricane itself, but by the panic the reports of it was stirring up. (See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rush-limbaugh-irma-hurricane-florida-evacuation-hoax-conspiracy-theory-a7937201.html.) I imagined that would discredit him for ever thereafter; but possibly not. I’ve seen dozens of ‘ordinary Americans’ interviewed in the streets on TV expressing ridiculous beliefs in the face of all the objective evidence, and excusing themselves on the grounds that their status as ‘free Americans’ allowed them to think whatever they wanted. (For an example, see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/22/btl/, first para.)

‘Freedom’ – of thought – is undoubtedly an important motive. More important, however, will be the mistrust of authority that, in many situations, this gives rise to. ‘Mistrust’ is, of course, healthy. I wouldn’t have become as averagely-good a historian as I like to think I am without a good measure of it. It involves scepticism, checking back, requiring evidence, asking questions, and being open to persuasion at every stage. (In other words, ‘scientific method.’) But it has to be subjected to the same processes itself. The American Right doesn’t just mistrust authority; it automatically discredits it. This is no better than automatically trusting governments, politicians, the mainstream media (MSM) or whatever. It’s just as lazy; a way of avoiding thinking and discriminating: which is, to be fair, hard work. But it’s certainly a process behind much Trumpian (and also Farageist) ‘thinking’ these days. If an ‘authority’ tells you something, it must be fake. This applies not only to political authorities, but intellectual ones too. ‘We’ve had enough of experts’, as our own Michael Gove once notoriously said.

That kind of argument does something else: it hitches these Rightist arguments to an anti-elitist popular culture. For the ‘elite’ is made up not only of the social elite of the country – the sense in which it used to be understood – but also of experts, intellectuals, the educated, people who know things. Read that Frontpage piece, and the BTL comments appended to it, and you will find this is a thread running all the way through. The Swedes who rejected this Norwegian minister’s criticism of their asylum policy were simply an ‘elite’. It was the little boy and the Emperor’s clothes once again. Elites and experts have their own agendas, which only ‘ordinary folk’ can see through. And these agendas cover everything. Which is why you can’t even trust them on something as obviously verifiable as a hurricane. So dismiss them out of hand; especially if so doing confirms your own prejudices, and saves you from the mental labour of thinking.

None of this is new. Richard Hostadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963, suggested it was an enduring tradition in free-thinking American history.  But it seems to have got more assertive in modern times, emerging no doubt out of the very real deceptions by governments, parties, corporations and others that have been revealed since then, which have slowly chipped away at the confidence in these agencies’ integrity which is essential to trust, and hence to real democracy. On the extreme Right, and also in some quarters of the extreme Left, this has left people with no solid evidential footholds for their opinions, and the idea therefore that what one believes is simply a matter of subjective choice. Fox, Breitbart, the Daily Mail and the rest of the proto-Fascist (yes) media then exploit this to pursue their own agendas. – Sometimes. Not always; or we’ll be falling into their trap, but in reverse: of simply and automatically believing the opposite of what they say.