Porter’s Pensées

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rules for public utilities, and the general principle of democratic accountability for businesses, have all been repealed to please the American side.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.

‘Who do you think you are?’ is the title of a TV programme going into celebrities’ genealogies. (Sweden has an identical series, as I’m sure have other countries.) I’ve always objected to the title, which implies that ‘who one is’ is rooted in one’s genes, rather than environment. For this reason, and because it looks a bit narcissistic, I’ve never been tempted to trace my own family back, though my father did many years ago. (He stopped when he got back to an ancestor who, he told me, had been transported to a penal colony in Australia for keeping a muck-heap outside his house in Writtle.) It must have been difficult then, reliant as you were on written records kept all over the place. Nowadays, however, it is far easier, with many of these records having been digitalised, and put on the internet.

A friend of mine, Sylvie Slater, who is interested in doing this for other people – I can see why – the other day offered to trace my family back. She’s brilliant. Within a few days she came up with a family tree which goes back to the early 1800s, and which, in spite of myself, I found fascinating. One ancestor on my mother’s side was a publican; on my Dad’s side another was one of the last ‘boot closers’ in England before the trade became mechanised. (‘Boot closers’ hand-stitched the uppers to the soles.) My mother’s family seem to have been marginally ‘higher’ in class than my father’s – bobbing in and out of the lower-middles – which was why they refused to attend the wedding of their daughter to a mere working-class lad. His side was consistently proletarian: peasants, factory workers, and – in the cases of the girls and women – domestic servants. My father’s family also remained living all this time in rural Essex, while my mother’s family moved around: a sure sign of aspiring lower-middle class ambition. Instinctively, I tend to go for the Essex ones. They give me some solid ‘roots’ in a part of the country I love and spent my teens cycling around. I also like the fact that none of them was a nob. ‘Salt of the earth’, no doubt.

Sylvie’s only just started. I’m looking forward to hearing more from her. I don’t suppose she’ll get much further back – peasants don’t often leave records – but in the very unlikely event that she’ll reach, say, 1066, I’d be eager to see whether I was a Roman, a Saxon, a Norman, or a Dane. I’d much prefer Saxon; the others were all colonial conquerors (I dread coming across a poor innocent young girl in my blood-line raped by a marauding Viking), and being Saxon might explain my anti-imperial tendencies and academic interests today. If, that is, there is something in the ‘who do you think you are’ assumption.

Of course I’ve conveniently left out the fact that the Saxons, further back, were invaders themselves, imposing themselves on the original Celts. Perhaps if Sylvie can find some Welsh for me? Or Irish? (One of my mother’s forebears came from Liverpool. That was enough to get me into the hard-drinking Hibernian Society at Cambridge.) But I still like the idea of being Saxon. That would also account for my good looks.

Amoral capitalist con-artists are a fairly common feature in literature – off-hand I can think of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), and HG Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) – and of course in historical reality: lots in the early 1900s, then Robert Maxwell, Sir Philip Green and scores of others in more recent times. A few of them achieve political influence and power, though that’s a phenomenon usually associated with post-Soviet Russia and post-colonial Africa. Now we have it in the USA. This documentary from 2000, which Trump apparently prevented from being broadcast at the time, fills in the commercial background to The Donald’s tricky rise. It’s all there – lies, fantasy, denials, amoralism, vanity: the lot. Hopefully it will be released for free-to-view TV shortly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/5pdw64/donald_trump_a_narcissistic_sociopath_2000_a

However the story develops from now on, it’s bound to be – if you’ll forgive the cliche – ‘stranger than fiction’. No-one would believe all this if it came out of Hollywood, or from a BBC satirist’s pen. By rights Trump’s hubris should end in nemesis. But none of us can see exactly how that can work out; unless my chilling New Year prediction – https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/31/2017-prediction/ – comes true.

Demonstrations and marches – and I’ve been on a few in my time, beginning with Aldermaston (well, the Trafalgar Square bit) – can be terrific. There’s a great spirit of what I suppose you could call ‘solidarity’ there, mixing and shouting alongside people you agree with; making new friends, however temporary; reading new jokes (the placards); and getting some exercise in, to boot. Solidarity is an elusive atmosphere in our present-day ultra-individualist and fractured culture. Your first whiff of it as you emerge from the tube station into the crowd is like a stiff shot of whisky, or – I imagine – the first puff of a spliff. After it’s over, and the crowd has dispersed, you feel uplifted, warmed and strengthened by the support for your cause you’ve felt all around you, even at the darkest times. That can linger for a few days; until you start thinking: well, what on earth did that really achieve? Did it stop Britain developing its H-Bomb, or Blair from invading Iraq? Did it materially contribute to the fall of Apartheid? Or wasn’t it all, in truth, just a self-indulgent waste of time; in the Alt-Right’s new terminology, a ‘snowflake’ occasion?

Whatever the general truth may be of that rather depressing conclusion, I’m hoping it can’t be true in yesterday’s case. The crowds in Washington – mainly women for their own causes, provoked by the appalling misogyny of their new President, but joined by many men too, demonstrating against the same thing: isn’t women’s liberation also men’s liberation? as well as against the prospect of a Trump Presidency more generally – truly were amazing, and far larger than predicted; as were the scores of sympathy – ‘sister’ – demos in other cities and capitals nation- and world-wide. By all accounts far more people protested against Trump than attended his inauguration the previous day, and much more enthusiastically – certainly more entertainingly. Surely this must have some effect on an administration elected, legally but by a minority of American voters – 25% of the total possible electorate, and 3 million fewer than voted for Hillary – to give it pause for thought, at the very least.

Of course Trump isn’t the sort of person who pauses for thought – ever. He’s far too confident of his own instincts – he doesn’t have to read or be advised by ‘experts’, he says, because he’s ‘smart’ – and, essentially, vain. (As evidence of this, look again at that picture of him and our own dear Michael Gove giving ‘thumbs-up’ signs in Trump Tower, and in particular the framed pictures on his walls: most of them – including the sexy Playboy covers – portraits of him torn from the front pages of magazines like Time: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/internets-toes-curl-after-michael-9631162). But it’s this last weakness that I think might make him peculiarly vulnerable to the implications of events like yesterday’s Women’s March.

Part of his vanity consists in his insistence that he’s supported by virtually everyone in America apart from the ‘lying media’ and the despised intellectual – that is, book-reading – élite on the geographical edges of America; and even loved by the majority. In his election campaign he was always drawing attention to the huge crowds he gathered to hear him and chant his ridiculous catch-phrases: ‘Build the Wall!’, ‘Jail the Bitch!’, ‘Drain the Swamp!’ He lived by this, breathed it in, was warmed and enervated by it, just as we poor protesters were – temporarily – in Trafalgar Square. (So we can understand.)

But then yesterday came the hostile demos, which I don’t think he had predicted, or at least in such numbers; which is why he spent yesterday evening – when a new President should surely be concentrating on more important things – rubbishing the estimates of the numbers the ‘lying press’ were putting out, and even claiming that journalists were doctoring airborne views of his inauguration crowd to make it look smaller than it was, and in particular smaller than Obama’s. Of course it was smaller, and the number of protestors larger. Quite apart from that, however – the facts of the matter – isn’t it curious, and possibly alarming, that a President should be so obsessed with this kind of thing, a matter, only, of personal vanity, in his first day in post as ‘Leader of the Free World’?

We should have known. Remember the times on the election trail when he continually mentioned, quite irrelevantly, how ‘successful’ his Miss World competitions were, and mocked his successor on The Apprentice for getting lower ratings than he had? Together with his funny golden hair, and sensitivity about the size of his hands and other physical attributes, it seems to indicate a degree of sheer narcissism that goes far beyond any normal person’s, and might even be classed as ‘pathological’. One of the speakers at the Women’s March yesterday – Gloria Steinem (thanks, Kajsa) – listed a number of his faults, including delusions of grandeur, sensitivity to criticism, and the inability to separate fantasy from reality, which she thought might qualify as psychological illnesses. Narcissism should obviously be added to these. Does it make America’s new President mad? (Or madder than you need to be, to put yourself up for President?)

Whether yesterday’s demos will make any practical political difference, we can’t tell. If so, however, it will be by targeting this huge character flaw of the new President. What effect that will have on him and on all our lives in the next four years is a matter of guesswork. He’ll probably just deny it all as ‘fake news’; the ‘fantasy/reality’ thing.

My immediate reaction: Trump hasn’t changed at all, isn’t going to tack even a little from his position during the campaign. He’s genuine. It was a pretty good speech, I thought, for his audience. I kept imagining it spoken in 1930s German: the content was very similar. Leftists could, or should, agree with a lot of it. The tragedy is that it was mouthed by a quasi-fascist and socially reactionary American nationalist. He touched on grievances that, rightfully, should be being exploited by the socialists: people like Saunders and Corbyn – but weren’t by Clinton. And of course – I guess – he won’t be able to achieve half of what he has promised. What happens then is anyone’s guess. Hopefully not what happened in 1939.

Well, the day has come. I’ll be watching the inauguration on the telly with a couple of friends and fortified, hopefully to blessed oblivion, by a bottle or two (or three) of cheap French wine.

Who could have foreseen it? Yes, the crisis of unregulated global capitalism, possibly its ultimate one – a number of us predicted that, going right back to the blessed Karl. But not a crisis with someone like the Donald, and his cabinet of gross capitalists, as its main political beneficiaries. That’s an irony too far.

Historically there’s no close precedent – unless it’s Caligula’s horse. Reagan isn’t one: an extreme free trader, which Trump isn’t, and with a great deal of political experience before becoming President. I suppose ‘showmanship’ is the main similarity between them, and the thing that makes this a characteristically American phenomenon: BT Barnum, Hollywood, et al.

Another big difference is the extent and persistence of opposition to Trump both in the US – amongst the sizeable majority who voted against him, we must remember – and everywhere else in the world outside Russia. (Putin’s support for him is understandable, I think, not only or mainly because they’re both reactionaries and ‘dictators’, but because Trump says he wants to bring an end to the often paranoid and always dangerous hostility between their two countries which has blighted international politics for the past 70 years.) In Britain you can find hardly anyone who has a good word to say about Trump, at least publicly, apart from the ridiculous Farage and Gove. On a discussion programme on TV last night no-one in the audience raised a hand in his support. Anti-Trumpism is not only the dominant discourse in the UK, but a near-universal one.

Will this make any difference to his presidency? You would have thought it ought to – to make him pause before grabbing the nation’s pussy – but there’s been little sign of this so far. His inauguration speech will have been penned by others, I guess, and so coated with a statesmanlike veneer. If on the other hand it’s anything like his campaign speeches – ‘me me me’, mocking ‘losers’, thin-skinned, and with all those rhetorical gestures: the outspread arms, jutting jaw, pointy fingers, ‘believe me’s’ and so on – we should probably dive for cover straight away. Or, if we’re more sanguine, wait a while for him to plunge down in flames before long, through impeachment – there must be some financial as well as sexual scandals to be unearthed – or (God forbid) assassination at the hands of a gun owner: the true ‘American way’.

The best principled case for Brexit was always going to be the ‘internationalist’ one, painting the European Union as a protectionist cabal and a ‘white men’s club’, by contrast with the truly free trading, non-exclusive and friendly-to-everyone nation that Britain might become. That was the line taken by many of the opponents of Britain’s original entry into the Common Market (as it was then) in 1972. For at least two centuries up until then Britain had been a far more ‘international’ nation than any of her neighbours (France came closest), with her extra-European trade greatly exceeding her commerce with the European continent, and her people – emigrants, tourists, missionaries, explorers, scientific enquirers – venturing all over the globe. In this ‘wider world’ view, Europe even as a whole appeared almost parochial, and no-one in the nineteenth century would have regarded relations with it alone as meriting the term ‘internationalism’.

However, the fact that many of Britain’s relations with that wider world took the form of ‘imperialism’, implying domination, rather tarnished the idealistic aspect of this ‘outward-lookingness’ (as I called it in one of my books); with the result that a great effort was made in the early twentieth century to make it less obviously imperialistic, and therefore more genuinely ‘international’, by seeking to evolve the old Empire into a new, equal and multi-ethnic ‘Commonwealth of Nations’: a bit like a proto-UN. But of course not many people outside Britain – or even Leftists inside – could see or credit this; which is why Euroscepticism right up to the present day has often been confused with, or seen as the legacy of, the more old-fashioned or ‘Blimpish’ kind of imperialism.

Theresa May began her policy-defining talk on ‘Brexit’ today –  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/17/theresa-mays-brexit-speech-full – by appealing to this older kind of internationalism, which nowadays of course doesn’t need to carry any imperialist connotations. (No-one thinks we’re going to try to annex India again. Or America – though that might not be such a bad thing for it just now.) Unfortunately most of the press commentary seems to have ignored this part. But it’s important, and was fair enough to point out, harking back as it does to a venerable British tradition; which wasn’t an ignoble one, until it was hi-jacked by the empire builders and capitalist exploiters. – But of course the capitalist exploiters are still out there, no longer needing ‘nations’ to back them up, and indeed more internationally powerful than any single nation can be on its own; which is why I voted to ‘remain’ in this white men’s club, in the hope that it might be able to resist the behemoth collectively. I can’t see an independent Britain doing that. Which rather detracts from the idea that we can ‘regain control’.

I wonder what the Brexiteers thought of the speech? Many of them were racists. Exiting Europe certainly won’t do anything to stop the nig-nogs coming in. Indeed, May’s clear implication was that Indian doctors and students would be welcomed more than Polish plumbers. Jolly good, I say; but what about Nigel?

(I’m booked to give a paper on this in Genoa in April. These are my first thoughts.)