Porter’s Pensées

Here in Sweden Donald Trump is overwhelmingly unpopular, and indeed reviled; more so even than in most other European countries (https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/50844-who-do-europeans-want-to-win-the-2024-us-presidential-election). Obviously one would expect this, in view of the vast differences between our political cultures. Swedish friends of mine find it genuinely difficult to understand his appeal to Americans; and even with my American experience – I studied US history at university, and have lived and worked there for about two years in all – I’m at a loss to account for it in a way that would make much sense to them. It’s another – and scarier – world.

I’m preparing for Tuesday’s election by soaking myself in Trumpiana. I’ve been watching Trump: An American Dream on Netflix; this evening we’re seeing The Apprentice at the cinema. Maybe I should be doing the same for Harris, but she’s not the main issue here, and not yet – I think – the subject of a movie. Trump is. I already knew a lot about him, of course – don’t we all: an effect of his narcissistic hunger for fame – but there’s still a lot that’s new to me. Roy Cohn is one (though I’m sure he’s familiar to all Americans); the disbarred McCarthyite lawyer who taught him to ‘never concede, never apologise’. Cohn really was a monster; fully deserving his death from Aids, in view (only) of his hypocritical persecution of gay people while alive. We saw a lot of the ‘never conceding’ Trump after the last Presidential election. None of us will be surprised to see it again – if he loses – next week.

Is it naïve, over-simplistic, or just Leftist-prejudice, to look at all this in the context of ‘late-stage capitalism’? As capitalism marches on it becomes redder in tooth and claw. Competition drives it into a ‘winner or loser’-only scenario. Nothing else counts. Morality flies out of the window. Trump learned this from his father, and from Cohn. He makes it very clear in interviews. Americans, or half of them, go along with this, and with a ‘strong leader’ who presents himself – by ‘never conceding’ – as a ‘winner’ all his life. That’s what late-stage capitalism does to you. The electorate knows no better. At this level, capitalism is fundamentally antithetical to ‘democracy’. Which is why capitalists like Elon Musk string along with Trump.

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To change the subject: on today’s UK election of a black woman as Tory party leader, which may have surprised many, see https://bernardjporter.com/2024/10/11/race-and-the-tory-leadership/. But that scarcely matters by the side of this coming Tuesday’s vote.

I feel I have a duty to comment on this issue, as an imperial historian, and as the author, fifty-six years ago (gosh!), of the first academic study of early British anti-imperialism. The question is this. Should Britain apologise and compensate ex-colonial countries for the damage she did to them in the past? The suggestion came up – again – at the recent Commonwealth leaders’ summit in Samoa (see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c207m3m0xpjo). The current British government has apparently promised to ‘consider’ it.

Among those who disagree with this – ‘nothing to apologise for’ – is the dreadful Robert Jenrick (see https://bernardjporter.com/2024/10/12/jenrick/). Here’s his rationale, published in the Daily Mail (where else?): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14012923/ROBERT-JENRICK-Britains-former-colonies-debt-inheritance.html. – Jenrick of course is one of the two remaining contenders for the British Conservative party’s leadership; and is defending British imperialism here probably in an effort to bolster his Right-wing credentials among the elderly Conservative party members who currently comprise his electorate, many of whom will be old enough (as I am) to remember the Empire while it was still – just – a going concern. For Jenrick, as is clear from that Daily Mail article, this is a ‘Culture Wars’ issue, with ‘patriots’ on the one side facing ‘woke’ liberals – ‘Leftists peddling pseudo-Marxist gibberish to impressionable undergraduates’ – on the other.

Now, when it comes to this kind of question I usually lean towards the ‘woke’ side; but not all the way by any means, and not enough to make me entirely happy with all this ‘historical reparations’ cant. That may surprise anyone who has read my ‘imperial’ history books, and assumes that I must be one of the ‘anti-imperialists’ about whom I wrote my first one. Which I am. But that doesn’t affect my attitude towards the issue of compensating ex-colonies for crimes and atrocities that my forebears undoubtedly committed there a hundred or more years ago. ‘Apologies’, perhaps – they come cheap. And we should teach about the downside of empire (all empires) in schools, so that new generations won’t come out with the rosy view of British imperialism that Jenrick seems to have picked up. But money?

My main reason for objecting to colonial reparations, qua ‘reparations’, is that they assume a ‘guilt’ on one side of the colonial ledger which history doesn’t really bear out. The British empire was more complex than that. Not everything that happened under it – ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – can be attributed to it. Wider factors were involved, including impersonal ones, like the development of global capitalism. ‘Britain’ as an entity was not necessarily wholly responsible; the British people even less so. When they were, it was not always out of malevolence. The best of intentions can often have the worst of effects. (Look at the Iraq war.) And so on….

I started to elaborate on this in the first draft of this post; but it went on too long, because of the complexity of the issue. The post was turning into a book; and not only a book, but – as I came to realise – one that I’d written already. That was British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t (2016). You can find out there (it’s only 200 pages) why I can have no truck with this idea of ‘compensation’ for colonial crimes. Or that Britain should take credit for the ‘benefits’ that Jenrick claims the empire brought.

And that’s before we come on to the more general question of the present-day ‘compensation culture’: the belief that we can atone for past sins – even those we could be said to be still profiting from, like all those National Trust mansions built with slave money – by shovelling money at the descendants of their long-dead victims. Money should go to where it’s needed, whatever might be the putative and historical source of that need. History – which in this case is much misunderstood – should play no part in this. That’s my second reason for breaking ranks with my fellow wokeists on this question; while still holding on to my credentials, I hope, as an ‘anti-imperialist’.

Until fairly recently calling Trump a ‘fascist’ was widely considered to be an exaggeration at best, or a typical left-wing slur at worst. It’s sometimes called the Reductio ad Hitlerum, or ‘Godwin’s Law: ‘as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches One’. No serious commentator wants to fall into that trap. I’ve always avoided the unadorned word for this reason, generally modifying it with the prefix ‘proto-‘, which is supposed to indicate that Trump might be preparing the ground for something that could resemble ‘classical’ fascism more closely, but isn’t quite there yet. I still prefer that formulation, partly because, as an (ex-)academic historian, I feel I need to be careful with historically-loaded words.

So I’m struck currently by the way the word has suddenly emerged into ‘respectable’ discourse about Trump, without bringing almost universal derision on to the heads of those who use it. Now even Kamala Harris has used it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/23/harris-trump-fascist-hitler-comments-election; and – more remarkably – JD Vance, albeit a few years before he became Trump’s vice-presidential candidate: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/jd-vance-once-compared-trump-hitler-now-they-are-running-mates-2024-07-15/. I think this means that the word has broadened its definition over the past few years, loosening its ties with the specific philosophies and policies of Mussolini and Hitler, and now covering more general Right-wing views that can be considered ‘extreme’.

By that definition, there can surely be little doubt that Trump qualifies. Among the most characteristic elements of fascism thus understood are illiberalism, crude nationalism, racism, anti-immigration, authoritarianism, dictatorship, the cult of the individual, masculinism, anti-intellectualism, lying propaganda, control of the media, and popular rallies. Trump exhibits most of these traits, or would like to; in a political environment that in some respects is reminiscent of 1930s Germany. It really doesn’t matter what we call it. The situation of America currently is proto-Fascistic, at least. Whether it goes any further than this we’re waiting – nervously – to learn on November 5th.

Of course it’s inevitable, when you get to my age; but it can be devastating nonetheless. I lost another great friend yesterday – the fourth in about a year. We hadn’t seen each other for years, but we were close then, and the memory of him is filling my thoughts just now, making it difficult for me to blog. Give me a few days.

In a move reminiscent of Corbyn’s time in the UK, the Swedish Judiska Centralrådet – the equivalent, I presume, of the Jewish Board of Deputies in Britain – has effectively blacklisted the Swedish Vänsterpartiet (Left-Socialist), for its supposed anti-Semitism, or inadequate response to anti-Semitism; and for its alleged support for terrorist organizations. (See https://swedenherald.se/article/the-jewish-central-council-shuns-the-left-party.)

As a (very inactive) member of Vänsterpartiet, I must say I was as surprised by this as I was by the similar charges made against the Labour Party six or seven years ago, which since then have been pretty conclusively disproven (see Asa Winstanley, Weaponising Anti-Semitism, 2023) – although they’re still dredged up by the Tories occasionally. (Mud always sticks.) In both countries serious studies have shown that anti-semitism is mainly found on the Right of politics, as you might expect, and may in any case often be confused with anti-Zionism, which should be regarded as a different creature. Leftists are almost always against racism in any form. With specific reference to Sweden, the tiny handful of examples I’ve seen cited there (and I’ve not researched the topic in any great depth) have mostly featured Moslem members of the Malmö branch of the Vänster party, who had already been thrown out as a result.

One common feature of both these charges is that they have targeted anti-capitalist parties especially. Make of that what you will; but it’s disturbing. Another may be that neither the Jewish Board of Deputies nor Judiska Centralrådet is necessarily representative of British and Swedish Jews.

In view of the atrocities currently being visited by the IDF on Gaza and Lebanon, we shouldn’t be too surprised that Israel is coming in for criticism and condemnation. There was always the danger of this morphing into a wider and less discriminating anti-Semitism; just as I remember Nazi atrocities – like the Holocaust – sparking Germanophobia in and after World War II. Netanyahu should be aware of that.

Nineteenth-century anti-democrats would recognise in recent events in the USA many of the dangers they warned against, if the ‘great unwashed’ were given the vote. They would point to the empowerment of ignorance, of short-sighted prejudices, of wild conspiracy theories, and of the most primitive and violent of human feelings in public life. On 6 January 2021 we saw all these operating in the lawless chaos that broke out on the streets of Washington DC, and even inside the Capitol building, triggered by Trump’s refusal to accept the result of the previous November’s election. (For anyone who may have forgotten it, there’s an excellent TV documentary telling the whole story, which I saw the other night on SVT2, but I think is available here: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/trumps-heist-president-who-wouldnt-lose.)

We must hope that there’s no reprise of this next time around. That of course is due very soon – on our (British) ‘Guy Fawkes Day’ (!), as it happens. It should make for exciting viewing, for those of us relaxing comfortably – and safely, for the moment – on our sofas in front of our TVs, with an ocean and 200-odd years of history between us. I’ll certainly be staying up for it.

But of course the result will affect us too, in Europe, in the Middle East and in Ukraine especially. How exactly it will bear on us we can’t yet tell; mainly because Trump (if he wins) is so unpredictable. What effect will his declared admiration for foreign dictators like Putin or wannabe dictators like Netanyahu have; or, overruling (‘trumping’?) this, his oft expressed – and traditionally American, although it’s been in abeyance in recent years – American isolationism? His flights of fancy could take him, and us, anywhere.

And of course he has admirers in Europe – on the far Right of British politics, for example – who are envying his ‘populist’ appeal, and taking lessons from it. (We’ve had our ‘popular’ riots in Britain too.) The specific issues may be different in each case (although immigration features in both), but the basic trigger is the same. That is a collapse of trust in politics generally, and therefore in government, or perhaps ‘democracy’ itself; although it’s usually expressed in other terms – as distrust of the corruption of democracy by ‘élites’, the ‘deep state’, ‘liberals’ (in America), Leftists, judges, intellectuals, foreigners, the ‘woke’ tendency, the BBC (or MSM in the US), pro-Palestine marchers, and Gary Lineker. That makes up a tidy group of straw men whom the copycat Trumpists in Britain can vent their hate on. And hatred is always a powerful weapon if you want to get the great unwashed on your side. Vide 1930s Germany.

How can we counter this – if of course we wish to? For ‘intellectuals’ like me, education would seem to be an obvious corrective, with recent surveys, both in the UK and in the US, indicating a clear correlation between low levels of schooling and more ‘populist’ or Right-wing views. I’ve long advocated the incorporation of logical and critical thinking into all levels of education, if they’re not there already (as I like to think they often are in History courses: mine, anyway). One problem with this is that one person’s ‘critical thought’ can be seen by others as political ‘indoctrination’, on one side or the other; and is certainly not likely to be favoured by those – and there are many of these, especially in America – who regard History as primarily a means of instilling ‘patriotism’. (‘Why are you studying British history?’ an American student of mine recalled being asked by his Republican neighbour. ‘America has the best history in the world!’) Beyond this there’s the larger problem, alluded to already, that the ‘populist’ Right will usually dismiss ‘intellectualism’ entirely, regarding it as intrinsically ‘élitist’, biased against ‘ordinary people’ like them, and its findings as being mere opinions, on a level with any prejudice. ‘I’m a free American, and can believe anything I want’. (I’ve quoted this before: https://bernardjporter.com/2024/09/21/stupidity-3/.) It’s difficult in argument to navigate around this kind of thing.

But ‘this kind of thing’ – people’s opinions – must be at least partly determined by wider societal pressures, which these days are inclining folk to disbelief, disrespect and mistrust, fuelled by immoral government ministers and an amoral press. And – to take it a bit further – these pressures in their turn may be influenced by the state of the society we are now living in, both in the UK and in the US, seen more broadly; which I – and I’m not alone here – regard as a ‘late (or ‘last’?) stage of capitalism’. The power of capitalist-accumulated money in the public sphere has long been obvious in America, of course, but is also currently increasing in Britain; personified in the former country by the cheating capitalist Donald Trump – an Ayn Rand ‘hero’ if ever there was one; and over here by the fabulously rich – albeit rather smoother (that’s a Public School education for you) – Rishi Sunak.

Of course the path travelled by capitalism has never been a smooth and uncluttered one, but has always encountered bumps and setbacks along the way; which will explain the interlude we’re experiencing just now in Britain with the election of a Labour government which may be able to tame the beast; and the possibility that in America Kemala Harris – unconvincingly characterised as a ‘Marxist’ by Trump – could do the same if she wins on November 5. Unlikely, I realise; but if not it will simply bolster my quasi-Marxist reading.

One thing I’m reluctant to accept is that aforementioned belief of my nineteenth-century anti-democrats, that democracy is too good for the ‘great unwashed’, because they’re irredeemably stupid. But these days I’m finding it more and more difficult to disagree.

Of course there have been periods in the past when everything seemed to be getting terrifyingly worse – one thinks of the times before each of the two World Wars, or the Cuban missile crisis – but the present day must be one of the scariest. Autocracy and illiberalism are gaining ground in the world; crude nationalism is resurgent; Russia invades an independent country; there are massacres in the Sudan; and even Israeli Jews – up until now history’s quintessential victims – are ditching what must be regarded as the best aspects of their religion (which could be the Jewish cult that became Christianity, cleansed of its Pauline addenda), and are now behaving as a colonialist power of the cruellest kind. On a more parochial (British) level, we have the ‘nasty’ party in our politics becoming even nastier, whatever the result of its imminent leadership election, and being pushed to further nastiness by a new proto-Fascist party on its Right. That’s after having so screwed things up in its last fourteen years in office that it’s difficult to see how the country can return to decency. And then of course there’s still our criminal Fourth Estate.

On the domestic front Corbyn had some of the answers; and also a larger popular vote. But he also, of course, had that awful Press to contend with; and I’m not sure that his pacifism would have helped him today re. Gaza, Lebanon and the Ukraine.

In those earlier periods of doom and despondency, at least there were glimmerings of hope. (See my Britain Before Brexit, 2021, ch. 11.) Not so much now.

Robert Jenrick is a monster; a smooth-faced one, but no less monstrous for that. His notorious banning of cartoon figures painted on the walls of a reception centre for unaccompanied child immigrants, because they seemed too ‘welcoming’, will surely repel any decent human being – among whom there must be some Conservatives. He also wants Britain to withdraw immediately from the ECHR, which was his particular bête noir as Immigration Minister; has claimed (approvingly) that British forces kill rather than arrest enemies in order to prevent their being examined under ECHR rules; and has recently revealed himself as a champion of Donald Trump. How much lower could he get?

Well, quite a bit lower, if the rumour surrounding him currently is true. That is, that he has vouchsafed to the Left of his party (such as it is) that he would ‘pivot back to the centre’ if elected Leader, in order to get their support. He’s denied it. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/11/robert-jenrick-denies-he-would-drop-hard-right-policies-if-he-became-tory-leader.) But it still leaves a doubt; and if true would confirm the suspicion that he is only adopting these far-Right policies for tactical reasons – in order to spike the ‘Reform’ party – and not out of genuine conviction. Which in my book would make him even more of a villain; and would also place him in the company of all those other Tories (led of course by Boris) who regard politics as mainly a game.

Is Kemi Badenoch any better? Maybe decent Tory decent members should abstain in the vote, thus undermining the credibility of whichever of them wins.

(‘AbsentMindedCriticofEmpire’, incidentally, is good and right on Jenrick, in his comment on my last post.)

So, the Tories’ choice for leader lies between two Right-wing (even by Conservative standards) candidates: anti-EU, anti-human rights legislation, anti-welfare, very anti-immigration, and anti-what they call ‘woke’.

That one of these is a black woman should not give us (on the Left) any comfort. The Conservatives have a recent record of appointing brown people to top posts in their party and in government – the eliminated and marginally more liberal candidate James Cleverly is another example – which says much for their open-mindedness on questions of ‘race’; just as their choice of Margaret Thatcher as leader 46 years ago indicates that they may not have been quite as sexist as they had often appeared.

But that is to misunderstand the importance of race (or gender) in British politics – and perhaps British life generally – in recent years. I’ve always thought that these two factors, especially the first, were exaggerated, by those who wished to portray Britain as an eternally racist society, either arising out of or contributing to her imperial experience; despite some indications to the contrary. So far as the Conservative party is concerned, ‘identity’ has always been rooted more in values than in ethnicity: values that were sometimes portrayed as ‘national’, but were in fact essentially class-based. So, Kemi Badenoch is accepted because of her entrepreneurial back history, just as those awful brown-skinned female politicians Priti Patel and Suella Braverman were; and on the other side, the new black Foreign Secretary David Lammy is welcomed for his typically ‘Labour’ background. Jews have also been accepted on both sides for similar reasons. ‘Race’ has little to do with it; so long as you can show that you have imbibed the dominant culture of whichever team it is you want to join.

Unless, that is,your race or gender makes you feel that you need to express that culture more openly and extremely than you would if you were white and male; simply in order to confirm your credentials. Which may have been a factor in Thatcher’s case (‘the only one in the Cabinet with balls’); and could be one today for Badenoch, Patel and Braverman. But to suggest this seems patronising. (What can I know about their psychologies?)

Still, and whatever their views, the prominence of these women and men in present-day British politics must be one in the eye for those who claim that ‘immigrants’ can never integrate. They can, and do, even if they don’t always integrate into the parts of British society – the particular British ‘cultures’ (there are of course many) – that we might prefer to see them in.

More generally, I’ve been struck by this recent speech by the socialist Prime Minister of Spain, going right against the xenophobic trend in Europe today, to laud the economic and – yes – cultural benefits of immigration into his country; with a view to easing migrants’ way into Spanish society. (See https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spains-sanchez-touts-benefits-migration-european-neighbours-tighten-borders-2024-10-09/.) I only wish that Starmer could do the same. Britain of course has taken in migrants for most of her history, and broadly welcomed them. In general they have enriched her culture and society, as much as Sanchez says they have in Spain’s case; and benefitted her economy. That’s another topic, perhaps for a future post. (But you could start by reading my The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics, 1979; and Britain’s Contested History: Lessons for Patriots, 2022.)

(Churchill’s phrase, of course, for his bouts of depression.) OK, I’m depressed. But just now that seems normal to me. In fact I can’t understand why anyone isn’t depressed these days. (That may just show how depressed I am.)

Here in the UK it surely shouldn’t be so. We’ve recently had what ought to have been an encouraging general election (for us Lefties), bucking what seemed to be a general European Right-wing trend at the time, and restoring the Labour party to government after fourteen and a half years. As a result there are some promising things on the political menu now, for us to dine on over the next five (or ten?) years.

But on the other hand, we’re all aware that Labour’s huge election victory was achieved on the back of a minority (just 33 per cent) of the popular vote, which nonetheless gave it 62 per cent majority in the House of Commons. That seems pretty flimsy, and so maybe not to be relied upon.

This could act to the detriment of Britain’s political system generally, further undermining the popular trust that the Tories had squandered so extraordinarily over the past five years: Brexit, Boris, Liz, ‘Partygate’ and all the rest. It certainly adds grist to the mill of Britain’s new main Right-wing party, ‘Reform’; which suffered more than most from Britain’s electoral system – 14% of the vote delivering minus one per cent of MPs – which will have exacerbated its burning resentment against the whole ‘democratic’ system. The Tories may be down and out for now; but that’s no guarantee that the Right won’t raise its bloody head again, via either Reform, if it lasts; or a ‘Reformed’  – in ‘Reform’s’ image – Conservative party. The present leadership contenders in the Tory party don’t seem to have a decent ‘one-nation’ and liberal candidate among them. And the global tendency just now – certainly in the USA and most of Europe – seems to favour what I would call at least ‘proto’ fascism.

That’s a description that could also be applied to the major tendencies and actors in the Middle East, Saharan Africa and central Asia; all of them terrifying to ‘woke’ liberal folk like me. Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine are of course our main worries; all with extreme nationalism – and even blatant neo-Fascism – playing a major part. Obviously from our tiny (British) islands we can do nothing about these international horrors, apart from – possibly – denying Netanyahu some arms.

But there’s danger at home too. Yesterday the head of MI5 warned us all of the ‘sustained mayhem’ that Putin was currently fostering, by cyber warfare, in Britain and other ‘western’ countries (see  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8e15yr1gwo); together with threats from Iran, and (and this is fairly new, coming from an intelligence boss: see my Plots and Paranoia, 1989), from the ‘extreme Right’.

These are terrible times. So I’m depressed. Why aren’t you?