Porter’s Pensées

‘I love the poorly educated’, said Donald Trump a few years ago (https://www.politico.com/video/2016/02/donald-trump-i-love-the-poorly-educated-044575). And of course Trump himself is poorly educated. Is that one of the factors behind his political success? And, incidentally, behind his assault on top American universities?

It may also be a reason for the anticipated success of the ‘Reform’ party in Britain today. Repeated surveys have shown that support for right-wing causes there is stronger among the relatively uneducated than among (for example) college graduates. (Here’s one example:  https://www.statista.com/statistics/572613/brexit-votes-by-education/?srsltid=AfmBOop9VLvHYH158J12Zw97L43OwL-NOre_cK1Qp_6LXnib5Wj_AQMf.) The same is apparently true in the USA. Which might suggest that the solution to the problem, if you see it as a problem, is more – or better – education for (the) hoi polloi.

For those of us who do see it as problematical, fears of what in earlier times was called ‘the mob’ are conjured up. These fears lay behind the restrictions that were placed on the British political franchise during the whole of the 19th century and a good way into the twentieth, to exclude non-property owners, and women. (Also incidentally peers; but only because they had a ‘House’ of their own.) Women were excluded on the grounds that they were too unstable (‘hysterical’) to vote; the relatively poor for lacking a sufficient material stake or ‘interest’ in the country. These ‘lower’ classes (and blacks in America) were also seen as vulnerable to what today we would call ‘left-wing’ propaganda, which would endanger the very foundations of what was, in effect, a property-owning democracy. For this reason, fears of the ‘mob’ then were mainly directed against popular ‘socialism’.

Which might surprise those old-timers about today’s situation; where the ‘mobs’ are mostly found on the political Right. This is not unprecedented in Britain: vide the ‘Church and King’ riots in Birmingham in 1791, and the ‘jingo’ demonstrations of 1899 in support of the Boer War. (The USA, I’m sure, had its historical equivalents.) Present-day demonstrations against foreign immigration follow in this tradition, illustrating the spread and depth of ‘reactionary’ opinion in today’s Britain.

We probably shouldn’t blame the ‘poorly educated’ themselves for this, if only because to do so would leave us open to the charge of ‘élitism’; a powerful tool of the Right these days, and one which no amount of intelligent – élitist – argument can dispel. But in any case we need to be aware of the pressures that many of the ‘poorly educated’ labour under, from the Right-wing propaganda directed at them by most of the media, and from which – Daily Mail headlines, for example – it must be difficult for them to escape. The purveyors of this propaganda are not generally‘poorly educated’ – in most cases rather the reverse; but simply unprincipled and – I would say – wicked. (I’m thinking here of course of Rupert Murdoch.) Maybe better education – in ‘critical thinking’, for example – could act as a prophylactic against this; plus stricter regulation of Britain’s notoriously amoral and partisan popular press (Leveson II?). We can but hope.

These may be the only ways to counter ‘populism’; which is today’s word to describe what in the past would have been characterised as ‘mob rule’. Either that; or again restrict the franchise, this time to what in the Middle Ages was called the maior et sanior pars – major and wiser part – of the population; with educational (rather than property) tests to wean the not-so-‘sanior’ out. But that would be very un-populist; and also undemocratic, in strict terms (‘demos’). The way of education and press regulation must be preferable. I’d trust it much more than what we have now.

Just to say that my KCom email still doesn’t work, despite the best efforts of the technical experts at KCom in Hull, and of the young people at the ‘Genius Desk’ in the bright, futuristic and friendly Apple Center in Täby (near Stockholm). So I’ve migrated briefly to another ‘server’ – is that the word? – with a new email address; which is:

bernardporter869@gmail.com.

Now to try to get my i-phone to recognise that. At present it only works on my lap-top. I need an adolescent boy or girl to help me set it up. Maybe one of Kajsa’s barnbarn?

You’ll have seen those ridiculous MAGA videos that have been aired on the internet recently. The first showed a post-war Gaza transformed into a piece of prime sea-front real estate, with a huge golden statue of Donald Trump bestriding it at the end. The second more recent one has Trump wearing a crown, and piloting a fighter plane which is bombing a ‘No Kings’ demonstration with faeces. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uGKtihX1U4.)

Where do these come from? Surely not from The Donald himself? But they’re childish enough, and reflective of his very real narcissism and spite. So he could have sponsored or at least approved of them. – Or are they on the contrary intended as anti-Trump satire?

I would genuinely like to know. If Trump is in any way responsible for these Loony Tunes, it must add to the evidence building up that he is, indeed, mad. Or, if you prefer, retarded and unbalanced – but in any case dangerous.

And he still has three years to go. And with authoritarian powers that the US’s Founding Fathers would never have anticipated – and indeed tried their best to prevent. Come on, you Democrats: fight back!

Just to say, to anyone reading this who may have been trying to contact me, or expecting a message from me (Ragnar Boman, for example), that my email (bernard.porter@kajsa.karoo.co.uk) is no longer working. Why I don’t know. It was working perfectly for years, transmitting my messages across the North Sea, until three days ago. The very impressive Apple ‘Genius’ store in Täby can’t help me; as neither can the ‘K-com’ department in Hull after about two hours on the phone to them from Sweden – trying all kinds of things and pressing lots of buttons. I feel I’m cut off from the world. I think I can still ‘message’; and of course send old-fashioned ‘letters’. And this blogsite I think works. But e-mail was my primary means of communication; as I imagine it is for most people now.

I could scarcely understand what the young ‘geniuses’ in Täby were saying (in English). Modern life has passed me by. If it’s not powered by steam, I’m lost.

Sorry for the recent gap in this blog, but I’ve been in hospital (nothing serious), and on a visit to England with Kajsa to see my children and grandchildren. We elected to travel by train and boat to help save the climate; but a night in an ancient sleeper carriage on a train to Hamburg resolved me never to do it again. Flying would have been quicker, cleaner, and a lot cheaper.

However, the boat from Rotterdam to Hull (again, we slept on it) was pretty good, with all those Asians whom P&O had controversially recruited to replace the dearer British crew a couple of years ago friendly and helpful. Being on the ’high seas’, you see, means that P&O don’t need to comply with British employment law. – It’s difficult sometimes to adhere to one’s socialist and environmental principles.

On the way back Kajsa bought a beautifully produced German booklet on Imperialismus, which features a full-page portrait of my early academic bread and butter: the ‘Critic of Empire’ JA Hobson; but without mentioning my path-breaking 1968 book on him. Ah well!

Serious blogging will resume, I hope, soon. I’ve plenty to write about; including the astonishing report in today’s Dagens Nyheter that the favourite to become the Swedish football team’s next national manager is the recently sacked manager of West Ham United. He’s managed before in Sweden, and far more successfully than he did with us. Perhaps the Swedish air suits him; as it does me.

If ‘Tommy Robinson’s’ great demo in central London on Saturday was designed to alert people to the popularity of his cause, it worked with me. No matter that the ‘million’ protestors that he had asked for beforehand turned out to be ‘only’ 110,000 (by most estimates), it still was an impressive display. 110,000 looks a lot of people, especially in the narrow Whitehall streets. They marched under the banner ‘Unite the Kingdom’; a clever slogan, which must have had a resonant appeal for conservatives and reactionaries on the march – especially the ‘King’ reference.  (Also a highly misleading one, for so divisive and revolutionary a movement.) From my hidey-hole in rational and Left-ish Scandinavia, watching the news on television (yes, SvT covered it), it looked alien and foreboding.

As does the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk in Utah, with Trump immediately attributing it to ‘radical agitators’, his favourite targets; effectively making Kirk a ‘martyr’, in much the same way that the Nazis made Horst Wessel one in 1930. Whether Kirk deserves this posthumous promotion, any more than Wessel did, is for his supporters to say. But it’s useful, for a cause that relies on a sense of victimhood for so much of its appeal.

And the marchers in London last weekend certainly regard themselves in this light. ‘No-one is listening to us’. ‘Governments’ – all governments – ‘are out of touch’. ‘They’re all the same’. ‘Just out for themselves’. (‘Look at that Mandelson’.) – There’s masses of this kind of thing on social media, from a movement that claims that it represents ‘ordinary people’, but which, as we know – we superior ‘élitists’, that is – is being manipulated by very un-ordinary (and disorderly) quasi-fascists.

And yet the ‘people’s’ grievances are real, albeit not strictly attributable to the agencies they claim are responsible for them: ‘boat people’, foreigners, judges, Lefty lawyers, Europe, liberals, trans people, wokeists, welfare scroungers, my sort of élitist; and the rest of that huge but very motley ‘conspiracy’ that the ‘victims’ see standing in their way.

The size of Saturday’s march convinced me, not of course of the correctness of these people’s analysis, but of the strength and wide spread of their feeling; and of our (that is, we élitists’) need to combat it before it turns to ‘Fascism’, or a British variant of it. That seems to be happening currently in America, towards which our proto-Fascists are looking for support. Starmer’s government has done a lot of good during its first year; but it is acknowledged to have also made mistakes – Mandelson is the latest – and has failed to fire up the people represented in Saturday’s march, as Farage clearly manages to. Personally I find it difficult to understand Farage’s attraction, but he obviously has more of it than the learned and solid Sir Keir. Does the moderate Left need a more charismatic leader itself to be able to challenge the extreme Right? Remember that the greatest of all Labour leaders, Clement Attlee, had virtually no charisma, which did the Left no harm then. But times are different now. Politics is all show business. (Look at Trump.)

What Labour may need, in order to counter the allure of ‘Reform UK’, is someone like the blessed Jeremy Corbyn – who did fire up people – but with more of what in the eighteenth century they called ‘bottom’, and with fewer left-wing hostages to fortune. People are saying that Andy Burnham – currently mayor of Manchester – might fill the bill. But then we saw the mess that the last metropolitan mayor to become prime minister made of the job. And of course he (or she) would need some firing-up policies too.

On the latter front my preference, as a bit of a reactionary myself, would be to return to the social democratic policies that Labour represented after the last war, but were then ditched in the ‘Great Reaction’ of 1979, when Thatcher came to power. Those policies broadly ‘united the Kingdom’ then, and could do so again. But today? Probably not.

Otherwise I fear that recent events may mark a turning point in the UK and the US, with democracy’s being supplanted by authoritarianism, and even a form of ‘Fascism’, in either or both those countries. Or am I over-reacting, from my safe refuge over the seas?

A ‘Christian nationalist’ – which is how Charlie Kirk is being described – is not the same as being a ‘Christian’. It’s a tribal affiliation, not a religious one. The intolerance and hatred – of other ‘nations’ – that stem from it, and the white racism that it is often a cover for, are certainly no part of Christ’s teaching, but rather the opposite; which leaves one wondering whether any of these Christian nationalists have got much beyond the Old Testament, if they’ve read any of the Bible at all. (Perhaps they should be called ‘Judaeo-nationalists’; but that might open up a whole new can of anti-semitic worms.) Christianity’s role in this context should be to alleviate the evils of ‘nationalism’ proper, which lie at the root of many of the most atrocious conflicts of the modern world. Instead, and in the USA today, it simply sharpens their edges.

I’m afraid I’ve finally lost patience with our (the UK’s) Labour government: the one I voted for. Its worst policy decision, in my view, was its re-classification of ‘Palestine Action’ as a ‘terrorist’ organisation, leading to the arrest of literally hundreds of peaceful demonstrators over the last month, protesting against the decision, quite reasonably; half of them (if reports are to be believed) over 60 years of age. They’ll be coming up for trial later. It will be interesting to see how the courts treat the old codgers.

Then there are Sir Keir Starmer’s two clever wheezes, both involving Trump, and both showing some imagination – thinking ‘outside the box’ – but with embarrassing outcomes. The first was his appointment of Lord Mandelson as British ambassador to the court of King Donald, probably on the grounds that one moral reprobate (I’m referring to his social rather than his sexual preferences) was likely to get on better with another, than a boring old professional diplomat would. Now of course that has turned to dust. The second clever wheeze was Starmer’s ‘unprecedented’ invitation to Trump to make a second state visit to Britain, with all the fawning ceremony that will involve, and which Trump is clearly a sucker for. We’ll be seeing how that turns out in this coming week, sans Mandelson. Trump is the most internationally despised American President in history. Was it really necessary to suck up to him in this way?

In the background to this there is of course the rise of the Right in Britain, demonstrated by today’s 100,000-strong march of ‘Tommy Robinson’ (Yaxley-Lennon)’s supporters in central London. 100,000 is a lot. Apparently Elon Musk addressed them. I’m scared; as I’m sure Yaxley-Lennon, Musk and the rest want us all to be.

I’ve been off-blog for a few weeks now, for a number of reasons: misery, injury, and trying to write an autobiography, which is proving more difficult than I expected. I’ve covered my first forty-odd years; but reading it back it seems very boring; and my past, although relatively privileged, is sometimes upsetting for me to recall. (Hence the misery.) I’m sure that other people’s autobiographies would be far more interesting. (Lord Mandelson’s, for example.)

Trump has already called Charlie Kirk a ‘a martyr for truth and freedom’, which should thrill the extreme Right no end. Every cause needs a martyr. From what I’ve learned over the past couple of days – I’d never heard of him before – Kirk seems to have had some pretty obnoxious views: obnoxious to me, that is; but ones that are on the rise internationally. Human nature? Or just one side of human nature?

Or a reaction against Western imperialism? – Which is an idea I’m mulling over just now, for a new post, bringing my historical expertise into the picture. That is,  when I’ve got over the misery.

What can I add, as a historian, to all that is being said and written about POTUS 47 just now? He is entirely sui generis. There are no close precedents for him in the past, at least among US presidents, and probably among leaders of any other country – although I shouldn’t be surprised if ancient Rome provides a few. (And of course POTUS 45. And some Mafia bosses?) – But maybe that’s the important historical point to make: that Trump is an entirely new phenomenon. No-one quite like him has been seen in the White House before.

But there’s also an alternative historical reading – my own idiosyncratic one, as it happens. This is that he represents the climax of an underlying historical trend in America – underlying, that is, its presidential history; which trend is the progress of capitalism, a.k.a. ‘freedom’, from the very beginnings of the Republic, to its final(?) crisis today. Other Presidents have gone along with this trend, notably Ronald Reagan; but none has represented, even personified, the chaotic ending of it, in a kind of ludicrous quasi-fascism, as faithfully as Trump does; unfettered as he is by the constraints that the American constitution was supposed to impose on its Presidents.

Ah, Shakespeare! Thou shouldst be living at this hour! Here we have a wonderful tragi-comic hero for you – powerful, but immensely flawed, ignorant, narcissistic, revengeful and childish: all of which would surely be grist to your mill. A combination of Richard III, Falstaff and Othello, perhaps? (Although Shakespeare might not get the ‘crisis of capitalism’ bit.)

Even without the Bard’s help, I have to say that I’m enjoying the drama that is coming out of America today. – Albeit not without some schadenfreude; but combined with genuine sympathy for my American friends.