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.