The Lure of Greatness

England's Brexit and America's Trump

Anthony Barnett

• Publisher: Unbound
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783524532, 9781783524525
• eBook ISBN: 9781783524549
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 2016 two surprising explosions of popular contempt for the existing order drove Britain into Brexit and paved the way for Trump's presidency of the United States.

On both sides of the Atlantic, proud regimes with global pretensions were levelled by justifiable revolts. But in the name of self-government, Brexit and Trump will intensify the authoritarian traditions of their outdated political systems.

The Lure of Greatness is a blistering account of how and why this happened. The shadow of Iraq, the great financial crash, campaigns of poison and intrigue, the filleting of David Cameron with the cold fury of a Remain voter... these are just the start.

At the book's heart is the story of the institutional and constitutional implosion of the United Kingdom, the farce of 'the sovereignty of parliament', a passionate account of English nationalism and the absurdity of the ever-increasing and insidious influence of the Daily Mail. What emerges is a compelling summary of an EU in crisis, the fateful absence of a viable left alternative, the normality of immigration – all of which frame the reasons for the triumph of Leave.

Anthony Barnett, co-founder of openDemocracy, applies a lifetime of observing, reporting and sedition in this searing analysis of the two great democratic disasters of our time.

PART I

AFTER TRUST

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

1

Jailbreak

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 worl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• By the Same Author
• New Walls
• Part I After Trust
• Part II Cameron
• Part III Brexitannia
• Part IV From Globalisation to Immigration
• Part V Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Supporters
• Dedication
• Copyright