2016: Annus Horribilis

The Last Laugh: As Plato predicted, more than 2,000 years ago, a democratic citizenry that loses faith in its own efficacy will voluntarily entrust its destiny to the first demagogue who learns to speak its language of despair. In 2016, this annus horribilis, those demagogues’ names were Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.

 

THIS WAS THE YEAR that democracy failed. The year that, in the English-speaking world at least, citizens stopped being citizens. Exactly what we are turning into is not yet clear, but it’s unlikely to be anything good.

 

This is a harsh judgement, and hopefully, in our own case, a premature one. In the case of the United Kingdom and the United States, however, it is more than fair. The Brexit decision and the Trump triumph, on their own, constitute more than sufficient evidence to warrant the indictment of both the British and the American electorates.

 

If it is to work at all, democracy requires a citizenry who both understand and value the principles of representative government. An interested citizenry, who take care to inform themselves about what is happening in their country – and why. A well-educated citizenry, who seek after the truth and cannot be swayed by the cheap falsehoods and even cheaper promises of demagogues and charlatans. A proud citizenry, who prize the scientific, technological and cultural achievements of their nation’s history. A decent citizenry, unwilling, on principle, to use the franchise as a means of inflicting shame and injury upon individuals, groups and organisations which a fraction (maybe even a majority) of them distrust.

 

In all the long history of the world there has never existed a body of citizens which fitted perfectly this idealised description of a democratic people. Prior to 2016, however, there have always enough of them in the United Kingdom and the United States to ensure that the moral trajectories of those nation states traced an upward course.

 

The British people overcame the power of their kings and wrenched a welfare state from the pockets of a reluctant capitalist ruling class. The American people, likewise, made good the promises of their Declaration of Independence and abolished slavery – even if they had to fight a bloody civil war to do it. In the 1930s, rejecting the extremes of left and right, they embraced Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and, in the 1960s and 70s, as the world’s most affluent society, they gave birth to the “New Social Movements” of racial and sexual emancipation and environmentalism.

 

While in both the United Kingdom and the United States the popular struggle for human rights and social progress has endured many difficulties and delays, it has never been decisively reversed. As Dr Martin Luther King reassured all those still fighting for their share of the American dream: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

 

Or, so we thought, until this horrible year.

 

Who is to blame?

 

The very question is emblematic of our malaise. So much of what went wrong in 2016 is attributable to an ever-increasing number of citizens’ furious quest for the causes of their besetting nightmares. Immigrants, Muslims, the undeserving poor, liberals, conservatives, Clinton, Trump: the dread creatures of our unease wear many faces. All of them, however, have one thing in common – they are to blame.

 

Progressives like to blame globalisation and its ideological bodyguard, neoliberalism. They point to devastated regions and hollowed-out communities filled with men and women psychologically paralysed by their diminished status and security. People mired in a crippling nostalgia for their vanished life-worlds. People frightened of the future. People hungry for some kind – any kind – of social and political revenge.

 

We are losing faith in collective efficacy. For the second time in a century, the future threatens. The first was after World War I, when the progressive belief that dramatic economic and technological change could be turned to the advantage of ordinary people, by ordinary people, faltered – and with it their faith in democracy. In Europe this disillusionment fuelled the rise of dictators. In the English-speaking world, however, ordinary people’s faith in democracy endured, and the totalitarian dictatorships were defeated.

 

In the twenty-first century, totalitarianism wears a different mask. Economic and technological change are no longer means to collective emancipatory ends, they’ve become ends in themselves. Winners find a place in the free-market system; losers get spat out. Thirty years of this inhuman political calculus have convinced voters that while they might change parties, they cannot change policies.

 

Except they can. Not in the progressive spirit of their ancestors, but in the spirit of an ignorant, illiberal and recklessly vengeful nihilism. If the “Establishment” urges them to remain in the European Union, then they’ll vote for Brexit. If Donald Trump represents the antithesis of everything the Establishment’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, stands for, then: “Let’s make America great again!”

 

As Plato predicted, more than 2,000 years ago, a democratic citizenry that loses faith in its own efficacy will voluntarily entrust its destiny to the first demagogue who learns to speak its language of despair. In 2016, this annus horribilis, those demagogues’ names were Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27 December 2016.

Four Limericks On The Friday Britain Took Her Leave.

Or Not: David Cameron's future as Britain's Prime Minister looks decidedly shaky in the aftermath of Britain's narrow, 52-48 percent, decision to leave the European Union. Cameron wagered everything on his country voting to remain in the EU - and lost. Anyone for Boris?

 

1.

 

William, with a conqueror’s grin,

Told the English: “It looks like you’re ‘In’!”

But, after one thousand years,

It’s all ending in tears.

Europe’s welcome has worn wafer thin.

 

2. 

Sheffield used to make knives, forks and spoons,

And sang all of the Left’s favourite tunes,

Until Labour’s “Remain!”,

Drove it’s voters insane,

And now UKIP is over the moon!

 

3.

 

Scotland’s voters were all shouting “Boo!”

As the Sassenachs turned England blue.

“If you all lack the brain

To vote for ‘Remain’,

Well then, fuck-it-all – we’re leaving too!” 

4.

 

Nigel Farage cried: “Look what we’ve got,

Without having to fire one shot!”

He’s forgetting the price,

That Jo Cox was shot thrice,

In the name of – come on Nigel – What?

 

These limericks were originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 24 June 2016.

UKIP's Genteel Xenophobia.

Loudly Defending "Little England": Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is the product of Thatcherism's elimination of the threat of Labour's "socialism" and the trade unions' "communism". Their greatest fears allayed, the Little Englanders are now voicing their xenophobic antipathy to globalisation and its consequences.

 

IN LESS THAN A MONTH the people of the United Kingdom will have a new government. Depending on how the votes fall, one of the key figures in that new government could be Nigel Farage – leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

 

Frequently interviewed outside a traditional English pub, pint of beer in hand, Mr Farage has spent a decade perfecting his populist political persona: that of the loud, but fearless, member of the local golf club who isn’t afraid to call a guest-worker a “bloody foreigner” – and political correctness be damned!

 

UKIP claims to speak for “Little England” – think Hobbiton with Range Rovers – a place where retired small businessmen and local branch managers keep their suburban hedges neatly trimmed, and their little squares of lawn as closely shaved as their own ruddy cheeks. Safe within the confines of the golf-club, or down at their local, these Little Englanders grouse and grumble about what they see as their country’s slow dissolution in the acidic cosmopolitanism of the despised European Union (EU) and the caustic demographic backwash of Britain’s long lost Empire.

 

The success with which Nigel Farage has given voice to this genteel suburban xenophobia has the British Conservative Party running scared.

 

Time was when Little England’s visceral fear of the “socialists” in the Labour Party, and the “communists” in the trade unions, was sufficient to keep them safely inside the Tory Party’s big tent. But thanks to Margaret Thatcher (the woman Little Englanders would canonise if they could) the great left-wing bogeymen of the 50s, 60s and (especially) the 1970s have been reduced to things of vinegar and brown paper. Ed Miliband undoubtedly possesses many talents, but the ability to frighten Tories isn’t one of them.

 

With the Left no longer strong enough to keep the Right united, the natural fissures within British conservatism have grown wider.

 

Little England and UKIP wishes their beleaguered country could look like Inspector Barnaby’s Midsomer (minus the lethal homicide rate). Theirs would be a land of picturesque cottages, thriving high-street shops and large Anglican congregations. A world in which everybody’s white, nobody’s red, and blue is still the colour you call true. UKIP and Little England have no time for the EU’s circle of stars; no time for the Euro; and no time for the tens-of-thousands of “bloody foreigners” pouring across the English Channel.

 

In their heart-of-hearts they must know that their Little England has never existed outside the pages of Agatha Christie’s whodunits. What made England – and Britain – “great” were her factories, her cities and her highly-skilled working-class. William Blake’s “green and pleasant” England is a place rooted in “ancient time” – one that is quite incompatible with the “dark Satanic Mills” that have made the Britain of modern times so prosperous and heroic.

 

For all its aristocratic heritage and old-Etonian chic, the modern British Conservative Party was built by Stanley Baldwin, a Big England iron-and-steel industrialist who understood that if British capitalism showed itself to be incapable of sustaining a prosperous and growing middle-class, then its much larger (and considerably less prosperous) working-class would, eventually, put an end to it.

 

Little England may have loved Margaret Thatcher for smashing Labour and the unions, but it never really grasped the fact that the Left was not broken for the sake of the posh and the toff. On the contrary, Mrs Thatcher broke the Left because she regarded it as an impediment to the modernisation of Britain’s economy. She didn’t want to turn England into Midsomer Worthy, she wanted to turn England into Canary Wharf. Thatcherism was about barrow-boys breaking into boardrooms. It was about the City of London sucking the wealth of Europe into a very big British bang. It was about refashioning the British Labour Party in Thatcherism’s own image.

 

Mr Farage can sup his traditional English pint, and excoriate David Cameron’s Tories for selling England’s inheritance for a mess of EU-approved pottage, but the truth of the matter is that a Conservative-UKIP coalition government; one at odds with Labour and the Scots, and out of the European Union altogether, would very quickly have the nation on life-support.

 

What UKIP has yet to grasp is that, given the goals they share, David Cameron and Ed Miliband would rather rule Britain together, than see it decline, out of Europe, on its own.

 

This essay was originally published by The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 April 2015.