New Walls
PART I: After Trust
1 Jailbreak
2 The Four Breaches of Trust
3 Roll the Dice
4 Explaining the Disruption
5 The Authenticity of Leave and Trump
6 The Artificiality of Remain and Clinton
PART II: Cameron
7 A Man of Means, Not Ends
8 Words Pop Out of His Mouth
PART III: Brexitannia
9 Short Preface to Brexitannia
10 It Was England’s Brexit
11 Anglo-Britain, the Hybrid Nationalism
12 I’m Not English. Oh Yes You Are!
13 Big Britishness
14 English European, a Modern Nationalism
15 Why the Right Wins and the Left Loses
16 The Discombobulated Constitution
17 The Sovereignty of Parliament
18 The Monarchy and ‘The People’
19 The Blair Coup
20 Manipulative Corporate Populism
21 From Churchillism to Thatcherism
22 From the Establishment to the Political-Media Caste
23 The Daily Mail Takes Power
24 The BBC
25 What Kind of Country Do We Want to Be?
PART IV: From Globalisation to Immigration
26 Neoliberalism: Just Say the Word
27 The Legitimacy of the European Union
28 Britain and the EU
29 No Left to Turn to
30 Where the 48 per cent go next
31 People Flow
32 Combined Determination
PART V: Conclusion
33 Peace or War
34 Citizens, Reimagine
35 Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Index
Supporters
Dedication
Copyright
Anthony Barnett was the first Director of Charter 88, the campaign for constitutional reform, 1988–95. He co-founded openDemocracy in 2001, was its first Editor and writes regularly for it. He co-directed the Convention on Modern Liberty in 2009. He is a Londoner.
ALSO BY ANTHONY BARNETT
Iron Britannia: Why Parliament Waged its Falklands War
Soviet Freedom
Power and the Throne (editor)
This Time: Our Constitutional Revolution
The Athenian Option (with Peter Carty)
Blimey, it could be Brexit!
England, 1830
These vague allusions to a country’s wrongs,
Where one says ‘Ay’ and others answer ‘No’
In contradiction from a thousand tongues,
Till like to prison-cells her freedoms grow
Becobwebbed with these oft-repeated songs
Of peace and plenty in the midst of woe –
And is it thus they mock her year by year,
Telling poor truth unto her face she lies,
Declaiming of her wealth with gibe severe,
So long as taxes drain their wished supplies?
And will these jailers rivet every chain
Anew, yet loudest in their mockery be,
To damn her into madness with disdain,
Forging new bonds and bidding her be free?
John Clare
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If you are British, and especially if you are young and British, your right to move, live, love, work, research and settle in another country of our continent, may be taken away from you by Brexit, should it be implemented. The likelihood that the UK will leave the EU strikes at your freedom to be the European that you are. Equally important, it removes your ability to welcome Europeans to come and live with you. Instead they, and the millions of Europeans who have helped to make our country so much a better place to live in, face the threat of expulsion. Grief over the loss of a shared European future hurts the young especially, but not only. Scientists, artists, scholars, medical researchers, business people and engineers – all those engaged in creative work and cultures embedded in international collaboration that the EU has assisted so hugely – are torn inwardly as the UK is ripped out of their European networks.
If you are American, your right to exist without fear is in jeopardy. In a country of immigrants, to be an immigrant is to live in dread, if not for oneself, for relatives or visitors. Welcome to what it is like to be black, is one riposte, revealing what is at stake when contempt for due process, civilised government, honesty and every liberty except wealth rules in the White House. It was becoming possible to love, live and share life with others without regard to the colour of their skin, nationality or religion. This has been put at risk by the election of Trump.
Perhaps the expectations were unspoken and it was only after his election and the referendum that something precious was lost, that is akin to bereavement. In addition to personal fears a dangerous political poison is in the air. Many were elated at the prospect of Trump and Brexit giving them voice and self-government, but in Washington and London authoritarian centralisers are bending the state to their will. These horrible developments are separated by the Atlantic but joined by more than the coincidence of taking place within months of each other.
Since the end of the Second World War, shared human rights have transformed the meaning of individual liberty across Europe. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany behind the wall that literally divided her country. No one could cross it without permission, or they put their life at risk. For her in an extreme form, but also for hundreds of millions of us, freedom to move across the EU means the end to a kind of imprisonment. Even if most of us decide to stay in our own country, this becomes a chosen destination when we have the right not just to travel but also to stay, temporarily or permanently, in any of the extraordinary range of settlements across the 4.3 million square kilometres of the Union. Suddenly a new wall has been thrown up across part of Europe. In 2017 the barrier of Brexit is just a declaration, all the more alarming because its meaning and consequences are still unclear.
The wall that Trump promises between the USA and Mexico is an expensive joke. Drugs fly. A significant barrier, often in fact a wall, exists. Millions of illegal immigrants are already caught and deported back. What is no joke is the symbolism of his proclamation: an internal wall is being driven into the heart of the country, separating Americans from one another. Legally nothing has so far been changed by Trump’s election. In practice the dark history of vigilantism that harks back to the lynch mobs of the Jim Crow era has been fanned back into life. Instead of violent prejudice becoming marginalised and dying out, for the first time the Ku Klux Klan celebrated the election of a new president. A terrible permission has been let loose across the United States.
The paralegal enforcement of discrimination never stopped in the USA, but now we are witnessing its resurgence expressed by the intensification of widespread voter suppression.1 A detailed report says 868 polling stations were closed between the 2012 election and 2016 at a time of population increase, hitting poorer voters especially and tilting outcomes to favour Republicans.2 Because this is systematic it defines actually existing America. The elimination of blacks and other minorities as well as poor whites from the electoral roll in key states may even technically have won the election for Trump. Especially shocking is the acceptance of such suppression and its purposive racial bias – a collusion that makes the whole country complicit. Millions of Americans are not registered to vote even though they are entitled to, and millions are in effect prevented from doing so.
The United States barely qualifies as a democracy in this respect. No one with an interest in the election of the most powerful person on the planet could have failed to register the importance of ‘the Second Amendment’ in the presidential contest. It enshrines the right of American citizens to bear arms. Trump positioned himself as its defender and Clinton, falsely, as someone who would undo it, when she demanded fewer weapons of mass slaughter be sold to the mentally unsound. The National Rifle Association became Trump’s number one lobbyist to defend the Second Amendment. Meanwhile the entire political system is in breach of the Fifteenth Amendment, about which nothing is heard:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The election of Trump legitimates the deep springs of American racism, measured by its failure to defend the Fifteenth Amendment. A renewed separation, segmentation and walling up of the peoples of the United States has been endorsed if by an anti-democratic eighteenth-century electoral system. In a similar way, the touchpaper of racial and cultural divisions inside Britain has been lit by an arbitrary plebiscite called without a written constitutional framework, that tears us from our European neighbours and throws up a barrier between us.
However, this is not why 52 per cent of British voters plumped for Brexit; nor is it the intention of the 47 per cent of American voters who backed Trump to turn their country into a bastion of white supremacy. For some, yes. Both votes had a core of supporters who are plainly anti ‘foreigners’ – anti-Europeans, anti-Muslim and racist – but nothing like enough to deliver electoral success. Neither Trump supporters nor Brexit voters are single monolithic groups, indeed the impulse to stereotype them as such can draw on the same itch as racism. Brexit was presented as a campaign for democracy and national self-government, not intolerance. Nearly a quarter of Trump’s supporters said he was not qualified and didn’t have the temperament to be president, yet they voted for him.3 A profound and multilayered process is under way concerning who has the right to rule, in what ways and how this relates to our neighbours and the world as a whole. It is political, economic, social, cultural, national, global and imaginative.
Imaginative because we look straight away to the tangible: shout out an unfairness, protest an injustice, mobilise to defend a specific right, point a finger at a lie. But we live in an age of the intangible: of hedge funds and derivatives, globalism and fundamentalism, carbon emissions and climate change; precariousness and longing; a desire for democracy locked in a system managed by the unaccountable. The intangible has physical consequences: houses are repossessed, heads literally roll, children go hungry, lungs get cancers, storms shatter communities, and some get yachts in warm waters. How this comes about is not straightforward. It is not just caused by globalisation – another intangible. There was globalisation in the nineteenth century and after the Second World War, both of very different kinds to today’s. The ‘globalist’ system that Trump rails against and the Brexiteers want to join, where the market rules, is governed by world banks and international funds, yet presents itself as ‘natural’, seeking only to assist ‘the market’. As for the market’s responsibility, say with respect to the financial crash, Macavity, the master of concealment, is never there.
Only this time, in their millions, voters defied actually existing globalisation that pretends it is natural. They elected Trump and chose Brexit to end a ‘rigged system’ and ‘take back control’. As they called out Macavity a double reversal took place. Those who believed that change is possible found themselves voting for the status quo, while those who thought the system is fixed voted for change and found it isn’t fixed after all.
Or is it? We will see. For the achievement of the vote for Brexit and the election of Trump is that they show that we, the voters, can alter the system by voting. If this includes the opportunity for genuine democracy, we might even take control.
To understand what is happening is demanding. Brexit and Trump came about in a cataract of deceit, sound bites, evasions and demagogy on all sides. The agitation was shallow. Taking a measure of the causes has to run deep. The starting point, though, is simple and direct: the human affliction of Brexit and Trump. How is it possible that England, which is so accepting of immigrants it has mixed-race rioting and has looked outwards with its people emigrating everywhere, should come to regard freedom of movement as a one-way ‘threat’ of inward invasion – and risk turning itself into a closed, self-regarding society, prejudiced and divided, impoverished yet obsessed with moneymaking, separated from Europe’s culture and leaving its immediate close neighbours – Ireland and Scotland – infuriated by our selfishness? Similarly, how can it possibly be that a country that elected Barack Hussein Obama twice running, and holds him in record esteem as an outgoing president, should choose a misogynist thug who plays the racecard to be his successor?
These notes, with live links, can be found at www.unbound.com
1 Greg Palast published an early investigation and warning, in August 2016, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-stealth-war-against-voters-w435890
2 http://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/reports/2016/poll-closure-report-web.pdf
3 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-exit-polls-how-donald-trump-won-the-us-presidency/
Any attempt to hold ideologies accountable for the crimes committed by their followers must be approached with a great deal of caution.
Naomi Klein,
The Shock Doctrine, 2007
Everyone can sense that the Brexit vote and the election of Trump are about more than a mere referendum and election. I’m not talking about the facts, far-reaching though they are. Something irreversible has happened, which people feel in their bones: it is the end of an era, a truly historic moment: 2016 is a year ‘like 1968’, a year of ‘revolution’. This was also the claim of Nigel Farage, the far-right bigot and England’s downmarket version of Trump, who led UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party. A celebration was thrown for him in the Ritz in November 2016, to revel in his role in Brexit. Speaking from the gilded staircase of London’s plush hotel, he leant over its banister in a posture that echoed Lenin addressing a crowd in Red Square. Farage predicted ‘a bloody sight worse to come’ as he hailed the past twelve months as ‘the year of the big political revolution’.1 The incongruity of the Ritz for a gathering of revolutionary triumphalism does not prevent it from being galling. Brian Eno summed it up for many of us:
My feeling about Brexit was not anger at anybody else, it was anger at myself for not realising what was going on. I had thought that all those UKIP people and those National Fronty people were in a little bubble. Then I thought: ‘Fuck, it was us, we were in the bubble, we didn’t notice it.’ There was a revolution brewing and we didn’t spot it. Because we didn’t make it. We expected we were going to be the revolution.2
In the speech to her first Conservative Party conference as the party’s leader, the British prime minister, Theresa May, used the R-word four times. She saluted the outcome of the referendum as ‘the quiet revolution that took place in our country just three months ago’. It was revolution she went on to say with roots; ‘roots’, she added, ‘that run deep’.3 We should beware of Tories praising revolution. In May’s case, she is trying to steal it. The aim of her phrase ‘Brexit means Brexit’ is to persuade us that it is over and there is no more room for argument. The decision has been taken, what follows is only the administration needed to implement it – her administration. She claims the Brexit revolution is in the past – it ‘took place’ in June 2016. Its roots may run deep but she has already cut off the flowers and put the quiet revolution into a vase. All that remains is for her to ‘get on with the job’.
Perhaps unfortunately for her, Theresa May is astride the bow of a Titanic process, uncertain as to what is going on below deck and as clueless as anyone as to what will break through the fog in front. Britain, and in its own prodigious way America, has entered a period of transition. Unlike the British, Americans are used to thinking of their country as a revolutionary one. This is – or was – the case on the right, as well as the left. When Ronald Reagan came to give his final address to the nation on leaving the Oval Office, he said:
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.4
Contrast this to the bleak, closed vision of Trump’s inaugural address, where he declared that Americans were a ‘righteous people’:
We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power, from this day forward: a new vision will govern our land, from this day forward, it’s going to be only America first …
At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other … When America is united, America is totally unstoppable.
Under his presidency the doors will swing shut and the City on the Hill will become Trumpistan, a bleak, closed fortress. The rhetoric of openness that enchanted Americans right and left is to be pulverised by a siege mentality. Trump’s repudiation of his country’s expansionism made him the most unpopular president at his inauguration since polling started. It begins a historic disagreement over the nature of the United States. Also, the future of the world – do we want a planet where the most powerful countries put ‘only’ themselves first while demanding the ‘total ’ allegiance of their people?
On both sides of the Atlantic, two hard-nosed governments are determined to stamp their vision on their societies. Trump and May have different world views but both seek to restore past grandeur and both claim an unprecedented popular legitimacy gained from upturning the once all-powerful, official order. Both in their different ways are closing their countries inwards – or trying to. Trump heads for protectionism while polarising domestically, which at least is having an argument of sorts. May wants free trade with Brexit but insists that the ‘will of the people’ has been heard and must now be implemented by her, and she will brook no opposition.
In contrast to their baleful visions, a different kind of unbounded energy propelled the extraordinary blows that struck both countries – and was the opposite of closure. John Berger suggested that if we are to look for a landmark to identify the nature of modern society, it would be a prison.5 Not the old-fashioned prison of industrial capitalism, but the new open prison of finance capitalism. I will adapt, not reproduce, his argument. Here we are in a society of unparalleled wealth and productivity, where one report claims that 62 people own as much as the poorer half of the entire world population put together, while the top 1 per cent own as much as the remaining 99 per cent.6 Furthermore, those at the top of politics proclaim they are working for the public good but pocket incredible sums when they retire or even before. If the results of being ruled by such a world were that we are free, safe, secure, honest, with our environment protected and our lives a decent challenge, people would cheer it on – despite the extreme inequity. Instead, for most people, the overwhelming experience of human life on this planet of unparalleled wealth is like being a prisoner, forced to labour under the confinement and insecurity of competition and precariousness – a world of debt and anxiety rather than the conviviality of shared wellbeing that is now a possibility thanks to human ingenuity and productivity.
The imprisonment takes different forms and seeks to penetrate our willpower. The weight of debt makes us passive. We are corralled by regulations of all kinds, which add up to a controlling framework in which we have no say. Insecurity is all pervasive and demotivates us, depriving us of the confidence to plan and even hope. Most of the time we are surveilled. This has always been the fate of the prisoner, but now with our phones we become our own guards. Unknown authorities access and can permanently store the history of our metadata, which records every web page we have visited in the past, every person we have linked to or communicated with on the internet, and all the locations we visit. The commercial websites that we interact with every day operate their algorithms to manipulate our desires and give us the pleasure of the choices they have pre-policed. We are free to speak, provided we are correct, but who decides this, and how? There is an obligation to ensure happiness that seems to be associated with the rise of new illnesses, physical and mental. Both ‘happiness’ and ‘illness’ threaten to become, some argue already are, forms of social control. The cost of seeking justice is beyond anything you can afford.
The most pervasive, intrusive and effective form of imprisonment is public and official language. This once mystified people with illusions as well as inspiring them to collective responses. Now it seems to mean nothing at all. The same words are used, but they sound like echoes. In the referendum campaign the then British Prime Minister David Cameron was told that voters doubted his sincerity and he needed to sound passionate. So he took off his jacket and told a hand-picked audience in front of television cameras how passionate he was. The context dissolved the content. The language of official, global power has ceased to mean anything that links us to real conditions and real choices. Instead, a seamless continuity exists, as exemplified by the transition from New Labour to the Conservatives in Britain or from Bush to Clinton in America, or was it from Clinton to Bush? This is not just the fault of politicians. Broadcasters who won’t take time to listen. Journalists who only want to know if a story ‘has legs’, not whether it is true. Our media reproduce ‘flat earth news’ – press releases made up by PR companies whose staff outnumber the newsrooms of the major papers.7 Politicians become the vacuum-sealed packaging of a corporate process that has hollowed out what used to be known as ‘meaning’. ‘Democracy’ becomes a celebration of a system where differences between parties seem trivial and their fundamental agreement overwhelming, hence offering no real choice at all. ‘Freedom’, ‘security’, ‘liberty’, even ‘the future’, all become terms that taunt us with a reminder of what they once were.
What was the reality that everyone could feel behind the rhetoric? Since 1978, the income of the poorer 50 per cent of the American population has fallen by 1 per cent. At the same time the income of the top .001 per cent has risen by 685 per cent.8 Pause and take that in. The annual income of the poorer half of the United States fell by 1 per cent over the last thirty years. At the same time it is often harder to secure good-quality jobs, pensions, houses, college education and health care. The flatlining of low and very low income in a society committed to growth is bad enough; it is much worse when accompanied by an intense deterioration of confidence in the future and a rise in precariousness. Meanwhile, at the very top, the wealthiest millionaires in America, who were already thriving by anyone’s standards in 1978, have seen a near sevenfold increase in their annual fortune.
Under these incredible conditions, to exercise our actual liberty we are reduced to surreptitious conspiracy with each other using tricks and code and often song. As soon as we do so in ways that are measurable, companies move in to try and appropriate the authentic energy of the music to sell it on for their profit. One way that the more educated and wealthier exercise freedom is through travel. The poorer and less skilled do not have even this area of manoeuvre and are more confined.
Finally, everyone is trapped by the way voting and its outcomes are bought, corrupted, manipulated, spun by the public-relations industry and the calibrations of costly marketing analytics. In our celebrated democracy, choice becomes no choice at all. Elections are bought. It costs $10 million to win a seat in the US Senate. A few hundred families bankroll US politics. Those who make the better investment win. The way money works in the UK is less overt but just as cunning. People do not ‘feel’ their interests are represented because they are not. Trust has not been ‘lost’ by voters – it has been betrayed by their rulers. Voters are indeed being chained to a process that is stealing their freedom.
The European Union became the most highly organised example of making entire nation states powerless. Smaller governments could be reduced to becoming the prison officers enforcing the rules of imprisonment on their own people, with rules decided elsewhere in the corporate stratosphere of investment frameworks and the Eurozone. The treatment of Greece is the most glaring example. The impact is felt by everyone in all countries, everywhere – that this could be our fate. Then, in Britain and America, an opportunity arose.
Brexit and Trump are attempts at a mass breakout from the marketised incarceration of contemporary corporate democracy. Getaways, to be sure, led by mafias, crooks, would-be dictators, demagogues, and their shyster newspapers and websites. An escape likely to end in tears, therefore, and renewed confinement. But you can’t understand either American or British politics without cheering on the desire to leave the open prison of the globalist order. Berger was asked why he had a ‘hunch’ that Trump would win and answered that if ‘somebody who is actually saying something seems to suggest that there may be a connection between what he says and what he will do, such a person is a way out of a vacuous nightmare, even if the way out is dangerous or vicious’.9
The desire to escape from the open prison of manipulated politics is shared – often profoundly – by many who opposed Trump and Brexit. They saw in them not a route to freedom but a turning of the screw. You can be appalled by the undemocratic character of the EU and want to fight it rather than leave. You can be aghast at the Goldman Sachs compliance of Hillary Clinton yet regard her as the better president. Many were. I was. But the understandable reluctance to support Remain in the referendum as headed up by David Cameron, or to oppose Trump if that means being steered by Clinton, fatally weakened the general spirit and energy of the two campaigns, whereas the prospect of a jailbreak from the old order filled their opponents with energy and glee.
We face a contrast of enormous consequences. Widespread, resentful opposition to Trump and May is just getting organised but contains a momentous division – between those who regard the impulse of the 2016 revolt against undemocratic globalisation as justified, and those who want a counter-revolution to return London and Washington to the world order they helped create. Explosive uncertainty stalks both the United States and the United Kingdom as rejectionist energy creates deep shifts in the political culture and structure of feeling of both societies.
It can be seen most clearly in America, where millions supported Bernie Sanders in his bid to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for the presidency. They opposed the corrupt system of Washington politics and at the same time supported modern progress, for all its insecurities, with its multicultural, internationally-minded tolerance. They wanted more of it, much more fairly shared. For them, divisive walls are being thrown up as bigotry and confrontation are discharged by Washington. Their dread is becoming prisoners of fear in their own country thanks to Trump’s triumph. At the same time millions who already felt confined by static living standards, collapsing prospects and growing insecurity, while the rich, who got richer and showered them with globalist claptrap, are free! Well, let’s see about that.
But what about those of us who saw through Trump, or suspected there will be no liberty in Brexit, and were also against the system? Do we have to be in conflict? Sam Altman, a Clinton voter, did the right thing when he went to talk to a hundred Trump supporters. One told him: ‘I’m angry that they’re so outraged now, but were never outraged over an existing terrible system.’ Another: ‘There’s a lot I hate about Trump. But our lives are basically destroyed, and he was the first person to talk about fixing that.’ A third: ‘You all can defeat Trump next time, but not if you keep mocking us, refusing to listen to us, and cutting us out.’10
The Trump wars in America are more serious for the world and more immediately polarising than the long-term consequences of Brexit. But they are being expressed within the existing party system and may be contained by its still vigorous political institutions. The contradictions of the ogre president are clear enough. To put ‘America First’ has to mean jobs, raising living standards, investment in infrastructure and therefore, with its New Deal overtones, some kind of positive government. To ‘deconstruct the administrative state’, which Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon says is their aim, means turning the USA into an open frontier for capitalism while engaging in ‘existential’ combat with enemies abroad. Opposing such a combination while distracted by canards and tweets, the Democratic Party leadership will prefer to restore an Obama-style presidency rather than address the systemic question Trump exploited. They will claim they have better policies on jobs, healthcare, immigration and national security. It is how they deliver on them and whose interests they are seen as serving that matter. The party’s base, mobilised by the provocations of the White House, needs to learn the lesson and change the game now that the right has upstaged them.
In the United Kingdom, Theresa May’s ‘quiet revolution’ will get noisy. With the main opposition party broken and a narrow referendum outcome being imposed as an irreversible fate, deep change is under way. For the first time in over 300 years, behind the traditional confidence of British government, the kingdom is splitting. Not into a class war, which the British always enjoy and the workers largely lose, but into a confrontation that runs through every class and nation and potentially divides society from top to bottom. What is most important at this early stage is to pull back from the immediate conflict to ask where it all went so wrong that millions thought the only answer was Brexit in the UK and Trump in the USA. Brian Eno’s time of ‘thinking hard, thinking out loud together’ should begin, with emphasis on the word ‘together’.11
These notes, with live links, can be found at www.unbound.com
1 http://news.sky.com/story/ukips-nigel-farage-hails-year-of-big-political-revolution-at-party-10669453
2 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/23/brian-eno-not-interested-in-talking-about-me-reflection
3 http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/full-text-theresa-mays-conference-speech/
4 https://reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1989/011189i.htm
5 The passage comes from Hold Everything Dear, London, 2008, and is included in Landscapes, London, 2016, edited by Tom Overton.
6 https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2016-01-18/62-people-own-same-half-world-reveals-oxfam-davos-report
7 The title of Nick Davis’s book, Flat Earth News, London, 2008.
8 https://www.adamtooze.com/2017/02/09/americas-political-economy-leaving-50-behind-latest-piketty-saez-co/
9 http://lithub.com/a-90-year-old-john-berger-is-not-surprised-by-president-trump/
10 http://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-heard-from-trump-supporters
11 https://www.facebook.com/brianenomusic/posts/1543156529031866
The history of the 2016 right-wing revolts that led to Brexit in Britain and the election of Trump in the USA begins fifteen years ago on 15 February 2003, when millions of us around the world marched and argued against the coming war on Iraq. It marked the first of four great breaches of trust that brought about a nativist downfall of the North Atlantic international system. Demonstrations can take the form of a potential uprising against a system of national or international power. Or they can be protests at the way government is carried out. Or they can express a movement demanding their rights. The enormous gatherings in the USA and UK, where a record one-and-a-half million gathered in London, were none of these. They were unique. They challenged the validity of a decision that had yet to be finalised. In this, the citizens who took to the streets in the Anglo-Saxon countries did something different from the demonstrators in other countries around the world who objected to Washington’s belligerence. In Britain and in the United States the manifestations of 15 February were a many-brained objection in advance, warning against an action not yet confirmed. It was a clash of judgements. The crowds pitted their wisdom against the combined collective wisdom and acumen of their own leaders and institutions, over a decision to attack another country: a decision to go to war.
A month later, despite the unprecedented scale of the protests, the government of the United States, supported by the United Kingdom, defied the judgement of the streets and went to war on the barbarous dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Weakened by years of sanctions, Hussein had long abandoned manufacturing his chemical armoury that supposedly justified the invasion. Iraq was conquered, not because it was a threat, but to avenge the terrorist crimes of 9/11. These had nothing to do with Iraq. But once avenged, the aim was to replace tyranny with democracy, conveniently installed over Iraq’s extensive oil fields. Although its economy was weakening relative to China, then just acquiring full membership of the World Trade Organisation, as well as the European Union, American superiority, polished by alliance with a sycophantic, style-conscious Britain, would dazzle the nations of the planet with the reach and accuracy of the US armed forces. The attraction of Anglo-Saxon democracy and market freedoms meant an ideology of peace and profit, backed by unmatchable military might and strategic domination of the Middle East; it would open a new era, thanks to the mass-murdering provocation of a few bizarre fundamentalists. On May Day 2003, appropriating what was once the workers’ festival, President George W. Bush announced ‘Mission Accomplished’. In a pointed message to China, he did so from the flight deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier named after an illustrious predecessor: the USS Abraham Lincoln. In a demonstration of planetary reach, it had just sailed halfway around the world from the Persian Gulf, through the South China Sea to the headquarters of the US Pacific Fleet in San Diego, after its strike forces had taken part in the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Wise heads had warned Bush and the UK’s prime minister Tony Blair of the dangers. Three months after Bush’s May Day triumphalism, the first major act of terrorist resistance blew up the UN headquarters in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. Fifteen years on and the conflict has metastasised across the entire region and continues to this day. By chance, in the UN building there were two of my colleagues researching for openDemocracy: Arthur Helton, who was killed, and Gil Loescher, who was terribly wounded and lost both his lower legs.1 Their fate personalises for me the experience of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Arabs, Kurds, Druzes, Christians, Americans, Brits and so many others, killed and badly wounded in numbers too considerable to count precisely, as well as their families devastated as much by the need to care for the traumatised and injured as to mourn the dead.2
Many were the warnings. Within two weeks of the invasion, on 3 April 2003, while US ground forces were still approaching Baghdad, Paul Rogers argued that the US showed ‘no understanding whatsoever’ of what it was doing and that unless it changed course, ‘a thirty-year war is in prospect’.3 John le Carré was more to the point; discarding his usual role as a cool observer he set out why Bush and Blair were ‘mad’.4 To no avail. In the two major English-speaking capitals that straddled the Atlantic, the ruling political-media castes (that is, the major parties, the ‘intelligence’ agencies, the Foreign Office and State Department, the press and media, above all Rupert Murdoch’s) chorused their support, propagandised the assault and failed to question or expose its false and contrived claims. When the BBC attempted to do so after the invasion with a report about Blair’s manipulation of public opinion, it was purged.
The failure of the two ruling establishments was complete on every level: military, economic, political and moral. Or rather, it was so great that it is still proceeding. The thirty-year war Rogers foresaw has only reached its halfway point with Trump and Brexit. They are part of the political blowback against an elite that, rightly, is no longer trusted. The military defeats were extraordinary and continue, as US surges and special forces try to limit the ongoing damage to its supremacy. (The UK was assigned two small battlegrounds, of Basra in Iraq and Helmand in southern Afghanistan; in both its army was humiliated and withdrew.) Economically, the waste of treasure, billions for Britain, trillions for America, fed the bubble of the financial crash. Morally, the invasion of Iraq launched ‘post-truth’ – which now stigmatises twenty-first-century political culture.
There has always been dishonesty in politics. In the summer of 2002, however, during the build-up to Iraq, a Bush political strategist, almost certainly Karl Rove, shared his knowledge of a step change (doing so, of course, off the record). He mocked ‘the reality-based community’, which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality’.5 Under New Labour the British echoed their master’s voice. Not all of Blair’s efforts were convincing, but even when his government’s post-truth dossier of September 2002 that was supposed to set out the case for war proved to be ‘dodgy’, he was untouched.6 In the USA a series of polls reported that nearly half the population believed that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11, although this was not the case.7 This manipulation of public opinion stemmed from the Special Operations Unit set up in the Pentagon to generate apparently factual allegations.8 None of the ‘post-truth’ falsehoods of 2016 came close to this.
Cheered on by the Murdoch-owned Fox News in the US and the Sun in the UK, the US and British governments defied the norms of old-fashioned honesty. Refusing to listen to ‘experts’, they poured gold and lives into the mountains of Afghanistan and the sands of Mesopotamia. Strategically inept, incredibly wasteful, they played Osama bin Laden’s game. They undermined their own democracies, cynically manipulating consent, tearing out the heart of their norms and procedures, and debasing their historic institutions. The first great loss is symbolised by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction. The breach concerned far more than a terrible incident of dishonesty. An entire section of the public who believed in the fundamental political integrity, overall honesty and legality of their country’s system of government lost their trust in it. Many clung to the hope that integrity would be restored. But their capacity to advocate its virtue, which is crucial to the reproduction of any system of authority, wilted in the scandal of mendacity for which no one was held to account.
At the turn of the century, the strategic question that most concerned the two capitals was how to consolidate American hegemony over the post-Cold War international system. This was the purpose behind the invasion of Iraq. Its humiliating failure leads directly to the meandering belligerence of President Trump. I am not exaggerating the global ambition of that moment. On 28 July 2002, well before the British Cabinet or Parliament had formed a view, Blair sent Bush a memo on the coming invasion, opening: ‘I will be with you whatever’ and ending: ‘the crucial issue is not when, but how.’ A week after the attack began, on 26 March 2003, Blair summarised their strategic purpose, writing to Bush: ‘This is the moment when you can define international politics for the next generation: the true post-Cold War world order. Our ambition is big: to construct a global agenda around which we can unite the world, rather than dividing it into rival centres of power.’ He proposes a six-part process as to how America should sort out global affairs.
At the same time, Blair continued, they both needed to overcome antagonistic public perception. He wrote:
The problem is we’re not communicating with the rest of the world in a way they understand. They get wholly warped views of the so-called right in American politics, played back through their media; until we end up with the fatuous irony of millions of liberal-minded people taking to the streets, effectively to defend the most illiberal regime on earth.9
Fatuous! Blair knew that the millions of protesters were not defending Saddam Hussein’s regime. (Indeed some of us had opposed the British government arming him in the 1980s, but that’s another story.) What we marched against was an ill-conceived illegal war of choice. A perceptive forecast of disaster was spelt out by one of the protestors, a rookie US senator for Illinois. He told a Chicago rally six months before the invasion, he knew that:
Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.10
The speech was to make Barack Obama president. Pioneering the use of social media, a young generation mobilised to ensure that he and not Hillary Clinton got the Democratic nomination – that an anti-war candidate for change led the fight against the Republicans in 2008. A president who attempted healing, consensus and togetherness, even though a more far-reaching programme was necessary, Obama became a stopgap – although what seeded itself in his eight years may be decisive for future progress. He wound down US involvement in the wars of Arabia and prevented a rout. There was no unseemly overrunning of the American withdrawal, as there had been when the US was forced to evacuate Saigon in 1975. Instead, under cover of drones and smart combat, Americans were pulled away from the front lines of the fighting and their vast bases in the Iraq oil fields.
As a result there was no single moment that symbolises the second breach of trust in the North Atlantic system of authority. Had a Tory government overseen the military disasters the British armed forces suffered in Basra and Helmand, Labour would have demanded a full inquiry. Perhaps because Labour was in charge and the Tories were more easily persuaded not to embarrass the armed forces, defeat was spun as an honourable sacrifice and withdrawal ordered before the losses became too great. Also the UK contribution to the wars was more ornamental than strategic, and the commitment across British society far less than in the USA, although large enough to create widespread hostility and support for wounded veterans.
In the United States, a majority of the American public had supported the invasion of Iraq, many out of a desire for revenge on those who had inflicted the outrage and humiliation of 9/11. The penetration of the military in everyday American life is often missed by commentators who only experience the big cities. Around 1.5 million are in uniform and 800,000 in the active reserves. The number of veterans is hugely greater, and across the country families, especially in small towns, engage in a form of civic worship of the armed forces. They followed the wars of the early century directly and personally. Nearly 4,500 died in Iraq and over 2,000 in Afghanistan. Over 32,000 were wounded in Iraq and nearly 20,000 in Afghanistan. In the course of the two wars, more than 1.5 million served in Iraq and over 800,000 in Afghanistan. In total: 6,500 dead, 50,000 wounded, and over 2 million sent to the Middle East to fight or support the fighting – and this does not include the numbers deployed by the navy, air force and intelligence agencies in ongoing operations outside the immediate theatre for over a decade.
The two sets of citizens only partly overlap. Not all red-neck Americans who project their bigotry onto Arabs went to fight. By no means all the millions in the families who sent a member to fight are prejudiced. Amongst both communities a gradual realisation took place. In the dark of their nights, as one setback followed another, they realised that it was Mission Failure. The government of their nation, which they saluted from the bottom of their hearts, had called on them to do their sacred duty and then abused their loyalty by screwing up. This was the second breach of trust. It would take an ‘outsider’ to vent their feelings in 2016.
Obama cloaked the colossal, multi-trillion-dollar defeat in his careful dignity, helped by his raid on Abbottabad to kill bin Laden. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party machine turned into a holding operation for Hillary Clinton to reclaim the crown. Now apologising for her error in voting for the Iraq war, she nonetheless called for renewed escalation in the Middle East with a no-fly zone over Syria, illustrating a deafness to the need for change that would prove fatal for her.