Porter’s Pensées

Churchill once described democracy as ‘the worst form of Government except for all those others that have been tried from time to time’; and that’s probably the best that can be said for it. Nowhere has it ever produced the utopia that was confidently predicted for it in its early heady days, and some of its recent outcomes must cast doubt upon its capacity to do any good at all. OK, so Donald Trump didn’t win the popular democratic vote; but the fact that such a flawed candidate could come as close as he did to a majority would be a cause for concern, even if the less than democratic Electoral College had not delivered his victory to him. Likewise, the British European referendum result last summer was far from convincing as an expression of the ‘popular will’ on the particular vital issue it was supposed to rule on, as I’ve argued before. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/.)

Of course these judgments are made from a particular political point of view, by a self-styled liberal (me) who could be said simply not to like the results that Democracy is currently throwing up. In both these cases, it could be argued, Democracy – at long last allowed to express the genuine wishes of the people, rather than of ‘elitists’ like me – got it right. To think otherwise is to demean the intelligence of the ordinary mass of the population – the Demos – as ‘educated’ people often do. Yet the results – both of them – were very close, and yet also extreme in their effects; which must cast doubt on the capacity of our two forms of democracy to reflect any kind of popular consensus, at the very least.

Exactly. It’s the forms of our two democracies which are the problem. I certainly hope so, for in company with most other liberals I wouldn’t be happy with the idea that the masses are simply too fundamentally stupid to deserve to govern themselves. That way lies monarchism, authoritarianism, dictatorship, rule by Old Etonians, the ‘Führerprinzip’. As against this, however, it’s fair to point out that in both the American and the British cases, our means of expressing our respective ‘popular wills’ are beset with imperfections that must obviously skew the results of any election; ranging from gerrymandering (especially affecting the black vote in America), the way candidates are selected, lack of political education, the excessive roles played by money and propaganda, and our respective voting systems (like ‘first past the post’: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/); and then, arising out of all this, the feeling it gives to voters that their votes are not going to count much anyway. These problems will need to be addressed if people are going to repose enough confidence in their democratic rights and duties to use them responsibly. Then we might see whether or not Democracy ‘works’.

Beyond that, however, there’s another factor. Currently even the best-managed democracies seem relatively powerless in the face of great worldwide movements that are proving difficult for them to control, like global warming, mass religious zeal, population growth, and – in particular, I would say – the final stages of unregulated market capitalism, powered by its own internal imperative, and overriding all. ‘Globalism’, in the narrow economic sense in which the word is generally used today, is clearly (to my mind) at the root of most of the economic and social ills the people of the American rustbelt and the north of England are suffering now; which, however, those people’s ‘natural’ representatives – the Democrats in America and traditional Labour in Britain – have not yet properly addressed. They really were out of touch. That’s why voting for them seemed so pointless.

Those who did respond to this new overriding factor were the Trumpists and the Ukippers; which is why they won. In this sense the results of these two votes – however perverse they may have seemed to us liberals – did fairly reflect the common mood and the genuine and rational grievances of their respective electorates, far more closely than a Hilary or a Remain result would have done. The pity of the whole situation is that it was the political Right that put itself in the right place to profit from all this – just as Hitler did in the 1930s – rather than the Left, which could so easily have done. Bernie might have harnessed the American Rustbelt grievances to better effect, if he hadn’t been squeezed out by the Democratic Party machine. So might a more left-wing Labour Party in better touch with its natural constituency, somehow.

Then we would have been spared the current desperate situation, in which the USA has a government which, whatever it may or may not do for the Rustbelt in terms of putting ‘America First’ in the international jobs market, might – with its alarming foreign policy – bring the world to an end (the worst-case scenario, obviously); and in which Britain is left isolated, humiliatingly dependent for her trade on this monster over the pond, and so even less able to counter the late-capitalist/imperialist global behemoth which lies at the root of her people’s problems, than if she had stuck with Europe and worked along, in hope at least, with its burgeoning Left.

And if Brexit sparks a more general break-up of Europe, which both Trump and Putin clearly desire, there will be no chance at all of stopping the behemoth; which individual nations below the size of, say, America, Russia and China, can have little purchase against on their own.

Who or what is to blame for this? In my view the tragedy was at least facilitated by the systemic deficiencies of British and American ‘democracy’. That, rather than being the fault of Democracy, or of the Demos, themselves.

Now back in Stockholm – where the weather is unseasonably mild – to be confronted by a huge spread in today’s Dagens Nyheter about ‘Swedes with central roles in the American extreme Right’. It’s here, but behind a paywall, I think, and in Swedish: http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/svenskarna-med-centrala-roller-i-usas-extremhoger/.

I also had an email this morning from the author of the following book, drawing my attention to a more unusual aspect of Swedish neo-Nazism: https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Lions-North-Sounds-New-Nordic-Radical-Nationalism/0190212608/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486116478&sr=1-1&keywords=teitelbaum+lions. That’s due to be published in the UK next month. I shall certainly get it; and have asked a couple of papers whether they’d be interested in my reviewing it for them. If not I’ll post a review on this blog.

Can anyone recommend a book in English on the Nordic or Swedish extreme Right since 1945? I’d like to get up to speed on it.

We mustn’t confuse the present US regime with those of the recent past, and especially with the ‘Neo-Con’ one behind George W Bush. The following article in next month’s The Atlantic magazine by David Frum, a leading conservative commentator and speechwriter for GW, should point the difference. It’s a devastating analysis of the Trump phenomenon and the dangers it presents to American democracy, and all the more enlightening in view of its provenance. Highly recommended.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/

If Trump is toppled, it may be from this quarter, rather than by the Democrats.

Talk about ‘unintended consequences’! Who – apart from me (well, elliptically at any rate: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/08/31/two-cheers-for-the-eu/) – predicted that voting for Brexit would make Britain more reliant on the United States, and consequently less essentially ‘independent’, than if she had remained in the EU?

Now that unexpected chicken is coming home to roost. The effect of Brexit has been to prise push us back into the American no-liberal (or liberalish) sphere, in our desperation for a trade deal to replace the European common market; and away from the only organisation that might have saved us from it – though I have to admit that the EU hasn’t done a very good job of that so far. But it could. (And it did resist TTIP.) In other words, Brexit won’t enable us to reassert ‘control’ over our own affairs at all, which could only be achieved in co-operation with others. And if one of Brexit’s longer-term effects is to boost other nationalist and separatist movements in the remaining EU countries, aided by Trump’s and Putin’s clear ambitions to see an end to the Union, it could spell the end of all collaborative resistance to untamed global capitalism; or to what that great economic thinker JA Hobson – the subject, as it happens, of my PhD thesis long ago – called ‘capitalist imperialism’: imperialism, that is, which is neither pursued nor controlled by governments, but by the far more powerful internal logic of the system itself. That’s the stage of history we’re entering upon now.

It’s for this reason that I hugely regret that we in Britain can’t have a second bite at the Brexit cherry; that and the fact that the decision to hold the original referendum, the form it took, and the conditions in which people voted in it, were so inadequate, and so the result so essentially fortuitous, as to make it – ‘the will of the people’ – the flimsiest of pillars on which to re-build our country and even the world. A nation shouldn’t have to make great life-affecting decisions in this trivial and accidental way. I hope, then, that a good number of Labour MPs do defy their party whip, and vote against Article 50. The Daily Mail will give them hell, and of course they’ll lose. But the fact that they stuck with their principles could redound to their benefit later, when the wider repercussions of Brexit reveal themselves.

There is, I think, a historical precedent for this. It is roughly what happened to those Labour MPs who resisted the siren call of (national) imperialism before the First World War. The jingos traduced them too. (See my Critics of Empire, 1969.) But it paid dividends after the War, which turned many people against the imperialism that they believed to have been the cause of it, and so rehabilitated those who had seemed to be flouting the popular will before; to the extent that just a few years later one of them even became the first Labour Prime Minister. It may be wise today for Labour to establish itself firmly on the ‘Remain’ side (with the Libs), and then wait a while for the unintended consequences of Brexit to row back. Who can say what will happen then? Except that it will almost certainly be unintended, again.

Crude, I realise; but worth a thousand words. (I’m not sure of the source; I got it through Facebook.)

There’s little more I can add to the flood of commentary that is pouring out these days in criticism of America’s new President. His character flaws are obvious; my only contribution to this discussion is to suggest that they might be intrinsic to late-stage capitalism – the amorality, especially. Or perhaps to Ayn Rand: though I’ve never been able to get beyond the first couple of chapters of Atlas Shrugged, so I can’t be sure. His ignorance – arising from those character flaws: ‘I don’t need to read because I’m smart’ (narcissism) – is equally obvious. The dangers that these two characteristics pose not only to Americans but also to all the rest of us is being shouted around the world just now, especially after yesterday’s executive order banning people coming into America from certain Moslem countries – the seven Moslem countries, incidentally, from which the USA has never been attacked, and leaving out those, like Saudi Arabia, from which she has. It’s suggested that this is because Trump has financial interests in, or obligations towards, the latter. I wouldn’t know.

What is interesting is that this executive order seems to have united almost the whole world against Trump. As well as its inconsistency, and what many critics are calling its cruelty, people agree that the ‘Moslem travel ban’ is bound to be counterproductive. Islamicists will feel that their claim that America is fighting a ‘holy war’ against their religion has now been given added plausibility, so helping them to inspire and recruit even more jihadists. Nearly everyone is saying this. The whole world – apart from our Nigel and Govey – is against him. I can’t recall an American President in history who has been so universally ridiculed, scorned and feared as Trump now is. And, as we’ve seen from the huge demonstrations that have mustered against him in America over the last few days, the majority of his own compatriots – remember he only won a minority of the popular vote – share these feelings with us.

We’ve all been taken by surprise. Speaking for myself, my surprise was that an American President has such huge executive powers at his personal command, before they can be ‘checked and balanced’ by Congress or the courts. (That’s despite my having studied more American than British history at my university, and having lived and worked in the country for longish periods.) It’s difficult for most of us to credit that such a clown can last much longer in the White House; but then it was difficult for us to see him being elected in the first place. The question now is: how might he be curbed, or deposed, before his allotted (initial) four years is up?

There remain, of course, those famous ‘checks and balances’. Regarding the travel ban, there are already legal challenges to that, but they will probably take months or even years to work their way through the courts, and the final Federal Supreme Court can’t be relied upon if Trump succeeds in packing it with his own nominees. The problem with Congress – the other major ‘check’ to the Executive in the American constitution – is that both houses there are dominated by Republicans. Trump isn’t exactly beloved by his own party, so it may be that some of his measures can be shot down by a combination of Democrats and dissident GOP’ers. Let’s hope for that.

The only alternatives would seem to be impeachment, on the basis, perhaps, of his business chicanery or his alleged plotting with the Russkies, or his lies, or a sex scandal (the ‘golden rain’? I don’t believe that, do you?): there’s surely plenty of scope there; or the prediction I made at the end of last year (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/31/2017-prediction/), that he’ll be assassinated by his own secret service. Another possibility is that all this international opprobrium might ultimately get through to him, undermining his enormous self-regard, unless he can attribute that to a ‘lying press’. Theresa May might help here, by publicly jilting him, after their brief love affair. That might make him wince. But no – I forgot. She’s in thrall tradewise to the USA, due to Brexit – part of Britain’s ‘regaining control’ (!). – Or, finally, the wheels might simply fall off the coach, stranding Trump in the middle of a great depression or even a little war, say with Mexico (pray God not a big one), and causing most of his support to leak away.

The trouble with any of these scenarios, however, is that we’d then be left with President Pence: less clownish, perhaps, but no less reactionary by all accounts. Whichever way you look at it, things look pretty bleak. As the old Chinese curse has it: ‘May you live in interesting times’.

PS. A good debate in Parliament this afternoon resulted in a motion lambasting the ‘Moslem ban’ being passed unanimously. Strong anti-Trump speeches from all sides. It was proposed by my friend Ed (see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/13/bearing-up-in-hard-times/), and seconded by a Conservative businessman of Yemeni origin. Much criticism of May and Johnson for sucking up to Trump. Big pro-refugee demos in cities all over Britain this evening. Encouraging.

Theresa May’s sycophancy before this appalling, childish, bigoted, proto-fascist clown – at least in public: viz. her speech last night in Philadelphia – demonstrates just how low Brexit has pulled us down. Blair could also be said to have acted as America’s ‘poodle’, but at least he retained a modicum of dignity. May’s language was very clever, flattering Trump, and pushing all his erogenous verbal buttons: words and phrases like ‘leadership’, ‘Reagan’, ‘Thatcher’, ‘patriotism’, ‘work’, ‘family’, ‘power restored to the people’, ‘Iran’s malignant influence’, Britain’s and America’s ‘making of the modern world’, his ‘great election victory’, and ‘as dawn breaks on a new era of American renewal’. Trump must have loved that last one. Indeed, he could almost have written the speech himself. (‘It was huge. Terrific. Believe me.’) OK, so she didn’t express approval of his stance on more sensitive issues like water-boarding, or ‘The Wall’, or pussy-grabbing, or women’s reproductive rights; and it’s just possible that she will raise these questions, critically, in her more private conversation with him this afternoon. Let’s hope she takes a long spoon with her. But what she has said up to now has already demeaned her; and so by association the rest of us, her compatriots – and all because of the pathetically weak position Brexit has put Britain in. She needs this US-UK ‘trade deal’. Watch out when its details are revealed (probably not yet), and we find that European-British health and safety laws, labour regulations, ownership rules for public utilities, and the general principle of democratic accountability for businesses, have all been repealed to please the American side. What – you Brexiteers – will become of ‘taking back control’ then?

At the end of the nineteenth century many far-seeing British imperialists, realizing that the Empire couldn’t survive in its present form for very much longer, placed their hopes in what they called a new ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Empire to succeed it, ruled now by Britain and America, with the USA taking the lead. This for example was one of Cecil Rhodes’s fond wishes, and why many of his ‘Rhodes Scholarships’ (to Oxford) were reserved for Americans. It’s also the idea lying behind Kipling’s ‘Take up the White Man’s Burden,’ which was directed to an American President, urging him to join in Britain’s great imperial enterprise.

During the twentieth century several efforts were made to implement this plan in one way or another, some of them through a secret society which later became the ‘Round Table’ group. There are some American conspiracy theorists who believe that this group did in fact covertly dominate Anglo-American foreign policy for much of the last century, in particular America’s entry into World War II. This general idea may also have lain behind successive British governments’ rather fawning emphasis on their so-called ‘special relationship’ with America, especially under Churchill-Roosevelt, Macmillan-Kennedy, Thatcher-Reagan, and Blair-Bush.

Watching Theresa May’s speech to US Republicans in Philadelphia this evening, however, I was struck by the overtly imperialist tone to it, which I don’t remember from previous ‘special relationship’ utterances; despite her disavowal of direct overseas interventionism. It lay in her references to Britain’s ‘great’ global history, and her appeal to Britain and the USA to give the world leadership together: which for me has an imperial ring to it. This may be the beginning of a new – third? fourth? fifth? – stage of British imperial history, with Britain sneaking back under America’s skirts. I’m embarrassed by this, as a Leftie, as a proud if not particularly patriotic Briton, and also as an imperial historian. But it will have been a tonic to those old-school (and even new-school: Niall Ferguson?) British imperialists who still, remarkably, cling on to their illusions from the past.

It was clearly done mainly to pander to President Trump, in order to get the bi-lateral trade agreement between them that May needs so desperately, after Britain’s likely loss of the single European market. Which is an alarming prospect; if only because Trump will demand, in the interests of ‘America First’, all kinds of concessions – like Britain’s opening up her market to genetically modified crops, American health care companies and the like – which Britain on her own will find it difficult to swallow, but will probably now have to. This was my major reason for voting ‘Remain’ in the EU Referendum: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/05/22/why-not-a-referendum-on-ttip/; my belief that Europe together was more likely to be able to resist this kind of thing – TTIP, for example, which the EU has resisted – than a solitary off-shore island beholden to America could.

What we have just now, both in Britain and the USA, and looming in the rest of Europe, is mob rule; historically always dreaded by the privileged classes, who used the fear of it to impede the progress of democracy. Even today, referring to ‘mob rule’ leaves you open to the accusation of being anti-democratic, or élitist, which is a common charge levelled against American Democrats and British Remainers by the Trumpists and the Daily Mail. That’s what makes it so difficult to argue against verdicts passed by popular referenda; and why, for example, British MPs will almost certainly allow Theresa May to implement the ‘voice of the people’ in relation to the EU. That notorious Daily Mail headline, featuring the judges who exercised their constitutional right and indeed duty to insist on Parliamentary scrutiny for pulling out of Europe, and traducing them as ‘Enemies of the People’, must have honest MPs still quivering in their boots.

‘What is it you don’t understand about democracy?’ yelled a member of the audience at a ‘Remainer’ in a recent BBC Question Time. Well, my answer is that truly democratic decisions are only made on the basis of cool consideration, with the issues being clear and not clouded by others, and based on pretty accurate evidence. They also require the opportunity to go back on them at leisure and consider them again. Everyone must know to their cost that many of their own personal decisions, if rushed or made under stress, can turn out to be wrong. Beyond this we could probably do with more political education, or even education in logical thinking, than most Britons and Americans, of all classes, currently get in their schools, and certainly in their media. That would go some way to creating a rational democracy. But this of course is a tricky topic to raise, on the grounds that one person’s political education could be seen as another’s propaganda, or as simply an ‘alternative truth’. (I didn’t realise that Trump was a postmodernist!) But we’ll let that go for now.

A more practical argument against allowing ‘mobs’ to rule is that they can be democratically counter-productive. Most dictatorships to have emerged in history have had an element of mobocracy about them, exploited, as mobs so easily are, by charismatic but vain and dangerous ‘leaders’. Britain doesn’t seem to be headed in this direction yet, with none of the leaders of ‘Brexit’ (certainly not Nigel; not even Boris) having quite the necessary charisma; but the United States definitely does. Trump does nothing for me charisma-wise; but he seems to have all the personal qualities, and limitations, that have been shared by most megalomaniacs in history. I personally can’t see how he can last much longer, despised and ridiculed as he is by half his own people and in most countries of the world, outside Russia and Israel – unless their sneers merely serve to strengthen him. (Millwall FC: ‘No-one loves us, and we don’t care.’) And then we do, both of our countries, have ‘checks and balances’. But if he does survive, unemasculated, it must be as a dictator, albeit of a very American kind.

But good – from my liberal-élitist point of view – could come out of this. What these two ‘mobs’ have achieved is to rip the democratic veneer from our political institutions, and reveal them to be as fundamentally undemocratic as many of us on the Left had long believed them to be. An obvious example is the two countries’ voting systems, which are obviously unrepresentative of their electorates, with ‘first past the post’ in Britain, which I’ve inveighed against before (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/), and the ‘electoral college’ device in America; quite apart from the gerrymandering in both countries, and the power of money in the USA. For years now people haven’t felt represented, by their Westminster and Washington ‘bubbles’; and in particular when the vulnerability of those bubbles to pressures from outside allows ‘market forces’ to force austerity, free movement and the like on them unwillingly. This alienation has been growing for some years now; until today when, fuelled by the present crisis of late-stage capitalism, it has burst out into the political open with Brexit and Trump.

Brexit and Trump aren’t the answers to the people’s grievances, but they are symptoms of the imminent collapse that lies behind them; and they may have the practical value of stirring things up. Most of Trump’s policies are wholly unacceptable to us liberals, of course, and his attitudes, language and behaviour even more so. But in one or two cases he has, by saying what used to be regarded as politically impossible, opened up new ways of thinking and acting which should appeal to us too, and may become more generally accepted under his aegis than, for example, under Bernie Saunders’s. There are powerful Leftist reasons for objecting to TTP, though they may not be Trump’s; and for trying to reach a better accommodation with Putin’s Russia, in the interests of a stable ‘balance of power’ and realpolitik. The American election was like a tsunami; but it had the virtue of up-rooting a number of rock-like assumptions, and getting us to look critically at their undersides. We hope.

Of course the Supreme Court was right to insist that Theresa May has to get the backing of Parliament before proceeding to trigger Article 50! I’m surprised that its decision wasn’t unanimous. I must read the three dissenters’ opinions – I assume they’re on the Internet. I don’t suppose they were the three traduced by the Daily Mail as ‘enemies of the people’ some time back? Trying to make amends? Probably not. Don’t these three know their English constitutional history? And don’t the Brexiteers? They’re always going on about ‘repatriating British laws’. This is one of the most basic of them.

The crucial point here that is that Britain is a Parliamentary democracy, not a plebiscitary one; and for good practical as well as historical reasons, which I outlined in a previous post: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/11/06/british-laws-for-british-people/. Parliament allows the democracy time for careful deliberation – a bill, three readings, a Committee stage, then on to the Lords, and the rest. The ‘people’s’ decision in this case – the referendum – was momentary, by contrast, and distorted by extraneous considerations, especially a wish to give the government a bloody nose over anything; as well as by the grossly misleading propaganda – or what we’re now being invited to call ‘alternative facts’ – on especially (though not exclusively) the Brexit side. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/.) So, by one single moment of collective unrest, or madness if you like, the whole character of our country is fundamentally altered: our wider freedoms curbed; one of our identities taken away from us; and our economy weakened and put more at the mercy of global markets. (So much for ‘taking back control’.) Isn’t that a decision that ought to be deliberated on? It’s as though a sick person were being asked to make a crucial life decision at the highest point of a fever. And on this occasion, unlike after the recent American Presidential election, there’s little chance of our coming back and reversing that decision after four years.

I imagine that’s why the leading Brexiteers are so passionate, even violent, in their insistence that Brexit go forward without further debate. They got this little moment of time, to the surprise of nearly all of them, when the public’s dissatisfaction with things more generally gave them the vote they wanted; delay any longer, or go through the normal constitutional procedures, and that moment will probably have passed. Personally, I would have thought that this was a good enough reason for Parliament to reject May’s upcoming bill if they want to. I would, if I were an MP. (And I’ll ask my MP to.) But of course the Mail and the Sun, speaking for ‘the people’, would have its guts for garters if it did.

Hurry up, Migrationsverket, and restore my European (via Swedish) citizenship to me before it’s too late.