It wasn’t the doomy medical diagnosis that caused F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mental breakdown. It was moment the doctors told him he was going to be OK.
“After about an hour of solitary pillow-hugging,” wrote the novelist in 1936, “I began to realise that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”
Come the day of the supreme-court judgement on Brexit, the progressive part of Britain could be forgiven if it succumbed to a Fitzgerald-style “crack-up”. Ukip leader Nigel Farage will mobilise 100,000 racists and xenophobes to intimidate the court; the justices will probably ignore them and uphold the high court verdict. But it is beginning to feel as if liberal democracy in Britain is, too, “drawing on resources it does not possess”.
Across the world, a succession of near-catastrophes has over the past two years begun to drain progressive politics of its resilience. Anti-racists, globalists and believers in the virtues of science over mumbo-jumbo are still winning elections. But the effort is going to exhaust us unless we become more radical.
In America, whether he wins or loses, Donald Trump’s candidacy — by sidelining the respectable right and creating a mass movement based on hate — has eroded American democracy to a new and fragile baseline. All the right needs to do in 2020 is to find a more respectable candidate and, until then, unleash a resistance struggle against the legitimacy of Clinton, her Supreme Court appointments and any Democratic majority in Congress that emerges.
It’s important to understand the new cross-fertilisation that has begun between Trump’s white-supremacist revolt and the revolt being planned by Ukip. Virtually nobody in mainstream politics a decade ago used the term “white working class”. Now it’s common to hear even BBC presenters parrot the phrase, as if the separation between white and non-white populations in Britain’s post-industrial towns were an accomplished fact, not a far-right fantasy.
In Britain, since the high-court decision, and with the tabloids ramping up their attack on the judiciary, people have been asking: what do Jonathan Harmsworth, owner of the Daily Mail, and Rupert Murdoch want? What would make them stop? The answer is: they want Britain ruled by a xenophobic mob, controlled by them. The policies are secondary — as long as their legal offshore tax-dodging facilities are maintained.
They also want a Labour Party they can control and a Tory party they can intimidate.
In pursuit of that, they have created what the sociologist Manuel Castells calls a “switch”. You create a constituency of angry right-wing voters, assembled around using language no respectable politician could utter, and you switch them on, or off, against the government of the day as long as that government does your bidding.
It’s facile to call Trump and Farage “fascists”. They are elite, right-wing economic nationalists who have each stumbled upon the fact that a minority of working-class people can be fooled by populism — especially when the left refuses to play the populist game. And they are moving forward fast. So we need to catch up.
“We” is no longer about leave versus remain, still less Corbynistas versus the rest. “We” should include everybody who wants this country to be run by parliament, with the judiciary guaranteeing the rule of law, to remain engaged with the multilateral, global institutions and be tolerant to migrants and foreign visitors.
The first thing we have to make is a rhetorical break with neoliberalism: the doctrine of austerity, inequality, privatisation, financial corruption, asset bubbles and technocratic hubris. It is entirely possible to construct a humane pro-business version of capitalism without these things. There doesn’t have to be a bunch of apologies and confessions.
You could assuage a large part of the anger that’s driving the ultra-right simply by a demonstrable change of path: pump money into communities and hope will follow. Likewise, get HMRC on to the case of the tax-dodging rich, and off the backs of small-business owners.
The next thing is to do something radical about the inequality of voice in Britain’s media. Enact Leveson. Ask companies such as British Airways why they are distributing the Mail mid-Atlantic, for free, as a kind of “unwelcome to Britain” card for visitors. People with resources should set up — or, even better, acquire through hostile takeover — mass-circulation newspapers that champion democratic values, tolerance and restraint. Plus we need to challenge supine editorial leadership of the BBC.
There are no minutes of a meeting where the BBC’s bosses decided to give free rein to hate speech and intimidation on programmes such as Question Time; no instructions exist that say reporters should run unchallenged vox-pops with racists, back to back. But this is what’s happening. It would take one email from the director-general, Tony Hall, to stop it.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote in the 1930s that the success of the radical right was fuelled by the failure of the radical left. Benjamin took it as read that the business class would either support, or flip over to, fascism once the demagogues had created a street movement and an atmosphere of crisis.
Today, however, the vast majority of business leaders, professionals and educated people operate in a world regulated to global standards, where markets depend on freedom and the rule of law. Today, therefore, it is the failure of the radical centre that’s the problem. It needs, like Fitzgerald after his famous “crack-up” to recharge its batteries.
If Nigel Farage leads 100,000 people to intimidate the supreme court, I intend to be on the other side of a police crash barrier opposing him. I don’t want to be flanked by only my anti-fascist mates from 30 years ago: I want to see an alliance of the left and the radical centre on the streets. That means bond traders from Canary Wharf, arm-in-arm with placard-carrying Trots. Masked-up Kurdish radicals alongside Mumsnet posters. Eighty years on from Cable Street, we don’t have many dockers and miners around, to help face down rightwing intimidation. Puny as we are, it’s up to us.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Paul Mason is a writer and broadcaster on economics and social justice.
