The Right to Have Rights

Citizenship is often referred to, in the words of Hannah Arendt, as the right to have rights, a phrase central to chapter 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism ("The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man"). She was highlighting a paradox: that the universal declaration of human rights was meaningless outside of the context of the nation state, whose rights were limited to the national citizenry and therefore not universal. Though this is actually a conservative argument that originates in Edmund Burke's condemnation of the universal ambitions of the French Revolution, it struck a chord in 1951 in a Europe still awash with displaced persons and a world struggling to come to terms with the establishment of the state of Israel: a development that both crystallised the national rights of Jews and immediately deprived many Palestinians of their own rights. It was also a reminder of the failings of the interwar period, with the denial of rights to national minorities and the institutionalisation of refugees through Nansen passports, as well as a pointer to the way that the developing Cold War would centre polemically on the rights of dissent and democratic representation (though it's worth noting here how little contemporary tragedies such as the partition of India seemed to inform the debate around rights and citizenship).

The paradox that Arendt noted remains at the heart of today's discourse on rights, for example in the British tension between the European Convention on Human Rights and the nebulous ideal of a "bill of rights" that would be a particular expression of the national genius (itself an ambiguous concept in a multi-national state whose original Bill of Rights in 1689 was distinctly sectarian). Arendt's resolution of the paradox, insofar as she advanced one, was that no one should be denied the right to be a member of some political community - that they shouldn't be made stateless - as without this foundational right there could be no other rights. This made a sort of sense during the Cold War, when the denial of political rights often led to exile and asylum claims were treated sympathetically, at least in the context of movement East to West if not South to North, but in the present the right to have rights is increasingly a qualified right applied within the borders of a national polity. This highlights that the issue of rights is about something more fundamental and persistent than the statelessness that emerged with the fragmentaion of the old European empires after 1918.

The core of the rights entailed by membership of the national community - or, to put it another way, the supreme rights of citizenship - are political rights. But this presents a problem that has been present since the formalisation of the liberal ideal of citizenship in the 17th and 18th centuries, namely that these rights were never regarded as universal (and nor was democracy associated with universal suffrage until well into the twentieth century). Not only was the 1689 Bill of Rights explicitly anti-Catholic, but the US Constitution of 1776 famously excluded native Americans and slaves from the national community while the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen denied full political rights to women and also failed to abolish slavery (though its claims to universality were still enough to inspire the revolt in Haiti). Olympe de Gouge, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizen, argued that if "Women have the right to mount the scaffold, they must also have the right to mount the speaker's rostrum". She never made it to the National Assembly but she did meet the guillotine in 1793. 

This discrimination in political rights is seen today not only in the tangible form of citizenship apartheid, as practised in Israel (both de jure in the 2018 Basic Law and de facto in the occupied territories), or an insistence that particular minorities prove their loyalty as citizens, as many across the political spectrum in France are now demanding. It also takes the form of the disciplining of citizens through restrictions on their national rights up to and including expulsion, as in the UK's 2014 Immigration Act and the current Nationality and Borders bill. Though such extreme measures may be rare in practice, the establishment of the principle of the "sovereign right of expulsion" - that the state can administratively deprive you of your rights such that the outcome is no different to being driven out of the country at the point of a gun - means that the lesser qualification of political rights, such as the denial of the vote to prisoners or the introduction of mandatory IDs at the ballot box, can be framed as modest hygiene measures rather than part of a more general programme that seeks to restrict democracy.

Jacques Rancière's 2004 critique of Arendt centres on what he sees as her questionable separation of the realms of the political citizen and the stateless: the presumption that those denied the rights of citizenship are thereby excluded from engaging politically, such that denationalisation equates to depoliticisation. This obviously rests on a narrow definition of the political, which may have been tenable in the 1950s but seemed too restrictive by the 1970s and the flowering of a range of activism (anti-racism, feminism, gay rights) that sought to intervene in society directly rather than via the vector of formal politics. Arendt's position has been rescued to a degree by those who emphasise that her understanding of statelessness centred not simply on the loss of political presence but on "world-loss", the loss of a sense of belonging in a human community, and that it is this that has been resisted by the growth of solidarity.  Another way of looking at it is that Arendt's own experience of statelessness (from 1937 to 1950) as a haute bourgeois German Jewish intellectual led her to see it in terms of individual exclusion and flight, to the detriment of a recognition that most exclusions affect entire communities and many do not even result in physical displacement.

While nation states continue to offer meagre support to refugees and asylum-seekers, and while social solidarity remains fitful - oscillating between sentimentality and disinterest, the activism of supporters is significantly better than it was in the postwar years precisely because it has moved on from charity and a pious humanitarianism to political engagement and thus the assumption of rights. Parallel to this, there has been an increasing recognition that groups within society, otherwise secure in their citizenship, face restriction and even outright curtailment of their rights in a structural manner that cannot be divorced from the operation of the state. For example, that "The key insight behind Black Lives Matters activism is, after all, that black Americans cannot depend on their government to guarantee them the standard legal protections routinely enjoyed by white citizens." Paradoxically, as the global population has become more mobile due to the opportunities of globalisation and the imperative of advancing climate change, the right to have rights has increasingly been discussed in terms of the qualification of citizenship rather than its supersession. 

It is not remotely likely that the UK government will deprive six million people of their citizenship, but it is restricting the rights of that number. The idea that such fundamental rights could be qualified or taken away entirely gives rise to a pervasive sense of insecurity. This may express itself negatively in xenophobia and a lack of sympathy for refugees, but the causes are more to do with a fraying sense of social identity and the precariousness of employment and public services. A good example of this, and the anxieties it gives rise to, is the NHS. Being "free at the point of use" traditionally meant that it did not concern itself with the entitlement of those who sought its help. The introduction of an entitlement test, and the associated charging (more performative than effective), was partly driven by the creeping markestisation of the health service, but it also reflected the turn towards the idea that the NHS was the restricted right of the national community rather than a service operating on the principle of common humanity - i.e. that you had to be a legitimate citizen, not just a person in need of medical assistance. 

For a long time after 1945, rights were seen as a defence against the encroachment of the market into social relations. Not only could rights not be bought or bartered, but the realm of rights was conceived as being distinct and inviolable. Arendt's concern was that this realm ultimately depended on the nation state rather than any common humanity or the UN's hopeful declaration. The stateless were doubly disadvantaged - lacking rights and the right to have rights - but they could achieve rights once they crossed the border into citizenship. But this conception of a limited but secure realm of rights has given way under neoliberalism to an interpretation of rights as conditional privileges within the nation state. Universal human rights have not disappeared, but they are increasingly marginalised as someone else's concern ("We should look after our own first"), while their invocation has been reduced to a justification for military intervention by the West or a means by which the West ritually criticises other nation states for their "abuses". 

The idea of conditional privilege is a return to classical liberal thinking in which universality is no more than a rhetorical flourish that obscures a deliberate discrimination between the worthy and the unworthy, even when the latter are nominally included in the national community, such as women then and dual passport-holders now. This means that we have eroded the right to have rights. We may have and be able to exercise rights, but we no longer possess an absolute right to do so. That is because citizenship is now a privilege rather than a right, and a privilege that can increasingly be bought by the rich, and not just in the UK but in many countries around the world. Ironically, what is becoming universal is not the rights of man (or woman), but the privileges of wealth. The old ideal of a world state is slowly becoming a reality, but it will be a supranational state in which citizenship is strictly limited on an invitation-only basis. As Bong Joon Ho, the Korean director of the film Parasite puts it, "Essentially we all live in the same country called capitalism".

Blocking a Scene

A paradox of social media is that the leading brands are so associated with the individual personalities of their founders, notably Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Jack Dorsey at Twitter. In some ways, the desire to make these two otherwise uninteresting people the story reflects the comfort of old media commentators with the model of the domineering publisher that dates from over a century ago, much as the likes of the equally dull Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are framed as Golden Age industrialists in the manner of John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, even if the conspicuous consumption of their wealth on space flight hardly compares with the more mundane philanthropy of the old robber barons. But it is nonetheless striking that a genuinely novel technology should still be thought of in terms that echo the anxieties of older media, from the pernicious effects of broadcasting (think of the various moral panics over cinema and TV) to monopoly (consider the desire to "break-up" the social media giants, as if they were comparable to the old telephone companies). Obviously the social isn't new, however amplified and extended by the technology, so perhaps this just reflects the perennial fear of the mob.

The announcement that Dorsey is to stand down as Twitter's CEO in order to spend more time with his payment platform, Square, and presumably invest further in crypto-currencies and blockchains (his new holding company, Block, is pretty suggestive), has been greeted as a sign that the micro-blogging business might start to grow and generate larger profits, but this is probably a vain hope. Twitter is not puny relative to Instagram and TikTok, let alone Facebook, because it doesn't have a good product or the company has been badly run but because it has a wholly different social function to those other platforms. As John Naughton recently summarised it through comparison: "Instagram is a way of combating boredom, endlessly scrolling in the hope of finding something interesting. A user in that frame of mind is more likely to be tempted by the prospect of an impulsive purchase. Twitter users, however, are not bored. Instead, they’re combative, annoyed, outraged or looking for a fight or a joke." This isn't quite Yeats's snobbish condescenion - "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" - but it does subscribe to the idea that Twitter users are highly active, when in reality the overwhelming majority are passive spectators.

The point about the different platforms' relative value to advertisers is correct, but this is also a bit of a red herring. Twitter could probably do better commercially if it leant into its strengths: cultivating fierce loyalty and leveraging engagement. The reason why specialist magazines were traditionally able to command high advertising rates wasn't because of the size of the audience but because of its greater conversion potential, which reflected greater engagement. Twitter has the ability to create audiences with a deeper relationship, if smaller size, than its competitors. It should be charging commercial users for followers, not for promoted tweets. That it doesn't do so is probably down to Silicon Valley's limiting belief, normalised by Google, that advertising works best as a covert process that avoids the customer's conscious involvement. We all know that this doesn't actually work, even if it is more targeted than old-style blanket advertising. Who hasn't been stalked for weeks with adverts for a trivial product you were only ever likely to buy once, if at all? 

If we have to draw a parallel between Twitter and older media, it would perhaps be better to think of it in terms of those relatively low circulation but high status magazines and weekly newspapers that characterised the twentieth century, such as The New Yorker and The Economist. That might appear a bizarre comparison given the interactive, free-for-all and (largely) uncensored nature of the one and the elitist, broadcast and highly edited nature of the other, but then you have to ask why so many members of the contemporary intelligentsia (and the people who write for The Spectator) are to be found on both. And the answer is that combativeness that Naughton noted. Though they constantly deplore the incivility and trolling, it is clear that the luminaries of the established media cannot stay off Twitter. This is partly due to its strengths in breaking news, gossip and frivolity, but it is also because of its now almost unique ability to create a virtual public square in which ordinary civilians can answer back. It might not be Habermas's idealised public sphere, but it's pretty much all we've got now that so many formerly public squares, both literal and figurative, have been privatised.

Now you might think that this is the last thing that BBC journalists and Times columnists, not to mention bumptious human rights lawyers and members of the PLP, would want, but this is to ignore the power of the block, which has a very different function on Twitter than it does on other social media platforms. On the latter, blocking is something that is done routinely and without much comment: it's straightforward hygiene. On the former, blocking is a performative act, both in the sense that some habitual blockers will advertise the fact to their followers, with a detailed justification of the verdict, while those who are blocked for their derision or criticism will circulate a screengrab as a badge of honour. The difference in scale is also important, not only in the sense that Twitter is a relatively small platform but that it is only a very small fraction of the user base who actively engage with these elite (usually blue-tick) accounts, and that fraction tends to be atypical of both the user base and society at large. They have detached themselves from the crowd in the public square and thus put themselves in the firing line, and it's clear that the frisson of metaphorically pulling the trigger is an attraction for those who do the blocking.

At this point it's worth emphasising what I mean by the "intelligentsia". Broadly, this covers all those in society who are highly-educated and participate in debate on public affairs. The expansion of higher education since the 1960s, together with the greater opportunities afforded by social media since the millennium, means that this is a growing proportion of society. And this growth has been both absolute and relative. The passive readers of the traditional broadsheet press, a tiny fraction of whom might have engaged in letter-writing, have been replaced by a larger group of spectators who engage more regularly (if more superficially) through likes and retweets. The older sociology of the intellectual, such as Bourdieu's concept of the dominated-dominant (a dominated fraction of the dominant class), or Gramsci's idea of a class-specific "organic intellectual", can still apply to the core subset of the intelligensia who make a living out of the production or dissemination of cultural and symbolic capital, but it's clear that the outer layers have expanded and simultaneously become more engaged and thus critical of that core. 

This in turn has produced a counter-movement, particularly among those engaged in the production of politics, whom we might refer to as the clerisy, against what they see as the impertinence of "hipster analysis" or the incivility of the marginalised left. Twitter has become an important field in this conflict, arguably the most important (which is a symptom of the wider intelligentsia's structural weakness), hence the members of the clerisy are attracted to it as much because of their class interests (notice the regular emphasis on "solidarity" with fellow blue-ticks facing criticism) as their personal gratification. The current demand to end online anonymity, which is an important feature of Twitter, and the insistence that social media platforms do more to take down objectionable material (a demand that predictably reinforces the authoritarian), has emphasised how much the field has become one in which discipline has superseded any Habermassian notion of deliberation. In other words, the conflict is no longer between an exclusivist representative democracy and an inclusivist participatory democracy, as it arguably was in the 1980s and 90s, but between an unashamed epistocracy and a popular democracy in general retreat. 

While the choreography of this scene involves significant theoretical assaults on democracy, notably through the spectre of populism and the never-ending demands for a competent and virtuous centrism, it is mostly played out in social exchanges that emphasise hierarchy. Central to this is the role of political journalists and commentators. Where once this was, perhaps naively, thought of as a tribune-like mediation on behalf of the people against an over-mighty state and a weakening establishment, it is now clearly about the message management of that state and the defence of an establishment that has successfully absorbed the politico-media caste (mention of their incestuous relations is one of the quickest ways to earn a block). Twitter provides both the simulacrum of a public sphere that is genuinely democratic (again, anonymity is crucial to this) while also allowing those social hierarchies to be reinforced and performed through micro-punishments such as blocking and micro-rewards such as likes. It is a finely-balanced mechanism that will no doubt survive Jack Dorsey's departure. Whether democracy will survive is another matter.

Who Would Be Replaced?

As a conspiracy theory, the Great Replacement is no more credible than the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You could even argue that the latter's story of an insidious menace (an ambivalent metaphor for either communism or McCarthyism in the original 1956 film) is a lot more credible and pertinent in its portrayal of an affectless society. But it is the former that is salient today. With this week's announcement by Eric Zemmour that he is to run for the French Presidency, the idea that France is under threat of being swamped by an alien culture has now achieved respectability among conservative politicians, a fact emphasised by the continuing lurch of les Républicains to the right. That Éric Ciotti wants a referendum "to stop mass immigration" and set up "a French Guantánamo bay" isn't in itself evidence of this lurch. Those are positions that would be supported by the current British Home Secretary and many centre-right politicians across Europe. But the renewed prominence of the big idea - first articulated by Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement - and its deliberate yoking to the bogey of political correctness, certainly is. 

In effect, the politics of the Front National have been absorbed into the wider conservative worldview, but it looks like Marine Le Pen will not gain from this. That she has invested so much in the rebranding of her toxic party is not the least of the ironies here. That the chief beneficiary may well be a rightwing Jewish media intellectuel, a combination that would have infuriated Le Pen's father, is perhaps the greatest irony of all. In many ways Zemmour is a perfect example of the politico-media elite's ability to adapt, something we saw with the similar trajectory of Nigel Farage in the UK. That adaptation arises from both cynicsm and an innate sympathy, which was all too obvious in much of this week's coverage, despite the pearl-clutching by various liberal media types. The Spectator's already notorious interview with Zemmour was short and cursory: little more than a snatched conversation in which he rehearsed his standard lines. The way that this was filled out by the journalist's own musings was a classic case of projection. The magazine has little interest in French politics beyond its touch-points with the UK, with the notable exception of that French strain of Islamophobia and its delicious combination with the "war on woke".

Zemmour, with helpful prompting, makes this explicit: "This wokeness, he argues, is a kind of Trojan horse for the Islamification of formerly Christian nations. ‘It is by destroying our cultures, our history, that they make a clean sweep of all that and allow a foreign culture, history and civilisation to come and replace it.’" The metaphor suggests that wokeness is a covert plot, which distracts us from the non sequitur that imagines delicacy over pronouns is somehow advancing the cause of the Taliban. The idea that Islam might replace (or, shudder, "cancel") the canon of Western civilisation reflects a profound ignorance of Islamic culture, not least its role in preserving much of Greek and Roman art and science and its borrowings from both Judaism and Christianity. If there is to be a defining "clash of civilisations", this would clearly be between the West and the Far East, specifically China. But any objective analysis would admit that the West has already won that particular battle, hence China's embrace first of communism and then of capitalism, albeit with "Chinese characteristics", a formulation that is obviously defensive. So if Western civilisation is globally hegemonic, what is the Great Replacement conspiracy theory really about?

One insight is provided by the nihilistic literature of Michel Houellebecq. His novel Submission, which was partly-inspired by the fuss that Camus' earlier work of non-fiction had stirred, is obviously a fantasy, hence the importance that access to nubile women (a perennial concern of the writer) plays in the narrative. But it does highlight two themes that inform the theory of replacement: the decadence of the West and the connivance of self-interested elites. Since the book was published in 2015, there have been a number of seismic political shocks, notably Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, that have revived the liberal theory of populism. This diagnoses a pathology of political weakness and the vicious nature of the people, with their propensity for vulgar xenophobia and derision of meritocracy. Central to this theory is the idea that populists set the people against a notional and misrepresented elite. But this is a self-serving trope that helps to divert attention away from actual elites, something that was obvious in the pushback against the left in the US and UK (the equivalence of anticapitalism with anitsemitism was a frank, if inadvertant, admission of this). 

In other words, the great replacement theory centres on the elite and their decision to either resist or collaborate in the face of an external threat. This has obvious resonance in France, not only in respect of the Second World War but in the anti-totalitarian discourse of the 1970s and 80s. Arguably, it originates in the Dreyfus affair, which not coincidentally marked the emergence of the intellectual as a key figure in the drama of French politics. That the inheritors of the Gaullist tradition are now embracing a worldview previously limited to the inheritors of the Vichy tradition is remarkable, but what's perhaps more troubling is the claim that this is being driven by thinkers (Ciotti talks of Zemmour's "lucid analysis") rather than rabble-rousers. That le grand remplacement has been such a pronounced feature of French culture in recent years is perhaps less to do with the country's Muslim population and continuing interference in North Africa and more to do with the structural decline of the intellectual, a topic covered by Shlomo Sand's book The End of the French Intellectual, which includes biting critiques of Houellebecq and Zemmour.

Despite the best efforts of David Goodhart and Douglas Murray, there hasn't been the same embrace of the great replacement theory in Britain's salons. This probably owes as much to the different role of "thinkers" in the production and management of symbolic and cultural capital in this country as it does to any innate tolerance or scepticism. While national identity has been an acutely divisive issue for the French since the Revolution, the British preference has generally been to avoid the topic through strategic distractions such as empire and monarchy. With those having lost much of their charm recently (thanks, Wokeness!), and with the running sore of Scottish independence prompting a revival of English chauvinism, it looks like we may be heading in a similar direction, but I doubt this will be led by public intellectuals, marginal cases like Richard Dawkins' militant atheism aside. As recent cases such as the risible "martyrdom" of Kathleen Stock suggest, and as the continuing prominence of the ridiculous Jordan Petersen attests, the intellectual in Britain and North America is a cat's paw of the media rather than an original thinker, and as likely to be triviliased as promoted as a champion of free speech.

As Sand puts it, in the French context of a shift from Bourdieu and Foucault to Finkielkraut and Zemmour, "The time when intellectuals first acquired prestige and authority in the field of creation and research, only then appearing in the public sphere, belongs to a bygone past. The directors of the mainstream media can nowadays do without public figures with their own charismatic authority, whom they see as uncontrollable. They are satisfied with manufacturing their own intellectuals, in other words 'clerks' who refrain from direct criticism of today's real ruling elites, who know perfectly well where power really lies, and are always ready to accuse and crucify the misérables." In Britain, the anti-intellectualism of the establishment has always meant a slighter role for the thinker, but even here there has been a notable structural decline from the days when Bryan Magee could present a BBC series on philosophy or Stuart Hall on Caribbean history. Instead we now have a production line in which newspaper columnists and minor academics are promoted to radio and TV prominence purely on the basis of their reliably provocative but fundamentally pro-establishment views.

It isn't Christian or Western civilisation that faces replacement so much as the relative privilege of particular groups within society, and it is "wokeness" - the challenging of established privilege - that drives this fear rather than the prospect of mass conversion. Islamophobia is not simply the latest iteration of the demonisation of the "Other" and the construction of a narrow national identity. It also serves to buttress the elite defence of privilege through appeals to popular bigotry: we must defend the right of middle-aged men to patronise and insult whoever they want or else accept sharia law. But this is less to do with the petit-bourgeois defence of marginal economic status that has traditionally fuelled the political right and more to do with a particular age cohort for whom the advances of multiculturalism and feminism have represented the decline of traditional social hierarchies, hence the disproportionate prominence of these ideas in a media industry dominated by the male, pale and stale. 

The perversity of this is the way that an essentially reactionary politics has been transformed into a condemenation of Islam as a reactionary religion, which has allowed the right to adopt not only the language of the Enlightenment and secularism but of progressivism more generally, leading to a striking continuity between the extreme right and many soi-disant liberals. A particular characteristic of this continuity is the way that an ardent philosemitism, manifested in a reductive image of Israel, has become the corollary of Islamophobia. While antisemitism remains as strong as ever on the right (and not just the far-right), it has become more nuanced in its expression. The historic role of the Jew as the ultimate outsider and threat to national integrity has been obscured by the recent coinage of "Judeo-Christian civilisation": a historically illiterate notion that serves to represent Israel as an outpost of Western values. This may not be entirely effective in legitimising settler colonialism, but it is effective in persuading European and American liberals that they should support the status quo. And it is the status quo, and all that this entails in terms of privilege and exclusion, that lies behind the fantasy of the great replacement.