A Savage Servility

Over the coming days, you can expect sage media heads to nod, whistle and admit that whatever it was, 2016 was certainly memorable. Popular historians will be tempted to confirm that the year was pivotal while its embers still glow red. Personally, I doubt it will prove to be either. It is more likely to mark a messy interregnum between phases of a continuing trajectory. Whatever the outcome of Brexit (which hasn't happened yet) and a Trump presidency (ditto), the long-run results are unlikely to diverge massively from what we could have expected to happen anyway. The UK will be poorer and more fractious outside the EU, but this is merely the exacerbation of a process that began in the late-70s. Staying in the EU was never of itself going to rebalance the economy or address widening inequality. Likewise, the US will appear more venal and corrupt, but that will simply highlight the degree to which Obama exerted a reality distortion field in which his performative probity and tolerance masked a continuing slide in public morality and a growing disenchantment with the Republic.

But if the year won't be pivotal, in the manner of 1989 or 2001, that isn't to say that stuff didn't happen. So, in the seasonal spirit, here is my (slightly premature) annual roundup, which I've decided to approach obliquely through media tropes: some old, some new. In the latter category, the pacesetter was the Celebrity Death Epidemic, which has now run the gamut from A Rickman to ZZ Gabor (see what it did there?). Statistically, it was just another year, but the coincidental departure of pop culture luminaries such as David Bowie, Prince and Leonard Cohen unleashed a tidal wave of solipsistic blather from middle-aged journalists. This has been coming for a while. There was already a noticeable tendency towards overkill in the reporting of the death of John Peel in 2004, despite the best efforts of Mark E Smith on Newsnight (5' in). Obituaries traditionally enjoyed a high status among journalists because they provided a rare opportunity for reflection among the ceaseless reportage. Today, in a sea of witless opinion and promos masquerading as "long reads", a celebrity death provides cheap filler and reliable clickbait.

Though the return of political economy was predictable after 2008, it is fair to say that it most definitely arrived on the scene this year, in no small part because the political establishment failed to measure up to the challenge from 2010 onwards. Whatever else they prove, the EU referendum in the UK and the Presidential election in the US show that the current economic dispensation isn't working for enough people to provide social and political stability. As yet, no one is offering much in the way of a cogent solution, which is why the hit-and-hope of Brexit and Trump have proved attractive. The underlying problem is neither fake news nor the irrationality of the masses but the persistence of TINA (there is no alternative) as the bedrock of neoliberal narrative. In this sense, modern populism - as an anti-elite discourse - is a rational response, even if it has been hijacked by right-wing loons. That this has happened is largely because elites insist that the true danger is the cuddly social democracy of Corbyn and Sanders and the "militancy" of striking workers. One positive development is that the rise of the alt-right, and the threat of Le Pen, has made the liberal claims of left antisemitism look even more ridiculous.

Let us now take a turn behind the scenes, to look at some of the structural changes afoot. We start with the trivia of commodities that no one really needs. If you think of the Tech-augmented Human in terms of wearables, 2016 has been a bit of a disappointment, with the damp squib that was the Apple Watch and the likes of Fitbit running (if you'll pardon the pun) into a brick wall as far as expanded functionality is concerned (there are only so many bio-metrics the average non-hypochondriac can worry about). Meanwhile, blockchain-based distributed applications, phone-based payment systems (which are conceptually on a road between a chip embedded in a plastic card and one embedded in your body) and home device controllers (i.e. secure hubs for the Internet of Things) continue to inch forward. This slow progress has inevitably fed into the Modern Technology is Rubbish trope, but that shouldn't distract us from the interesting change in the discourse from complaints of deficiency - that new tech is not as good as advertised or that it has failed to live up to expectations - to the charge of outright malignancy.

While fretting about AI and mass surveillance has remained popular, the big change in the realm of the malign is that the fears of Matrix-style machines draining our vital bodily fluids or the NSA and GCHQ reading our emails have given way in the popular imagination to robots "stealing our jobs". This meme of dispossession has replaced the earlier "they took er jerbs" trope in which the people casually branded "globalisation's losers" supposedly pointed the finger at poorly-paid Mexican and Chinese assembly workers. What is noticeable (and is clearly worrying a number of people in Silicon Valley) is that this is shifting the focus of popular ire away from foreign labour to domestic capital. Of course, that capital is only evident as such if we recognise that robots are simply plant and machinery. The imputation of malignancy is intended to anthropomorphise the machines, much as the earlier Luddite trope claimed that weavers were driven by an irrational animosity towards power-looms rather than mill-owners.

This shift reflects the growing salience of reshoring and full automation as global production chains are shortened to increase profits. It also heralds a change in financial flows as capital is increasingly repatriated for investment in mature economies. Though a lot of Transatlantic attention is being given to the promise of a Trump-led infrastructure investment programme, the more significant change under the new administration is likely to be a reduction in the taxes levied on overseas profits when brought back to the US, which will encourage the likes of Apple and Amazon to invest their offshore funds in domestic projects. Given their interests and capabilities, this is more likely to be in the area of automation (which is job-reducing) rather than infrastructure (which is job-expanding). In other words, there will be rapid advances in autonomous vehicles while US roads may get a few potholes filled in.

Given the amount of capital flooding into Driverless Cars and the necessity of profitable returns in the medium term (assuming Trump is serious about inflation and interest rates in the 2-4% range), we may shortly see legislation to enable the creation of AV (autonomous vehicle)-only areas. These will most likely be in high-value city centres where there are sufficient rich people (who will be able to afford to buy the first generation of AVs) and young professionals (who will be able to afford driverless Ubers everywhere). Given the wealth bias, this won't just be limited to the US, which raises the prospect that legislation to allow autonomous vehicles may be passed in Saudi Arabia before legislation to allow autonomous women. This should remind us that the idea that technology is revolutionary, in the sense of socially progressive and personally liberating, is ideological. In many ways modern digital technology, with its focus on surveillance and control, and its incidental delight in public shaming, is highly conservative. The rise of the reactionary alt-right in this milieu should not come as a shock.

Equally unsurprising is that the debate on Basic Income has seen a drift away from the ideal of human flourishing towards the necessity of a dole in the face of technological unemployment. While voices on the left imagine a hopeful post-capitalism ("Demand full automation! Demand the future!"), the political centre, which is where any practical consensus will coalesce, is increasingly attracted to basic income as a new route to the old goal of "welfare reform". This is recognition of two secular trends. First, the twinned growth in precarious employment and income inequality is making welfare systems based on payroll contributions increasingly problematic. As the majority of payers can afford to contribute less and less, and as demographic ageing shrinks the working population, per capita contributions decline. The obvious solution - to increase taxes on the well-off over-and-above payroll contributions - is politically unpalatable to centrists, particularly as more of the wealthy opt-out of public services and political parties rely more on wealthy donors.

The second trend is that the privatisation and financialisation of public services is increasing the unit costs of public goods - a fact only obscured by Procrustean cuts in service provision to fit those goods into reduced budgets. While this might cause some politicians to question the foundational claims of privatisation, most are resigned to accepting the neoliberal order (TINA) and "managing" it better. In practice, this means capping expenditure. While some services, like the NHS, will remain free at the point of use, at least for a sizeable segment of the population, others are likely to become optional. This may take the form of citizens having to choose a subset from a list (an idea already trialled in the realm of corporate benefits), with "over-use" being chargeable, or it may lead to a basic income that is meant to cover not only the bare necessities but limited public (chargeable) goods as well: effectively a revival of the old idea of vouchers.

My prediction for 2017 is therefore more of the same, which is always a relatively safe call. Technology will continue to be under-estimated because it is already hyper-commoditised; driverless cars and basic income really are on the way, but the manner of their implementation will be punitive and discriminatory; and centrist politicians will continue to funk the challenge of inequality and economic power, providing easy ammunition for the far-right. Paradoxically perhaps, the geopolitical situation will probably stay relatively calm, despite plenty of cheap talk, because the modern generation of authoritarians are more interested in money than metaphysics. As the Republican Party and Silicon Valley are proving in the US, conservatives and liberals can do business with such authoritarians. In the UK, the reality of "taking back control", and the lack of consequentiality for lies (Katie Hopkins paying damages is the exception that proves the rule), have entrenched a sullen cynicism. Rupert Murdoch's bid for Sky plc seems well-timed. I recall a line from Robert's Lowell's For the Union Dead: a savage servility slides by on grease.

Parental Advisory

Though they are routinely yoked together as two of the horsemen of the post-truth Apocalypse, the leave campaign in the UK's EU referendum and Donald Trump's campaign in the US Presidential election were very different in terms of the means they used to circulate "fake news". In the UK, the standout moments in the propaganda war involved media that have been around for over a century: newspaper headlines ("Queen backs Brexit", varieties of "millions more migrants on the way"), billboard posters ("Breaking Point"), and even a big red bus assuring us that £350 million could be diverted weekly to the NHS. In the US, attention focused on the new media of the Internet, notably Trump's Twitter account, Facebook's inadvertent creation of neo-Nazi safe spaces, and (though their importance has been over-stated) out-and-out black propaganda sites like Breitbart News. This led to the odd sight of US cable TV, which was once the new kid on the media block, misjudging the popular mood and being artlessly played by Trump.

The sense of the two countries inhabiting different centuries - possibly the 19th and the 21st - was obscured by the commonality of the "mainstream media" doing a poor job in countering the nonsense or interrogating (rather than witlessly amplifying) popular "concerns". This might not appear to reflect particularly well on the UK, but it actually points to a greater resilience, or at least inertia, in the institutions of British politics. We still have a career politician in Number 10, UKIP aspires to be a party just like the others, and the judiciary doesn't seem minded to rubber-stamp the will of the executive. While institutional rot affects both countries, it looks to have spread further in the US, accelerated by the removal of restraints on political financing and the strategic vandalism of the Republican Party in Congress since the mid-90s.

This cultural difference goes some way to explain why the Guardian Media Group (GMG) appears to be far more worried about the impact of the Internet than most other UK news organisations. Having consciously set out to be the global liberal's trusted source, it has invested heavily in both online and the US, and is acutely aware of the power of the Internet giants to dominate advertising budgets. It has become simultaneously more American (and thus prudish) in style and more fretful about market imperfections. This has led to an increasingly moralistic critique of both individuals (e.g. the prominence given to online harassment and the defensive focus on identity politics) and organisations deemed to be eroding journalistic values. This often produces hyperbole. For example, Facebook's filter bubble is presented as tantamount to a system of mind control when it is essentially just confirmation bias.

Despite the high profile given to its ability to amplify dodgy news, Facebook's chief feature is that it reinforces existing mainstream media preferences through sorting. If you're a teacher in Hackney whose mates are mostly teachers, you'll see plenty of Grauniad articles. This makes it a poor channel to grow readership beyond already saturated groups. In contrast, Google can provide much wider exposure, particularly if you can appear in "natural" search results rather than via Ad Words. While adverts of any sort have a low return, the benefit to a news provider of appearing in a self-directed search is considerable. If it is going to grow its global audience, GMG probably needs to rely more on Google than on Facebook, but the lack of predictability inherent in search produces anxiety: "New platforms have put a bomb under the financial model – advertising – resources are shrinking, traffic is increasingly dependent on them, and publishers have no access, no insight at all, into what these platforms are doing in their headquarters, their labs".

That statement featured in what appears to be a planned campaign, launched in The Observer this month by Carole Cadwalladr,  to warn us that "tech-savvy rightwingers" are "gaming" the Google algorithm. The gaming of Google for political rather than commercial ends is not new. The Google bomb dates from the late-90s, and was made famous by the association of "miserable failure" with George W Bush, while the autocomplete function of Google Search has been around since 2004. For years Google has been editing both search rankings and autocomplete predictions to remove objectionable results, though it keeps this quiet because the system's credibility depends on its comprehensiveness - i.e. reflecting what users in aggregate are searching for and which pages the Internet as a community of content-providers considers most authoritative on any given topic.

Cadwalladr's article conflates two separate issues: autocomplete and search result rankings, though this is forgivable since Google launched Instant Search in 2010, which presents cached results based on predicted search terms. Autocomplete tells you what other people are searching for. If you enter "are jews" and this produces "are jews [evil]", then that is a reflection of actual usage (which is also changing, so don't expect the same results each time), not of gaming. Neither does it reflect an upsurge in antisemitism. The word "Jews" is likely to produce negative stereotypes in autocomplete predictions because while antisemites tend to bandy it about, most people tend to be sensitive to the charge of inadvertent antisemitism and are therefore circumspect in using it. To put this in context, consider some leading autocomplete predictions for a variety of other groups: are the french [rude]; are lawyers [rich]; are man utd fans [glory hunters]; are the japanese [a cruel race] (autocomplete is also localised, so this may reflect heavy usage by Daily Mail readers in my neck of the woods).

Another example reported in The Observer a week later was "did the hol[ocaust really happen]". It is easy to mistake the salience of certain terms in autocomplete as evidence of a conspiracy, but the mundane truth is that predictability largely depends on the probability of alternatives. "Did the hol[e in the wall gang really exist]" or did the "hol[iday inn invent holidays]" are questions that are rarely asked. "Did the hol" is not a commonly used prefix, even among members of the Hollies fan club. This means that the number of searches required to feature in the autocomplete top four may be quite small, certainly compared to something like "the cheapest price for". It is also likely that many of the (possibly few) people who entered the predicted search are already primed to question the reality of the Holocaust. We regularly use search engines to validate existing beliefs or confirm prejudices, not just to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, hence the idea of Google as a "prosthetic memory".

While there are plenty of ignorant people in the world, it would be wrong to assume that they are empty vessels that will be filled by the first propaganda they encounter. That is a reactionary prejudice with a long history, combining a contempt for the common sort and the demonisation of malign forces set on undermining our cherished social order. To put this in the terms of an earlier technology, it is like the debate over whether public libraries should stock copies of Mein Kampf, or whether certain "dangerous" literature should be held under lock and key and only be made available to responsible persons bearing a letter signed by a bishop. Significantly, Wikipedia, as an edited content platform, is not seen as a problem, just as the Encyclopaedia Britannica wasn't, though a case can be made that both are riddled with errors and dubious editorial judgements. Of course, Wikipedia is not in the business of providing news, so it is not a competitor in the eyes of media organisations like GMG.

In demanding that certain search terms be curated the liberal media is exercising its own bias. Nobody seems too bothered that the term "was Hitler" produces: a socialist; married; German; a dictator (the last of these leads to a result set that uniformly confirms that he was and that this was a bad thing). The insistence on curation goes beyond autocomplete predictions to actual search results, which is the main prize for the likes of GMG. The top-ranking result for "did the holocaust happen" is a comment thread on the site of Stormfront, a neo-Nazi group, in which a convinced denier recycles various myths. The reason for its prominence is the form of words used in the search. If Hannah Arendt had chosen that phrase as her title instead of Eichmann in Jerusalem, the first result today would probably link to her book on Amazon, no matter how much "gaming" white supremacists got up to. If you search for just "holocaust", you'll get Wikipedia first. On a lighter note, the first page of results for "are jews evil" currently includes articles about the Observer story and Google's response. Irritatingly for all at GMG, the top link is to a report in The Telegraph.

Cadwalladr makes the relationship between the Internet and democracy explicit, casting Google in the role of a privileged interest that must be restrained by the people: "Are Jews evil? How do you want that question answered? This is our internet. Not Google’s. Not Facebook’s. Not rightwing propagandists. And we’re the only ones who can reclaim it". Though this sounds like a clarion call to liberty and the defence of the commons, what GMG is demanding is that Google be obliged to exercise editorial control. Their practical hope is that this will give greater prominence to traditional media businesses in search results, while their ideological aim is to reinforce the gatekeeper model central to the liberal notion of civic responsibility. I'm not one for giving Google a free ride - their claim that they merely reflect the wisdom (or stupidity) of the crowd is disingenuous - but the value of a near-universal search engine with minimal editorial direction far outweighs the downside of a bunch of muppets at Stormfront denying the Holocaust.

There is a lack of logic in insisting on editorial control without addressing the question of ownership, which is particularly obvious in a week when Rupert Murdoch revived his bid for Sky plc (something you can be sure he wouldn't be doing unless he had already squared the government). The nutter who recently turned up with a gun in a Washington pizza parlour looking for Hillary Clinton's child sex ring was primed not just by far-right websites but by the longstanding virulence displayed towards both Clinton and paedophiles by cable TV, radio and tabloid newspapers. The press coverage of paedophilia changed in the 1980s, with Murdoch's outlets very much to the fore, with the trope of an organised conspiracy to target children overtaking the traditional image of the seedy loner. This was fed not just by "ritual satanic abuse" panics and government campaigns against the "promotion of homosexuality" in schools (both in the context of an assault on the public sector), but by bonkers claims that drug dealers thought kids a more lucrative market than adults ("just say no") and rock groups were urging teenage suicide in backmasked recordings.

At times, Cadwalladr sounds like Tipper Gore, whose objection to Prince's Little Nikki famously led to the introduction of Parental Advisory stickers. Consider the emotional register of the following: "The right is on the rise everywhere. And that includes on the internet. It is creating more content that is travelling wider and further. It has changed both the questions being asked – did the Holocaust actually happen? Are Jews evil? Should Islam be destroyed – and answered. It is in the process of remaking the world, rewriting history, rewiring minds, changing the conversation, reframing the questions and answers. It’s our world. Our internet. Our history. And we have to wake up to what is happening right now on the laptop on our desk, the phone in our pocket, the tablet in our children’s bedrooms. This is our choice: do something. Or accept the truth according to Google. That six million didn’t die. That the Holocaust never happened. That we didn’t care enough to remember."

A Song From Under the Floorboards

The spat between UKIP donor Aaron Banks and media celebrity Mary Beard over the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire (which produced an epic piss-take by Left Outside that, inter alia, correctly noted there was no single cause because there was no single fall) has once again raised the spectre of a new dark age of unreason. What has struck me about this meme over the course of 2016 is the thoughtless way in which the term "expert" has been bandied about, not just as a rhetorical slur by the likes of Michael Gove but as the epitome of beleaguered rationality by liberals. Banks's claim that historians don't have a monopoly on history is a classic populist manoeuvre, which Beard was wise enough to agree with, but I also suspect he knew that questioning the value of expertise was the sort of thing that would reliably wind up her liberal supporters, many of whom appear to consider the knowledgeable and qualified, from climate scientists to Supreme Court judges, as a persecuted minority in need of protection and solidarity. I'm surprised there hasn't been a campaign to adopt an expert for Christmas.

In fact, we're all experts to a degree, in the sense of having access to local or tacit knowledge. The problem with institutionalised expertise is that it suggests a categorical difference - an epistemological class system, if you will - and one that is made through the narrow and flawed mechanism of formal qualification. You'll note that I didn't introduce Beard as a professor of Roman history, the point being that she can also legitimately claim a degree of expertise in the ways of the media (something that she is quite well aware of). Similarly, the introduction of Banks as a "donor", rather than an expert in commercial insurance, recycles a media trope in which the funding of politics outside the narrow centre, and particularly by the nouveau riches, is deemed suspiciously transactional or destabilising. Among the cheerleaders of first the SDP and then New Labour, David Sainsbury was more likely to be introduced as a thinker, though his money has had a greater indirect impact on British lives than his negligible "thought".

The idea that experts are an endangered species - that we are likely to see their euthanasia before that of the rentier - is absurd, but no less ridiculous that the hyperbolic claim that we have entered an era of "post-truth politics". Like the voguish concern over "fake news", this suggests a remarkable ignorance of the history of both politics and the mass media. The promotion of feeling over facts is as old as the Enlightenment itself, while we really didn't need to rediscover the Frankfurt School to recognise that politics deals in imagined communities and symbolic discourses. To my mind, what is most depressing about the post-Brexit / post-Trump angst is the degree of emotionalism displayed by liberals as they loudly insist on the virtues of reason while confessing themselves appalled by the irrational behaviour of the common sort. To Paul Krugman's confusion we should now add Martin Kettle's condescension: "People who once carried our hopes have increasingly embraced other causes". The bastards.

Pankaj Mishra has often been sceptical of liberal claims, but he is also a friendly critic who has long earned a crust in the liberal media. In a long (and rather confused) essay for The Guardian, entitled "Welcome to the Age of Anger", he exhibited this liberal fascination with emotion and the unknowability it gives rise to: "we cannot understand this crisis because our dominant intellectual concepts and categories seem unable to process an explosion of uncontrolled forces". Mishra taps into the liberal fear, crystallised at the turn of the twentieth century, that democracy gives voice to atavistic desires and hatreds that are as incomprehensible as they are uncontrollable: "It is a moment for thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, who warned in 1915 that the 'primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual', but are simply waiting for the opportunity to show themselves again. Certainly, the current conflagration has brought to the surface what Friedrich Nietzsche called 'ressentiment' – 'a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts'".

The connection he makes between the liberal worries of a century ago and today is evident even in those aspects of social life, such as the ubiquity of the market, that we can confidently say are more recent: "Today, the society of entrepreneurial individuals competing in the rational market reveals unplumbed depths of misery and despair; it spawns a nihilistic rebellion against order itself". Here you see the more modern language of Foucault yoked to that of Dostoyevsky. Homo oeconomicus meets the Underground Man (which is not a bad synopsis of the film Taxi Driver). Mishra's turn to the literature of a century ago is a rebuke both to the post-1989 delusions of globalised liberal democracy and to the neoliberal notion of the rational utility maximiser that came to the fore in the 1970s, but it is also an attempt to reframe contemporary events in the language of classical liberal anxiety, which first and foremost means occluding the working class (the Freudian pathologising of Trump - the imputation of incestuous lust, the coprophagy, the "Daddy will save us" meme - is another example of this turn away from rational engagement to the delights of disgust).

Ressentiment, as originally theorised by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, was a response to the destabilising impact of industrial modernity on the marginal bourgeoisie, not the proletariat. It is a condition associated with the socially insecure and the declassé, such as the penurious ex-civil servants and thwarted students of Dostoyevsky's 1860s. Mishra goes further back to Alexis de Tocqueville's 1830s criticism of American "meritocracy", which is a thinly-disguised fear of universal suffrage: "The rage for equality is conjoined with the pursuit of prosperity mandated by the global consumer economy, aggravating tensions and contradictions in inner lives that are then played out in the public sphere". What is notable here is not the commonplace observation that capitalism is destabilising, nor that this effect is amplified by globalisation, but the suggestion that a popular "rage for equality" is also to blame. If right-populism seeks to constrain globalisation and equality, and if left-populism seeks to restrain capitalism and globalisation, liberalism believes that all three must be restrained (i.e. scrupulously managed) by the qualified.

Mishra is astute on the failings of the liberal establishment: "Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new 'irrationalism' through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism. Not surprisingly, they are now unable to explain its rise". He is also right to dismiss the voguish calls for a centrist nationalism, and its associated disavowal of identity politics, as nostalgia for a "time when paternalistic white liberals occupied the vital centre, little disturbed by the needs and desires of history's forgotten, humiliated and silenced people". But his diagnosis ultimately dribbles away in a wishy-washy call for "a richer and more varied picture of human experience and needs" based on a "greater precision in matters of the soul". Given his reliance on late 19th century thought, I half feared he was about to recommend Theosophy. This inconclusive end should be a clue that surrendering to the dark force of unreason is a dead end, even if it offers the erogenous pleasure of victimhood in the manner of Mary Beard's supporters.

To understand shifts in the popular mood it is always wise to first proceed on the assumption that they are rational. The fact that liberals are so easily spooked suggests that their own faith in rationality is fragile, though perhaps this is because they secretly believe that only a chosen few are really capable of rational judgement. It also means that they fail to appreciate just how hegemonic liberalism is, notably the idea of progress. It is the fear that progress, in the sense of "getting on", is over - that our children and grandchildren will lead poorer lives - that animates much of the current dissatisfaction. It is in this ironic sense that many people have understood the phrase "the end of history". Martin Kettle says "The most important political lesson of my lifetime still feels to me to be the fall of the Soviet Union". What he and many other liberals cannot seem to get is that for most working class people in the West this was one of the less significant events of the last 30 years.

The Politics of Identity

One of the early consequences of Donald Trump's election has been the questioning of the role of identity politics. Initially this foregrounded a longstanding theme of the left - that the Democratic establishment had promoted sectional rights to occlude discussion of economic power - but it was quickly hijacked by liberals who claimed that the real problem was that identity politics had created the seedbed for Trump's demagoguery, not least by legitimising the claims of the white working class to be an aggrieved minority. This wasn't an overnight conversion, but it did signal a change in tone from a critique of self-indulgence and other-worldliness to one of pernicious decay. It continues the liberal criticism of political correctness (echoing conservative tropes) that hit its stride after 2001, and which was bound up with the longstanding assault on the left's "intellectual cowardice" that liberal commentators like Jonathan Chait in the US and Nick Cohen in the UK have built a career on. What this has done is to marginalise the case of the left that identity politics is insufficient ("not good enough", as Bernie Sanders put it), replacing it with the quest for a new progressive super-identity that further relegates class. It also misdiagnoses the decay of democracy by a focus on actors rather than institutions.

This about-turn was crystallised in a much circulated opinion piece by Mark Lilla in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago. After paying lip-service to the beauty of diversity, Lilla insists that "the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end" because it "has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life". The piece is itself comically narcissistic in its use of personal anecdotes: "Recently I performed a little experiment during a sabbatical in France: For a full year I read only European publications, not American ones". It also makes daft historical claims, such as that "identity politics ... never wins elections" (the same liberals argued the opposite in respect of the Obama coalition), and that "the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan" (Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia but appears to be unaware of the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s - did he not see Scorsese's Gangs of New York?).

The piece ends with an epiphany as Lilla and a mixed ethnic group listen to a recording of Franklin D Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" speech from 1941. What he is summoning here is a common national identity that is above sectional interests. But just as FDR's four freedoms avoided any mention of economic power, Lilla omits to mention that Roosevelt's winning coalition depended on the racist Democratic party machine of the South. The corollary of this appeal is that some in society must forgo pursuing their sectional interests for the common good: "We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale".

Beyond the giveaway emphasis on decorum in that last sentence, what's striking about this rhetoric is that it isn't a million miles away from that of Trump himself ("Make America great again"), absent the gratuitous insults and rambling non sequiturs. It is a patriotic appeal to Americanism that urges caution in the area of social reform and offers nothing in the realm of economics beyond civic sympathy. Though he cites the 1940s, it sounds more like the 1950s, which suggests that it may require the creation of a scapegoat to act as a binding agent. It doesn't take a genius to work out that this will probably be "Muslim terrorists". What's also noticeable is the palpable sense of release: that members of the liberal elite have managed to throw off the shackles and speak the truth, which echoes the same trope of repression and self-pity cultivated by the conservative elite since the 1960s. As Adam Johnson noted of Lilla and others, "Every one of the above pundits who is blaming identity politics and political correctness for Trump, it can’t be stressed enough, hated identity politics to begin with, and would have regardless of who won".

Even those liberals who have taken issue with Lilla from the position of "we need to do identity politics better" have tended to frame this conservative nostalgia as "left of centre" when it is anything but. Their objection tends to be pragmatic rather than principled - "There is no other way to do politics than to do identity politics", as Matt Yglesias puts it - and is clearly motivated by a desire to continue using this vector, along with economic liberalisation and technocracy, to constrain the sort of class-based politics that would offend rich donors. This instrumentalism finds an interesting echo on the right where identity has shown itself to be increasingly divorced from any normative values or strategic principles, hence evangelical Christians have embraced the profane Trump while GOP luminaries who once warned of The Donald's monarchical ambitions have raced to court in order to bend the knee. It appears everything is negotiable, which means that identity - in the eyes of liberals and conservatives alike - is a matter of style not of substance.

What this points to is the gradual evolution of identity from biological destiny to a question of culture, or even a consumption preference (Rachel Dolezal may by a figure of ridicule, but the media fascination with her metamorphosis is as telling as their obsession with diets). While some of this is simply a way of legitimising bigotry through hypocritical appeals to tolerance, for example accusing Muslims of being misogynists or homophobes, it has the consequence of suggesting that identity is a matter of choice. In this regard, the political utility of Islam (compared to other religions) owes a lot to its framing in terms of choice. "Strict" Muslims are deemed to have consciously rejected integration, hence wearing a veil is interpreted as a provocation. Converts to Islam are regarded as vulnerable and possibly deluded, which partly reflects the secular belief that any strong religious feeling, beyond some commercialised "spirituality", is tantamount to membership of a cult. The trope of "radicalisation" suggests a perversion of individuation and socialisation and thus another kind of failure of choice.

The opportunity (and ability) to chose one's identity was once the preserve of a small minority of outsiders, from mythic heroes to mountebanks. Though the industrial revolution and emigration changed the material circumstances of many over the course of the nineteenth century, this was accompanied by a determination to preserve cultural identity as a social stabiliser, which remained the norm up until the late 1940s (in the UK, the NHS was the last great "reform" in this lineage). The post-war era saw identity become more fluid under the impact of social mobility and increased consumption (which fed the advance of civil rights in the US), but this was nothing compared to the acceleration after 1980, not just because settled communities were fragmented by deindustrialisation but because the new imperative of human capital encouraged wholesale reinvention of the self. Racial bigotry hasn't disappeared, but the modern resentments delineated by Brexit and Trump owe more to optional identity (cities vs small towns, graduates vs non-graduates, cosmopolitans vs localists) than they do to ethnicity. In fact, the current "nativist" turn shows how race is in decline as an organising principle as first-generation Asian immigrants vote to leave the EU in protest at Polish migrants and Latinos vote for Trump in the hope of economic prosperity.

The frothing of the alt-right does not herald a revival of "scientific racism" any more than it does "sacred monarchy", which is why Republican grandees have found it easy to drop their supposedly principled objections at the first whiff of power. Conservative elites routinely absorb new entrants who buy into the club rules (well hello, Kate Middleton), giving the lie to the idea that they are firm believers in genetic destiny. They make a fetish of inheritance and nobility, but this is largely an ideological justification for the preservation of wealth and privilege. What the liberal turn against identity politics in the US suggests is a similar instrumentality. Having created a market in which multiple identities compete for institutional influence through the Democratic Party, the intention now appears to be to create a bland national identity that is capacious enough to accommodate all those interests that will be alienated by Trumpism in action. In other words, this is a strategy of neutrality that hopes to profit from Trump's divisiveness and executive incompetence.

The danger with this approach is that conservatives are no slouches when it comes to crafting a national identity, and divide and rule can prosper if it makes the beneficiaries even more fearful of loss. It is also ahistorical to imagine that a progressive national identity can be forged without a commitment to state intervention (i.e. protection from the market), particularly in the areas of the economy and welfare. For all the iniquities of Jim Crow, FDR's broad coalition in the 1930s and 40s was popular because it offered both tangible opportunity and realistic hope to most sections of society, not because it was patriotic or deified "freedom". A similar broad coalition today would require liberals to accept that the white working class is neither irredeemably racist nor stupid, that economic management should prioritise production and productivity (i.e. wages) over financialisation, and that identity politics only becomes divisive when it is turned into a competition for privilege. The ready dismissal of women and minorities by privileged white liberal males, on top of their prior dismissal of the working class en masse, suggests that this isn't about to happen.

Varieties of Nostalgia

It sounds like Branko Milanovic, former lead economist at the World Bank, didn't have time to proof-read when he wrote the following, but you can just about get his point: "In a very symmetrical way, the arrival of Utopia to power that began in glacial Petrograd in November 1917 ended with the death of its last actual, physical, proponent, in a far-away Caribbean nation, in November 2016". This was part of a confused blog post that recycled various tired tropes (communism as millenarian religion, capitalism as the end of history) in an attempt to finally dismiss the old spectre on the occasion of Fidel Castro's death. Not only did the piece do violence to history as well as language, but it lapsed into the surreally comic: "Communism could not innovate in practically anything that required for success acquiescence of consumers.  It thus provided tanks but no ball-point pens, spacecraft but no toilet paper". It was fortunate that the defeat of the Wehrmacht depended more on T-34s than bog rolls, but I'm still baffled as to how they got fountain pens to work in space.

What struck me about this was the nostalgia for a time of certainty, when communist manufacture meant Soviet tractors rather than Chinese smartphones and the denial of private property went hand-in-hand with the denial of human rights. Long before 1989, most historians recognised that the actually existing varieties of communism were essentially political projects to build nation states in which Marxism was largely instrumental or contingent, hence Deng Xiaoping's eager conversion to "getting rich" and the reappearance of ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia. Cuba was another example of this. Castro started out as a radical nationalist in the American tradition of Bolivar, San Martin and Marti, who adopted communist rhetoric for convenience and remained wedded to permanent revolution (to the benefit of liberation movements in Africa) because that was what he was good at. The crippling of the Cuban economy owed much to the US embargo and the hostility of other Central and South American states, but it also owed something to the institutionalisation of a guerrilla campaign: strong on coercion, health and education; weak on production, innovation and plurality.

Milanovic is the author not only of the well-known "elephant chart", which puts the stagnation of developed nation median wages in the context of the advance of the Chinese "middle class" and the global one percent, he is also the author of this year's Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalisation (whose chief arguments are summarised here), which has been hailed as a subtle riposte to Thomas Piketty's Capital. Milanovic has suggested that fluctuations in national inequality are periodic, with succeeding waves of growth and decline set within the wider context of a global convergence. In this reading, far from being a historical exception caused by two world wars and the post-1945 reconstruction, les trente glorieuses was just one iteration of a decline in inequality and we can expect a similar turn in the future rather than the inexorably increasing inequality theorised by Piketty. However, these cycles ("Kuznets waves") are driven not just by benign secular forces but also by malign ones that build during the upswing of inequality, such as the increased bellicosity and financial crises of unequal societies (one irony is that his explanation for WW1 - growing inequality led to the export of capital, which led to empire and then war - is pure Lenin).

In other words, we may be facing more trouble in the years ahead, of which the xenophobic nationalism of Brexit and the plutocratic populism of Trump are harbingers, before things take a turn for the better. Milanovic does suggest a number of benign forces and developments that could reduce national inequality without too much pain, such as the positive impact of ageing on wages, but most of his policy prescriptions are well within the bounds of neoliberal orthodoxy, such as capital pre-distribution (e.g. employee share-ownership) and higher inheritance tax rather than increased income tax. He is pessimistic about social democracy (i.e. welfare states) because of the mobility of capital and skilled labour, and thinks that economic migration (which he sees as globally beneficial) can be reconciled with nativist concerns by recognising that citizenship is a rent (your wealth and opportunity largely reflects where you were born, not your personal talent), so differential citizenship (i.e. a premium) could make natives more accepting of immigrants. This could range from having to show your passport at a hospital to a citizens' basic income.

I'm not going to dwell on the problems in Milanovic's diagnosis, or the wishful-thinking in his prescriptions, so much as the "eve of war" vibe that has been knocking around since 2008 and has, I think I can say without fear of contradiction, gone up a notch or two this year. Another example of this was provided last week by George Monbiot, channelling Cassandra in The Guardian: "Eventually the anger that cannot be assuaged through policy will be turned outwards, towards other nations. Faced with a choice between hard truths and easy lies, politicians and their supporters in the media will discover that foreign aggression is among the few options for political survival. I now believe that we will see war between the major powers within my lifetime. Which ones it will involve, and on what apparent cause, remains far from clear. But something that once seemed remote now looks probable". At least he didn't say the lights are going out all over Europe. This gloomy prognosis revives the old idea that nationalism necessarily leads to war, because it fails to resolve domestic social and economic conflicts while providing an organising principle to externalise tensions.

The idea that nations export their inner turmoil originates in the French Revolutionary Wars. Prior to 1792, and with the notable exception of the off-stage American Revolution, European conflict was largely a series of "cabinet wars", relatively small-scale conflicts engineered by absolute monarchies for marginal gains, which in turn represented an advance on the bloody sectarian conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries. In other words, wars that originate in the passions of the people tend towards cruelty and excess, unlike the wars of calculation made by elites. The problem with this theory is that while national fragmentation often leads to wars of liberation and unification, increased national homogeneity doesn't. This is why Nazi Germany was more aggressive beyond its borders than Fascist Italy or Francoist Spain. While it is conceivable that Russia might seek to "protect" its fellow Russians in the Baltic states, as it did in Crimea, the likelihood of it risking war with NATO (and the mass-expropriation of oligarchic assets abroad) is slight. Likewise, climate change may well trigger conflict, but this is most likely to happen in developing countries, not among what Monbiot refers to quaintly as "the major powers".

This apocalyptic vision has roots closer to home in the automation of jobs: "At lower risk is work that requires negotiation, persuasion, originality and creativity. The management and business jobs that demand these skills are comparatively safe from automation; so are those of lawyers, teachers, researchers, doctors, journalists, actors and artists. The jobs that demand the highest educational attainment are the least susceptible to computerisation". What the tales of Macedonian youth creating fake news for pennies points to is the increased commoditisation of news (we've always had fakes). Much of it is already produced by software and "free" opinion is ubiquitous, which makes the inclusion of journalists in the list of "safe" professions look like nostalgia. The fear of the liberal press that it may be talking to itself reflects a suspicion that "originality and creativity" are over-rated. While Monbiot has a distinctive voice, it would take little to write a program that could randomly generate think-pieces by Polly Toynbee or Julia Hartley-Brewer. Indeed, Monbiot's often comical battiness is all that stands between him and redundancy. Perhaps Branko Milanovic is aiming for the same effect.

Asymmetric Stupidity

Paul Krugman asked an interesting question about objectivity and subjectivity in politics the other day, though I doubt he saw it in those terms. Here are his original words, as tweeted:

There are two parts to this: the unreasonable suspicion that liberals despise "ordinary folk" for their ignorance and the tendency of the working class to ignore or discount collective insults levelled at it by conservatives. In fact, this behaviour is quite rational, if subject to cognitive bias. The first thing to note is that the ruling ideology, shared by liberals and conservatives, equates intelligence with the possession of qualifications. If you have a college degree, you are assumed to be more intelligent than someone with only high-school certificates, and if you have no formal qualifications, you are assumed to be probably less intelligent. In aggregate this isn't unreasonable, but at the level of the individual it is obviously problematic. We've all met people, usually from a working class background, who left school with no qualifications and enjoyed subsequent success, and most of us have probably met an upper-class idiot with a degree.

As the owner of not only a PhD but a Nobel Prize, Krugman is perhaps a little obtuse on this point. I don't get the sense that he is a condescending snob, but from the perspective of a working class Midwesterner who couldn't afford college, Krugman is part of the coastal elite and therefore more likely to be a snob. It might be personally unfair, but it is no worse a "rule of thumb" than assuming the unqualified are unintelligent. This prejudice also reflects a pragmatic recognition of the narrowness of "book-learning" - that there are more types of intelligence than are recognised by formal qualifications - and that certain types of high-status education are designed to be exclusionary. It's also worth noting that working class people don't undervalue education, as is often claimed, they simply have a greater pessimism that their possession of qualifications will translate into economic power. In other words, they understand that class bias (differential access to top colleges, the leverage of social networks etc.) works to devalue qualifications. There is a lot of rationality at work here.

Educational qualifications are tokens. You either have them or you don't. In contrast, there are no qualifications handed out for industriousness. What we do have are social cues, but these are notoriously unreliable: "curtains drawn in the daytime" can suggest indolence, but it's just as likely to indicate shift-work or illness. Subjective bias means that few of us will readily admit to being lazy (and even those few that do may actually be hinting at other problems that deserve sympathy), but we're only too ready to suspect laziness in others, and that includes friends and family members as much as casual acquaintances or strangers. When the "Britannia Unchained" group of Tory MPs announced a few years ago that UK workers were idlers, there weren't many people who replied "They've got a point, I'm always swinging the lead", but there were plenty who said "They've got a point, next-door is a right shirker".

Dividing society into virtuous sheep and vicious goats is the foundation of conservative rhetoric. Since the rise of democracy, the trick has been to avoid defining the two groups in objective terms but to instead rely on subjective virtues that the majority believe they already possess or can justifiably aspire to. You can tell a lot about the current government's naivety in the coining of the acronym "JAMs". Most political commentators have wearily greeted the "just about managing" as simply this year's version of "hard-working families" or "alarm-clock Britain", but this misses the point that by defining the group in terms of its economic power (i.e. income), the government is dangerously close to admitting that what divides us is output (wages) rather than input (labour). They'll no doubt try and emphasise the appropriate behaviours over the coming weeks, but what has lodged in the public mind is "managing", which is a matter of resources rather than virtue.

So the answer to Paul Krugman's questions is quite simple. On the one hand, the population with no or limited educational qualifications reason that liberal elites look down on them because of the neoliberal insistence on the primacy of formal education in the economy. On the other, they tend to assume that conservative rhetoric about lazy proles, particularly if presented in the lurid terms of dissolute crackers and chavs, is directed at other people. To put it another way, liberals make explicit the idea that society is a contest, but do so in a manner that immediately condemns a large part of the population to the category of losers. Conservatives suggest an even more unforgiving struggle, with the hint that a lack of virtue is congenital, but they allow most of the population to imagine they are in the category of current or future winners. The failure of liberals to see this asymmetry explains much of their bewilderment in the face of "post-truth" politics.

Since the 1990s, conservative rhetoric has modified its vocabulary but it has remained largely unchanged in its focus on virtue. Race-inflected terms like "welfare queens" and "super-predators" have given way to "takers" and "skivers", but they are still recognisably the goats of old. In contrast, the correlation between education and inequality has become ever more pronounced, leading to class becoming increasingly associated with qualifications. The "haves" and the "have nots" obviously referred to material circumstances, but the voguish dichotomy of "cosmopolitans" and "left behinds" clearly implies different social capital. This in turn winds up the non-graduate, suburban middle-class who are economically secure but status-anxious. If Fascism in the 20th century got its oomph from the precarious petit bourgeoisie rather than the immiserated proletariat, conservative authoritarianism today relies on the financially comfortable rather than the downwardly mobile "white working class".

The traditional liberal or left attitude towards education was that it was an enabler of social mobility and aggregate growth, but that it wasn't the only route out of poverty or the only contributor to social advance. Becoming a skilled mechanic or nurse was good for you and good for society, and of course there were many in the working class who considered education a good in itself rather than just a ticket to prosperity. During the neoliberal era, education came to be seen as the sine qua non of economic growth, but this happened at the same time as the field of education became socially narrower. The varied ecosystem of the social democratic era, from polytechnics through apprenticeships to the WEA, has been flattened. We have many more colleges now, but they're all doing fundamentally the same thing. Many more kids go through further education today, but they usually end up with interchangeable degrees that get them clerical jobs. Education has become a transactional marketplace and that has amplified the role of qualifications as a class identifier.

This development has also reduced heterogeneity in the normative role of education. In other words, there is less plurality of values, which partly explains the perception of a "closing of minds" on campuses. One value that does remain dominant is the virtuousness of education. It isn't hard to see how this encourages elitism and a sense of privileged entitlement among the beneficiaries, and resentment and a sense of being looked down upon among the rest. There are two lessons here for liberals. First, stop over-determining education as a fundamental social divide. Analyses that claim educational differences explain Brexit and Trump are useless unless the plan is to disenfranchise non-graduates. All they do is reinforce the idea that unqualified equals stupid. What's needed is a sociological understanding of what education represents. Second, understand the difference between insult and identification. Christian Parenti writing in Jacobin put this particularly well.

At almost every turn the liberal pundits misunderstood, or did not hear, what Trump was saying. After his win in the Nevada caucus Trump said: “We won with highly educated, we won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated! We’re the smartest people, we’re the most loyal people.” Liberals lampooned him, assuming that he had insulted part of his base.

A different interpretation translates those comments as: “Trump understands that it’s not all my fault that I couldn’t get an education. He understands that even people who don’t have advanced degrees can make good decisions and are worthy of respect.”

Paul Krugman isn't stupid, but he exists in an elite bubble that encourages a lazy intellectualism in which liberals and conservatives are reduced to homogeneous tribes or personality types in the manner of Jonathan Haidt. Consider this from a column he wrote in April, 2014: "People want to believe what suits their preconceptions, so why the big difference between left and right on the extent to which this desire trumps facts? One possible answer would be that liberals and conservatives are very different kinds of people — that liberalism goes along with a skeptical, doubting — even self-doubting — frame of mind; 'a liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in an argument'." What he fails to see is that most people without college degrees are each a mix of liberal and conservative but that they are asymmetric in their scepticism. They are more suspicious of liberals because liberals have given them grounds to be. Krugman's column piece was entitled: Asymmetric Stupidity.

The South

The best film I saw this summer was Victor Erice's 1983 masterpiece, The South (El Sur), which belatedly received a UK theatrical release in September as part of a favourites list chosen for the BFI by Pedro Almodovar. I confidently use the word "masterpiece" because not only is the film very good, it is one of only 3 full-length features that Erice has made over a long career, the others being The Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritu de la Colmena) in 1973 and The Quince Tree Sun (El Sol del Membrillo) in 1992. Less is evidently more. Erice's approach certainly suggests the work of a master painter, not just in the visual debt owed to Caravaggio and Vermeer, but in his patience and attention to detail. The Quince Tree Sun, a documentary about the artist Antonio Lopez Garcia, is partly a meditation on his own craft, but Erice is more than a painterly director, obsessed with the play of light and colour. He is also more than the reverential cinephile suggested by his reference to other films, such as James Whale's Frankenstein and Alfred Hitchcock's The Shadow of a Doubt.

For me, Erice is first and foremost a literary film-maker, inspired to render the shifting intellectual moods captured in a novel, particularly one that plots the moral and aesthetic growth of a young mind - what used to be known as a bildungsroman. In this sense, The South can be thought of as a portrait of the artist as a young girl. I chose those words because the author with whom Erice appears to have a particular affinity is James Joyce, another whose oeuvre was limited to a handful of masterpieces. If The Spirit of the Beehive has parallels with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - a dawning childhood awareness of adult hypocrisy leading to aesthetic rebellion and emotional exile - The South has clear thematic links to Ulysses, though it also freely borrows from the rest of Joyce's work. While Erice adds postmodern irony in his concern with truth and fiction (not least through the motifs of film and writing), this is at heart a modernist tale that contrasts an emerging consciousness with the inability to fully comprehend the motivations of others.

The consciousness belongs to Estrella, a child growing up in 1950s Spain, whose middle-class parents have reluctantly moved from Seville to a chilly, unnamed town in the North. This is the era when the Franco regime was at its most secure: forgiven its Fascism as an anti-communist bulwark, and yet to be economically and culturally marginalised by the rest of Western Europe in the 1960s. The film starts with a word repeatedly shouted in the night, a scene that will turn out to be the end of the film and which echoes the circularity and verbal emphasis ("yes!") of Joyce's Ulysses. The narrated story (a tale within a tale) opens with Estrella's father, Agustin, holding a divining pendulum over her mother, Julia's, swollen belly, predicting the sex of the unborn child and giving her a name. As Estrella's voiceover admits, "It is a very intense image that in fact I made up": an origin tale presented as a tableau of the Holy Family. This points to Estrella's determination to situate herself in the narrative, to understand her own life, but also to understand her enigmatic father, whose death by suicide will be revealed as both the start and end-point of the story.

We do not know if Agustin was exiled to the North because of Civil War politics, an unhappy love affair or a simple falling out with his own father. All are alluded to. Why does a man of science - her father is a doctor at the town's hospital - rely on the occult power of a pendulum? What exactly is being handed over, or let go, when Agustin leaves it under Estrella's pillow (on the same bed on which she imagined her naming) on the night of his death? We learn that Estrella's mother was a teacher in the South, but no longer teaches in the North, so perhaps it was she who was exiled for political reasons and Agustin who was obliged to follow. Estrella sees no mystery in her mother and even when she discovers, through an old letter, that her father had a previous love for whom he still pines, she shows more interest in the off-stage Laura, an actress who adopted the stage name Irene Rios, than she does in her mother's attitude to her father. Despite this, it is Julia, along with a number of other female characters, who gradually educates Estrella in the ways of the human heart.

El Sur is based on the novella of the same name by Adelaida Garcia Morales, who was Erice's then partner. The novella features many of the neo-gothic tropes that provided a rich seam for Spanish film-makers exploring the legacy of Franco's dictatorship: an isolated house, death, a mystery, a journey, family retainers etc. Famous examples include Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth , Alejandro Amenebar's The Others and much of the work of Pedro Almodovar (Volver, The Skin I Live In, Julieta etc). Where the film achieves a depth greater than the original story is in the amplification provided by a classical mythos accessed through Joyce. Agustin is another version of Odysseus, but one who ultimately fails to return from exile because he is finally rejected by a Penelope who demands ownership of her own life and fate (in political terms, this is a post-Franco Spain rejecting the emotional weight of the Civil War). In this reading Seville is Ithaca, Laura is Penelope and Julia is Calypso.

The role of Estrella is perhaps that of the young Nausicaa. In Homer's telling, she is both a symbol of unrequited love and motherhood - her saving of Odysseus prompts her to say, "Never forget me, for I gave you life", which parallels the way that Estrella's tale brings Agustin back to life through posthumous narrative, and also echoes the creation of life in the Frankenstein theme of The Spirit of the Beehive. If The South is also the story of the narrator's life, of an emerging consciousness, it is one that doesn't reach full maturity (the film was meant to have a second part, where Estrella finally visits the South, but funding ran out), however I think that much of its power comes from the fact that illusions are never fully shattered or truths wholly revealed. The beauty of the work comes in the quivering moments of realisation and doubt, not in the satisfactory resolution of a narrative arc. If gothic tales, like cinema thrillers, cleave to the melodramatic seriality of crisis and resolution, what distinguishes Erice's work is a classical sense of simultaneity. As Joyce put it, "There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present".

Agustin's slow, final crisis is triggered by seeing Irene Rios in a fictional Spanish film, Flor en la Sombra (Flower in the Shade), a black and white thriller in which Rios's character is killed by a jealous lover. This prompts Agustin to write to Laura, which in turn leads to Laura's response in which she both finally rejects Agustin and her life as Irene Rios. We cannot be sure that this actually happens, as what we see is Estrella looking covertly in through a café window as her father reads a letter, while Laura is heard as a voiceover. Could this simply be the romantic projection of an adolescent girl? The cinema that showed the fictional Spanish b-movie now carries lobby-cards for Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. For Spanish cinema, Hitchcock was as heavy a presence as his contemporary Franco, reflecting both his prominence as a "supra-political" (and therefore uncensored) artist and the resonance of his themes of unreliability and deceit. It's also worth noting in passing that James Joyce was, for a short while, the manager of the first dedicated cinema in Dublin.

The South has always stood for potential in European thought - the direction of the warming sun and the exotica of empire - and the notion of potential is central to marginal societies ambivalent about tradition and struggling to achieve modernity, such as Ireland or Spain in the early 20th century. Were it not for the language spoken on screen, you could easily mistake the wet, green hills and the dark town by the reed-fringed river for Athlone or Galway. The air of conservative solemnity in Franco's Spain, which has an obvious analogue in the Ireland of the half-Spanish de Valera, is occasionally punctuated by ceremonies of hope. Estrella's first communion is followed by a family party at which she dances with her father for the first time, to an Andalusian pasodoble that appears to evoke memories for Agustin, and which marks her transition from child to girl. Years later, as they meet for lunch in a hotel restaurant, the two will overhear the same song playing at a wedding party in an adjoining room. This will prove to be Estrella's last meeting with her father, and the point at which she stops being a girl and becomes a woman.

For Agustin, the song provokes a sense of irretrievable history and one's own insignificance in the thoughts of others. This reminds us of Gabriel Conroy in The Dead, the final story in Joyce's Dubliners, who experiences a similar epiphany as his wife tells him how a song sung at a dinner party recalled to her a youthful sweetheart who she believes died for love, singing outside her window in the cold and wet when already ill. Where the two stories diverge is that Gabriel overcomes his dismay at his ignorance of his wife and comes to realise that we are all fated to become nothing more than memories in the minds of others. In contrast, Agustin seems unable to reconcile himself to this humanist thought, which leads to his suicide. In this sense, the narrative of Estrella is an attempt to preserve Agustin's memory more fully than he was able to preserve his own memory of the South or of Laura. The South, which preserves the youthful Estrella through her narrative, is both Erice's sardonic meditation on the unreliability of memory and an affirmation of the ability of film to capture time.

Meet the Leader of the Opposition

The US media reaction to the Trumpageddon has been predictably solipsistic, ranging from angst over the misinterpretation of polling data to pessimism over the regressive sociology of newspapers. While John Cassidy's polite "Media Culpa" and Thomas Frank's polemic against "The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders" might not seem to have much in common, they both spring from an American belief in the institutional importance of the press as a pillar of democratic practice. Cassidy is painstaking in his attempts to prove that the media were sincere and diligent in their pre-election analysis, to the point of blaming deceitful voters who misled pollsters. In other words, "they" didn't play by the rules. Frank, whose 2004 book, What's The Matter With Kansas? helped construct the contemporary trope of a coastal elite in conflict with a small town middle-class, suggests that newspapers (The Washington Post in particular) have been captured since the 1970s by Ivy League graduates compromised through their social links with politicians and lobbyists.

Frank is accurate about the structural forces (the Ivy League takeover is real while the economics of the press have promoted opinion-mongering and clickbait to the exclusion of sober reportage) but he cannot resist conjuring a golden age situated somewhere around the pre-Internet era of All The President's Men: "The boom years of journalistic professionalization are long over. Newspapers are museum pieces ... no group knows the story of the dying middle class more intimately than journalists. So why do the people at the very top of this profession identify themselves with the smug, the satisfied, the powerful? ... This is a field, after all, that has embraced the forces that are killing it to an almost pathological degree. No institution has a greater appetite for trendy internet thinkers than journalism schools". While the sociology is on the money, it is shot through with nostalgia. Establishment newspapers have always preferred to support the powerful rather than hold them to account. Frank's claim that "every pundit and every would-be pundit identifies upward, always upward" applies to every era.

While similar claims for the institutional importance of the press can be heard in the UK, these tend to have less popular traction because of the dominant role of the BBC. Even before the Murdoch takeover of The Times, British broadsheets were seen as partisan. This in turn explains the near-hysteria that greeted Andrew Marr's decision to broadcast an interview with Marine Le Pen yesterday. Some liberals have criticised the decision to do this on Remembrance Sunday, which leads cynical old me to suspect a distraction: on any other Sunday the focus would be solely on the politics, not the appropriateness. In contrast, conservatives have insisted that "squeamishness should not be allowed to forestall a necessary debate". This is not just another example of how the concept of propriety has migrated from the right to the left, it's evidence of how the word "debate" has been corrupted to mean providing a platform. I can think of any number of people who would have been more effective than Andrew Marr at actually debating Le Pen's propaganda, and none of them are journalists. Frankly, Danny Dyer could have done a better job.

What this points to is both the systemic bias of the BBC's culture and the structural bias that arises from its claim to be the national broadcaster. Of the two, the latter is more problematic at present. The former is visible not just in the disproportionate coverage routinely accorded to business and professional elites but in the tendency to situate the middle of the political spectrum to the right of centre. This bias arises from BBC senior staff often being recruited through the same social channels at their preferred subjects: Oxbridge, journalism, politics etc. Though it is derided as cosmopolitan and liberal, this culture is actually just metropolitan and conservative. The bias is recognised in abstract terms by the BBC, but its attempts to mitigate this through "awareness" and positive discrimination are always going to be inadequate so long as senior roles at the corporation provide access to that elite milieu. Le Pen's appearance was made inevitable more by her speech to the Oxford Union last year than by Question Time's invitation to Nick Griffin in 2009.

The structural bias of the BBC is often reduced to the notion of "balance". In fact, the problem is not the corporation's tendency to give airtime to climate-change deniers, but its curation of a narrow political spectrum. This arises because it believes there are diminishing returns at the margins, which means debates are typically framed as a struggle between two positions in the centre. This is not a new tendency, even if it has been amplified by the economic and political pressures placed on the BBC since the 1980s. It made a lot of sense after 1945 shifted the political centre leftwards and 90% of the electorate identified with the two main parties, though its worth recalling that before the war the BBC, like most of the media, sought to marginalise Labour by preserving the traditional Conservative-Liberal duopoly long past the Liberal Party's sell-by date. In other words, it reflects the history of the UK Parliamentary system.

Now, at a time when the political centre is intellectually weak but the political left is barely tolerated by the establishment, this structural bias provides an opportunity for the far-right to intrude, essentially by recasting the centre as more "liberal" than it really is and by connecting small-c conservative elites, such as journalists and judges, with a network of more shadowy forces. Le Pen's remark to Marr that "Trump’s victory is an additional stone in the building of a new world which will replace the old one" hints both at the far-right's ambition (the totalitarian gloss of "a new world") and the complacent acceptance by the BBC of the suggested frame of "old" versus "new". For Marr, reflecting the BBC's own editorial values, the substantive issues were the Front National's electoral prospects and its propriety. Le Pen pere's dismissal of the Holocaust as "a detail of history" was predictably raised, and just as predictably dismissed by his daughter with practised ease.

One of the characteristics of the media's treatment of the far-right (from populists through nationalists to real Fascists) is the way that it abandons its usual critical tactics, such as the insistence on fiscal transparency. Few pressed Trump to put a cost on his wall and fewer still asked him how the US would fund it, knowing full well Mexico wouldn't. Farage was up-front ahead of the EU referendum in admitting that he'd rather the UK be poorer but with fewer migrants, but no one really pressed him on the implications, such as that an increase in relative poverty would not be evenly distributed across society. When Marine Le Pen rejected further Muslim immigration with "we're full up", and insisted her Islamophobia was a defence of secular values, Marr didn't ask how many Muslims France could continue to accommodate, nor how religion could fail to be a means of discrimination against existing citizens if Islam was defined as being at variance with French values.

One reason why establishment media like the BBC have traditionally done a poor job at challenging the far-right is that they simply don't believe that they are a threat. "How would you pay for that policy?" is what you ask a party you think might win an election. The approach has been to give the far-right a little airtime, to emphasise plurality and free-speech, but in the expectation that this modest rope will be more than enough to hang them, as Nick Griffin proved on Question Time. But that is no longer a credible explanation. If Marine Le Pen really could be the next French President, as Marr suggested, then his performance - the appearance of rigour and the total absence of pressure - was simply craven. The worry is that the structural bias of the BBC, which you can date from its behaviour in the 1926 General Strike, has become so much a part of the wider institutional fabric that it is now acquiescing in the normalisation of the far-right as the official opposition. And no - you can't blame that on Jeremy Corbyn.

Institutional Rot

If we think of Brexit and Trump as of an ilk, then a notable characteristic of this "illiberal tide" is that it has succeeded first in states with the longest established liberal political systems. Despite facing greater economic pain and social disruption in the wake of 2008, countries with relatively recent experience of Fascism and conservative authoritarianism, such as Spain and Greece, have not succumbed. The parties of the liberal centre have often been rejected, and even obliterated in some cases, but the far-right has not come close to power, and doesn't look likely to (e.g. Golden Dawn polls around 9%). Where it might is in next year's French Presidential election. However, while Marine Le Pen may do better than her father did in 2002, the most likely outcome remains defeat to a centre-right candidate with a vote of around 30%. This is a worrying increase on the elder Le Pen's 18%, but it doesn't herald the end of the Fifth Republic. What Brexit and Trump point to is the failure of the political centre, not the resurgence of the anti-democratic right.

While progressive reform over the years has done much to alter the dispensations of 1689 and 1789, the UK and the USA both retain institutional features that embody a bourgeois democracy suspicious of universal suffrage (e.g. the US Electoral College), sympathetic to personality-driven factionalism, and dedicated above all to the preservation of property rights. Whether you consider it be-suited Fascism, know-nothing populism or ethno-nationalist authoritarianism, the current rightist insurgency is clearly directed at a liberal establishment. In most cases it is adopting a constitutional form, which is typical of populism, so the "threat to democracy" remains mostly hyperbole, and in many cases it is advancing classical (if not neo) liberal policies. Even parties like the Front National that consider democracy irrelevant to the "nation's will" know that challenging the liberal establishment is best done by claiming to be defending the constitution and secular rights, notably from "reactionary" Islam, not by advocating their overthrow.

The ascent to power of Fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain in the first half of the 20th century depended on three things: the dissatisfaction of conservatives with the extension of democracy (and the boost this gave to socialism); a general bourgeois fear of Bolshevism (which led to centrist toleration of the "state of exception"); and the liberal encouragement of ethno-nationalism at Versailles and after. You might be able to find faint echoes of each in contemporary politics, if you listen hard enough, though it's often liberals who are most dissatisfied with democratic practice while the great terror for centrists appears to be the mild social democracy advocated by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Ethno-nationalism is alive and kicking globally, but the fractious borders of the former Yugoslavia remain an exception in Europe, while the US is still a society divided by racial claims to property rather than ethnic claims to territory. What is consistent between the two eras is the fragility of liberal institutions: then because of their relative youth in Continental Europe; now because of their senility in the Anglosphere.

On election eve, The Economist caught the scent of this: "It can seem overwrought to warn about the risk of fascism in the context of proud old democracies like America and Britain. And in truth, neither is about to see brownshirts in the streets or the complete domination of government and society by autocrats. At the same time, it is important to understand that liberal society is not immutable. There is not much holding it up apart from the institutions we build, which themselves rest on a fine balance of costs and benefits. Mess around with those costs and benefits enough, and the thing can come crashing down." Though the piece was straplined "Democracy in danger" and opened with the observation that "Liberal democracies, while not exactly on the brink of a descent into fascism, are facing a period of crisis", the key point is that the hegemony of liberal norms depends upon the effectiveness of liberal institutions, and they have been in decay in the US and UK since the late 1970s.

Many people are confused by the distinction between liberal (meaning classical liberal) and neoliberal, assuming the latter is just the former in skinny jeans. While the theory remains fundamentally consistent, particularly in its privileging of private interest, there is a significant difference in practice, namely that the neoliberal extension of the market from commerce to all spheres of society has eroded both the normative authority of liberal institutions and their practical effectiveness. The institutions that developed in the 17th and 18th centuries were focused on protecting landed and bourgeois interests against autocracy, hence the division of powers, the constraints on prerogative and the focus on property rights. Those that developed over the course of the 19th century were more geared to managing contending interests thrown up by the industrial revolution and the growth of nationalism - i.e. the "social question" and issues of ethnic identity.

The success of Anglophone democracy in the 20th century owed something to luck, but it also owed something to the greater capability of its first-wave political institutions, first displayed by their resilience in the face of nationalism and then by their greater adaptability in the face of demands for universal suffrage and social reform over the course of the 19th century. Evolution, rather than the periodic revolution to be seen in Continental Europe, seemed to be more effective, but this gave rise to a smug superiority that in turn produced fussy constitutionalism, the preservation of antique forms and a self-satisfied civil service. This initial foundation was buttressed by the growth of civil society institutions, such as trade unions and local government, the adoption of claims to institutional roles by private enterprises like newspapers (the "fourth estate"), and the subsequent expansion of the welfare state. In the UK, for example, the BBC and NHS took on quasi-state roles in respect of normative values: truth, equality, solidarity etc. The problem arose when neoliberalism insisted that these auxiliary institutions, like the state itself, should respect only one value: the wisdom of the market.

As the varied institutions of civil society were gradually eviscerated or colonised by the market after 1980, more and more social demands were consequently directed towards the political institutions of the state. This was problematic both because of the neoliberal state's retreat from hitherto key areas of public life, such as responsibility for full employment and market regulation, and because the remaining antique forms were increasingly incapable of satisfying those demands. The regular call for public inquiries in the UK nowadays, which are by definition exceptions to the institutional norm (and are often decried by centrists for that reason), reflects the failure of the liberal state to efficiently respond to popular concern, much as the original concession of the EU referendum did. Every time a liberal commentator insists that only the House of Lords is defending our liberties against an aggressive government (and in the face of an incompetent opposition), you are witnessing an implicit admission that the institutions of liberal democracy are in crisis. Of course, liberals would prefer (as ever) to blame "mismanaged" democracy itself, or even cut to the chase and blame the mob.

Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, provides a good example of this transatlantic tendency when trying (ahead of yesterday's vote) to understand what motivates Trump's supporters and what liberals can do about it: "His followers are not, shall we say, there to root on their favored libertarian in his pursuit of free-market solutions to vexing social problems; they are there to scream insults and cry havoc on their (mostly imaginary) enemies" (given that Trump has got out the usual Republican vote, another way of reading this is that GOP supporters were never that bothered by free-market solutions). This leads Gopnik to liberal pessimism: "The more tragic truth is that the Trumpian view of the world is the default view of mankind. Bigotry, fanaticism, xenophobia are the norms of human life—the question is not what causes them but what uncauses them, what happens in the rare extended moments that allow them to be put aside, when secular values of toleration and pluralism replace them". The answer, of course, is that toleration and pluralism must be practised at an institutional level to become normative in society.

It would be easy to point at the multiple failings of the media in this regard, from the lies and vitriol of British tabloids and US cable TV, to the stupidity of the BBC's "balance" and the liberal media's indulgence of outrage (they need the clicks too), but the media has been partisan, bigoted and condescending since the advent of mass literacy. The real institutional rot has occurred elsewhere: in the performative cruelty of the "reformed" welfare state; the destruction of organised labour and the atomisation of the gig economy; and the denigration of any social solidarities outside the shared experience of a cultural commodity, like the Great British Bake-Off or the latest Netflix must-watch. Brexit was sold in terms of sovereignty and "taking back control", but the immediate result is that the UK's impending departure from the EU has placed intolerable stresses on the already rickety institutions of the liberal state. These have become attenuated not because of a lack of match-practice since 1972, but because the embrace of the EU allowed us to preserve antique forms long past their 1960s sell-by date.

So what can we forsee for the USA? Donald Trump's "movement" remains organisationally weak and ideologically inchoate. In the manner of many of his previous business ventures, the "brand" will be quickly absorbed by the Republican Party. Though he ended up running against the GOP establishment as much as the Democrats, Trump's lack of any emotional party affiliation means that he will pragmatically accept their support rather than seek to build a new organisation, though he'll no doubt indulge far-right fan-fic as well. The eclipse of the Bush dynasty, and Trump's likely appointment of people like Stephen Bannon of Breitbart fame, will see an ethical realignment all down the line. There will be a willingness, as in the UK, to interpret the "will of the people" in the harshest terms. Trumpism will simply be right-wing Republicanism largely unconstrained by the institutions of the Republic. Very soon, Trump will be the establishment, even if he continues to claim otherwise. Psychologically, he wants the luxury of being the ultimate outsider-insider.

His domestic priorities will most likely turn out to be tax-cuts and removing restraints on business, rather than building walls or quitting the WTO, even if he uses executive orders to make early eye-catching gestures and turns up in Nogales with a trowel. Digital economy companies like Apple and Amazon, who were solidly behind Clinton, will probably cut a deal on tax (they'll pay a bit more) in return for greater help for the security services (i.e. more surveillance). Obamacare may be formally repealed, but it will live on in diminished form: half a step forward, a quarter step back (Barack Obama will become the new Jimmy Carter). More illegal immigrants will be deported and Muslims will face higher hurdles to get in, but the bigger "homeland security" issue will be the steadily worsening relations between the police and working-class black Americans. The vote will be taken as a sign on both sides of the divide that black lives really don't matter that much.

Abroad, Trump will cleave to the usual positions, simply because US foreign policy rarely moves outside narrow bounds regardless of who is in the White House. With a compliant Congress and the prospect of a more right-wing Supreme Court, he will not need look to foreign affairs to compensate for gridlock at home. If his previous comments on Europe mean anything, it is that foreign policy isn't an area of real interest to him, not that the US is going to abandon NATO. After the liberal interventionism of the 90s and the neocon adventurism of the 00s, the pendulum had already swung back towards instrumental realism, which in practice means geostrategic caution and a disinterest in human rights. Extra money will flow to the military, but Trump's comments to date suggest he is more interested in spectacle and rhetoric - from drones to nuclear missiles - than boots on the ground.

What will ultimately distinguish Trump's tenure is institutional rot. The credibility of the Supreme Court has been dribbling away for years and this is likely to accelerate with further conservative appointments. The end of Congressional gridlock, combined with the opportunities for directing military and other infrastructural spending, will lead to a great flowering of pork-barrel politics and corruption. Trump's inability to control his own appetites or temper will lead to an excessive use of executive orders and the brokering of favours for buddies. The Federal Reserve will be bullied into line. The calibre of the civil service will plummet. I'd put the chance of him surviving four years at 50% (jail being a bigger risk than a bullet), and the chance of a second term at zero. Meanwhile, liberals, who today are already trying to love-bomb Trump into respectability, will bleat "I told you so, the man is deplorable", completely missing the point that they made him possible by rejecting pluralism and social conscience for the divisiveness and winner-takes-all mentality of the market.

In the UK, which suddenly looks almost comically parochial in comparison, there appears little likelihood the institutional rot will be reversed. Theresa May's commitment to an activist government, and the insistence on the social responsibility of business, will mean nothing without the rebuilding of the institutional infrastructure degraded since Margaret Thatcher bustled into Number 10. This is not only too big a task (Brexit provides the excuse to avoid a lot of hard choices), but it's one that might open up the pandora's box of constitutional reform, which would threaten too many vested interests. It will be far easier to focus the Home Office and Justice Secretary on keeping the tabloids sweet, which means beasting the poor and repelling immigrants, while Crown prerogative is exploited at every opportunity. The one hopeful sign in the UK is that some in the Commons looks like they're up for a fight with the executive. The worry is that the politico-media caste that has overseen Parliament's recent decay, from the evasions of Iraq to the cowardice of welfare reform, remain very much in situ and more concerned with social media proprieties and factional plotting.