Things fall apart
Things are falling apart, though more in the sense of Chinua Achebe's sociological interpretation than in the Yeats' original. [1] Faced with invasion by an alien ideology, and the imminent collapse of traditions of governance which have served us well for many years, the people keenest to be seen to confront it are doing so in a way which, through misplaced pride and failure to come to terms with the subjective dynamics of the crisis, actually militates against effective cooperation, and leads to the kind of ‘heroic’ defeat which merits nothing more than a footnoted paragraph in a history written by the winners.
This four-part piece is my small attempt to influence those who object to the new ideology of hate with which we are now threatened, so that resistance at this stage is not futile, and that we don’t, for want of attention, get to the point at which resistance is morally right, but probably futile:
A new Fascism, with its trail of intolerance, of abuse, and of servitude, can be born outside a country and imported into it, walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names, or it can loose itself from within with such violence that it routs all defences. At that point, wise counsel no longer serves, and one must find the strength to resist. Even in this contingency, the memory of what happened in the heart of Europe, not very long ago, can serve as support and warning. (Primo Levi, quoted in Roger Griffin, 2012)
Writing in the LRB recently, James Butler noted that the new Prime Minister, presumably Johnson [2], faces not just an obvious constitutional crisis if he tries to force through a ‘No Deal’ Brexit, but a wider crisis of legitimacy:
The deeper political problem is the mismatch between what people think they are doing when they vote, and what the rules of British democracy say they are doing.
For James, the main hope lies in parliament’s more recent rediscovery of its powers to challenge government, and he hopes that will be enough to see us through the coming storm. The RSA’s Anthony Painter pins his hopes in the same place:
Parliamentary Conservatives have failed in their duty to the nation. The wider party likely to fail. Two more firewalls left: Parliament as a whole then the people. And then we're defenceless from Johnson and the #brexit ultras….
Both are right to be anxious at what may be coming down the tracks, because lying behind both expressions of hope in the robustness of parliamentary institutions lies a greater fear of what, in a time of Bannon, Farage, Puton and Trump, might come after a collapse in parliamentary government as we have known it.
But it’s been coming for a while now. We should have been more ready. And by “we”, I mean me.
Seven years of hindsight
When I first wrote, back in 2012, about the possibility of a full-blown fascism emerging within the decade, I was roundly mocked. The country still basked in the glow of the London Olympics, including an opening ceremony which celebrated cosmopolitanism and the longevity of the NHS. [3]
Yes, Anders Breivik had killed dozens of young people in an attack ‘inspired’ by fascist ideology, but that was in another country, even if it was an unusual one for this kind of thing to happen in,
The recession was over, and the worst effects of the cuts to public services had still to be felt. In this context, my concerns that the rise of rightwing ideologues like Michael Gove [4], already displaying a strong tendency to combine straightforward lies with a grand narrative about national decline and decadence, looked melodramatic:
Enter Michael Gove: reluctant leader, saviour of the party, prospective saviour of the nation. I don’t expect to see Gove striding down Whitehall in jackboots soon, but the danger that he will – at least metaphorically – is real enough.....
Within the ranks Conservative party itself, Gove will find plenty of willing acolytes to support him in in his reluctant crusade. The intellectually impoverished members of the Free Enterprise Group, for example, have already shown what good fascists they might make, using their Britannia Unchained publication to go beyond the bog-standard Thatcherite supply side solutions to economic stagnation (making it easy to hire and fire etc.), for an initial taste of the coming war against the decadence of the British workers.
And the leading light amongst these young fascist wannabees, Liz Truss, has not only been snapped us by Gove for his department, perhaps because she already displays – as her recent ‘research’ on childcare affordability shows – a notable ability to tell bare-faced lies for the greater cause. This group, and others within the 2010, will become willing and easy converts to the Gove cause, in the absence of continued Thatcherite leadership within the party.
Much of the mockery I got was, of course, justified; while my instincts, honed by years of listening on doorsteps with people of my age (50+), often about the need for respectability [5], along with too many hours spent in pubs overhearing regurgitations of what the Sun had to say about modern standards, I had put my case ignorantly.
There were four main gaps in that case, the filling of which all remain relevant – indeed are even more relevant – to the situation facing us now.
First, I didn’t recognize that the shift in the Tories’ governing mode under Cameron, away from Thatcherite statecraft and back towards the (Bulpittian) ‘dual polity’ and high/low politics divide of previous Tory administrations, had created the conditions for the growth in influence hard right ideologues like Gove and those in the Britannia Unchained movement. We are living now with the Brexit-ridden consequences of what I then called the ‘New Conservatism’ (wrongly, given its throwback nature) and, as I will set out in part III, the new Johnson government will offer the same fertile ground, but for faster growing invasive species imported from the US.
Second, while I recognized that the sharp shift towards exaggeration and lies [truss link] by a new generation of Tory politician, I did not properly contextualise that shift as being a radical new form of statecraft in itself, though one rooted in the existing habits of the main agents of that shift. As Timothy Garston-Ash put it recently, in reference to the referendum, but with wider applicability, this new form of statecraft was akin to “a Union debate with the addition of modern campaigning techniques” (quoted in Simon Kuper's illuminating piece on many senior Tories' Oxford Union training ground)
I realize now that It is precisely this coalescence between the narrow interests of this subset of our ruling class, and the ideas adopted by it, which creates the powerful, and toxic, political mix of a very English establishment preparing to do what are regarded as very un-English things. Recognizing the coalescence is important to understanding why and how the current situation is developed, but it is also key, I contend below, to organizing a leftwing response to it.
Third, and related, I saw Gove’s and other lesser lights’ new ideological imprint on the way the Tory party was beginning to go about its business in government in very parochial terms, even while reaching for the symbols of European fascism to make my point.
Yes, I was aware of growing far-right activity in post-Soviet era countries, and of the continuing disconcerting electoral strength of the Front National in France, but I didn’t really see the worldwide nature of the growing movement, and certainly did not see the links to Christian fundamentalists in the US, who were already pumping funds into the coffers of far-right parties and their leaders.
This meant that I underestimated the likely power of the alt-right in the UK to use people like Gove and now, in more dramatic terms, Johnson, to establish its legitimacy as a new “common sense” hitherto hidden from view by the “cultural Marxists” said to dominate the (once) liberal establishment.
Ironically, 2012 was the year in which the open access Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies was launched under the editorship of Roger Griffin, with a stated normative aim of drawing together the international threads of far-right growth, precisely so that emergent fascist forms might be countered. But I didn’t know that then.
The fourth, and perhaps most important gap, in my understanding of what was afoot, as early as 2012, was to do with what creates the very legitimacy of a state – or, more precisely in terms of the circumstances of mid-2019, what and how a crisis of legitimacy is created.
Without that understanding, I was unable to offer anything more than the vaguest of explanations as to how, by developing a narrative of national decadence and decline linked to the promise of redemption under strong and upright leadership, someone like Gove might actually end up destroying the fabric of law and order under the parliamentary system in the way feared by James Butler and Anthony Painter (above).
That failure to conceptualize how such a crisis might be triggered and developed, as well as the vital question of crisis ownership, meant that I was in no position to suggest countermeasures.
So seven years too late, I'm starting from the beginning.
Legitimacy
To my knowledge, the best account of why and how crises of state legitimacy occur is Jurgen Habermas’s 1975 study Legitimation Crisis).
It is therefore with a brief application of that study to the current political crisis in 2019 Britain - and in a first important respect, how the late capitalism of “bullshit jobs” and precarious living has been “steered” away from crisis in a way Habermas did not predict - that I will begin the task of:
a) Surveying the state we’re in now, especially through an assessment of whose crisis it is and whose it definitely isn’t (clue: it’s not ours).
b) Critiquing (as friend to the Corbyn project) the current well-intentioned but inadequate response of Labour and the wider left, understandably focused on a radical programme for government - and within that programme for government geared to remodelled economic institutions - but at the expense of what I will call a programme for parallel legitimacy, which will need to be designed to work with, and not in spite of the current psychological realities of late capitalism and thus, in the terms Paul Mason adopts, solidly in defence of the human being.
c) Using the statecraft framework offered by Jim Bulpitt, old-fashioned Tory historiographer or pioneering historical institutionalist, depending on your take), to reassess the likely ‘governing mode’ of a new Johnson government and in which that toxic mix of Tory interests and alt-right ideas may lead to very dangerous times but which, conversely, offers the left the best route to a legitimation crisis of its own construction (as helpfully tested for us by Margaret Thatcher), and towards the ‘inflection point’ for a newly legitimated governing mode.
d) Proposing how the delegitimation of Johnson & coterie’s von Papen style of governance (yes, I know that bit may be controversial) needs to both feed into and feed off a reinvigorated narrative of popular sovereignty, in which a single, overarching ‘right to participate’ [6] effectively bypasses the alt-right’s assault on post-war conceptions of equal human rights, and allows for a socialism delivered via the eye of the liberal needle [7], in combination with a renewed spirit of (English) functional pluralism and associational freedom;
e) Emphasizing, via a reading of Ulrich Beck’s final work, the extent to which this new political participation project will have to be so closely integrated with as to be indistinguishable from the project to delegitimize governance modes which are rooted in the causes of climate catastrophe (this being the second key aspect that Habermas could not easily have predicted back in 1975), through an exploration of the current potential for an ecological ‘inflection point’.
Part II follows soon.
Notes
[1] For avoidance of doubt, Achebe quotes the famous Yeats lines at the start of the book.
[2] It remains possible that Johnson will never become Prime Minister, if May decides that she cannot advise the Queen to appoint him. Alternatively, his days in No. 10 may be shortened to near zero by an immediate No Confidence vote. These scenarios have been well covered elsewhere, and my working assumption is that he will form a government which, by hook or by crook, lasts beyond October 31st's Brexit deadline and into the 2020s. Even if Johnson does not survive, many of legitimacy issues raised here will remain for a successor.
[3] The London Olympics of 2012 provided an environment for liberals like me to delude themselves about how cosmopolitan and tolerant we all were. Come the Rio Olympics of 2016, the tone was more becoming more desperate. Writing in the Guardian, Suzanne Moore did her best bit of Keynesian journalism, deficit spending on our national tolerance budget in a noble effort to create aggregate demand in the conviviality market, but even she seemed unsure whether we could pull it off this time round:
[I]n Rio we saw that winners come in all sizes, shades and sexualities and when they do brilliantly everyone gets behind them. I am not always fond of folk wrapping themselves in flags but nationalism is always an imaginary concept that can be mobilised in whichever way we choose. This nationalism – inclusive, warm, sentimental, hardworking – is the one the left should embrace, but is too often embarrassed about. So it leaves nationalism for others to remake in their own brutal image.
The refusal of so many people to understand that globalisation does not work out for everyone, or that mumbling at rallies about internationalism makes few hearts sing, is precisely why so many were out of touch with the result of the EU referendum.
In truth, we couldn't pull it off. Cool Britannia is gone, except as nostalgia item. We must build something more substantial.
[4] Of course, I was wrong about Gove himelf being the one to make it as leader, at least for now. There is potential for Johnson's government to crash and burn very quickly in the Autumn, so Gove or Gove-esque ideologue like Truss may still take the top job, but as I will setr out in part III, it is actually more likely now that the alt-right puppet masters prefer a charlatan fool like Johnson, and these are not in short supply in the Tory ranks. Stll, I contend that the main thrust of my 2012 - that the decadence of Cameronism would create the fertile ground for the growth of the alt-right both in and around the Tory party - has been proved broadly accurate.
[5] I shall return to the question of 'respectability', which I will suggest is a key motivational device used by the alt-right to legitimize and popularize its worldview amongst the baby boomer generation. One point that gets missed because opinion polls tend not to disaggregate answers from people between 55 and 80 from those now over 80, is the way the older set tend to value integrity over respectability (and this is still apparent in relation to how this group regards Corbyn more favourably). The 'bourgeois values' of the postwar generation have a whiff of those pre-war values described, controversially but cuttingly, in Willhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933).
[6] It is one of the deeper ironies of May's disastrous term of office that she should, in her very last days, happen upon on a route to the initial development of just such a 'right to partcipate', through her announcement of a new Office for Tackling Injustices. Nothing will come of it, other than the usual waste of a bit of taxpayer money, but an incoming Labour government might be well advised to rebrand and reuse the broad idea.
[7] The idea of socialism reached by the 'eye of the needle of liberal institutions, renewed in a new spirit of Enlightenment, is at the heart of the Habermasian project, and of this website:
The non-communist Left has no reason to be downhearted [and must adapt to the challenge of] transforming socialist ideas into the radically reformist self-criticism of a capitalist society, which, in the form of a constitutional democracy with universal suffrage and a welfare state, has developed not only weaknesses but also strengths. With the bankruptcy of state socialism, this is the eye of the needle through which everything must pass (The Rectifying Revolution, New Left Review, October 1990).