I gave up writing about politics a few years ago because I realised nothing I said or did would make any difference. Ironically, the fact that this stance has been vindicated is the reason I’ve decided to write something political again. I always was a contrarian.
Donald Trump has been re-elected President of the United States of America. A convicted criminal, sexual predator, sociopath, a man who encouraged a riotous assault on the American seat of government after losing a democratic election. A man who has already vowed revenge on his enemies. It’s extraordinary.
But utterly predictable.
And the people who will be blamed for it – the American voters who fell, again, for Trump’s MAGA rhetoric, the poor and the disconnected of America – are not the ones who are responsible. The people responsible are the ones who are now sitting round their coffee tables weeping and sighing and crying “how could this have happened? What have these people done to us?”
The truth is – and I say this as a liberal – they have done the only thing they could do to be heard by people like us: they’ve thrown our arrogance and our certitude back in our faces, they have told us that they want to be listened to, they want their views reflected in national politics.
Way back in 1992, Benjamin Barber identified two axial principles of our age – globalism and tribalism – which, he said, may be threatening our democracy. ‘The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment,’ he said. This was prescient at the time, an analysis of the contrasting neoconservative view on one side and cosmopolitan idealism on the other. Thirty-two years later, this conflict appears to be reaching some kind of climax.
Samuel P Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations theory, first posited in 1993, suggested that the post-Cold war world order would be characterised by clashes where ‘the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.’ The fundamental source of conflict, he suggested, would no longer be ‘primarily ideological or primarily economic’, but cultural. It could be argued that future events – 9/11, the Iraq War, Afghanistan – bore out his view, with deadly clashes between Western liberalism and Islamic fundamentalism dominating global politics in the decades that followed, but his central thesis was weak. He paid lip service to civilisations other than Western, Islamic and Sinic (to the extent he couldn’t even decide how many civilisations there were in total, the number depending on whether African civilisation could be considered more than a ‘possibility’, an assertion which is, frankly, racist). For that reason, liberals disregarded Huntington’s views as reactionary and ignored him.
Ignoring people who don’t agree with them is a liberal characteristic that has now reached its baleful yet inevitable conclusion.
A further work by Huntington in 2004, Who Are We?, further reinforced Liberal opposition, with its view that Latino immigration in America could ‘divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages.’ His solution was to return to America’s Anglo-Protestant beginnings, forcing immigrants to embrace the culture of the US that was established by its founding fathers. As a Scot, familiar with the schisms and schisms-within-schisms of Protestantism, its inability to ever agree on anything, its tendency to ever-increasing dogmatism, the idea that there is a single Protestant worldview that could drive a harmonious culture seems naïve in the extreme.
Huntington’s ideas, then, were wrong.
And yet.
And yet the issue of immigration has not gone away. Rather, it has worsened. And that bothers people. Millions of them. 71.5 million of them, in yesterday’s poll. But the Liberal elite are not listening. They never do. And in that vacuum something sinister is happening. In the end, the real clash of civilisations is not between the West and Islam, but between neighbours, families, communities. Between liberals and conservatives. Between us and them. And we saw the outcome last night.
Martha Nussbaum, that eminent proponent of cosmopolitanism, regularly quotes Diogenes the Cynic – ‘I am a citizen of the world’ – to promote her view that an ‘individual’s primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.’ It’s a worthy view, one that you see promoted with varying degrees of saccharine sentimentality daily on Twitter. Cosmopolitanism is essentially a thesis based on idealism, whose totem is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which sets out the rights and freedoms which should be expected by all citizens of the world. At its most idealistic, cosmopolitanism sees a shift away from the nation state as the predominant model. Anthony Giddens even suggested that an elected second chamber of the United Nations might one day be feasible. For Ralf Dahrendorf, such a concept of ‘global democracy’ was akin to ‘howling at the moon.’
Yet still we howl.
To return (reluctantly, I’m a liberal after all) to Huntington, he coined the term ‘Davos Man’, named after the World Economic Forum which meets annually in Davos, Switzerland, a self-selecting global economic elite who see ‘little need for national loyalty’ and who could be accused of trying to make decisions and change the world without any degree of accountability to ordinary citizens. It is fundamentally undemocratic, yet the WEF’s power is considerable. Alongside the WEF, Benjamin Barber identified non-elected, unanswerable trans-national organisations such as international banks, global news agencies and NGOs which wield disproportionate power. As long ago as 2004, Daniele Archibugi was warning that these could become a ‘trojan horse enabling technocrats to prevail over democratic control.’
Well, it wasn’t the technocrats who won the US election last night. Nor was it the fascists, as many claim. It was the oligarchs. The USA, like Russia, is now an oligarchy. Still one rooted in democracy for now, but an oligarchy all the same. Elon Musk now wields true political power. Power has been bought. It will be used. How was this allowed to happen?
Cosmopolitan utopias mean nothing in the Rust Belt. In Appalachia. In cities devastated by economic downturn. Time and again, voters asked for help. They didn’t get it. Then a corrupt, venal, orange, self-serving oligarch offered them what they wanted. Reduced immigration. Import tariffs to protect local producers. America great again. He won’t deliver on any of that – he doesn’t care – but it doesn’t matter because now he has claimed power. He has beaten the Liberal elite because the Liberal elite was too arrogant to listen, too sure that it had all the answers, too smug to concede that ordinary voters had legitimate concerns. I have no doubt a liberal approach would be best, Kamala Harris would have made a more effective President, America has made a dangerous date with fundamentalism, but that doesn’t matter. It’s happened. They (we) lost.
There is a direct lesson here for the UK. This is a warning we should not ignore. Earlier this year the British public voted overwhelmingly to reject the prevailing political approach. The Tories’ self-interest and greed and corruption was swept out of power and the Labour Party was entrusted with an enormous mandate. A mandate to change Britain.
Not a mandate to behave like the Tories, only a little bit more competent and a little less corrupt. Not a mandate to carry on ignoring the concerns of the majority because they don’t chime with the views of the minority elite.
And yet, here we are, with Starmer’s Conservative-lite government peddling the same rubbish because they cannot accept – simply find it impossible to conceive – that their shibboleths, their worldview, their certainty, might somehow not be the answer to the problem after all.
Meanwhile, political extremism is marshalling its resources. Political pygmies like Robert Jenrick give themselves a hard-on by talking of pulling Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights – our means of enacting the cosmopolitan ideals of the UDHR – and we scoff because he’s not in power and we are. But the day will come, my friend. The day will come. In a year’s time, in two, in three, if the Labour government does not tackle the issues that the voting public consistently tell us concern them, these people will turn their backs on conventional politics. The fringe – Reform, or perhaps something even worse – will become their refuge. And, like the oligarch over the water, the undesirables will be voted into power. And then what?
It doesn’t matter that you may not agree with people’s views on immigration, on net zero, on culture wars, on policing and crime. You can lock them up for rioting but unless you address the root causes of that rioting – a deep and lingering sense of disenfranchisement – the rioting will return, redoubled. We can’t ignore this. Because if we democrats won’t deal with these people’s concerns, they will turn away from democracy, just as America has, just as states throughout Europe are doing.
The sadness is that all of this happened before, in the 1930s. We didn’t learn then, and we know what happened.
Will we learn now?
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