Brexit: The On-going Battle With Reality
And What’s Wrong With Democracy
That which seems to be wealth, may in verity be the guilded index of far reaching ruin. And therefore, the idea that directions can be given for the gaining of wealth, irrespectively of the consideration of its moral sources, or that any general and technical law of purchase and gain can be set down for national practice, is perhaps the most insolently futile of all that ever beguiled men through their vices.
John Ruskin
The Brexit debate is a national embarrassment. At least, that’s how it would be felt if the British had any semblance of self-awareness. In allowing the Leave-Remain divide to become their defining one, they have caught themselves between a hopeless cause, and one we had better hope doesn’t succeed.
This, the first of two posts, will examine Remainers.
Pity The Man
There are those who, on any other question would be “progressive”, are dedicated to a futile rearguard action. One that seeks to maintain Britain’s place in the moribund European Union. A great deal of political energy has been squandered in this effort; their enemies have wasted none.
It is curious that so many of this tendency would hitch themselves so determinedly to the status quo. Older Remainers have come to imagine the EU as the Enlightenment project made real. Finally, at last, the ideals of that heady age — fumbled in America, and quashed in France — have been realised. (I have a response to such dreamers, that has become something of a stock response.) While the younger status-quoers have come to see the EU as a multiculturalist bastion, as all around it moves further into reaction: a heart in a heartless world.
In truth, the EU is primarily run for the benefit of central bankers (as was shown most painfully in Greece), and careerist politicians who refuse to accept the fundamental breakdown of the ideology that joins them.¹ These liberals proved too conciliatory to big business — blind to the its ill-gotten gains and corruptive influence — and, caught up in bourgeois tedium, became deaf to those trammeled beneath. While they believed themselves to be cultivating worldviews more broad and humanistic than any yet achieved (an judgement bolstered with every new installment of Pangloss’s Bible), they in fact developed a siege mentality.
Christopher Hitchens once wrote of Conor Cruise O’Brien (again anticipating much about his own “evolution”), that, “he could descry, in the features of a ruling elite, the lineaments of an oppressed minority”. So it is with Blair, Osborne, Clegg and Labour’s right-wing. Recieving electoral blowback for the neoliberal reforms they championed, they now see themselves as society’s most sat-upon.
[Due to populism] we are losing sight of the values which brought the West together, saw it through the menace of fascism and communism.
Tony Blair, a man still sought for words of wisdom despite being Tony Blair
Which goes some way towards explaining the now overt antipathy towards democracy among the chattering classes. Such a development would’ve been unsurprising to Christopher Lasch, perhaps the leading thinker of Left conservativism.
As with all good leftists, we find his salvos most consistently in the liberal camp. Among those who, in the style of Lippmann and H.L. Mencken, believed themselves above “the bewildered herd”. These two belonged to small, self-selected minority of highly-educated men, who considered it a duty to reject everything common. And it was under their wise tutelage that Americans were taken to the gleaming heights of the Great War, the Great Depression and the great “blunder” of Vietnam.²
Chomsky’s examination of the mainstream media was named for Lippmann’s own “manufacturing consent”. Something the latter believed was just and necessary, seeing as how the mass were simply incapable of rational decision making.
The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent with the prosaic quality of modern life — a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate “intentionally biased” information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Thus he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that neglect to give the base year from which growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living-with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present regime therefore deserves the people’s confidence, or on the other hand that things are getting worse so rapidly that the present regime should be given emergency powers to deal with the developing crisis. By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood.
The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch
This “revolt of the elites”, as Lasch called the authoritarian turn in liberalism, or the liberal turn in authoritarianism, would presage a counter-attack. Perhaps it would even be led by another star from the big screen? (He was, after all, writing in the age of Reagan.)
If you’re still unconvinced by his powers of prediction, in the early 1990s he wrote,
In Europe referenda on unification have revealed a deep and widening gap between the political classes and the more humble members of society, who fear that the European Economic Community will be dominated by bureaucrats and technicians devoid of any feelings of national identity or allegiance.
On those rare occasions when they deigned to ponder the lot of “ordinary people”, political and cultural elites would cite their flimsy utilitarian measures. “GDP is growing, unemployment falling, and the number of flat screen televisions has never been higher. So what are you complaining about? You’ve never had it so good!”³ (Nothing about the exponential growth of anti-depressants, homelessness, or suicides, mind.)
As dignity, solidarity and the consolations of the soul lay outside what is quantifiable and imagined to be certain, they were simply dismissed. The remarks by the IMF head, Christine Lagarde, were indicative of that liberal mix of grandiosity and shallowness.
Asked whether she is able to block out of her mind the mothers unable to get access to midwives or patients unable to obtain life-saving drugs, Lagarde replies: “I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens.”
It’s difficult to imagine virtue signalling servicing more callous ends. We ought not forget that she made this distinction while overseeing the decimation of Greece’s civil society. All in order to protect the credibility of the EU, IMF, and German creditors.
(Expanding upon the last of those, John Gray has described the EU crisis as, “half of Europe being sacrificed in order to solve the 20th century German Question”. That being the attempt to maintain Germany’s status in a global economy 1) relentlessly opposed to social markets, and 2) pivoting eastwards. Not a very fair, or “progressive”, compromise, all considered.)
In promoting a demarcation between the citizens of the economic core and the billions of its periphery, the financial establishment has revealed to depths to which it will sink: “Europeans! Rather than attending to those thinning Greeks, why not look far off to Lagarde’s model toilers? Perhaps, even, aspire to them?”
Yet now, at this sad juncture, it’s become politically expedient for the British establishment to make flares of the dusky masses.
Figures from Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems have all bought this line, arguing that the driving force behind the Leave win was a “concern about immigration”. Not the distress caused by planned job insecurity, a hemispherical decline in living standards, the state-market war against particular communities, like the miners’. No, the plebs have an incurable, all-consuming hatred of Johnny Foreigner, so what can we do? What better way of ignoring the deep institutional failings — ones that victimise Congolese, Afghans, Bangladeshis, Colombians just as much as European workers — than by fomenting that base passion, xenophobia?
Sadly, as is often the way in politics, it doesn’t take a lot for the refugee, migrant, or non-national to be sacrificed upon the altar of Order (a pleasing way of saying “the procedures currently shafting you”). And though politicians of the Right may prepare the knifes and incantations out of genuine feeling, cynicism compels liberals to join in.
Cynicism, and a fear of having to scrutinise their own precepts. Ones that imagine everyone wishes to live a life of naked individualism, with no need for tradition. That a large collection of competing nations can be simply unified, politically and economically. That, against what the neoliberal president of Mexico Carlos Salinas understood (see False Dawn), any type of true democracy is compatible with capitalism.
It used to be understood by liberals that their way of seeing, and indeed using, the the world would always be the domain of a minority.
It is not only possible, but, on present evidence, probable that most conceptions of the good, and most ways of life, which are typical of commercial, liberal, industrialised societies will often seem altogether hateful to substantial minorities within these societies and even more hateful to most of the populations within traditional societies … As a liberal by philosophical conviction, I think I ought to expect to be hated, and to be found superficial and contemptible, by a large part of mankind.
Stuart Hampshire
And yet now, anyone who dares murmur a word of dissent against the Consensus that ensures a “permanent state of contingency” is branded a terrorist-sympathiser, a racist or extremist.
In forcing out of mainstream debate reformers and well-meaning discontents, the reigning order has guaranteed its demise. Without accepting the dire need for evolution, society is left with a final option: an uncompromising change from without.
Democracy’s Greatest Hurdle
Our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?
As T.S. Eliot hinted at, this isn’t entirely the fault of the elite. The discontent now coming to a head speaks to something wider, cultural. To what, indeed, Walt Whitman could discern upon the horizon in Democratic Vistas. He argued that if the experiment of full suffrage, then at its inception, was to survive, a new mode of citizenship had to be invented. It wasn’t enough to rid themselves of feudal institutions, citizens also had to banish the centuries-old feudal mindset of deference and short-sightedness. Democracy demanded creativity, skepticism and nerve from the masses: a revolution of the mind.
A viable alternative emerged in the trade union movement. It instilled a new sense of responsibility and solidarity among its members — and, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, extended those feelings far beyond national borders.
If emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.
Karl Marx on the English working class during the American Civil War
By the 1980s, however, a majority of American and British voters were willing to see all that undone. Charmed, as they were, by a wannabe cowboy and a shrill poseur. There was “no such thing as society”, and a pathological pursuit of self-interest, rather being seen as the defect it is, was again venerated; last seen during the Age of Empire.
The revolution Ronald Reagan and Mrs Torture intiated merely wore the guise of conservativism, and smashed a working class culture that at least had the beginnings of what Whitman prescribed. It’s worth noting that he certainly wasn’t alone in his assessment. It was commonly understood among the intellectuals of the early democratic period (among those who didn’t wish it to fail in any case) that for such a system to flourish, rentiership and wage slavery had to be done away with. The death not only of feudalism, but of capitalism too.
George Scialabba brought Whitman’s argument up to the 21st century, writing in Plutocratic Vistas,
The talk [following the 2008 economic crash] was grim around my office, the building-services center of a large research complex at Harvard. Contractors came by frequently for keys and instructions, and the more gregarious ones often stayed to schmooze. Sports and celebrities, our usual topics, were replaced that year by political griping. As the details of the bank bailout emerged, imprecations were fervently heaped on both bankers and politicians; a respectful hearing was even accorded the office radical (me), usually humored or ignored. But these conversations always ended the same way. One or another of those tough, no-bullshit, can-do guys would shrug: “Hey, what can we do about it? Nothin’.” And the rest would chorus: “Yeah, what can ya do?” It was an epitome of twenty-first century American democracy: people used to coping with dauntingly complex mechanical systems simply took their political impotence for granted.
Scialabba’s account is from the States. Britain shares much with the American experience, and this looks to be intensifying as Greece becomes Rome’s new plaything. But Pankaj Mishra has addressed the Banana Monarchy head-on.
Mishra is perhaps the most important commentator in Britain today. He has largely been shunned by the Left for forcing them to face unpleasant truths, and entirely by the Right, either because his Indian extraction or his sympathy for socialism. Political impotence is a consistent theme in his “history of the present”, our Age of Anger.
We see again, in our own sad age, the stark extremes of political inflexibility and anarchic revolt, insuperable backwardness and a gaudy cult of progress. Indeed, the men trying to radicalize the liberal principle of freedom and autonomy, of individual power and agency, seem more rootless and desperate than before; even less constrained than the Russian nihilists or immigrant anarchists of the late nineteenth century by shared rules or possibilities of political participation. For society itself, let alone its spiritual substance, has been diminished by the loss of its relative autonomy and internal order in the age of globalization. The spatial and temporal reference points that have helped orientate populations in specific territories, since the rise of civil society and the nation state in the eighteenth century, have faded. Thus, individual assertion, often wholly lacking the constraining context in which it was born, tends to be more volatile today, and can degenerate quickly into a mad quest for singularity.
This is only — if the Leave-Remain distinction is insisted upon — half the story.
In his The Strange Death of Liberal England, Dangerfield wrote, “when codes, when religions, when ideas cease to move forward, it is always in some shining illusion that an alarmed humanity attempts to take refuge”. This was the first time liberalism perished, falling victim to the chain reaction of the Tory, womens’, and workers’ rebellions. The shining illusions then (beaming in order to obscure the trapdoors beneath) included Bolshevism, Fascism and Nazism.
Nothing so grizzly now (yet?), but grand deceptions all the same. And, as before, they’re not going anywhere without a fight.
¹ If not liberalism in toto, at least their evangelical, universalistic, über-capitalist kind.
² To read these highly fallible men, all of whom seemed to think themselves angels, is to be reminded of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor all over again, and I’m glad to learn my revulsion hasn’t tempered.
³ It is a sign of the times, that many engaged voters gauge the decency of candidates depending on whether they cite these “accurate but meaningless” figures cynically, or out of a genuine belief. The latter, those true believers in superficiality, are judged praise-worthy.
