I am writing this on the day that Boris Johnson, having been elected leader of the Conservative Party by a huge majority, becomes prime minister of the country to the universal (and justified) horror of the establishment. I will add some comments on how this relates to the central issues I have been trying to grapple with in these posts later in the post. However, its main purpose is to explain the delay in my promised follow up to initial reflections on the upsurge of media concern with the phenomenon of “fake news” contained in my last post The Guardian, Donald Trump and Fake News- Part 1: The Relevance of Bourdieu .
When I was researching the issue of “fake news”, I came across a strong recommendation of the work of Hannah Arendt as essential for an understanding of the question. I have read in the past with great interest Arendt’s “The Human Condition” and it has made a substantial contribution to my thinking. I have also been vaguely aware that Arendt is regarded with great suspicion on the Left but have not really known why. The suggestion that I couldn’t approach the subject of “fake news” without taking into consideration Arendt’s thinking led to me acquire not one, but two copies of her The Origins of Totalitarianism– a paper version and a Kindle edition 1. Its nearly 700 pages of small type contain an extraordinarily complex and rich work which promises to provide invaluable insights for the understanding current concerns with the rise of “populism”. As a taster I would like to share with you a quote from this book, first published in 1951 as an attempt to understand the Holocaust. Its prescient relevance to current events should be obvious.
“Where discrimination is not tied up with the Jewish issue only, it can become a crystallization point for a political movement that wants to solve all the natural difficulties and conflicts of a multinational country by violence, mob rule, and the shear vulgarity of race concepts. It is one of the most promising and dangerous paradoxes of the American Republic that it dared to realize equality on the basis of the most unequal population in the world, physically and historically. In the United States, social antisemitism may one day become the very dangerous nucleus for a political movement.”
I suspect that when I have completed my study of the book I may end up sharing the general reservations that exist on the Left with regard to Arendt’s thinking. Arendt is no socialist. However, the great importance of her work is in that it is attempting to grapple with the key question of our age: what makes populism popular? In current debates I have come across few, if any, attempts to address this question directly. The Guardian’s hatred for populism is an expression of the political establishment’s bewilderment and horror at the breakdown of all the normal assumptions under which representative politics is conducted. Yet there is little attempt to understand the causes of this. The response appears to be to clutch desperately at straws in the defence of a system which clearly no longer works.
The (justified) attacks on Johnson as a self-serving posh, lazy narcissist incapable of paying sustained attention to anything and lacking any of the skills normally required for government multiply. They have been aptly summarised by Rafael Behr, an often thoughtful commentator on the political Right, in today’s Guardian:
Ministers who witnessed the new Tory leader in action as foreign secretary testify to laziness, inattention to detail, contempt for relationships, congenital unseriousness and dangerous indiscretion. Johnson could not be trusted to stay focused in national security briefings, nor to keep their contents secret.
Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s grandson, in last night’s BBC Panorama accuses him of “flying by the seat of his pants”.
These mirror largely the attacks on Trump. Yet little is written, except at the margins, about the historical conditions that have made them popular, the prerequisite for a search for an effective antidote. Those that are trying to address these conditions, created largely by the dynamics of the capitalist economy on which government action has at most a limited effect, are vilified as equally to blame for upsetting the system, as Left populists.
Behr, in the same column from which the previous quote was taken, points to the key issue:
The charge that Johnson is a flagrant charlatan and has given licence to racists can be true without those traits inhibiting electoral success. His target audience is a coalition of voters who don’t believe it or don’t care. The accusation that he defies diplomatic norms is even less effective. It is taken as a compliment by people who despise protocols and conventions as shackles imposed by a remain-infested establishment. The manual of good governance that Johnson will shred is followed mostly by Westminster’s losers. For that reason it feels prudent to brace for a long stint of bad government.
The question that I feel needs addressing urgently is why the numbers of people who despise protocols and conventions as shackles imposed by a remain-infested establishment have grown to such an extent that it is they who determine the outcome of elections and referenda. As Behr implies, Boris Johnson is not responsible for this. He is merely the product of this historical process. Both Johnson and Trump are instinctive politicians whose great skill is to sense accurately the popular mood. Johnson only took up the cause of the Brexiteers because he sensed that was going to be the winning side. He was right. A comment I read somewhere, but the source of which I can’t remember wittily described Johnson as the kind of politician who waits to see which way the crowd is running and then runs to the front waving a banner and shouting “follow me”.
An even more concerning associated phenomenon that requires urgent explanation was highlighted by Aditya Chakrabortty in his column today entitled “The UK is at its most combustible. And now it’s led by a man who plays with matches”. He says:
Look at a report last week from Hope Not Hate, a charity that monitors political extremism. It asked more than 6,000 Britons if they would join a campaign to defend Brexit from being reversed. Almost two-thirds of leave voters said they would. Then they were asked: what if that campaign turns violent? Again, almost two-thirds said it wouldn’t put them off. They would happily sit through ugly threats, bloodied faces, broken bones. Some might even join in, because the means can self-justify the ends.
The role of political violence is central to Arendt’s work, I believe .
I have been attempting to contribute elements in answer to these key questions of our times in my previous posts Reflections on a series of Guardian articles and Reflections on the Gilets Jaunes protests in France.
I am hoping that the reading of Arendt’s book which centrally addresses the issues will provide a great deal of further clues which I intend to use in future posts.
Alvaro de Miranda
Alvaro de Miranda is retired from the University of East London where he co-founded a Department of Innovation Studies. He came to the UK in 1958 aged 15 to join his parents who were exiles from the Salazar regime in Portugal. Having experienced fascism, he is particularly alarmed with the recent worldwide electoral rise of the far-right and has been following it comparatively in this blog.
24 July 2019
- The electronic version, with its ability for keyword searches of the text provides a research tool that is unavailable in the paper version. I have found that the paper edition offers the opportunity to quickly get an overview of the main themes of the book through browsing which isn’t possible in the electronic version.