Neofascism

The defeat of Donald Trump, and the widely anticipated defeat of Jair Bolsonaro, has led to a drop-off in commentary of the "Are we heading for Fascism?" sort, though the continued success of Narendra Modi remains a caution. Focusing on the latter, the Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik recently published an article in the Boston Review suggesting that the BJP's dominance in India represented a critical turn in neoliberalism that would persist regardless of electoral change: "As the old prop of trickle-down economics lost its credibility, a new prop was needed to sustain the neoliberal regime politically. The solution came in the form of an alliance between globally integrated corporate capital and local neofascist elements". I've never been happy with the casual use of the term Fascism, though I do think that the BJP comes close to the definition because of its focus on Hindu cultural hegemony (Hindutva) and vicious treatment of opponents. Like populism, the word is bandied about with little regard to its history. Patnaik does at least recognise the change over time, both in theory and practice, hence his version is "neo", but that raises the question: just what is new about it?

Before addressing his definition of neofascism (I'll use his spelling, rather than the more pedantic neo-Fascism), it's worth considering his working definition of neoliberalism: "The result today is a perverse regime defined by the free movement of capital, which moves relatively effortlessly across international borders, even as free movement of the people is ruthlessly controlled by a sharp increase in income inequality and a steady winnowing of democracy". The free movement of people as an economic factor has increased during the neoliberal period and its regulation has been administrative rather than economic or political. For all the talk of a border wall in the US, the mechanics of economic migration centre on amnesties for the undocumented, while the free movement of labour in the EU shows how the administrative is often in tension with the political. The idea that this is somehow controlled by changes in income inequality not only flies in the face of the evidence - East European migration to the UK grew in lock-step with inequality during the 00s - it doesn't make any sort of sense. This seems typical of Patnaik's approach: adding a rhetorical flourish that is so dubious it serves to distract from his substantive and inarguable point, namely that neoliberalism is chiefly characterised by the free movement of capital.

The idea that there has been a steady winnowing of democracy is also questionable. While there has obviously been a technocratic turn against popular representation during the neoliberal period, as outlined by Colin Crouch (Post-Democracy) and Peter Mair (Ruling the Void), and an increasing deference shown to corporate interests and epistocratic fancies (Dominic Cummings is very much a product of neoliberalism), "disillusion with" rather than "winnowing of" would be more acurate. Whatever else it was, and however much it was manipulated or misinterpreted, the UK's EU referendum in 2016 was clear proof of the health of democracy. Patnaik is more on the money with his observation that "No matter who comes to power, no matter what promises are made before elections, the same economic policies are followed ... The sovereignty of the people, in short, is replaced by the sovereignty of global finance and the domestic corporations integrated with it". But that is a critique of neoliberal hegemony and the failings of the politico-media caste, rather than a critique of democracy itself.

The centrepiece of Patnaik's argument, both as to the definition of neofascist neoliberalism and how it can be overturned, are two issues that he sees as interdependent: capital controls and welfare spending. "For evidence of the connection between neofascism and neoliberalism, we need look no further than the fact that no neofascist political formation has actually imposed controls over cross-border financial flows. Ultimately, it is only by implementing such controls—along with strong domestic welfare policies—that we can escape this alliance". But turning this around, what he appears to be saying is that the neo of neofascism is precisely its abandonment of capital controls and its under-investment in welfare, which implies that they were both distinguishing marks of classical Fascism. In fact, though Germany did impose limited capital controls in the 1930s, these predated the Nazis and remained largely in line with other economies (except for an increasing focus on the expropriation of Jewish emigrants after 1933). Similarly, most developed nations expanded welfare spending after World War One, a development clearly linked to the extension of the franchise in countries like the UK. 

Historians such as Adam Tooze (The Wages of Destruction) have shown how flimsy the claims to economic revolution under the Nazi regime were, in particular highlighting the continuing reliance on foreign currency and the way that social spending and consumption were squeezed to divert funds towards armaments. That said, there is no doubt that the German economy, like that of other Fascist regimes in the 1930s, was centrally planned. But then even the American economy was experiencing the central direction of the New Deal, while other liberal economies such as the UK and France were significantly increasing public investment at the same time and moving towards the direction of industry in preparation for war. However, while capital was given an expressly national set of goals under the Nazi regime, it was far more indulged than contemporary critics like Hayek would allow. For example, it was an outlier for the times in its pioneering of privatisation. The truth is that the interwar Fascist regimes were far more economically liberal, and the democracies far more centrally-planned, than both contemporary and subsequent propaganda acknowledged.

At this point, you might begin to wonder just how Fascist the neofascists really are, given that they are so tightly circumscribed by neoliberalism. A traditional way of conceptualising Fascism is as an anti-democratic agent of capital. Patnaik continues this Marxist tradition, noting that neofascism depends on "fringe elements [that] take center stage in periods of crisis only with the backing of corporate capital, which provides access to massive financial resources and control over the corporate-owned media and other means of opinion-making". But if we're applying the neofascist tag to Trump, then that picture doesn't reflect the US in 2016, when the bulk of corporate capital supported Hillary Clinton and the establishment media leant Democrat. Even in Brazil, Bolsonaro owed more to traditional extractive capital (notably agribusines and mining) and reactionary outlets than to corporate capital or mainstream media. It may be a more relevant model for India, but if so that may just reflect the relative political immaturity of Indian capital: essentially still in a nationalist phase similar to that which the US experienced in the late nineteenth century.

Patnaik's view of Fascism and its position within economic history becomes eccentric when he addresses imperialism: "Classical fascism emerged before capital had been globalized, in the sense that it more clearly bore the stamp of its national origin: it was engaged in intense inter-imperialist rivalry with capital from other advanced countries, a rivalry in which it enlisted the support of its own state". This implies that imperialism wasn't globalised capitalism, which is an unconventional view. Patnaik's "national origin" qualification also ignores just how much global capital was circulating outside the boundaries of formal empire in the nineteenth century, such as between the UK and South America. As part of his contrast, he further oversells the universality of neoliberalism: "Since globalized capital is intent on keeping the entire world open for its free movement, it discourages inter-imperialist rivalry and the fragmentation of the world into rival economic zones". Clearly, we still have a patchwork of economic zones, such as the EU and NAFTA, even if lip-service is paid to the near-moribund GATT, while US-China rivalry is essentially economic. In short, capital was globally mobile in the imperial era (particularly via London) and this predated Fascism. Today, world trade is organised around regional blocs in an often uneasy relationship with the actual and would-be hegemons.

The argument that classical Fascism and neoliberalism were antipathetic because of global capital mobility segues into the claim that neofascism is distinguished by the absence of this antipathy. Turning specifically to India, Patnaik argues that "India provides a vivid illustration of the relation between neofascism and neoliberalism. For one thing, the neofascist Hindu supremacists that came to power in 2014 never had anything to do with India’s anti-colonial struggle (indeed, one of them even assassinated Mahatma Gandhi). Instead they are arch neoliberals, even more so than earlier neoliberal governments". What exactly is the relevance of the point about the distance maintained by the RSS (the BJP's predecessor) and the Quit India Movement? That the BJP aren't meaningfully nationalist, at least within the frame of colonial liberation? The substantive point surely is that the BJP are "arch neoliberals". You don't need to highlight neofascism or the ethnic exclusivity of Hindutva to explain the economic policies of the Modi government, as the point about the continuity with earlier administrations should make clear.

When it comes to a prescription, Patnaik is ironically arguing for policies that he associates with classical Fascism, namely welfarism and capital controls, albeit leavened by the sort of wealth taxes that those earlier Fascists (as much as contemporary neofascists) would have abhorred. His critique of neofascism is that it is incapable of reforming neoliberism in this way, but that simply raises the question as to whether it is really Fascist in any meaningful sense. I'm more inclined to think that what Patnaik defines as neofascism is merely one of the morbid symptoms of neoliberalism post-2008: a flirtation with ethnic exclusivity and a more authoritarian, interventionist style of government. This is intended to divert popular anger with the political and economic establishment and provide a semblance of social responsiveness after thirty years in which the state insisted that it was subject to the discipline of the market. Neoliberalism doesn't need neofascism, as Patnaik suggests, but liberals do like to imagine that by trying to return politics to a pre-2008 golden age they are resisting Fascism. I'm not sure whether the Marxist Patnaik is just employing their favoured rhetoric to convince them of the need for capital controls or whether he really has drunk the Kool-Aid. Either way, neofascism really isn't a useful term.

The Paranoid Style in British Politics

Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics is often cited in commentary on the history of American conservativism, particularly since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. This is despite the fact that its employment of a pyschological reading and its tendentious linkage of the agrarian radicals of the 1890s with Senator Joe McCarthy have been widely criticised as condescending and ahistorical. Perhaps more to the point, there is little that links the anti-communist paranoia of the 1950s, which was actually as characteristic of liberals as conservatives, and the resentment towards civil rights advances that would fuel the American right from the 1970s onwards. What this highlights is that there is often less consistency in political stances than academics would like to believe and that divisive issues are often the product of contingent circumstance rather than principle. This discontinuity is not only visible across time but also across geographies, and nowhere more so than in national varieties of liberalism.

One paradox this gives rise to is the tendency of British liberals to embrace certain positions on social policy that are closer to American conservatives than American liberals. Whereas the "culture war" in the US is engineered to produce a division between progressives and liberals on the one hand and conservatives on the other, when specific topics have been imported to the UK via the media this has sometimes produced a divide between progressives and a liberal-conservative alliance. Recent examples are David Aaronovitch's support for a gender critical and conspiratorial interpretation of trans rights and Ian Leslie warning about the "closed system" of Critical Race Theory, which echoes classic tropes of totalitarian dogma. Most American liberals are pro-trans and consider CRT, as demonised by the right, to be little more than a strawman created as cover for a conservative pushback against the teaching of the history of racism. The first reflects the importance of autonomy in the American liberal tradition (you can be who you want to be), the second the recognition that civil rights are fragile and subject to erosion by state legislatures.

This transatlantic difference in liberal opinion doesn't apply across the board, of course. For example, on the management of the pandemic, British liberals cleave to a progressive position that accepts the virus is real and that mild social constraints such as masks are an acceptable price to pay to limit its spread. This reflects their habitual support for a regulatory state, their deference to academic expertise, and their sentimental attachment to the NHS. The libertarian strand that believes that mask-wearing or lockdowns are an intolerable assault on liberty, not to mention the outright conspiratorial view that the virus is a hoax and the vaccine a Trojan Horse, finds less purchase on this side of the Atlantic outside of the conservative tradition. Another dividing line that is consistent between the US and the UK is climate change. While some British liberals did express sceptical views in the past (I recall Simon Hoggart regularly banging on about the unrealiability of climate data), this largely died away after it became an article of faith for American liberals when mainstreamed by Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

It's worth noting at this point that another topic on which the US and UK liberal traditions don't meet eye-to-eye is antisemitism. Attempts in recent years to repeat the British manoeuvre and cast the American left as antisemitic have failed, and not just because Bernie Sanders is Jewish. Indeed, the positions taken by members of "the squad", such as Ilhan Omar, on Palestine should have made this easier. The failure is because uncritical support for Zionism has been a dividing line within the mainstream of American liberalism since the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, with many American Jews choosing to criticise Israel and some going so far as to support the BDS (Boycott, Disinventment and Sanctions) movement. In the UK, criticism of Israel - except in the pious form of a vain hope for a two-state solution, in the manner of Jonathan Freedland - is taken as tantamount to antisemitism while support for BDS is proof beyond a shadow of a doubt. Much of this is down to Corbyn derangement syndrome, but there was a discernible move towards a greater intolerance for criticism of Israel before 2015.

British liberal support for gender critical feminism is partly a reflection of social context. Feminism in the UK has long been dominated by the middle class, and its grammar increasingly policed by the upper middle class of academia and the media, while US feminism has always been more socially heterogeneous, not least because of the importance of black, working class feminists in the evolution of theory. The result in the UK has been an increasingly aggressive turn towards the defence of privilege framed as the rights of natal women. It is no accident that JK Rowling has become an icon for the gender critical. Another factor has been the widespread support for trans rights on the left as part of the wider LGBTQ+ liberation movement. For many liberals the "line" should have be drawn after the achievement of gay marriage. Trans rights, as they see it, go too far and thereby erode women's rights, hence the focus on predatory natal men and gender self-identification. At the political level, trans rights are characterised as a foolish indulgence of the left that alienates "ordinary" people, like UBI or Palestine.

Critical Race Theory as an academic approach in legal studies has long since been lost to view in the discourse to the claim that it's a censorious dogma that dismisses any criticism of itself as blatant racism (you'll note the ironic parallel here with criticisms of Zionism). Separate to its employment as a strawman by American conservatives to undermine the acknowledgment of structural racism, there are two distinctive features of the bogey that appear to appeal to British liberals, essentially because they overlap with the concerns of the gender critical. One is the idea that it is primarily a danger to schoolchildren, even though CRT in the wild is rarely found outside law colleges. This chimes with concerns over the state's active support for trans teenagers (NHS access to puberty-blockers etc). The other overlapping feature is the assumption that the promotion of CRT is an organised conspiracy. This is even more overt in the case of the so-called "trans lobby", the critique of which is often couched in terms straight out of the antisemitic conspiracy playbook: insidious, masquerading, funded by George Soros. 

While British liberals mostly accept the reality of structural racism, and even unconcious bias, they are less happy to accept that they themselves are part of the problem. In their view, it is obtuse conservatives and the uncouth who are to blame, the first for their lack of enlightenment, the second for their incorrigible vices. This assumption of their own innocence goes some way to explain why British liberals seem to be deaf to the bigoted overtones in gender critical claims, such as that trans treatment of the young is tantamount to child abuse, that the greater availability of trans treatment and the spread of self-identification is the result of a well-funded lobby operating globally (whose supposed leaders are Jewish), and that natal women are at risk from a presumptious group of natal men (which echoes old racist ideas of black men threatening white women). What's notable here is the lack of interest in their own value-formation. Compare this to the angst of American liberals over "coastal privilege" and the neglect of the "heartlands". In Britain, the "metropolitan elite" is a dinner party joke, or even a slur liberals will themselves employ to denigrate anyone on the left who wasn't born in a pit village.

Another notable difference between American and British liberals is that the latter have drifted away from the "big tent" approach to centre-left politics that still dominates across the Atlantic. Apart from the Corbyn interregnum, this has been a trend since the mid-90s, and includes such recent morbid symptoms as the Westminster and media indulgence of Change UK and the shallow mobilisation of the People's Vote. In the US, the Democrats have inched away from the Clintons' reliance on rich donors and centrist consensus to the broader appeal of Obama and Biden to a progressive coalition. With the country closely divided, the latter approach now looks a necessity, whatever the reservations of the Democrat National Convention. In contrast, the news that the Labour Party faces a financial crisis - membership falling, the unions reluctant to release funds, rich donors thin on the ground - isn't going to cause the leadership to change course from its desire to create a cartel party insulated from activists and plugged into circuits of establishment power. The aim has always been to weaken the union link, to the point where organised labour is merely a lobbyist rather than a power-broker, and to avoid the risks of commitment and accountability entailed by a mass movement. 

Keir Starmer's decision to proscribe four small and marginal groups - contrary to the press briefing in The Mirror, this is unlikely to see anywhere near 1,000 party members "auto-excluded" - looks like an escalation in the purge initiated in the wake of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission report on the party's handling of antisemitism. Its significance is not in the numbers involved but that it sets a precedent to exclude members en bloc rather than on an individual basis. Leftwing groups such as Jewish Voice for Labour and Momentum are not in the firing line yet, though rightwing Labour MPs and members are already banging the war drum on social media. Naturally, there is little prospect that British media liberals are going to raise the flag of free speech in defence of those expelled, let alone enquire whether Starmer's continued focus on factional beef is electorally sensible. The idea that the prime directive of the Labour leader is to purge the left is too solidly embedded in the British liberal tradition. But beyond the historical predictability, what stands out in this latest manoeuvre is the paranoid style: the assumption that there are organised conspiracies at work, which is very much going with the grain of contemporary British liberalism.

The Kids Are Alright

The aftermath of England's defeat by Italy in the European Championship Final has highlighted our ambivalent attitude towards youth. For all the praise of the young England players' bravery, there was an appetite for tales of yobbery on the day and racist social media thereafter, with the assumption that this was down to the lairy lads "who have given football a bad name". In fact, the scale of the trouble was relatively small while the online hate reflected the ingrained bigotry of the old as much as a youthful lack of respect or self-control, and much of it clearly wasn't even from football fans. The government made a mistake in assuming that it could extend this disdain for the young to the players' social conscience, not just in the taking of a knee before matches but in the extramural work of Marcus Rashford. The Tories' volte-face this week is not only evidence of habitual opportunism but of a genuine confusion over how to handle a youth cohort increasingly confident in its social and cultural politics - it's "wokery", if you prefer. Demonising football fans is easy, but demonising football players has proved anything but, largely because they (despite being rich) represent their age group as much as their sport. 

While the youth vote was crucial to modern conservativism's reinvention under Margaret Thatcher (the Tories won fractionally more than Labour among 18-24 year-olds in 1979), the dynamics of the property market and the electoral impact of age-sorting between big cities and small towns has pushed the Conservative Party towards an antagonism towards the under-30s since the millennium. But this is not just limited to the Tories. William Davies, in an article that's really chiding Labour for turning its back on the younger voters who flocked to it during the Corbyn years, notes that the angry melancholia that underpins Johnsonism manifests in a resentment: "the attitude to younger generations is also a component, the insistence that the future cannot – must not – be better than the past". This same attitude was on display this week in the BBC recording of a focus group session between Keir Starmer and ex-Labour voters in Blackpool (ex-Labour here means "has voted solidly for the Tories for decades") in which under-25s were derided as lazy. While he didn't agree, the Labour leader failed to challenge this (as far as I can tell from the BBC edit), presumably on the grounds that it wasn't worth having a fight. I think that was a mistake.

Labour is the party of youth, in the sense that its ideological function is to manage labour for the benefit of capital. That includes training the young for the world of work, hence the focus on education and entry-level jobs, but it also involves a normative dimension. This includes not only the overtly disciplinary, such as the party's support for more police officers and "crackdowns" on antisocial behaviour, but also a fear of the disruptive, which manifests most obviously as a reluctance to support extra-parliamentary protest. It also produces a tension over social developments between the conservative instincts of the hierarchy and the progressive enthusiasm of the membership. Feminism, anti-racism and pro-LGBT+ rights have all proved to be touchy subjects. However slowly, Labour did move in the right direction on each and did push public policy towards progressive outcomes. But then it was going with the grain of youth, reflecting the evolution of society. The problem now is that the interests of the young are orthogonal to the route the party believes it must take to recapture lost seats. The same calculation informs the Conservatives, who want to retain those seats. The result is that both parties are torn between celebrating and criticising the young in the service of an electoral demographic that may be nothing more than a figment of the media's imagination.

The recent Education Select Committee report on working class underachievement was used to launch another culture war talking point around the supposedly pernicious influence of the term "white privilege". It's worth noting that in late 2020 the rightwing MP Steve Baker was conceding that white privilege was real, showing just how mutable Tory attitudes are (this week, to reinforce the point, he has suggested the Tories should be supportive of players taking the knee). The Prime Minister and Home Secretary's intervention last month, when they failed to condemn the booing of the England players, was not only a convenient way of distracting the media after the Chesham and Amersham by-election loss, it was also a transparent attempt to divert attention away from the government's poor track record on education, notably the disproportionate impact of lockdown on children from poorer families and the inadequacy of the proposed catch-up funding. It's also worth noting that like the earlier report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (aka the Sewell Inquiry), which downplayed structural racism, the claim in respect of "white privilege" is that we are being misled by language and in particular the language of the young. 

This distrust of the young is not limited to elderly conservatives pining for a mislaid past. Its chief cultural manifestation, the disdain for the "woke" and the claim that the young are censorious enemies of free speech, is as much the response of a liberal intelligentsia troubled by the erosion of its social status and sharing the conservative view that "things have gone too far" (a notable iteration of this is the gender-critical attack on trans rights). For all the talk of Britain as a young country in the 1990s, its rhetorical manifestation was the canonisation of George Orwell, who had died over 40 years before. When a writer like Howard Jacobsen refers to the "monotonous chorus of young people" today he is not merely dismissing their concerns as aesthetically displeasing, he is literally reminding them of their subservient place on stage and their duty to follow the script of others. It is no coincidence that many of the recent "cancellation" rows have centred on authors and academics being held to account by younger critics and students. It's also the case that these rows have been inflated out of all proportion by the media and presented as an attack on the foundations of society. 

At the legislative level, this has given rise to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) bill and the Online Safety bill. The former is the very definition of gesture politics: addressing a problem that is miniscule in scale and trivial in effect, all in the name of a higher principle. Of course this has nothing to do with free speech as such - i.e. the negative freedom that means I cannot be restrained from speaking my mind short of hate speech. Rather it demands a positive freedom that certain people should be allowed to insist on having their views aired in a particular and notably exclusive setting. Just as I cannot insist on The Times or Guardian printing my opinions, I doubt I'll be able to insist on the Oxford Union hosting my rants. In other words, this is legislation that would establish a privilege for a select few. Similarly, the Online Safety bill is concerned with privilege in the form of exemptions for news publishers (i.e. traditional media) and the requirement for platforms to protect journalistic content and the vaguely-defined "content of democratic importance". All speech is equal but some is more equal than others.

In practice, neither bill is likely to make much difference to the existing moderation regime of universities and social media platforms, but they do reserve the right for ministers to intervene in those areas in a way that would be considered intolerable for newspapers or TV. It is likely that this intervention will be selective and aimed disproportionately at the left, if only because the existing regimes already limit far-right "harms" (the reason why far-right-friendly platforms such as Gab and Parler exist is precisely because Facebook and Twitter are relatively successful in their moderation). While Labour has opposed the Higher Education bill on the grounds that it would protect hate speech, they have welcomed the Online Safety bill because it supports the liberal demand for online civility and the tighter regulation of platforms for the benefit of legacy media (a particular concern for liberal outlets, like the Guardian, that cannot necessarily rely on subsidy by the rich). 

A troubling aspect of the search for civility is its discriminatory impulses. One example of this is the growing demand for online accounts to be supported by an offical identity, on the grounds that anonymity shields offenders. This isn't likely to help law enforcement all that much, and it will probably be easily circumvented (the platforms have an obvious incentive to avoid stringent regulation), but it will make it more difficult for the powerless and vulnerable (who bias towards the young) to have a voice. Another is the proposal (floated by Labour and now endorsed by the government) that individuals found guilty of the online racial abuse of footballers should not only be barred by the relevant social media platforms but issued with a Football Banning Order. This is an authoritarian legacy of New Labour that anachronistically preserved the 80s idea of football as the sole locus of objectionable racism, long after the social changes in the game had marginalised it in the 90s. In reality, most of the abusers probably don't even attend games. Racist trolls don't limit themselves to particular spheres of activity.

Given that the young currently vote disproportionately for Labour, you'd imagine the party would be supportive of pro-youth policies, and in many ways it is, albeit policies that are concerned with the socialising of the young as model citizens. However, it is also suspicious of politicised youth - not least those energised by Momentum since 2015 - hence the PLP's current disdain for free tuition fees, which it interprets not just as a subsidy to the middle classes but as encouragement for the critical independence and even social deracination of working class kids. If the public response to the dignified behaviour of England's football players - and in particular Tyrone Mings' calling-out of Priti Patel - tells us anything, it isn't simply that there is an overwhelming majority in favour of anti-racism. It's clear that society at large is more in tune with the views of the young than those of right-leaning, middle-aged newspaper columnists, let alone confirmed Tory voters who think the young are stting on their arses and living off benefits. That Labour appears keener on courting the minority rather than the majority is stupid, but perhaps an inevitable result of the determination to exorcise the influence of a politician who managed to connect with young voters in his 60s.

Blindspot

David Baddiel's Jews Don't Count is a slight book, in both senses of the word. It's not very long, it's padded-out with screenshots of tweets, and it's made up mostly of anecdotes lacking historical or sociological context. It's also a book about Baddiel's feelings in the face of both real and imagined slights. What it most put me in mind of was Woody Allen's film, Annie Hall. Two scenes in particular. In the first, Allen's character Alvy Singer is insisting to his friend Rob, played by Tony Roberts, that other people routinely refer to his Jewishness in an underhand and slighting manner, for example saying "Jew" instead of "D'you". Rob not unreasonably suggests Alvy is paranoid. In the second scene, Alvy morphs, in his own imagination, into a Hasidic Jew while having a meal with the WASP family of his girlfriend, Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton. What's notable in both scenes is that while they are played for laughs at Singer's stereotypical Jewish anxiety, they also acknowledge that antisemitism is real. Some people do make disparaging remarks about Jews under their breath; many New England WASP families in the America of the 1970s would have looked down their noses at New York Jews. But while Baddiel shares a background as a comedian with Allen, he lacks the latter's balance, not to mention self-doubt.

The book is a polemical essay about political language (the shadow of Orwell looms large), ranging over topics as diverse as literature, dramatic casting and cuisine. Its subject is what he defines as a progressive blindspot: the deeming of antisemitism as a lesser prejudice, and how that makes him, as a Jew, feel. One obvious problem is that his feelings aren't necessarily representative of Jews as a whole, just as the supposed lacuna isn't necessarily representative of all progressives. The idea of a blindspot entails a logical leap: the assumption that subscribing to a hierarchy of racism - or, more accurately, an equivalence of all prejudices with the exception of Jew-hatred - is characteristic of progressives. The book's emotive title also suggests that a lesser valuation of antisemitism is really outright disregard or even denial: not that Jews count less but that they don't count at all. The first assumption is tendentious, the second absurd (the EHCR investigation of the Labour Party is proof enough of that). As the polemic depends on Baddiel's own feelings, it's inevitably solipsistic. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that it biases towards a metropolitan, middle-class milieu: the BBC's Today programme, the broadsheet arts pages, and the Upper East Stand at Stamford Bridge. There is nothing here about assaults on Haredi Jews in Stamford Hill or Gateshead.

In Baddiel's definition, progressives are "those who would define themselves as being on the right side of history" [his italics]. This condescension is typical of his susceptibility to rightwing tropes. As the book progresses his focus narrows to the political left, and specifically those who have taken on a symbolic role in the eyes of the media, such as Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn and Ash Sarkar. But to begin with his targets are the lesser known, and this perhaps in part explains his patronising vocabulary. For example, on the first page he draws a distinction between "the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman" and "a critic called Holly Williams" while discussing an Observer review by the latter of the former's novel, Antkind. Baddiel's issue is that Williams refers to the book's "white-male-cis-het perspective" but ignores that the protagonist is Jewish. The variation between definite and indefinite article might be attributed to the relative fame of each, but it looks like a concern with status: what right does Williams have to criticise Kaufman? In insisting that there is a hierarchy of progressive regard, he suggests there is also a hierarchy of judgmental authority. In a later example of this, he notes that "a poet called Omar Sakr tweeted this image created by the photographer Bas Uterwijk". The image was an AI "reconstruction" of Jesus. The Arab poet's jocular comment was to suggest that he looked like family, which Baddiel interpreted as erasing Jesus's Jewishness. This is obviously silly (not least the AI bit), but his choice of "a" and "the" is again revealing.

In reviewing problematic art and how our assessments change over time, Baddiel makes some good points about moral compromises. For example, that we delicately bracket TS Eliot's antisemitism because of his poetic excellence, or that we allow Edith Wharton's to pass unchallenged in order to recover her from the disregard of misogynistic critics. But he undermines his case when he criticises the 2020 BBC documentary Drama out of a Crisis, about the history of Play for Today, for not mentioning Bar Mitzvah Boy or The Evacuees. The clue for this editorial choice is in the title: the role of Play for Today in reflecting the political and social crises of the 1970-84 period, which largely centred on class, trade unionism, feminism, racism and latterly the impact of Thatcherism. The point about Jack Rosenthal's plays, excellent though they both were, is that they didn't. To suggest that they were excluded simply because they reflected Jewish themes is illogical. After all, if the BBC were so institutionally antisemtic it wouldn't have made the plays in the first place. You could counter that the BBC has become more antisemitic over time, and now chooses to disown such works, but then you'd have to provide some evidence for that and there isn't any.

A central topic, and arguably the reason why the book was envisaged, commissioned and published, is the failure of the Labour Party to effectively deal with charges of antisemitism between 2015 and 2019. This is not simply an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, whom Baddiel is careful not to label an antisemite in the manner of Margaret Hodge, but a critique of its commitment to a progressive anti-racism that excludes Jews. This implies that the issue hasn't necessarily been resolved by Corbyn's exclusion from the PLP, at least not to Baddiel's satisfaction, so further work (i.e. purges of the left) may be required. Baddiel is selective in his treatment of the issue. There is no qualitative or quantitative analysis of the party's policies or the speeches of leading figures, nor is the voting record of its MPs examined. Instead he highlights a single speech by Dawn Butler that describes some of those whom the party will fight for. In its multi-dimensionality, this is closer to Borges's Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge than a systematic list (i.e. a rhetorical enumeratio): LGBT+, people who didn't go to Oxbridge, carers etc. The only mention of ethnicity is "black, white, Asian". Baddiel notes there is no mention of Jews. Is this really evidence of a blindspot? The list mentions those who "struggle to pay the rent" but not those who "struggle to put food on the table". Would you conclude from this that the Labour Party has a blindspot about food poverty?  

There is the familiar disingenuousness over the "Epshteen" incident, the Mear One mural and Corbyn's reluctance to dance to Andrew Neil's tune during the 2019 general election campaign. Baddiel's conclusion is that "Corbyn is not someone who hates Jews but someone ... who places anti-Jewish racism lower on the hierarchy of things that truly matter". In other words, that Corbyn is the embodiment of the progressive blindspot. Despite the careful phrasing (lower than what?), that is a charge that doesn't really stick given Corbyn's long record of opposing anti-Jewish racism (again I note that Baddiel hasn't analysed early day motion votes to determine which MPs actually do care enough about antisemitism to bestir themselves). Baddiel has an answer to that, namely that Corbyn's "we oppose all racisms" is the equivalent of "all lives matter" and therefore suspiciously evasive. This shows the way that his interpretation of a person's motives allows him to invalidate their language (obviously the influence of Orwell only goes so far). In another example he suggests that Diane Abbott showing solidarity with Luciana Berger over misogynistic attacks is deliberately erasing antisemitism.

At times, Baddiel's method lapses into self-parody. Noting that charges of cultural appropriation in the realm of food have become a thing in recent years, he searches Google for "cultural appropriation" in reference to Jewish food, finds little beyond a few denunciations of Jews appropriating Palestinian cuisine, and so concludes that Jews don't count: that their cultural integrity is not valued as highly as that of other minorities. This ignores that there are many other cuisines that aren't "culture-war battlegrounds", as he puts it. Nobody's insisting that only the Irish can make Irish stew, after all. He also seems oblivious to the implication that Jews themselves don't care enough about their food being appropropriated, in the way that American blacks might care about white chefs appropriating soul food or Spaniards care about the abuse of paella, to actually make an issue of it. Baddiel here comes close to interpreting the uncontested cultural assimilation of Jewish cuisine in America (bagels, chicken soup, salt beef etc) as evidence of antisemitism, which is nuts. In a British context, are Jews irritated that gentiles blithely eat fish and chips without regard for the meal's ethnic origins? Are Belgians, for that matter?

Another bee in his bonnet is the issue of casting across racial, gender and other lines in theatre, cinema and TV. His argument is that non-Jews routinely play Jews but there's usually a row when other boundaries are crossed. In his attempt to prove that there is a hierarchy of regard, he does identify another, more persuasive point. If a character is recognisably Jewish, that's usually because it's a stereotype. He acknowledges this point in his criticism of the US sitcom Seinfeld for presenting obviously Jewish characters like George and Elaine as ostensibly a Greek and a WASP respectively. His mistake is to imagine that this was intended to make the New York-based sitcom less obviously Jewish, when it couldn't be more, and that the lack of pushback would have been unthinkable for any other ethnicity. The irony here is that Baddiel admits to perpetuating the same stereotypes in his own writing, e.g. describing Israelis as "Jews without angst, without guilt. So not really Jews at all". Another target is the North London-based sitcom Friday Night Dinner, the cast of which weren't Jewish, but this seems to serve solely as an excuse for a footnoted anecdote suggesting that Jim Rosenthal (the TV sports presenter father of the actor Tom) is a self-hating Jew, which seems ungenerous, to say the least.

In the field of literature, Baddiel first notes that a novel of his appeared in his local Waterstones in the "Jewish interest section". I don't know where he lives, but if it has a dedicated section that probably reflects the local market, much as a black section in a Brixton bookshop would, rather than a policy of segregation. But his beef here is less the idea of a bookshop ghetto than that works by the likes of Zadie Smith and Bernardine Evaristo are presented as "state of the nation" novels. In contrast, Jewish writers, such as Howard Jacobson, are always thought to produce simply Jewish books. This is a weak argument if you recall that Benjamin Disraeli pretty much invented the state of the nation novel. To ask where is the British Bellow or Roth is to ignore that the conditions that gave rise to them are similar to the ones that produced Smith and Evaristo. In contrast, the conditions that produced Jacobson are similar to those that produced Kingsley Amis or David Lodge: chroniclers of the postwar middle class rather than panoptic surveyors of wider society (so not unlike Jack Rosenthal either). As Jacobson has become more reactionary with the passing years (see his remarks here on the "monotonous chorus of young people"), it is optimistic to expect him to rise above his prejudices to produce a state of the nation novel that captures the contemporary mood.

Despite the brevity of the book, Baddiel cannot escape mentioning that he once appeared in blackface, and with a pineapple on his head, as a lampoon of the Nottingham Forest footballer Jason Lee in the 1990s TV show Fantasy Football League, which he co-hosted with Frank Skinner. He freely admits that this was a "mistake" and that he has "apologised for it publicly on various occasions since". What he doesn't say is that he hasn't apologised personally to Lee, despite being frequently urged to do so. Perhaps he would be uncomfortable hearing from Lee how it made him feel. The reason why this infamous incident keeps appearing in Baddiel's Twitter timeline is not, as he imagines, that people want him to shut up about antisemitism, but that they don't think he is genuinely contrite. In other words, the charge isn't one of hypocrisy (or "whataboutery"), and therefore meant to nullify his concerns about Jew-hatred, but of insincerity. He is, ironically, being accused of operating a hierarchy of racism.

Perhaps the key sentence of the book is this: "For a long time, only Jews really cared about Jews, only Jews really cared about anti-Semitism". That double use of "really" is doing a lot of work. It implies that the solidarity of non-Jews with Jews may be at best suspect and at worst wholly insincere (more irony). This is tantamount to dismissing the Nuremburg trials and subsequent cases against Holocaust perpetrators and deniers as somehow of no account. For all his indifference to Israel, it also echoes the claim that the Jewish state has few real friends in the world, despite its widespread indulgence. There is also a wry irony here in respect of his central claim that progressives have a blindspot when it comes to Jews, namely that in many ways Israel was the epitome of a progressive state up to 1967 (and for some, beyond) with a blindspot for the Palestinians. In a further layer of irony, some Jewish critics have accused Baddiel of having a blindspot about Israel, of forgetting that it is intrinsic to the identity of many British Jews and thus explains their suspicion that anti-Zionism is really a cloak for antisemitism.

The subtext of the sentence is that Jews were historically treated as an exception from Christian society and that has now led to the exception of antisemitism from progressive regard. Even if we accept that the progressive blindspot is real, I find the idea of cause and effect - that it's the legacy of "classic" antisemitism - unconvincing. It is far more likely to reflect the changing socio-economic status of Jews. Baddiel attempts to dismiss this argument by characterising it as the claim that Jews are "white", so cannot in the minds of progressives be victims of racism, but this simply ignores the multiple dimensions of prejudice. As Stephen Bush says, anyone with power is capable of using it unfairly, so no one can be wholly free of prejudice in their dealings with others or of being discriminated against (despite the offsetting benefits of "white privilege"). I'd simply note at this point that one of the funniest (if now straight up offensive) cinematic jokes on exceptionalism was made by another New York Jewish writer and director, Mel Brooks, in Blazing Saddles.

Ultimately, Baddiel's case isn't persuasive, largely because it is often illogical and makes claims that it can't justify. For all the real instances of antisemitism he cites, too many of the examples he offers in support of a specific progressive blindspot are simply ridiculous, while his focus on the supposed sins of the left is transparently partisan and gives the impression of a blindspot about rightwing antisemitism. If I was looking for a common theme in the antisemitic remarks of TS Eliot, Roald Dahl and Dave Whelan (Conservative Party donor and former owner of Wigan Athletic FC), I wouldn't imagine it had anything to do with progressive shibboleths, let alone the Socialist Campaign Group. The book was published this year, which means it would have been timed perfectly for the general election due in early 2022. In the event, the Conservative government short-circuited the last parliament and secured a majority in which "Get Brexit done" counted for more than the claims of Labour antisemitism. I suspect the book will read as more hyperbolic, even hysterical, in years to come. I doubt Baddiel will mind, particularly if the progressive England football squad ensure "It's coming home", though that may require another refereeing blindspot.

Beastie Boys

Centre-right commentators seem to have a thing about bestiality these days, though this appears to have been prompted mainly by the advance of veganism as a dinner party topic. According to Tom Chivers, "From a utilitarian point of view, zoophilia is no more immoral than eating meat". He uses this comparison to highlight that customary disgust at certain sexual or dietary practices is often illogical and historically contingent, which is a challenge to conservative moral schemes based on tradition. In an earlier example of the genre, from 2014, Hugo Rifkind acknowledged that when it comes to animals, "We eat them because we want to, and we figure out the morality afterwards as best we can". Clearly neither is suggesting that bestiality is good, or likely to become socially acceptable. They are simply noting that dietary attitudes are changing, with meat-eating moving from the realm of the tolerable to the disgusting for some. Despite Chivers' reference to Jonathan Haidt's "moral dumbfounding" - the idea that moral values reflect personality rather than reason - this isn't an attempt to divide society into innate liberals and conservatives (and so another skirmish in the culture war) so much as an acknowledgment that disgust is a social artefact.

There is an irony in British empiricists, who would normally decry "fashionable nonsense", hinting that sexuality, as much as diet, is socially constructed. This points to a deeper truth, recently exhibited by Matt Hancock, which is that the establishment (and Chivers and Rifkind are representative) is mostly made up of moral relativists, always ready to excuse ethical lapses in the service of power. Indeed, the ready equation of postmodernism to moral relativism indicates that for many in politics and the media it is the latter which is the real subject of interest, hence the persistent yoking of the two despite academics wearily pointing out that they are not the same thing. In discursive practice, moral relativism is actually a debate about liberalism's elevation of individual conscience (e.g. Mill's harm principle) over the conservative belief that tradition and norms are the foundation of social order. It has little to do with materialism, let alone poststructuralism or "cultural Marxism". When a politician decries postmodernism, they are clearly signalling a conservative defence of social order.

But why does that defence so often employ references to bestiality? For example, just as it has become a habit among soi disant liberals to equate carnivores with sheep-shaggers, so it became a habit among traditional conservatives in recent decades to object to gay marriage on the grounds that it would open the door to human-animal unions ("Why not marry a dog?", as Charles Moore put it). But there is a difference between the two stances. Whereas traditional conservatives are clearly pointing to what they consider the absurdity of homosexual marriage, in which both it and bestiality are considered contemptible and an affront to nature, those weary liberals are suggesting that while conservative norms are necessary to ensure social order, the elite should be governed by a strict utilitarianism in which sexual morality is subservient to what Michel Foucault memorably described, in the context of Roman sexual ethics, as "the care of the self". This is not just the pursuit of selfish interest behind the facade of respectability, in the traditional conservative manner (i.e. ethical egoism), but the conceptualisation of sexuality as a matter of personal hygiene. 

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault traced how that individualist view evolved, via Christian confession, towards an increasing focus on sexuality as a matter of social hygiene and thus a dimension of biopower - i.e. the systematic management and cultivation of the "species body" in the service of capitalism (natalism, public health, pensions etc). Parallel to the increasing regulation of society that starts in the 17th century, we see a growing fascination with sexual deviance and excess as a spillover of the developing philosophy of self-interest: libertinism as the coeval of liberalism (consider the competitive and acquisitive nature of Les Liaisons Dangereuses). As Foucault noted, the nineteenth century was not an era of sexual repression but was instead marked by a shift towards the scientific management of sexuality in both conventional and deviant forms. The hypocrisy associated with the Victorian age was a reflection of the fundamental dichotomy between social norms (how the mass should behave) and personal pleasure (how the elite did behave). 

The sexual licence of the elite is both a historic fact and a powerful myth about the abuse of the vulnerable (consider the persistence of conspiracy theories about secret paedophile cabals). As such, sexuality has a dual political role. Sexual liberation is fundamentally a project of democratic empowerment - each and everyone should be able to pursue their own pleasure, not just the elite - and it is also, in the disproportion of appetite and opportunity, a metaphor for inequality within society. Despite a growing concern with animal cruelty, bestiality sits at a remove from this. Tales of sex with animals tend to be humorous, whether the tone is scurrilous (Catherine the Great) or pitiable (the lonely shpeherd). But they also evoke a deeper memory: gods who take animal form to have sex with humans (Leda and the swan, Europa and the bull) and the transformation of humans into animals as a divine punishment, sometimes for sexual transgression (Actaeon). These tales are not just about breaching taboos but about crossing categorical boundaries. 

The most fundamental boundary in the eyes of the politico-media caste is not between man and beast but between the leaders and the led. It is in the realm of political commentary, starting with Plato's Republic, that we repeatedly encounter the metaphor of the people as a beast that needs to be tamed - a metaphor that dissolves the boundary between human and non-human in service of a critique of democracy ("Would you let a dog vote?"). At all levels of society we explicitly dehumanise people we don't like by calling them beasts, we even employ that metaphor for weather ("Beast from the East") or abstract concepts such a crime, but it is a particular characteristic of the elite to employ bestiality as a reductio ad absurdum. I doubt either Tom Chivers or Hugo Rifkind really want to shag a sheep, but what they are signalling with their formulaic attempt to present an amusing paradox is that they recognise that rules are for the little people, the less than fully human. It is Nietzsche, rather than Foucault, who underpins their moral relativism.