Porter’s Pensées

The British Empire, as well as being a site of conquest, exploitation, racism and atrocity, also harboured pockets of idealism, good intentions, and – just occasionally – good outcomes. The best of these (apart of course from cricket) was the establishment of the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ – subsequently simply ‘The Commonwealth’ – as a repository for most of Britain’s colonies and dominions after their ‘liberation’. The Commonwealth was imbued with a number of ‘standards’, which were supposed to reflect British ‘values’, especially political ones; and which included democracy, self-government, human rights and anti-racism. Not all these ideals were lived up to (which was why South Africa left in 1961); but they always stood as an aspiration, at the very least, for all its 56 members.

Of course the original thirteen North American British colonies were never among that number, chiefly because they broke away too early to join. Canada was, however; indeed, fighting successfully to preserve its position in the old British Empire and then the Commonwealth, and to retain a portion, at any rate, of its ‘Britishness’, and of British ‘values’, against pressure from the United States. Australia is another Commonwealth nation that remained ‘British’ in many respects (cricket is one) after its de facto independence, although many Aussies might not thank me for saying it.

Which makes it interesting that it is these two latter countries that have recently given the clearest single-finger gesture to Trump, in the form of national election results which are seen as direct repudiations of his whole political, cultural and economic philosophy. In the Canadians’ case, of course, it was partly a response to his stated ambition to annex them to the US as its ‘beloved fifty-first state’. But there may also be some significant differences between their societies, which arose originally from their divergent post-colonial histories; with the United States embracing a new set of values to replace the ones Britain had left with them. These included rugged individualism, the frontier spirit, its gun culture, an ignorant populism, showmanship, and – of course initially – slavery.

So post-independence America became dominated by capitalists, cowboys and conspiracy theorists. Not that these were entirely absent from Britain – frontierism, for example, Ned Kelly, and colonial slavery, albeit at a distance from home – but to a lesser extent; and combined with other inherited values which are today considered rather ‘woke’. Could this at least partly account for the difference between Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe on the one hand, and Trump’s America on the other? Does it all go back to 1776? Might it have been different if the thirteen colonies had remained under the protective wing of the mother hen?

Just an idea; from an old imperial historian trying to make his subject relevant.

Can anyone any longer doubt the Fascist proclivities of the Trump administration? It is now even targeting West Point Military Academy, in its aim to force an uncritical and über-‘patriotic’ mindset on Army cadets.

And MAGA make themselves out to be the champions of ‘free speech’. – We need to read 1984 again. Orwell intended it as a warning; but here we are.

During the Corbyn era, the Labour Party’s alleged anti-semitism played a leading part in its electoral defeat in 2019. The accusation goes back a few years; although certainly not to the origins of the Labour Party, which was one of the main opponents of any kind of racism, and a major supporter of Jewish causes in the early 20^th century. Anti-semitism then was mainly the province of the political Right.

I first commented on modern Labour and ‘anti-semitism’ ten years ago: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/28/anti-semitism-and-labour/. I was a member of the party then, as I should acknowledge, as you may think it gives me an interest in defending it. But my arguments for objecting to this kind of demonization of Corbyn, in that post and in subsequent ones, still stand on their own merits, I would claim, and need stating again.

Especially, I would say, for me here in Sweden, where Vänsterpartiet is currently being tarred with the same brush as British Labour was then: see https://bernardjporter.com/2025/04/11/leftist-anti-semitism-in-sweden/. Last night the party held a ‘crisis meeting’ over this via Skype. (My line on the particular issue raised is that the offending MP should have resigned over it, whether she is a good MP otherwise or not. Her intervention was at the very least unwise, and leaves her party vulnerable.)

The reason I’m blogging on this today however is that the issue has resurfaced, in connection with recent accusations against universities, in both Britain and America, of not doing enough to combat anti-semitism among both students and faculty there. – Now, on the one hand, none of us should be surprised at any resurgence of anti-semitism today, in the wake of Netanyahu’s and the IDF’s blatant atrocities in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. I remember the feelings in Britain against ‘the Germans’, as a people, being equally condemnatory for a few years after the Second World War and the opening of Auschwitz. (I think I shared these, as a very young boy.) Of course that was grossly unfair; but it was understandable. It’s easy to channel even righteous anger on to a particular racial group. In the present case some of the criticism of Israel may well express a pre-existing racial prejudice; but it’s important to realise that this isn’t always so. Netanyahu’s crimes are condemned by many Jews in Israel too.

Unfortunately not everyone shares this view. One of the difficulties stems from an  ‘IHRA working definition of anti-semitism’ (IHRA stands for the ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’), which many reject as far too open-ended, but which is treated as holy writ by Israel’s very vocal and influential defenders (the ‘Israel Lobby’?) in Britain and America. (There’s an excellent ‘Wiki’ piece on the controversy over this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHRA_definition_of_antisemitism).

But what particularly struck me this morning was a radio interview with someone from the Israeli Embassy, which leant heavily on that controversial ‘definition’; and in particular took aim at a discussion by students of a recently-published book called Understanding Hamas, and Why That Matters (by Helena Cobban and Rami G. Khouri, October 2024). ‘You wouldn’t discuss a book called Understanding Hitler, would you?’ claimed the contributor, as her coup de grâce.  – Well, yes! We would, and do. There are many books trying to get to the bottom of Nazism, and were even during World War II. You need to understand your enemy in order to defeat him: as any general will tell you.

Beyond that, it’s surely every university’s main purpose to try to ‘understand’ everything. So the Israeli spokeswoman was implicitly attacking not only Hamas, or her perceived anti-semites, but also academics like me (I’ve researched many horrible things); and the whole function of universities, and even of education generally. That’s why I take personal umbrage at her intervention. And will continue criticising Israel’s bombing, starving and possibly now annexation of Gaza (as well of course as condemning Hamas atrocities), while continuing to support the many brave Jews and Israelis who criticise these horrors too.

Around 1900 the ‘science’ of Eugenics was invented by Francis Galton. It was taken seriously in Germany and the southern States of America in the 1930s – as well as in Sweden, as it happens. Not so much in Britain, however; where gross poverty among the working classes raised fears about the quality of the British-imperial racial ‘stock’, leading some to advocate ‘eugenic’ solutions – that is, euthanising the weak, or merely allowing them to die off, and encouraging geniuses to breed; but which were broadly discarded; in favour of the alternative approach, of strengthening the ‘unfit’ by means of social reform. Eugenics then became a no-no, too closely associated with Nazism and slavery to be a respectable academic or political line of thought.

With that historical precedent in mind, I’ve been disturbed by recent suggestions in America, mainly on the political Right, that eugenics might be adopted once again, this time as a national policy of racial recovery. You’ll know about Elon Musk’s sperm-spreading with carefully selected partners, on the assumption that he is particularly gifted in the ‘IQ’ department (which I’ve never accepted, by the way). But it goes further than this. Here’s the recent press report that filled me with particular horror this morning: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/04/maga-soft-eugenics.

So, here comes Robert Kennedy – that repository of all kinds of weird conspiracy theories, and currently Trump’s Health Minister – to bio-engineer the future American ‘master-race’. That’s MAGA with a vengeance. Don’t tell me that History never repeats itself.

The elections last Thursday were for local councillors and mayors (except one: a Parliamentary bye-election due to an MP’s resignation. That one went to Reform too).

I’m afraid I’ve never taken much interest in local politics, and so am not sure what the newly-elected councillors and mayors can do; but the followng Facebook post, by a organisation calling itself ‘Ripples’ (‘a progressive digital campaigning platform launched in 2020; registered non-profit and not supported by any political party’), may gives a few clues.

‘Their first acts in office? Reform leader Nigel Farage has declared that he wants to set up a Trump-style ‘DOGE’ in every council to make brutal spending cuts. He has warned anyone at a council “working on climate change initiatives or diversity” to seek “alternative careers”. Reform’s new mayor of Lincolnshire, Andrea Jenkyns, even declared that she wants to put refugees in “tents”’.

That’s for starters.

I’m comforting myself after last week’s earthquake by thinking that not all Reform voters were rabid right-wingers. Disillusionment with politics generally was clearly a factor, with Reform’s carefully cultivated anti-politics image drawing the disillusioned in. If there had been a new anti-establishment left-wing party with as much popular allure as Nigel gave to Reform, it might have taken some of those votes. (The leftish-wing Lib-Dems took some of them, but they’re still too ‘establishment’.) And of course a national election – due in Britain in about four years’ time – won’t necessarily reflect these local results.

Another encouraging bit of news has been the recent national election results from Canada and Australia; suggesting in both cases that Trump was a negative factor, alienating voters from right-wing, Trump-like policies. Let’s hope that as he goes on he’ll antagonise more and more people in the rest of the world; and hopefully in America too.

Still, I can see the lasting appeal of many of the common planks in the populist programme world-wide: its anti-wokery, its (often fake) nostalgia, its deep resentment of the clever people who are mocking it (Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’), its tribalism, its democracy (in a fashion), its appeal to the (false) god of ‘common sense’; – all this I feel I could share with the populists, if I weren’t as privileged as I am in so many ways. Add resentment of social inequality, of capitalist greed and of indiscriminate bombing to that list, and a left-wing populism might be as powerful as Trump’s and Farage’s versions clearly are.

Our new mayor of Hull – the boxer – seems a nice boy, and untrammelled by political dogma (https://bernardjporter.com/2025/05/02/a-mayoral-election/). Maybe he’s young enough to think again?

JD Vance clearly dislikes Europe generally; but he appears to harbour a particular animus against Britain. Recently he was reported to be insisting on her abandoning her ‘hate speech’ laws, as a condition for the US’s entering into a commercial treaty with her. (See https://www.advocate.com/politics/us-uk-trade-deal-lgbtq.) Remember also what he said about Britain in a speech to a ‘Peace Conference’ in Munich this last February, accusing her of imprisoning people for ‘silently praying’, outside an abortion clinic. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYHjv7QnLLw.)

This was in order to illustrate his main argument: which was that the chief danger to Europe currently comes not from Russia or China or the Middle East, or from domestic terrorists, but ‘from within’. More specifically, it comes from ‘liberals’ and the so-called ‘wokerati’, who are seeking to limit ‘free speech’ (and prayer), in Britain especially. It’s all a question of ‘values’, which he claims used to be held in common between America and Europe, but no longer are. This – Liberalism, in its European and British form – now poses an existential danger to ‘Western civilisation’, no less; which it should therefore be the first priority of the Munich Peace Conference to address.

OK, that’s debateable (possibly); but in any event for Vance to use a pretty minor – and misunderstood – cultural and legal difference between the UK and America to interfere with a trade agreement between them, seems disproportionate. That’s especially so when Britain might point to cultural peculiarities on the American side which are arguably more problematical, like the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, and many of Trump’s recent query-Fascistic Executive Orders. ‘Motes and beams’ come to mind.

This however illustrates one new element that has entered into both domestic politics and international diplomacy since the rise of the Right in recent years. Values have sometimes – although not too often – played a part in foreign policy, usually in support of boycotts against nations that are felt to have offended against international standards of ‘human rights’; but usually deployed from the Left side of politics, and opposed by the ‘Realpolitiker’ Right. If Vance’s suggestion that we in Britain should be excluded from American markets because of our domestic laws is taken up, it could signal the arrival of a whole new system of global trade; and indeed of the relations between our two peoples generally.

Well, my city’s mayoralty – a newly created one – has fallen to an ex-professional Olympic boxer (he won gold in the bantamweight class in 2012), who was a bit of a hero here in Hull, but so far as I know has had no political experience or serious political ideas. He was the right-wing Reform Party’s candidate, and was obviously chosen because of his local appeal, which brought him victory in yesterday’s election by a landslide.

On the other hand, the turnout for the election was under 30%; and his share of that only 35.8%. So this was hardly the major endorsement of Nigel Farage’s movement that he (and more neutral commentators) are claiming. In each of the elections that took place yesterday, Reform was competing against a number of parties, who between them will have ‘split’ the anti-Right vote. (The party I voted for was one of them.) With any other system of voting, Reform would probably have lost. But that’s what you get with ‘First Past The Post’ (see https://bernardjporter.com/?s=first+past). (You could say the same, incidentally, about last year’s British General Election).

The reasons behind this bizarre result are, of course, the low state in which traditional politics have fallen recently (’they’re all the same’); people’s political ignorance generally; and the trivialisation of the electoral process, which is seen as a popularity contest rather than a serious choice between serious politicians and their policies. Boris started this trend; now Nigel Farage is exploiting it. Hence Luke Campbell’s appeal to the good people of Hull and the East Riding.

Trump’s knowledge of his own country’s history is not very sound. If it were, he’d know that America tried to annex Canada once before, in 1812, and failed. This was because the Canadians resisted then, as they appear to be doing today.

Americans (that is, US Americans) sometimes refer to The War of 1812 as their ‘Second War of  Independence’; but that is nonsense. You might just as well call the present war in Ukraine a fight for Russia’s independence. (Indeed, there’s an argument for that.) Back in 1812 the Brits, with colonial and also native American help, were only fighting to save their bit of the North American continent. And it’s probably good that they did; otherwise we wouldn’t have present-day Canada to act as a counter-weight to the excesses of the Great Republic, and of its current President.

British imperialism is conventionally reckoned to have been a thoroughly bad thing. But in certain circumstances – usually when it mainly impacted on white colonial subjects – liberation from British rule, or from British protection, could have its downsides. Canada’s separation from the USA made little or no difference to its people’s ‘freedoms’ overall – British imperial suzerainty was a very light, indeed almost non-existent, burden; and it also meant that it preserved some British governmental and social institutions there, which are likely to have informed the Canadian people’s present sense of difference from their southern neighbours. Looking at Canada from over here in Europe, most of us – and not only her Commonwealth partners – are more likely to identify with her than with the USA. Canada’s Parliamentary system – I guess that government by ‘executive order’ would be next to impossible there – and its very different healthcare system, may be crucial factors here. Trump’s myopic, real estate-capitalist view of the world probably blinds him to these kinds of factors. And also perhaps to Canadians’ very unTrump-like ‘niceness’ (in my experience, anyway). But they will be crucial, I imagine, to Canadians’ reluctance to becoming his ‘beloved fifty-first State’.

Perhaps the USA could become Canada’s ‘beloved’ eleventh (or is it fifteenth?) Province’. That might stem the flow of Americans (Harvard academics, for example) currently fleeing there. When Harvard College was founded, after all, it was still British.

There’s very little more one can say about Trump. He must currently be the most famous person on the planet. (I imagine he revels in that.) Of course there may still be new Trumpian scandals to be revealed – kompromats, perhaps, going back to secret trysts in Moscow hotels years back, when he was touting for money from Russian oligarchs to save him from bankruptcy – but these would not surprise anyone, or damage his reputation among his supporters; who will probably dismiss them as ‘fake news’, or otherwise will have been inured to this sort of thing. After all, they’ve tolerated his known misdeeds until now. To the rest of us – probably a large majority of people world-wide – he’s obviously an appalling character: deeply dishonest, selfish, narcissistic, stupid, a liar, woefully ignorant, tasteless, illusionist, mean, over-sensitive, revengeful, hateful, insincere, amoral, instinctively criminal; and even (surely?) ridiculous; so much so, indeed, that it genuinely puzzles most of us outside America that that he could possibly have been voted in as President a second time.

The mystery of Trump and his appeal will be debated by historians for decades to come. Because the US is now so deeply divided – look at all the ‘comments’ on social media – we are far from any kind of agreement over why he is like he is, and why so many of his compatriots support him. Some think it’s rooted in Trump’s own personal psychology; others in local and contemporary cultural trends that he may reflect; while a third explanation is that he’s simply part of a global phenomenon: the American version of the ‘great reaction’ that is hitting almost every country now.

The psychological explanation is something that psychologists need to work on – not me. I have no expertise in this field. (If I had, I’d want to take a good look at his awful father, bearing in mind Philip Larkin’s famous line about parenthood.) But I leave that to others. – On the second kind of explanation – local and contemporary influences – I feel I have a little more purchase, having studied American history and lived and worked there at various times; and even before then having been brought up on ‘Western’ (cowboy) and gangster films and comic-books, which reflect an American popular culture that must have left its mark even on more modern minds. The pistol-toting range-rider, reclaiming vast wildernesses from the native American ‘savages’, and meting out rough justice to outlaws and Latinos, used to be held up as your typical American hero; until the ‘woke’ (or rather pre-woke) brigade, with their sentimental regard for the gun-slingers’ Amerindian victims, arrived to rub away some of our heroes’ sheen. ‘Individualism’ was a common virtue running through all of this, and indeed through American culture and society more generally; expressed best, perhaps, but also most tediously, in the novels of Ayn Rand. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2025/01/30/ayn-rand/.) This, together with male violence, plucky mothers; and of course guns.

Another contemporary cultural characteristic that will have influenced – and probably moulded – Trump’s personality was American capitalism; the ‘red in tooth and claw’ version that reached its apogee there and then, and which has dominated not only Trump’s personal upbringing (that awful father again), but American life and discourse more generally for at least two hundred years. All Trump’s words, actions, policies and ambitions are clearly rooted in what he learned as a real estate developer; the particular and least productive branch of the modern capitalist system that he is supposed to have excelled at, but might not have done if it had not been for all those Russian loans. I’ve not got around to it yet; but his famous early book The Art of The Deal (1987), albeit ghost-written, might be worth reading to see whether it gives as many clues as to what goes on in his mind as Mein Kampf did in Hitler’s case. Everything Trump has done in his first hundred days as 47^th President bears the mark of the ‘Dealer’; negotiating man-to-man with rivals and enemies to divide property – in this case international real estate – between them. To him, it’s as simple as that. The claims of democracy, principle, history, morality and justice don’t come into it; just as they wouldn’t if he were merely haggling over the price of a piece of land on which to build a new ‘Trump Tower’. It would depend solely on the material value of the property, its potential, and on the ‘cards’ that he and the other side held in their hands. (Remember that one of the early ventures he failed at was running a casino.)

It’s no wonder that Putin finds him so easy to manipulate, and that Trump has thrown in the towel with him over Ukraine. He can’t easily or profitably win that ‘deal’, and so the only sensible – businesslike – solution is to cash in his stake and withdraw. He’s done much the same over Gaza. At the same time he has appointed a score of his fellow billionaire capitalists to his cabinet, some of them real estate developers like him, who will have the same skills – but also the same limitations – as he has. In other words, he’s running the country as a business; and the last thing the CEO of any business wants is to be hedged about by ‘principles’, or beholden to a democracy. Hence his authoritarian and unconstitutional ‘executive order’ approach to governing in his first hundred days. It’s the capitalist coming through, again.

I made the point in my book Empire and Superempire, which compares British and American historical ‘imperialisms’, that they both followed broadly the same pattern, of economic dominance followed by annexation; except that America usually – but not invariably (viz. Hawaii and Puerto Rico) – avoided the annexation stage, at least overseas. That will no longer apply, however, if Trump’s wettest dreams come to pass, and he does a full-on ‘Cecil Rhodes’, by bringing Greenland, Canada, Panama and Gaza  under the formal protection of the Stars and Stripes. (Rhodes called his acquisitions ‘Rhodesia’. Is Trump swollen-headed enough to rename Greenland ‘Trumpland’?)

Lenin called this kind of thing ‘the last stage of capitalism’ – before, that is, the whole system’s collapse. The extreme Right-wing movements emerging all over the world just now, of which Trump’s is one, might be taken as evidence of exactly this: the final throes of a global capitalist system struggling to survive against the inevitable contradictions that are gnawing at it internally, provoking uncertainty and unrest, manifested in various forms of protest; of which ‘Populism’ and ‘Fascism’ are the two main ones – and ‘socialism’ might be another, although that’s not looking too likely just now. This sort of analysis would hugely expand the context in which to place and explain ‘Trumpism’, and the neo- or proto- or quasi-‘Fascism’ which it is now widely acknowledged to represent. But isn’t that a bit too ‘Marxist’ for comfort?

In my day, sixty-odd years ago, British universities were predominately Conservative politically, or at least the ‘élite’ ones were. I attended one of those top ‘Unis’, as they’re called now (we called ourselves a ‘Varsity’), joining a college where my fellow students (or ‘undergrads’, as we preferred to call ourselves: ‘students’ went to inferior, or ‘red brick’ universities) were predominantly upper-middle class, and from ‘public’ (private) schools. I guessed that there were far more Lefties in the ‘red bricks’; but at my college I was the only one: or at any rate the only one who joined the university Labour Club; and as a result was appointed Labour’s ‘college rep’ there. (That was quite fun: it got me invited to dinners at the Union with cabinet ministers.) I remember one of my new upper-class college friends – an Etonian, actually, and an ‘Hon’, rather like Harry Enfield’s ‘Tim Nice but Dim’ – coming to my room for coffee one afternoon, and spotting the Labour Club card on my mantelpiece. ‘Gosh, Bernard,’ he said; ‘I didn’t know you were Labour. I think if I’d been in your position I’d have been a socialist too!’ At the time I took that as a compliment. Thinking about it later, however…

Now that the ancient universities are a little more democratic, they must have a far greater proportion of left-wing students, as clearly the ‘red bricks’ have always had. America’s Ivy League colleges clearly do too. Which will be a main reason why Trump is presently engaged in such a vicious war with them – see https://fortune.com/article/trump-government-overreach-slammed-princeton-brown-colleges-universities/ – and why the universities are also particular objects of suspicion on the British Right.

Why is this? Their democratisation may have something to do with it, with the new ‘lower-class’ students being more open to democratic thinking than the toffs I studied with. (Which of course is not to imply that public school products are bound to be Tory. Look at George Orwell.) As I understand it, nearly fifty per cent of all children in Britain now go on to university, which has obviously taken the latter deeper into the proletariat. (I don’t have the figures for the USA, although I’ve taught at universities there.) All recent opinion polls have shown that this is a key determinant of British views on issues like Brexit, on which the university-educated were far more likely (74%) to have voted to ‘remain’ in the EU than were the rest of the population (https://www.statista.com/statistics/572613/brexit-votes-by-education/). On the other hand, class is no longer quite as reliable an indication of political allegiance as it used to be. That may be an effect of modern ‘Populism’.

Which leaves the possibility that it’s the education itself that lies at the root of this, rather than the social class of the educated. Of course, as a Left-wing ex-educator myself I’m predisposed to hope this is so, as it makes my life’s calling a more valuable one, and so massages my amour propre. Obviously it depends on the sort of education you have: the best subjects are probably the ‘thinking’ ones (like mine!) – the ‘humanities’, in other words – rather than the mechanical and utilitarian ones. But most university courses, and many school ones, as well as the whole higher educational experience, encourage critical thinking; which might not invariably turn you into a Lefty, but in any event will arm you with better reasons for holding whatever political views you have.

That could explain why universities are associated today with Leftism, and with what their enemies call ‘wokery’; and in America’s case with the critical – that is, unflattering – views of past American history which Rightists like JD Vance feel are undermining the ‘patriotism’ that is so essential to the Trumpian agenda of ‘making America great again’. (The clue is in that last word.)

We academics like to see the universities as cradles of new and critical thinking – sometimes wrong-headed and even silly, but all ideas need to be aired and tested – and of what used to be called ‘enlightenment’. The extreme Right however appears to regard them simply as elitist bodies infected by a disease – Vance has called it ‘the woke virus’ – which needs to be purged, painfully. (They are also being linked with ‘anti-semitism’. What’s the truth of this? I have no way of telling; but in Britain we know only too well how powerful that charge can be, but also how easily it can be falsely ‘weaponised’.)

These perceived weaknesses are what are being exploited now by Trump at Columbia, Harvard and other prestigious US colleges, with a campaign that is reminiscent of some of the worst fascist and totalitarian book-burning regimes of the past; and I’m sure is being viewed enviously by the ‘Reform UK’ party over in Britain. On one level it may be simply a continuation of the popular ‘anti-intellectualism’ which has been a powerful trait in both the US and the UK for many decades (see Richard Hofstadter’s seminal Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 1963), and is clearly a comfort for many folk in both our countries. As Michael Gove (now a Lord) famously put it in 2017: ‘the people have had enough of experts’. And without expertise, an American President can do almost what he likes.