Porter’s Pensées

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.

Yesterday we attended a performance of Bach’s St John Passion in the Berwaldhalle in Stockholm. It was a first for me; of course I know the St Matthew Passion, and have all of Bach’s cantatas (around 200 of them) on CD; but not this earlier version of the Easter story. It was a great experience; more overtly dramatic than the Matteuspassionen, and enlivened in this performance by a troupe of young student dancers from the Stockholm Ballet Academy. It left me almost wanting to return to Christianity again.

Returning home, we watched part 3 of a TV documentary on the life of Jesus; made I think originally for the BBC, with lots of convincing historical context; except that for my taste the characters weren’t brown-skinned enough. I of course was familiar with the story from my years of gentle (Methodist) biblical indoctrination when I was a boy. It’s a gripping one, isn’t it, even if you choose to reject its religious message, and the miracles. It was pretty new to Kajsa, however, who was brought up rather less enamoured of the Lutheran Svenska (State) Kyrken; and I think it confirmed the point I’ve suggested to her more than once: that Christianity has generally been corrupted by churches, and turned into a tribal allegiance rather than the humanitarian philosophy Jesus had intended it to be. (Look at the USA; and most Kristdemokraterna parties in Europe.) Kajsa herself remarked on how revolutionary, anti-establishment and indeed even socialist Jesus’s life and teachings appeared to be. If I could find a ‘Christian’ church that lived up Christ’s real teachings (as I understand them), and – crucially, for me – didn’t require my unquestioning ‘faith’ (I’ve written about this before – https://bernardjporter.com/2025/03/11/christianity-weaponised/), I think I might go for it.

Quakers? Christian Socialism? (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Christian-Socialism)? Is that still a going concern?

[I’ve been nervous of publishing this, in view of the way that any criticism of Israel can be labelled ‘anti-semitic’ by dedicated supporters of the modern Israeli government. (See – again – Asa Winstanley, Weaponising Anti-Semitism, 2023.) I don’t regard myself as anti-semitic by any stretch of that word; and seriously hope that what I write here won’t be taken in that way.]

‘Israel stands on stolen territory’. Well, yes; but to start with we should acknowledge that many if not most nations of the world are the results of theft: built, that is, on land taken from others. I imagine that the Celts or Britons who originally lived in the part of England I come from were pretty cross with my Saxon antecedents when they pushed them westwards to allow them (the East Saxons) to settle in Chelmsford. (Or where Chelmsford is now.) A more recent example of course is the entire American continent, both north and south, whose present populations are by and large not the ones that lived and ruled there 500 years ago. Humanity’s history has been one of successive waves of territorial expansion and robbery. So, historically, Israel’s situation today is not unique.

In fact it fits this pattern pretty well. The land on which the modern state of Israel stands was stolen from its previous inhabitants and rulers – mainly Arabs and Ottomans at the time it was taken over – by a people whose ‘title’ to it rested on disputed interpretations of an ancient religious text, implying that God, no less, had ‘promised’ it to the Jews several thousand years previously. There were other and I think better reasons for their occupation, which I’ll come on to later; but these can’t alter the fact that it involved blatant land robbery: a form of ‘colonialism’ familiar from what we are taught to despise in the European history of a century or two ago. For a historian of that period and of that episode, the parallels are striking: the seizure by force of an already occupied land; the ‘settlement’ movement going on now in the West Bank, involving the bulldozing of Arab villages to make room for Jewish incomers; the religio-racism that lies at the foundation of Israel’s very existence; and the virtual ‘apartheid’ found in many areas of Israeli social life that this gives rise to. These are all genuine throw-backs to, or continuations of, the original and much despised ‘European age of imperialism’; with its colonialist character given extra credence by Israel’s supposed origin in the infamous ‘Balfour Declaration’, which was issued by a British imperialist for imperial motives of his own.

So, the creation of Israel started off as a crime; but then what state hasn’t, if we look far enough back in time? More serious is the fact that it has become obvious subsequently that it was also a huge diplomatic mistake, bearing in mind the troubles it has given rise to, right up to the present day. Some of these have been the results of a misreading of Balfour’s original ‘Declaration’, which promised the Jews only ‘a national home’ – whatever that meant – ‘in Palestine’; and – crucially – ‘its being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. Israel of course has gone some way beyond that; which is one of the reasons (not the only one – clearly Hamas bears a great portion of the blame) why she and the Palestinians are in conflict with each other today.  

But history – even historical crimes – should not determine the present in every situation. Otherwise we should need to give America back to the Amerindians, Northern Ireland back to the original Irish, and Chelmsford back to the Welsh. History, whether modern or very ancient, as in this case, can be a useful tool for understanding the present; but it can’t be allowed to confine our present-day options in any way. The most it should do is to make the ‘winners’ of past events – modern Americans, Ulstermen, Chelmsfordians; in this instance Israeli Jews – aware of the ways in which they have ‘won’ their new countries, and of the resentments that may still linger from those times.

The other – and to my mind better – factors said to justify the Jews’ takeover of this territory are, of course, the appalling atrocities committed against their people over the centuries, culminating in the Russian persecutions of the 19th century and then the Nazi Holocaust; against any repetition of which it is perfectly understandable that modern Jews feel that a nation-state of their own will safeguard them. Of course the Palestinian Arabs had nothing to do with any of this, which is what makes it doubly unjust that they should be saddled with the West’s tardy act of contrition for allowing it. But the Jews’ appalling suffering in comparatively recent times must explain and even justify the sympathy that many of us have for them, and consequently for the solution that was found for them in 1948.

That this solution has turned out so problematically should not justify our turning back on it completely, as Hamas for example proposes. But it surely ought to encourage Israeli governments to tread more softly than they have over the past few years in response; keeping in the front of their minds the original offence – so far as the Palestinians are concerned – from which all this horror sprang. Clearly bombing the living daylights out of the Gaza enclave is not doing this. And it is also turning many of Israel’s and Judaism’s former friends and admirers into what are now being slandered as ‘anti-Semites’, when they clearly aren’t.

In fact it surely can’t be, when those critics include many Jews themselves, both in Israel and in the diaspora. Here is one example: prominent members of the highly influential British Board of (Jewish) Deputies, coming out against Netanyhu’s and the IDF’s actions yesterday. ‘Israel’s soul is being ripped out and we, members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, fear for the future of the Israel we love and have such close ties to’.  (See https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77ndzkz778o.) That is powerful.

In Britain a crucial economic decision – the government taking over control of the steel industry – requires the recall of Parliament to endorse it; which it did today. Over in the USA the President, entirely on his own, makes deep and sweeping economic changes – mainly the imposition of tariffs – under the terms of an emergency law passed years ago, and intended to be used only in case of war; without Congress getting a look in. Which is the more genuine ‘democracy’?

On another but related topic, here’s a piece on Trump’s and Vance’s current attack on the Smithsonian: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/at-the-smithsonian-donald-trump-takes-aim-at-history.

Eric Blair – thou shouldst be living at this hour.

The Swedish Vänsterpartiet (‘Left Party’: formerly Communist but no longer) is currently being attacked on exactly the same specious grounds as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was a few years ago. (See Asa Winstanley, Weaponising Anti-Semitism, OR Books, New York, 2023.) Here’s an English-language account of the Swedish controversy: https://www.jns.org/eja-calls-for-swedish-mp-to-apologize-or-be-expelled-for-sharing-antisemitic-image/.

Of course the image referred to there – originally published on social media (only), and attributed to one ‘Mohamed Hadid’ – picturing an Israeli hand ‘controlling the world’, clearly reflects a common anti-semitic trope from the past; and whether or not it was intended to be directed against Jews as a people should clearly not have been used. It’s also apparent from her written comment that Lorena Delgado Varas, the Vänster MP held to be responsible for republishing it, was not thereby endorsing it; although it would obviously have been wiser if she had put a little more distance between the anti-Semitism it implies, and her own point of view.

What was depressing to me, after my British experience of Labour under Corbyn, was to see the same ‘weapon’ being employed here in Sweden, against a party that has historically been more anti-racist and supportive of Jewish causes than most, just as the British Labour Party was. I happen to be a (quite recent and very inactive) member of the ‘V’s, which I suppose gives me an interest in this; and am pretty sure that the slur against us is totally unjustified. Personally I’m a philo-semite rather than the reverse, albeit struggling these days within myself to resist the anti-Jewish prejudices that both this ‘weaponising’ of anti-Semitism, and of course Netanyahu’s cruel and disproportionate onslaught on Gaza, must be arousing elsewhere.

Here’s the Rektor of Stockholm’s equivalent of the LSE, describing the Trumpian assault on America’s universities, and the resulting exodus of some of their top academics to European and Canadian universities; and making the same point as I did yesterday about Marx.

https://www.dn.se/kultur/lars-strannegard-det-pagar-en-motorsagsmassaker-pa-amerikanska-universitet/

Of course you’ll need to read Swedish to understand it, or perhaps feed it through Google Translate.

Most of the discussion here, however, is about Trump’s mental state. The words ‘narcissism’ and ‘fascism’ crop up a lot.

Historians are usually quite good at pointing out precedents for what is happening in their own times. But I’m afraid I can’t think of any close precedents for what is going on today. For the clear ‘Fascist’ tendencies in modern politics, yes, certainly: 1930s Germany, for a start. For tariff wars: OK, there were several of them in the past. But for a tariff war on this global scale, accompanied by other fascistic measures, perpetrated by a leader who seems to have accrued absolute power, and in America, supposedly a bastion of modern democracy: no, I believe there’s nothing in the past to compare with this. We’ve suddenly been plunged into a new and alarming age.

For historians (like me) of a moderately Marxist bent, it does make a sort of sense. Donald Trump is a real estate developer – a very modern kind of capitalist – above everything, now appearing on the political scene at what Marxists would recognise as a ‘late stage’ in the natural evolution of the capitalist system. As it evolves, capitalism becomes more ultra-competitive, more monopolistic, more amoral, and – as a consequence – less democratic. In the USA this tendency has resulted in some of the most prominent capitalists of the day, mostly fabulously rich technocrats, exerting more and more influence on government, and by this means shaping national policy to satisfy their commercial needs; and – more importantly – to adopt their business philosophy and methods. These methods are profoundly undemocratic, quite understandably: no CEO of a business is going to want to be told what to do by the people. And so a ‘democracy’ like America’s becomes in effect an oligarchy, if not a dictatorship. The rest all follows: universities defunded and controlled; ‘improper ideologies’ (the ‘woke virus’) banned; dissent crushed; barriers erected; immigrants summarily expelled; blame for domestic failures placed on foreigners – ‘looting, pillaging, raping, and plundering our nation’, as Trump put it last week: all of them attitudes and measures that in any other context – for example in 1930s Germany – would be openly called ‘Fascist’; suddenly foisted on a country that had used to be known for (among other less admirable traits) its liberalism and toleration.

Fascism wears different clothes in different situations. So we shouldn’t look for too close parallels with pre-War Germany or Italy. (The Jews can relax – for the time being. Unless they want to join in. If Netanyahu hasn’t already.) This is a very American version of Fascism; which is also influenced by other traits in the US’s historical culture, but is au fonde the end-product of her ultra-capitalist evolution. As Marx might have concluded if he had been alive today.

He would have also viewed it as inevitable (‘historical determinism’). That’s where I would part company with him, albeit more in hope than out of conviction. Apparently – although it’s difficult to see it from this side of the pond – there is resistance to Trump and Trumpism in America; which nation of course embraces other cultural traditions besides the proto-fascist ones (see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz79ewg193ro). Or a stock market crash might bring the whole building down. So in the end it could turn out alright for us wokerati. Let’s just trust that if this happens, it’s without the ‘new American civil war’ that some are already predicting.

Anyway, that’s my sub-Marxist theory. It may be a simplistic one, and I can’t prove it. But it fits.

‘For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike’. That was the line Donald Trump took on Tuesday (April 2), to justify the long list of ‘reciprocal’ American tariffs on foreign imports he was announcing on what he chose to call ‘Liberation Day’. Included in his audience were a number of invited American autoworkers, who were asked to blame foreign tariffs on their exports and other ‘unfair’ practices for the decline of the car industry in Michigan and elsewhere.

That is being debated currently; as well as the question of whether Trump’s draconian taxes really will help revive American industry more generally: an issue I’m afraid I’m not competent to judge. (I would guess that Volvos sell better in the US partly because they’re superior cars; but that may simply be my pro-Swedish prejudice.) What interests me more, however, is the role that Trump is placing his country in, of ‘victim’ to all those horrible foreigners.

It’s clearly a canny card to play, in a world where most decent people side with the weak and hard done-by, rather than with the powerful bullies who are tormenting them. Britain has played it in most of the wars she has been involved in over the last hundred-odd years: defending ‘poor little Belgium’; ‘plucky Falklanders’; ‘brave Ukrainians’, and so on. Many of her colonial exploits were claimed to be justified as means of rescuing or safeguarding weaker native peoples. Israel has employed the same rationale continuously since 1948, exploiting Jews’ reputation as History’s leading ‘victims’: not only on account of the Nazi holocaust, but for centuries before. It’s a powerful trope; and so it’s not surprising to see Trump using it. Poor little America: ‘looted, pillaged, raped’ – eh? – ‘and plundered’ for all these years.

It’s odd, though, to hear the argument employed by the President of a powerful country that for decades has been seen as dominating, colonising (in one way or another) and ripping off other countries for at least eighty years now. And used to punish little countries (including one uninhabited one!); whose use of tariffs to safeguard their ‘infant’ industries against big rivals was even justified by the doyen of free traders, Adam Smith. It really is hard to see the USA as a long-term ‘victim’, in any way that would justify sympathy. Perhaps a victim of her own economic system? But that might not play so well.

Maybe it’s simply personal and psychological, on Trump’s part. It’s common knowledge that he’s a narcissist, and not as intelligent as he boasts. He must hate the derision that’s hurled at him, which makes him feel a ‘victim’ too. (That’s why he’s nice to those other world leaders who are – or pretend to be – nice to him.) It’s why both he and his Vice-President ‘hate’ Europe, where almost no-one apart from a few far Rightists gives him the respect he believes is his due. And it’s why he is so revengeful against his critics; with that revenge expressed now in the strongest way that he as a capitalist knows: through their nations’ pockets.

I’m still astonished by the revelation that the American Constitution gives so much unchecked power (as it seems at present) to a single person. George III had nothing like the same authority; and some of his royal predecessors met gruesome fates when they tried to assume it, over the heads of Parliament.

It is even more surprising when we learn, as we are expecting to do later today, that this power extends over foreign countries too. (We’re still waiting for his announcement on tariffs.) Again, that would be unthinkable in most other ‘democracies’. It’s no wonder that Trump’s closest soul-mates today are Putin and Netanyahu; who must feel that they’ve been given carte blanche to pursue any policy they choose.

I would like to feel a constitutional revolution coming on. Or a civil war (17th-century English style). But probably not.

Easy, isn’t it? – USA gets Greenland, Russia gets Ukraine, China gets Taiwan. All neat and tidy. Everyone agrees. No more wars. Back to the 1790s: https://bernardjporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/caricature_gillray_plumpudding.jpg.

(See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/28/putins-endorsement-of-trumps-greenland-takeover-reflects-their-vision-of-a-new-world-order.)