Porter’s Pensées

Interesting historical piece by a conservative Canadian/American.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/opinion/trump-mckinley-populism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Prince Harry’s utter vindication this morning in his High Court case against the Murdoch press (https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/prince-harry-v-murdoch-lawyers-due-back-court-after-last-gasp-deal-talks-2025-01-22/) is a rare ray of light in today’s on-going war between Good and Evil. I’ve not much time for the British royal family, least of all for Harry after the scandal of his wearing a Nazi uniform to a fancy-dress party twenty years ago (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jan/13/royalsandthemedia.pressandpublishing); but to my mind he has fully made up for that with the battle he has been waging, at some risk to himself, against our over-powerful and, yes, ‘evil’, Fourth Estate. It will be interesting to see what the Sun – his main adversary – makes of it all tomorrow.

Unfortunately it won’t have as much impact as it would have done in the days when people still read newspapers, before they switched to the social media. (Of course neither is completely evil; you still have the Guardian, and this blog.) In connexion with which it was depressing – even scary – to see our social media lords and masters given second-row seats at Trump’s Inauguration; quite apart from the (allegedly) Nazi salutes that one of them gave to a rally of MAGA Republicans shortly afterwards. I think that even the twenty year-old Harry would have baulked at that.

How many self-styled ‘democracies’ allow their elected leaders to pardon convicted criminals by ‘executive action’, without reference to the ‘due process’ that applies to the rest of their people? (I’m referring of course to the roughly 1600 Capitol rioters whom Trump pardoned yesterday. Of course Biden has done the same, as outgoing President.)

The reason in America’s case may be the legacy of the colonial ties she escaped from in 1776. The new-minted USA ditched its ‘mad’ British monarch then, but not all his monarchical privileges. The American President is essentially a George III de nos jours. In certain circumstances he can do what the hell he likes. In this respect, British leaders, at least, could be said to be more democratically accountable than Trump.

I doubt, too, incidentally, whether any European rulers would be comfortable with their rich backers celebrating their electoral triumphs with Nazi (or ‘Roman’) salutes (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/20/trump-elon-musk-salute).

But you never know what might come. I have to say I’m troubled. I’m almost grateful that, at my age, I probably won’t live to see the final victory of ‘fascism’ (or whatever), in its 21^st-century guise. Looking at the signs now, that guise will probably be late-stage capitalist, and scaringly technological. Look at Trump’s government, and his rich and nerdish backers. And be afraid; very afraid.

Recent studies in both Britain and Sweden have shown that over 20% of ‘young adults’ (18-40) would ‘prefer a dictatorship to democracy’. (For Britain, see https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/one-in-five-britons-aged-18-45-prefer-unelected-leaders-to-democracy-poll-finds; for Sweden, https://www.icenews.is/2011/06/15/young-swedes-pick-dictatorship-over-democracy/.)

Today’s US Presidential inauguration, however, seems to suggest that you can have both at the same time. Trump, who was democratically elected, has said that he wants to be a dictator, albeit only ‘on day one’. His long list of over 200 ‘executive actions’, to be announced this afternoon, may reveal what he meant by this. Part of his appeal clearly lies in people’s perception of him as a ‘strong leader’, which is halfway to dictatorship. That’s ‘populism’ for you. And a majority of Americans, as well as those 20+% of young British and Swedish adults, clearly prefer this to the indecisive, short-termist, divisive and messy results that democratic systems usually turn up. Vote for the Führer you prefer. (Or, in the USA, the capitalist.) That’s squared the circle; if, that is, your idea of ‘democracy’ is that very simple one.

I’m not sure whether SvT will be covering the US Presidential inauguration, but if not I’ll be following it on my laptop, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2L-knUrFi8. Bring out the Coors.

Maybe I was over-optimistic, or simply naïve, in thinking that my dual Swedish citizenship, in which I take great comfort, was irrevocable. It is according to present Swedish law. But a Parliamentary Committee is currently discussing whether the constitution should now be amended in order to enable citizenship to be revoked (for duals only) from certain classes of citizens:

• If they are found guilty of crimes which pose a serious threat to Sweden’s security, such as espionage, terrorism, sabotage, treason, or rebellion
• If they are found guilty of crimes covered by the International Criminal Court, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression 
• If they received their citizenship on false grounds, either through supplying false documents or information or by bribing or threatening government officials.

On first reading I was (personally) reassured by this. I have no intention of committing any of those heinous crimes; am pretty sure that my original application was honest and accurate; and can’t remember offering any bribes to Migrationsverket.

Following the Committee’s debates, however (as reported in the English-language Local newspaper), it’s clear that some of its members would like to broaden its scope to include any dual citizen who ‘seriously threatens the state’s vital interests’; which of coarse is much vaguer, and more subjective. Leftists are afraid it might cover people who think like them (and me); especially if the far-Right Sverigedemokraterna ever take control. Which they might.

Quite apart from this, it’s very likely that Sweden will impose a Swedish language test on future applicants for citizenship. I have a certain sympathy for that; but it would have excluded me.

I’m lucky to be living most of the time now in Sweden; always regarded as the ‘shining city on the hill’ by us old Labourites, even by those – like me – who had never visited the place, but had read about the near-perfection of its ‘social democracy’. When I started coming here in the 1990s (for other reasons), I was not disappointed; and still am not after nearly 30 years. It’s a highly civilised country, with efficient industries, excellent public services, strong trade unions, general equality, an almost universal sense of social responsibility, good and affordable health care, farmers brought into the cities with their tractors in winter to shift the snow, free university education, universal and state-funded parental (not just maternal) leave, humane prisons, clean streets, a cashless system for buying things (‘Swish’ – all you need is your mobile phone), and doctors’ prescriptions computerised – so we can get them at any Apotek. For those of us who miss ‘home’ (pathetically), there are English pubs all over, with names like the Friar Tuck, the Beefeater, and the Old Brewery, a couple of them serving Sunday roasts… I could go on. And of course we have masses of unspoilt nature, urban beauty, long warm summer days, and natives who are polite and friendly, and generally speak better English than we do.

Of course it’s not perfect. Winter’s a bit of a bugger; but houses are treble-glazed to keep us warm. The native food, although usually healthy, as you might expect here, is not always to my taste (raw herring and meatballs); but there are some excellent Indian and Thai restaurants around, and I can of course cook for us: Kajsa particularly likes my Shepherd’s Pie and Lancashire Hotpot. (And I’m getting a taste for the herring: not strictly ‘raw’, in fact, but marinated in vinegar.) There are beggars – supposedly Romanians – sitting outside tunnelbana stations. The state can seem a little intrusive – but I’ve become comfortable with that, and it helps when we’re filling out our tax forms – see the end of my 20 November post. We’re struggling just now with a minor case of misplaced bureaucracy (a parking charge; Kajsa doesn’t even own a motor-bike!); but we’ll soon sort that. The taxes are a bit higher; but only a bit, and look what we get for them! Pubs and restaurants are relatively expensive, but mainly because they pay decent wages to their staff. There are very occasional far Right demos: an anti-Fascist meeting Kajsa had helped to arrange was attacked by one of them a few weeks ago, but when their masks slipped they turned out to be adolescent boys. On the whole it’s pretty good here for most of us – apart perhaps from the Romanians. The ‘Swedish model’ seems to be working still; standing almost alone (together with the other Nordic countries) against the global neo-liberal tsunami that broke over other countries in Thatcher’s and Reagan’s time.

But ominous clouds are forming, even over this ‘shining city’ of mine. We no longer have a Social Democratic government, but a centre-Right coalition being pushed to the further Right by the relatively new ‘Sweden Democrats’ – ex-Nazis – who are close in their political philosophies to Trump, Farage, the AfD, and similar tendencies in France, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere. ‘Free’ schools – free to their students but owned by and run as businesses – are often problematical. Privatisation is creeping in other fields. State subsidies for culture and even newspapers – keeping the latter free from the right-wing bias that pervades the British press – have been drastically reduced. Sweden’s generous citizenship laws are being stiffened; if I had waited much longer to apply for it, my own (dual) nationality might not have been granted now. And on the wider political front, Sweden has just joined NATO, which she had pointedly avoided for eighty years. That may have been a good or a bad decision; but while her ‘neutrality’ lasted it had reinforced her image of difference from the rest of the world.

Today’s advance of the extreme Right – nationalism, racism, sexism and the rest – is of course a global phenomenon. I came to Sweden partly to escape it. (I call myself a ‘Brexit refugee’.) So far I remain happy with that decision. But will I feel the same about it in five years’ time (if I last that long)? The auguries are not clear.

All those nineteenth-century anti-democrats’ warnings about the evils of ‘mob rule’ – see https://bernardjporter.com/2019/03/31/the-mob/ – seem to be coming to roost now, in the new guise of ‘populism’. There can be little doubt that ignorance and stupidity are two of the elements that fuel political discourse currently, on all sides, of course, but most noticeably and dangerously (I would say) on the Right. We’ve witnessed several example of literal ‘mobs’ in the US and the UK recently (Washington 2021, British cities 2024); all of them expressing typical Right-wing complaints, and many of them coloured by far-Right conspiracy theories. It’s not necessarily their fault, of course, but a response to real – but ignored – grievances and concerns, boosted and manipulated by both the millionaire-owned mainstream media and, now, the billionaire-owned ‘social’ sort.

There are general questions to be asked over whether foreign-based multi-millionaires of any political persuasion (and they are likely to be Rightist, because they’re rich) ought to have so much influence over any country’s domestic politics. There are also questions to be asked about the veracity of the information they put out: how we can tell whether it’s true or reliable, or untrue enough to be discouraged or even censored by the ‘fact-checkers’ who used to be employed to establish the reliability of posts on blogsites, until Musk and Zuckerberg came along. Is it only a ‘freedom of speech’ issue, as those two chappies maintain? And – more philosophically – what is truth? One doesn’t have to go all the way down the ‘postmodern’ burrow, or adhere to Kellyanne Conway’s 2017 line on ‘alternative facts’, to think that Trump’s claim that the USA’s alliance with Italy goes back to the days of the Roman Empire, or Musk’s description of Labour minister Jess Phillips as a ‘rape genocide apologist’ (and there’s more where that comes from), were anything but grotesque lies: stupid in the first case, malevolent in the second. True or untrue, the fact that these views have millions of dollars projecting them on to the internet, whereas the rest of us only have a single comment or vote each (or at best a newspaper article) to disagree with them, can’t be healthy for a democratic politics.

Quite apart from their distribution, where do these views – in general terms – come from? I think I glimpsed a clue when I once lived in the USA, and heard this comment on a night-time phone-in radio programme. (I’ve quoted it before, possibly more than once, but think it’s worth repeating.) The topic for discussion was the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945. The host brought up the issue of the London Blitz. A phoner-in justified that by claiming it was ‘in retaliation’ for the Dresden bombing. The problem with this, of course is that the Blitz came four years before Dresden. When this was pointed out to the speaker, his reply was I think revealing: ‘I’m a free American and can believe whatever I like.’ Could that be the mind-set that lies behind Trump’s and Musk’s dangerous howlers?

Or it may be simply the amoralism that seems to be endemic in Right-wing politics these days: the idea that in a flawed political world what persuades is more important than what is true. Especially if it can be trumpeted over and over again, by those whose views can be amplified – in the present case by social media – and to people who rely on headlines and slogans, and have not been educated to discriminate between propaganda and likely truth. Surveys of the educational attainments of each of the sides in recent national debates in Britain and the USA indicate that the ‘populist’ Right is relatively unschooled by comparison with ‘progressives’. Which is why ‘populists’ demean schooling so much – ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ (Michael Gove) – and put them in the ‘élitist’ category that is the common target of most of them.

Which of course raises the hackles of the populists even more, and is a further obstacle to a politics of a more considered and rational kind. Listen to any phone-in programme today and you will find stupidity in abundance. Dare to say it, however, and you’re immediately dismissed as one of those liberal, wokeish ‘elitists’. It’s depressing.

Solutions? Electoral reform. A ban on rich people having too much influence on the internet. Dissociate yourself from the most outlandish ‘woke’ ideas. An educational system that prioritises thinking over everything else.  And perhaps take Musk off his anti-depressants. (What are the side-effects of ketamine?)

Anyone who is alarmed by Trump’s recently-expressed expansionist ambitions – Greenland, Canada, Panama, and even Britain – and is curious about the place of US ‘imperialism’ in modern history, might like to take a look at my Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (Yale University Press, 2006). Its argument is that the United States, despite its anti-colonial pretensions – ‘we don’t do empire’ (Donald Rumsfeld) – has long been ‘imperialistic’ in much the same way as nineteenth-century Britain was, and with similar motivations, methods and results. Most people outside the US, especially on the Left, won’t need to be told this; but it’s important to know, especially just now.

I’m sure this has occurred to many others; but what’s the chance of Johnson defecting to Reform UK to become its leader – and then possibly a second-term  prime minister – after Musk’s ditching of Farage?

Musk’s interventions in British politics recently – and also in German, Canadian and (of course) American affairs – are clearly worrying. In the first place many of them are misinformed, especially the ones blaming Starmer and his ‘Safeguarding’ Minister Jess Phillips for covering up child-rape gang crimes: Phillips to the extent of claiming that she should be sent to prison for being (I quote) ‘a rape genocide apologist’. He also thinks that King Charles should prorogue Parliament to enable another general election; in which he has indicated that he would generously finance the ‘Reform UK’ Party (or Limited Company) in order to propel his new friend (but vide infra) Nigel Farage into Number 10.

All these indicate two things: a very weak grasp of British constitutional politics, as well as of ‘truth’ in the cases he makes against Starmer and Phillips (who surely have grounds for libel actions against him); and secondly, what is now revealed as his extreme right-wing approach to politics generally, putting him in the company not only of Farage, but also of Trump, Meloni in Italy, the AfD in Germany, and probably Putin. In Sweden (where I’m living) he’s currently in conflict with the powerful trade unions over workers’ rights (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/01/one-year-on-we-know-this-swedens-trade-unions-are-more-than-a-match-for-elon-musk); which makes him persona non grata here. He has also alienated liberals worldwide with his views on gender issues, sparked by one of his children’s seeking re-assignment from male to female, and what she has described as his cruelty to her over this (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender-daughter-vivian-wilson-interview-rcna163665). He has recently positioned himself as one of the most prominent members of a movement pledged to eradicate what he sees as the  ‘woke mind virus’ in America and elsewhere (https://wng.org/opinions/a-vow-to-destroy-the-woke-mind-virus-1722103194). So we know where he stands philosophically.

Where does all this come from? And why is he now particularly targeting the UK?  It could of course be his South African birth (in 1971) and early upbringing: ‘white’ South Africans are not particularly noted for having liberal ideas, and may still resent their former British masters for their role (eventually) in ending apartheid. His parents were wealthy, which enabled him to enrol at prestigious universities in Canada and the USA, whose citizenship he acquired in 2002. Thereafter he made his huge personal fortune – he’s reputed to be America’s, or even the world’s, richest person – in the high-tec industry. (All this can be followed up in his Wiki entry.) His political influence today comes through his acquisition in 2023 of the social networking service Twitter, now renamed simply ‘X’; and his very recent public support of President-Elect Trump, whose administration he’s hoping to join – although they don’t agree on everything: immigration, for example. He regards the English racist activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (who hides behind the more normal-sounding moniker of ‘Tommy Robinson’: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson), as a defender of ‘free speech’ and a British patriot, and has pleaded for his release from prison on these grounds. (He disagrees with Farage on this; and also – according to reports today – on his leadership abilities: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigeln-farage-elon-musk-reform-b2674035.html). This indicates a surprisingly close interest in what might be regarded as the minutiae of British politics, for someone who has had little or no personal experience of the country, and can only have been briefed at a distance by fellow Rightists there. Their main channel seems to have been our ‘Nige’, who is cuddling up to him too, proudly – and profitably, if Musk comes up with the dosh he is said to have promised to ‘Reform UK’. Or was, until today: vide supra.

Of course capitalists have always tried to influence politics; but none – that I can think of in British history – quite as openly and personally as Musk. (Cecil Rhodes may be the closest. South African, again.) You can understand some of the intrinsically ‘capitalist’ reasons for this: democratic accountability is often regarded as an unnecessary hindrance to the free play of market forces, especially under Labour, whose election to government last summer – against the global Right-wing trend – is what seems to have ignited his attacks on Britain.

For a Marxist all this must make sense. This is a late stage in the development of capitalism, and a problematic one, when one might expect to see its power revealed more blatantly: in this case with the richest capitalists emerging into the setting (?) sun, and taking personal control. If Marx was right, this should presage the system’s final collapse, under the weight of its own contraditions. Of course it won’t. With any luck men like Musk, Trump and Farage will be tamed, and life will go on.

I used to be a bit of a fan of Elon’s, especially his environmental cars, which could help prevent climate Armageddon; and his spaceships, which – if that didn’t work – might enable earthlings to escape, and the best creations of our culture (Mozart et al) to be preserved for ever in galaxies far away. But now I’ve gone right off him.