The Left Has To Answer For Trump
In both the US and the UK, the age of Trumpism is a crisis on the Left, not on the Right
The miserable turn of 2020–21: an election cycle rotates, and a reckoning screams towards us. For the first time in more than seventy years, the transatlantic levees of liberal democracy have been overwhelmed. At the Capitol in Washington the democratic liturgy, deeply sacred within American consciousness, is chaotically upended, with blood on the floor. In Europe one of the major powers truculently resigns from the moral idealism fertilised by the tears and shame of World War Two, quietly retreating into a low-level, persistent hum of accusatory bitterness and nationalist rancour as the bodies of those who actually lived the war pile up all around.
Both the Trump presidency and the Brexit project have arrived on deadline, both black-eyed, bleeding and swearing; both protesting the requirement to submit accounts. Both look down contemptuously at the ledger put before them, both spit blood on the pages and, with a leering smile, refuse to sign.
This is unexpectedly neat. The US election timetable always had this moment on the board, but the high-speed Brexit drunk-drive could have crashed anywhere, that it has done so now, asking us to confront the twin cataclysms of 2016 at a single point, is a cosmic accident. Or maybe it’s final proof of divine order and original sin. Four years into the nationalist dawn that was supposed to offer hope to the hopeless in both America and Europe, here we are in a plague-ridden moral desert, where truth burns in oil drum fires and history proves the maxim that all ideologies are ultimately devoured by their most extreme forms.
The images from Washington displayed a swaggering contempt for the institutions, symbols and ceremonies of the state; as if it’s all just the final act in a great epic of absurdist theatre, and a participatory one at that. Perhaps this is what participatory democracy has come to mean, an avant-garde game in which anyone is entitled to join on terms of their own choosing. Costumed mobs, resembling premium avatars from Fortnite more than political demonstrators, enjoy a first-person wander through the key institution of the American state without any fear of arrest, censure or accountability. Outside, Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, a song until recently associated only with irony and nostalgia, blares from speakers, confirming that democratic politics has been violently supplanted by post-modern nihilism as the animating force of contemporary life.
More than that, the images suggest that we may have arrived at the end point of material reality being steadily consumed by the imaginative realm, in which every person, both famous and obscure, are simply equal characters in some multi-seasoned dramatic narrative and spin-off series; the final realisation of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, in which authenticity and history have no place and in which “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation”. Or maybe not, maybe there’s a way to go yet. How are we here? How do we claw forward, in the hope of finding a way back?
It is significant that the 2016 cataclysms, Trump and Brexit, set just 5 months or so apart from one another, occurred in the two nations that had stepped forward to lead the global response to the 2008 crash: one the world’s loudest economy and locus of the original sub-prime contagion, the other the reactor-core of the world’s financial system.
A brief summary of the history: The US had been the chief architect of the thirty-year neoliberal political-economic programme that led directly to both 2008 and 2016, while the UK, through its paradise archipelago of tax havens, had become a leading state sponsor of the hyper-rich class created by that programme, uncritically underwriting its outrageous games of international embezzlement and unearned wealth inflation. In 2008 this giant Ponzi scheme finally collapsed and the political left, implacable opponent of monetarism and post-industrial globalisation, should have had its moment of vindication. This was it: step forward, torch in hand, over the twitching carcass of Alan Greenspan, and re-design the future; but instead it became horrifyingly clear that the left was M.I.A.
Gordon Brown in many ways personified the catastrophic state of the democratic left after three decades of its bargain with neo-liberalism. That original Faustian pact, signed under easy grins by Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK, settled the terms of the future: lightly regulated hyper-capitalism would drive late century globalisation, the gears of the market would be permitted to chew their way across the planet, macerating state defences like publicly-owned utilities and subsidised key industry, while the left would triage the victims, salving their wounds with renovated public services and expanded social security.
The initial, transformative energy that this form of capitalism injected into emerging economies provided a moral justification, at least in the short term, and the yawning inequalities that followed were dismissed as irrelevant so long as those caught on the wrong side of the divide (the vast majority) didn’t tumble into the chasm — “we’re intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich so long as they pay their taxes” Tony Blair’s bagman Peter Mandelson famously remarked (as it turned out the qualification about taxes was insincere). As Chancellor of The Exchequer, Gordon Brown sold this settlement in millenarian terms: “an end to the cycle of boom and bust”.
When the bust inevitably arrived it was more spectacular than anything seen for almost a century, plunging graphs wailed across television screens and newspaper front pages; it fell to Gordon Brown, recently elevated to the office of Prime Minister, to fly to Washington, corral the panicking and present a sober business plan. Brown was the last man standing from that original 90s group of triangulating, third-way social democrats, the last defender of their vision, it was natural that responsibility should fall on his shoulders. There was hope that he would rediscover his socialist roots, explain to his colleagues in the western democracies that the effort to gently ameliorate neoliberalism had failed, conclusively, and that the task now was to prevent an immediate depression, followed by an effort to articulate what a new global economic settlement might look like.
Instead Brown’s solution was to renew the pact with piratical capitalism and introduce alongside it a special form of socialism, one to be implemented only for the designated losers: the state would underwrite the debt, through centralised, command-economy programmes, and the masses were expected to dutifully form austerity-collectives and labour to pay the bills, freeing the wealthy to rebuild their fortunes. Victory to the workers! Constructing Socialism through paying billionaires’ debts! This was the beginning, and it remains with us.
Action by the radical left was desultory and self-evidently inadequate. In Britain and America the Occupy movement appeared as a leaderless melange of incoherent and contradictory political ideas that failed to describe a credible alternative (and apparently didn’t want to). Anyone deploying their critical faculties at the time could see that it was obviously destined to fail. Occupy also contained within it the seeds of the rupture that would ultimately occur in 2016, in that it did not seem like a movement that spoke to and included the post-industrial working class, but rather a collection of university-educated activists clustered into the major urban centres, organising on expensive Apple devices and self-righteously discussing prospects for their own self-determination. Left-populist groups that managed to participate in the electoral process, like Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain, were more successful, but ultimately too weak and scattered to meaningfully dent the neoliberal barricades.
And so the whole carousel was refurbished and fired up again, accompanied by Sisyphean hopelessness in the unrelenting struggle to service a festering system that offered nothing but vaguely managed decline to the huge areas of society expected to work for it. And so the grievances expanded and in came the slogans: “Make America Great Again”, “Take Back Control”, “Drain The Swap”, “Lock Her (read “them”) Up”. In came Trump. And when I say “Trump”, I mean it in a broad phenomenological sense, rather than in limited reference to the individual.
Commentary since 2016 has presented the Trump age as a crisis that erupted on the right, it’s even been described as a “rebellion on the right”. The broad claim is that the political right, under threat from multi-culturalism, environmentalism and demographic changes has sought to exploit the discontent germinating within disenfranchised, traditionally working-class, post-industrial communities that once voted to the left but have been the principal losers from both globalisation and the unstable, post-2008 resettlement. White people in this group, it is alleged, are particularly disturbed by the rollback of deference towards the patriarchal whiteness on which their sense of culture is predicated. The right aims to marshal these instabilities into a new populist movement in order to secure the continuance of right-wing governments and the stability of their donor class in the oligarchy.
It’s a project that has sought to galvanise its constituents by perpetuating a certain narrative of the recent past, sometimes stretching back as far as the 1950s, which imagines that society in general has been captured by a class of “elites”, defined as the state bureaucracy, political class and any financial-industrial plutocrats that seem supportive of the status quo. The media (re-cast in this narrative as the “mainstream media”), as organisations that report news from within the assumptive framework that facts are to be verifiable and interpreted according to the normal terms of reference, and that individuals are assumed to be acting in good faith unless it can be demonstrated otherwise, is seen as acquiescent in the self-serving and dishonest activities of the “elites”. In other words, unless the media openly supports the prejudices and narratives of the new, radical right e.g. Fox News, Breitbart, The Mail etc, which are deemed to be trustworthy exceptions, the media is itself an organ of the “elites” (although the post US election denunciations of Fox News shows how arbitrary and fragile these designations of trust are).
Political change, it is claimed, can only come from outside the elite class, with a disruptive leadership launching a radical insurgency from the right that will attack the liberal, global political-economic consensus, thus breaking the status quo. Donald Trump is one of such leadership figures, as is Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and other right-wing populists. Their qualifications are usually that they A) refuse to conform to the expectations of the liberal centre ground and the soft left e.g. around responsible use of language and respect for the sensitivities of other groups, including minority communities and out-groups — the very existence of such expectations is portrayed as having been manufactured by the “elites” as a tool of subjugation. B) They refuse accommodation with any of the positions of their political opponents (or other out-groups) and frame all political conflict as a zero-sum game. They and their supporters typically claim to be the victims in this zero-sum game, a conflict which they are belatedly and reluctantly fighting only after it was initiated by their opponents, and C) precisely because they refuse to acquiesce to these disingenuous demands presented by the other side, they are disdained by traditional voices within politics and media commentary, which further confirms their authentic separation from the “elite” class.
The story goes on to posit that the national project of an earlier era, as one that had the equal interests of its citizens at its centre, has been usurped by a global project that by definition has no responsibility towards the citizens of any particular state — Theresa May, as a beleaguered Prime Minister attempting to curry favour with Brexit chauvinists, made a shameful speech in which she described opponents of nationalism (and proponents of global multilateralism) as “citizens of nowhere”, implicitly indifferent to the lives and prospects of those who feel tethered to a society, economy and culture that is constituted on a national basis. Or at least was constituted on a national basis during a mythical era in which life was vastly more rewarding.
Within this schema, the genuine “citizens” possessed of connection to national life and culture are subjected, by the elites, to a coercive, “globalist” campaign aimed at stripping them of their basic identities. The primary features of this campaign are relentless policing of language, behaviour and value systems and the insistence that citizens repeat “things that they don’t really believe” under threat of social and economic penalties. This is all held to be a process of usurping “traditional values”, “classical ideas” and “rights and freedoms” and drowning “truth” in a post-modern, elitist swamp of irony, relativism and simulacra.
The narrative concludes that these “elites”, in sinister confederacy with the “globalist” “citizens of nowhere”, have manipulated national government institutions and political structures, which are subversively operated by secret, “deep states” that exist beyond the realm of democratic control. Democracy itself has thus been supplanted and can only be restored by an insurgent figure from outside the “elite” class. It is also an underdog story, a heroic struggle in which the odds of failure are presented as overwhelming, so an obscene, avaricious character like Donald Trump is counter-factually cast as a defender of the powerless, his armour of vast, independent wealth and global celebrity enabling him to make war on the deep-state without fear of immediate, crushing defeat.
Accompanying the concept of an end-times war against the deep state, is a bewildering matrix of conspiracy theories to which supporters of the Trump project subscribe, no matter how contradictory or incompatible with one another they may seem: QAnon, Covid-19 as a “Plandemic”, 5G technology and vaccination programmes as instruments of social control and so on. Interestingly, the individual merits of these theories have become largely irrelevant, their adherents do not tend to view them as discrete phenomena, but rather as grouped manifestations of deep state activity. Communications from central government around events like Covid-19 or Russian counter-intelligence operations are interpreted as part of a single, integrated mis-information campaign directed by the deep state, the logic of which means that all utterances by the elite class are not only lies, but are related ultimately to a single, international lie. Which explains such irrationalities as the QAnon conspiracy (which accuses the US Democratic Party of a breathtaking spectrum of crimes), being adopted by people in the UK and Europe, despite matters belonging to American party politics having nothing whatsoever to do with their lives.
The old, patrician conservative right, particularly in Trump’s America, but also in the UK in the shape of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, has assumed a depressing role in all of this. It is as if the lessons painfully bled from the twentieth century’s blackest moments have been abruptly deleted from the general consciousness. Rather than moving to contain the dangerous mutations taking place within their parties, mainstream conservative leaders have engaged in backstairs intriguing, seeking to instrumentalise the populist right for reasons of political expediency and in a corrupt attempt to expand their own political capital, with catastrophic consequences: it has produced a crisis in which the right has split between traditional conservatism and populist radicalism, with populist radicalism both in the ascendency and dangerously out of control. No better example of this crisis can be given than the disgraceful spectacle on January the 6th 2021, when conservatives like Ted Cruz took to the Senate floor to lie and dissemble for their own benefit only to be interrupted by a tattooed conspiracy theorist, bare-chested and dressed in bull horns, charging at them to the soundtrack of Don’t Stop Believin’.
Since 2009, when an initial phase of post-crash shock transmogrified to incontinent rage, the crisis on the right has both disgorged the Tea Party movement in the US and suddenly improved the fortunes for assorted fringe far-right aggregations in the UK — initially the grotesque but comically inept British National Party, and latterly UKIP, the Brexit Party and The European Research Group. Naturally, the first response of left in both countries was to declare a state of emergency and propose various countermeasures: fighting the radical right with radical left activity in a zero-sum game (the Momentum project and grassroots campaigns like Black Lives Matter are examples); pressuring traditional conservatives and the centre-right to supress or purge the radical right from within their political formations and join with the liberal centre and soft left to define and defend the “normal” frame of politics; identifying the underlying causes of the populist surge (social and economic destabilisation of lower income groups) and exploring what can be done to mitigate those issues in the near term.
All of these approaches are inadequate — activity from the radical left has intensified the culture war (the right’s citizens versus global elites narrative), centrist “normal frame of politics” initiatives ignore that the populist surge is a product of the status quo and so can’t be solved by affirming the status quo, and, finally, proposals to relieve the pressure on lower income groups are typically not-far reaching enough, focus on a narrow set of practical issues and therefore fail to properly diagnose the existential nature of the problem and the structural causes for it.
In the UK, there was an inebriated attempt to both elevate an anti-elite leader and address the 2008 breach with the selection of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of The Labour Party. Corbyn was dramatically inept, his project ill-defined and his most fervent supporters a motely coalition of ageing 80s refugees, Occupy failures and culture-war millennials (of which more later). Crucially, Corbyn already had a long record in politics, a survey of which rendered him unacceptable to the post-industrial working class that has been successfully courted by the right.
Thus far, two big misapprehensions have crippled efforts to confront the new right, and both will need to be understood and addressed as a precondition of any future advance against it: first, we need to appreciate that the crisis is not in fact on the right, but on the left and, second, we need to stop classifying supporters of the populist right, or “new right”, as deluded nativists and callous bigots, and recognise that they have a point.
The first thing to notice about new right catechism is the dazzling contradictions. What is mythologised as the noble struggle of the humble everyman against the tyranny of elites has in fact been enthusiastically supported by the billionaire class, those who are not explicitly supportive seem to have been at best indifferent. Further, despite all the self-righteous wailing about the corruption of the “mainstream media” and the “political class”, it is a movement that requires political mechanisms in order to organise and express itself. It requires corporate mass media channels to amplify its messages (Facebook groups only get you so far) and it relies on the traditional political class in order to invade the democratic institutions. It is clear from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Russian counter-intelligence operations and other ructions associated with right-wing insurgency, that what may have appeared at first glance to be successful outsider, grass-roots campaigns actually relied on vast funding and centralised planning. Achieving the kind of grand-scale (dis)information and propaganda environment that now oxygenates the right has unambiguously been the achievement of traditional elites in the oligarchy — Rupert Murdoch, the Kochs, the Mercers. Similarly, the new right’s route to executive power is via the established political vehicles of the traditional right — The US Republican Party, The UK Conservative Party — these are vehicles that are at their core operated by an established political class and financed by a self-interested donor class, in other words traditional elites. The donor class, in particular, is essential to sustain political momentum and achieve political consequence. The new right is most definitely a project of elites.
There has been some limited recognition of this problem within right wing discourse. Implicit in the hagiographies around Donald Trump, for example, is the notion that his private wealth exempts him from fealty to the donor class. It’s a defective proposition, one that fails to acknowledge that Trump himself has always been a part of that class. Trump has tried to counter this obvious objection by claiming that his political ascent represented an exit from the donor class and that as a lapsed member he understands how to defeat it better than anyone else. It is an unpersuasive argument, fundamentally he remains part of the elite, a proud member of the billionaire caucus who has never, in his entire life, demonstrated any qualities other than venality and dishonesty. He has never even made a token attempt at the usual self-justification of the super-rich, which is some form or other of philanthropy or patronage. While in office his approach to governance was ruthlessly transactional at all times, which is characteristic of the self-serving avatars of his class.
In relation to the uneasy co-habitation between traditional conservatives and the radical right, there has been explicit criticism from the both the left and the liberal centre that establishment political elites risk making the same mistake as the Weimar Republic; that in seeking to instrumentalise the new right they risk being consumed in a repeat of the conflagration that ended democracy in Germany during the 1930s. At this stage the direct comparison is mildly hysterical, we’re not there yet. Trump’s revanchist post-election attempt to inspire some modern reincarnation of the Enabling Act was ultimately unsuccessful, more psychic disintegration than surgical putsch.
The glaring differences to the rise of National Socialism should be obvious — ultimately, unlike in Weimar Germany, the guiding hand of the new right is not a group of obscure, populist outsiders, it is traditional elites within the billionaire class, oligarchy and establishment right. While it is true that there are charismatic everymen in visible leadership roles, Tommy Robinson for example, they are ultimately inconsequential without traditional elites to amplify them, elites at whose pleasure they serve. Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage are former investment bankers, the Brexit gang of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are from the old-money, old-Etonian traditionalist upper-class. The Republican party is packed with the super-rich and its donors are to be found in the Texan oilfields, on Wall Street and running the industrial oligarchies.
These elites stimulate and tolerate the new right because it serves their agenda, principally by guaranteeing a steady upward funnel of wealth in the form of tax cuts, subsidies and other indulgences, but also in dismantling the post-war social contract and making sure that industrial era labour rights (and the associated rights culture) are not grandfathered-in to the post-industrial, post-unionism, flexible labour market of the digital era. They have also shown themselves to be at pains to ensure that those remaining, old-world enterprises in heavy industry and fossil fuels are insulated from the new frontiers of environmentalism and that foreign workers in emerging economies that do not have a history of regulation (or progressive taxation for that matter) are kept poor and disenfranchised. A programme that is ostensibly nationalist in nature in fact operates to further these international aims.
How do we explain a movement against “elites” that appears to be financed by elites, amplified by media organisations that are owned by billionaire oligarchs, expressed politically by elites in the mainstream parties on the right, and of which “elites” appear to be the principal beneficiaries? The answer is in redefining our concept of “elite”, and specifically in how that term is understood within the lexicon of the new right. We have to separate economics from culture, which drags us onto the depressing plains of the culture war.
Traditionally, the term “elite” has described a small group who enjoy unusually large reserves of economic, political and social capital — in other words the wealthy and the establishment class. Or, more specifically, the traditional aristocracy and wealthy bourgeoisie, because membership of these groups has historically been a precondition of entry into the establishment. One of the successes of the post-war left was, to a limited degree, breaking this formulation.
The two most important mechanisms for democratising access to the establishment were initially universal education (importantly, in the UK this extended to free higher education) and formerly insurgent left political movements that had over time become part of the establishment — The British Labour Party, for example. Later on, the disruptive energy of neo-liberal capitalism made it possible to accumulate massive wealth from humble beginnings. It must be said that this potential has been hugely overstated: it’s typically not possible to accumulate that wealth without access to the capital controlled by traditional elites, and in accumulating vast wealth one automatically in turn joins those elites, but, nevertheless, there are enough examples of the poor-turned-rich to buttress the ideology around “entrepreneurial capitalism”, the idea that the path to wealth is merely a process of self-actualisation: want it enough, work hard enough and it is within reach of anyone, irrespective of their socio-economic circumstances. It is no co-incidence that the leading cultural depiction of this ideology is Donald Trump’s television show “The Apprentice”, fronted in the US by Trump himself and in the UK by Alan Sugar, both tycoons associated with the 1980s, when the neo-liberal project was given its head and the entrepreneurial capitalist fantasy invaded all aspects of culture.
And so in the popular imagination the concept of “elites” has become uncoupled from economics — being rich does not designate you as part of the “elite”, extreme wealth is, after all, available to anyone. Elitism has instead come to be a concept almost exclusively associated with intellectualism: where it is possible for anyone and everyone to become wealthy, it is conversely not possible for everyone to become intellectually gifted. There is a profound corollary to this concept, which is that if class does not express itself in purely economic terms, it can certainly be construed in cultural terms.
Thus a divide opens between the old, industrial working class communities and the new, metropolitan communities of the post-industrial economy. The former are often under-educated, feel that they have been stripped of their social value and that their economic value has been undermined by a migrant class. The latter are educated, benefit from services provided by a migrant class that they value as useful, and whose concerns have refocused on how to resolve questions of historical and structural injustice closely associated with identity — race, gender etc. These post-industrial metropolitan communities have also in large measure submitted to the neo-liberal ideology that refuses to recognise traditional economic class barriers, and so they all too often construe social justice as a process of defending groups that have faced social marginalisation, but do not always suffer from contemporary economic marginalisation — BAME, women, LGBTQ+.
It is a perverse, irrational conflict in which one side accuses the poor and uneducated of seeking to preserve some imagined reservoir of great privilege, while the other denounces education, the great, classless emancipator, as the universal signifier of duplicitous and oppressive elitism. From the point of view of the real elites, the oligarchs who finance this production, the culture war is a great boon. From capitalism’s point of view, it is irrelevant if the worker is black or white, male or female, gay or straight. Displacing traditional, class-based economic struggle with the politics of identity is ideal from predatory capitalism’s perspective, it has no skin in that particular game.
This is the central failure of the left; it has abandoned the very people that it was supposed to represent. Rather than expanding its founding constituency, as it sought to do in the 60s, 70s and 80s by explaining why class rights, BAME rights, women’s rights and LBGTQ rights are part of a joint struggle for social justice, the third-way, 90s left made its peace with neo-liberalism, which automatically meant that it abandoned the cause of the working class, which, it insisted, had been swallowed by Fukuyama’s End of History, the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy. The Blair/Clinton concept of society as a meritocracy is essentially the same dog as the right’s classless society, just wearing a different collar.
But the working class has not been erased by the evolution of history, it endures. Its factories have closed, its working men’s clubs have disappeared, its stable, reassuring communities have atomised, but the people still exist, and so does their memory, irrespective of whether some aspects of that memory (xenophobia and racism, for example) are deserving of criticism. This is the political vacuum into which the new right has stepped, one which opened on the left and which the left has almost entirely ignored. The new right is correct, people have been left behind, in vast swathes, in whole communities; they are bewildered and angry and hopeless and it is the left who have abandoned them, not the other way around. The journey of the left from the movement of social justice and the working class to a party cast as representative of the “elite” took place in just a few steps over the past century, some of which were an unavoidable consequence of political tides, some of which are attributable to its own success and some of which are the unhappy harvest of its own, depressing mistakes.
The close of the industrial era brought with it the winding-up of trade unionism as the force that it had been during most of the twentieth century, and the political organisations of the left correspondingly ceased to be vehicles for the aspirations of organised labour. In reformulating themselves, the mainstream parties on the left generally abandoned the last vestiges of their radical origins in order to consolidate their place within the political establishment and signed an armistice with neo-liberalism: leave the system structurally unchallenged, attempt to annexe and redistribute some of its profits where possible. In this, the charge that the mainstream left is now “the elite” has some resonance.
Industrial decline also dismantled much of the architecture of working-class society — working men’s clubs, libraries, community services and organisations — that the left had been able to use as forums in which to raise consciousness and engage people in political ideas. In Britain, certainly, labour unions and working men’s clubs frequently held debates and hosted lectures from national political leaders. The failure to adequately respond to the loss of this ecosystem has been devastating. It is the duty of the left to explain to people the substance of political ideologies, and how they are expressed within our democracies. The right depends for its political success on exploiting a certain level of generalised ignorance, without it they would not be able to rely on the election-clinching votes of people who are not part of the narrow class in whose interests the right governs.
The glittering road of education, fought for and achieved by the left as a route out of disadvantaged childhoods and abbreviated life chances, has also had unintended consequences. During the era in which prospects for social mobility were limited, bright, intellectually engaged people often remained in the communities of their birth, securing reasonably paid, unionised jobs in local industries. I know anecdotally that such figures would often police reactionary tendencies displayed by those around them, challenging unthinking prejudice or petty racism. This phenomenon largely ended with wide access to education and the initial waves of post-war social mobility — the bright and auto-didactic, the “elite”, migrated out of their working-class communities and into the universities, the cities, the economies of the future. What of those who remained, who didn’t or couldn’t take advantage of those opportunities? Sometimes they felt disdained, sometimes inadequate, sometimes indifferent, but certainly the opportunities to engage with and argue with the best minds among them were further depleted. More mono-culture, more singularity in thought, more atomisation.
Addressing this issue should have been a long-term project of the left, particularly during its periods in government. Instead, in place of a genuine, evolved political discourse, a bleak war of slogans and epithets has opened — “socialism”, “fascism”, “classical liberalism”, “globalism”, “black lives matter”, “all lives matter”, “defund the police”— without the vast majority having any real concept of what any of these words mean, subsumed as they have become into a general morass of apocalyptic misrepresentation and opportunistic obfuscation by bad-faith actors. And speaking the language of conflict plays directly into the hands of the populist right, which has always required fear and Manicheanism in order to thrive.
The left’s accommodation with neo-liberalism was the worst crime of all. Ultimately, what the losers from that system want is not purely economic; some light redistribution, tax credits or social security programmes are not enough. Again, what people also require is cultural meaning, communities, a sense of purpose. Marx’s proposition that, freed from the exploitation of the capitalist labour market, people would spend their abundant free time on hobbies and intellectual pursuits now appears tragically optimistic. The results are in and the recent Covid pandemic has confirmed them: when deprived of or excused from meaningful work and meaningful cultural life people get drunk, watch Netflix and consume the dismal ideological messages that emanate from neo-liberalism. I remember, in my youth, attending a talk by Chuck D of Public Enemy and something that he said has stuck with me for twenty years. To paraphrase: if you tell people that all that you should want in life is a Mercedes, that there’s nothing that is as good or desirable as a Mercedes, that without a Mercedes you are worthless, and then you rig it so that most people will never, ever be able to get a Mercedes….don’t be surprised if someone sticks a gun in your face and takes your Mercedes.
Chuck D’s parable applies whether you are black, white, male or female and is utterly unanswered by the culture war and the present concerns of much of the discourse on the left. The abandoned, post-industrial class perceive the advantages of those who were able to transition into the new economy and benefitted from neo-liberalism, these are their “elites”. It is no accident that tipping-point support for the new right was drafted from the former industrial working-class (the Red Wall in the UK and the Rust Belt in the US) with a prospectus that offered cultural meaning and solidarity, mainly framed around the easily accessible concepts of tradition, nationalism and antipathy towards migrants and other out-groups.
Fundamentally, the concerns of these constituencies have remained static: stability, dignity in work and pay, decent housing, a sense of community and purpose, opportunities for the next generation. These are concerns that all too often seem to be absent from the contemporary agenda of the left, or at least of second or third order, despite being pressing for decades. For the people that feel that they have remained suspended in time, still waiting for a hearing, still waiting for representation, unseen and unheard by the left, it is easy to see why they are reluctant to acquiesce to demands that they get their heads around inter-sectionality and critical race theory. Yes the statues need to go, but put something in their place.
One of the of the unfortunate, unintended consequences of critical theory is that with it the left has equipped the right with a theoretical framework for its current mission to foster distrust of the media, question the nature of truth and re-define the context of power and “elitism”. It’s noteworthy that some of the key Brexit ideologues, including Boris Johnson’s policy director Munira Mirza, are former members of The Revolutionary Communist Party. Although these characters are unambiguously right wing, they have been enabled by the left’s slide into subjectivity and relativism, which has served to obscure ideological boundaries, boundaries that will need to be re-drawn in order to denude, name and attack the new right.
The right has already made a head start in exploiting ideological dissonance to warp reality and is beginning to yield results. On talk radio, YouTube comments and social media the phrase “Neo-Marxism” is frequently tossed around, alongside its bastard twin “Cultural Marxism”. If you examine how right-wing audiences tend to interpret these concepts, it’s clear that they mistake the foundational Marxism of the left as prescriptive rather than descriptive — their claim is that the Marx somehow “invented” class categories (rather than observed them) and thus actively stratified society and created class conflict. It is easy to see how this narrative relates to the culture war: the left is cast as the instigator of conflict, which it prosecutes by making unreasonable cultural and social demands of everyone else (note again, economics, central to the Marxist analysis, are absent). It’s a concept that to some degree regurgitates traditional fascist ideas around “healthy” class co-operation being undermined only by immoral Marxist demands for conflict, but it has proved to be a highly fertile line of argument for the new right, who have cross-bred it with their novel definition of “elites” to propose that the Socialist state would be one in which a narrow “elite” at the top subjugates and exploits the rest of the population. It is an astonishing inversion of political ideology and historical reality, but one that does appear, depressingly, to have gained some traction.
On the battlefields of the culture wars, the left’s tactics too often pump blood into the corpus of right-wing fantasy. Arguments made by the left frequently present themselves as demands — and intolerant, unthinking and irrational demands at that. In part this is due to the nature of social media, which admits only slogans, memes and maxims screamed in the most attention-grabbing fashion possible, lest they be lost in the general torrents of digital chatter. It is a medium of shouted absolutes rather than discursive ideas. Within this incessant, perplexing clash of words and images the left frequently transgresses into all the crimes of which it accuses the new right: deliberately refusing to listen (cancelling), pretending not to understand, dividing people between the woke in-group and the un-woke, moronic out-group.
In Andrei Platanov’s 1930 novel The Foundation Pit, a group of Soviet workers are tasked with excavating a vast pit on which a house is to be founded. They toil each day from dawn until dusk, but the pit is never completed. Around the building site speakers have been erected which carry messages from the ruling party, when some of the workers begin to question the meaning of their activity they are chastised by one of their comrades, gesturing to the speakers he remarks that “the line” has been issued and their duty is to follow it. This unfortunately, has come to characterise the attitude of large sections of the left: the line comes down, the only accepted response is blind obedience, the line cannot be criticised, challenged or adapted unless by some new line that may seem entirely contradictory but yet is insisted upon with equal fastidiousness; for examples see the “Terf Wars” currently raging within the Trans-rights debate. It is a mode of discourse which people find both perplexing and insulting, for which the left has to accept its part of the responsibility. The formulation of social inclusion as a zero-sum game, a formulation to which the left has contributed, has opened the yawning cultural delta into which all the raw sewage of the past decade of collapse, failure and recrimination now flows.
Above the raging mass at the Capitol waved a placard on which the phrase “All Lives Matter” was printed, in red and blue block capitals. It’s one of the familiar totems of the new right, a slogan which on its face seems to be an ugly, bad-faith riposte to the Black Lives Matter campaign, intended to minimise the BLM message and drain its active power. Obviously no-one has suggested that white lives don’t appear to matter, so “all lives” don’t require political advocacy in the same way as “black lives” which are, in the present moment, being worryingly terminated by state agencies, with systematic regularity.
But there’s another reading, one rooted in the emotionalism that permeates the causes and complaints of the right. If one accepts that many people, especially those of lower educational attainment, do not typically express themselves in consciously political terms, the meaning behind “All Lives Matter” expands and ceases to become about race at all. If one thinks about the origins of 2008, 2016, 2021, it transforms into a plaintive, desperate affirmation uttered by a mouth that bobs just above the rising waters of casual employment, merciless creditors, food banks, foreclosures and, lately, corpses. It’s a slogan that, shorn of symbolic baggage in the culture war can be read as “Don’t I matter?”. It becomes a statement that complements, rather than negates, its counterpart. This is the territory in which solidarity is found and it’s called Class.
We’re not talking here about Trump’s core support and its advocates within the culture, or those that led the charge at the Capitol. Those people are either far-right neo-fascists or so far gone that they have tumbled into the embrace of the fascist far-right. But they are not 71 million in number, nor are they the 17 million that voted for Brexit. The ideological nucleus of fascism has been around forever, there are no means of dealing with it other than aggressive containment, and that starts with rescuing its host: the millions of people onto whom it leaches and whose better nature it steadily depletes. Those disenfranchised post-industrial communities who support the new right project need to be offered something other than comprehensive defeat in a zero-sum game. The ordinary, beleaguered citizen struggling to negotiate this cacophony of lies is entitled to some sympathy, not least as the only means of pulling them back into clear air.
There’s a moment in American Dharma, Errol Morris’s outstanding documentary about Steve Bannon, in which Morris agrees with Bannon’s diagnosis of the ills that afflict American society, but then goes on to ask him how wrecking the environment and funnelling cash to billionaires helps. Bannon falls silent, purses his lips and fails to provide an answer. The right has never had an answer, the answer can only come from the left but the left, apparently, has stopped being interested in the question.
Watching the ecstatic carnival of ignorance and violence staving in the windows of the Capitol, I was struck by the number of commentators who breathlessly sought to remind us that America was the “shining city on the hill”, in which such a spectacle was never thought possible. Well, America has never been the “shining city on the hill” for its African Americans and a long time has elapsed since it’s been that for a good number of other Americans, too. Perhaps that’s a story that has now run its course.
This is a crisis that has opened on the left and has been exploited by the right. Despite the talk of breaking point, of all the lies collapsed under the cumulative weight of insurrectionary hordes pouring through the US Capitol, miles of lorries snaking through the south of England and bodies overflowing in the hospital morgues, it’s worth remembering that, if not for the Covid crisis, Donald Trump would in all likelihood have won re-election. It’s worth remembering, as we watch a flak-jacketed clown light up a joint in the House Speakers’ chair while Don’t Stop Believin’ thunders on, that the wheel is going to keep rotating, returning us to election after election in which the consequences become ever more extreme, until we at last address the beginning or are devoured by the end.
