Schools of Thought

John Mearsheimer, the doyen of the American realist school of international relations, has become an unlikely YouTube star because of a 2015 lecture at the University of Chicago in which he pinned the blame for Ukraine's woes firmly on NATO and the EU. A shorter article from 2014 makes much the same points but also usefully describes the liberal-realist dichotomy: "Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy." Though the Western discourse on Russia looks like it will be dominated by a clash of the realist and liberal schools, it's worth noting that there is also a third to consider: constructivism. This emphasises socially constructed ideas over material factors. These ideas include national identities (e.g. Vladimir Putin's insistence that Ukraine isn't really a nation), historical justification (e.g. Putin's reassesment of the Bolsheviks' support for national self-determination as a betrayal), and norms about state behaviour (e.g. if the population of Ukraine is being "liberated", civilian casualties must be avoided, or at least downplayed). 

The liberal IR school is founded on the idealist view that peace can best be achieved through cooperation, and not just between states but at all levels of society. To this end, it advocates the benefits of trade and the value of international institutions and NGOs. It also emphasises the pacific tendencies of democracy and the importance of a robust civil society in restraining adventurism (neither is entirely reliable, as 2003 proved). In contrast, realism is founded on the Hobbesian view that the natural condition of the world is anarchy, that the sovereign state is paramount and motivated by self-preservation, and that states collectively are in perpetual competition for resources, respect and hegemony (realism is subdivided into defensive and offensive perspectives that believe states prioritise balance and hegemony respectively - Mearsheimer is of the latter tendency, hence his belief that NATO expansion could only be considered an existential threat by Russia). Though the field of international relations traces its intellectual lineage back to Machiavelli, Hobbes and Kant, it's really a product of the twentieth century. That's not to say that theories of state relations didn't already exist, but that they were subsumed into broader ideas about empire, religion and race. The discipline really comes into its own after World War One and the dominance of the Wilsonian idealism that led to the creation of the League of Nations. 

Realism was a critique of this idealist tendency that was heavily influenced by first the rise of Fascism and Nazism, with their emphases on national competition and the struggle for resources, and then by the emergent Cold War and the revived idea of a balance of powers. The early 1950s marks the highpoint of realism in the form of the Truman Doctrine and the theory of containment.  But while this remained the dominant paradigm in terms of US-Soviet relations, it started to weaken as an all-purpose explanatory framework in the face of the Third World liberation struggles of the 50s and 60s and the growing nonaligned movement. This resulted in a revival of the idealist framework (now called liberal) with its emphasis on institutions, trade and soft power, culminating in the superpower détente of the early-70s. Superficially, the Reagan years marked a revival of hardnosed realism (despite fantasies like the "Star Wars" Strategic Defence Initiative), but in reality this was the beginning of the dominance of the liberal school in the form of the Washington Consensus and globalisation. Though it possessed a theory of peace, liberalism was obliged by its expansion to develop a theory of war, which birthed the liberal interventionism of the 1990s. This would eventually run into the sand in Iraq, and latterly exit down the runway of Kabul airport, prompting revived interest in the realist framework.

Moscow's current attitude clearly has a constructivist dimension, not only in terms of Putin's ideas about Russia's historic role and the reality of Ukraine as an independent country, but also in a belief that the West looks down on Russia and is fundamentally malevolent. There is clearly a desire to humiliate the US and the EU as much as Ukraine's pro-Western government. Some of this can be attributed to blunders by the West, or more specifically the US, but it also points to a very real determination to block Russia's full integration into the first world order: to keep it as a second or even third-tier power in a unipolar world. The expansion of NATO in an essentially nominal manner (e.g. "tripwire" troop deployments in the Baltic states) was a liberal initiative intended to symbolically extend that order to Russia's borders but no futher. While this prompted a compensatory Eurasianism among some Russian thinkers, the main response was simple resentment at the all too obvious slight. This has been personalised by Western commentators as "the warped vision of one man", or as evidence of his "mental instability" and "sick political imagination". Such views are typical of a tradition that treats the rulers of Russia as all-powerful but prone to paranoid isolation and mania. This "personalism" avoids any realist engagement with Russia's actions - i.e. treating them as rationally self-interested and reflecting broader social forces than just the whims of the ruler. Instead, we end up with shallow psychoanalysis: a cross between old-style Kremlinology and a daytime TV inquisition.

It also plays into the liberal idea that international relations depends on cooperation at other levels within society: in other words, a form of soft decapitation strategy in which the head of state is bypassed and becomes little more than a figurehead, obliged to accept the international liberal order. This reached a peak in the 1990s when Boris Yeltsin (while actually laying the foundations of today's capitalist autocracy) became a parody of the disempowered and eccentric Tsar. From the perspective of Russians, this was deeply humiliating, but the shame arose not merely from Yeltsin's drunken incapacity but from the trashing of the economy during the years of shock-therapy and the failure to resist or moderate the West's interventions in the former Yuogslavia. It also became clear at this stage that Russia was being offered a particular development path that meant being held at arms-length by the West. The model of globalisation Russia was encouraged to adopt was based on a third world template: an extractive economy, dependent on foreign capital investment and imports, and vulnerable to the fluctuations of commodity markets and the predations of politically-connected criminals. It made some rich but it also rankled. In this context, NATO expansion was seen as part of a wider strategy of condescension and discipline.

Russia is poorer, more isolated and weaker than it should be given its history and resources (compare its trajectory with the other so-called BRICS, notably China and India). Some of this is self-inflicted, but much of it is down to the disaster capitalism of the 1990s and the subsequent inability, or lack of enthusiasm, to break away from the extractive economic model and invest sufficiently in its own productive and intellectual capital. It should not be forgotten that Putin came to power on a promise to end the chaos of that era. His realist offer of security was more compelling than the alternative offer of futher liberal adventure. While this has led to another era of stagnation, the liberal offer remains unattractive. Viewed from Russia, the liberal world is prone to financial crises and destabilising foreign interventions. The West's intentions do appear plausibly threatening - NATO has expanded and it and the EU have (perhaps carelessly) encouraged Ukraine and Georgia to believe that accession will happen. And we shouldn't ignore Putin's long-running campaign to paint the West as decadent - hence the instrumental homophobia, anti-feminism and Islamophobia that so thrills his rightwing Western admirers. While any resolution of the current crisis may require a strong dose of realism, it's important to recognise how much Russia sees international relations in ideational rather than material terms.

But the material remains important. We think of oligarchs as heading energy combines with murky origins, or having taken over factories in semi-criminal ways, but they're perhaps better thought of as a comprador class - i.e. as agents of international capital - taking a cut from imports as well as exports and facilitating foreign direct investment. This is one reason why they spend so much time in the world's financial centres. But despite being personally liberal in many cases, or at least happy to enjoy the fruits of a liberal society in their Italian Villas and London townhouses, the oligarchs aren't going to lead a bourgeois revolution against Putin precisely because their comprador status depends on the maintenance of the current economic model. The revolutionary class in Russia today is arguably the domestic middle class that formed after the recovery in 2000, who lack accessible foreign assets but have become dependent on foreign imported goods and so are vulnerable to exchange rate fluctuations. These are the people trying to withdraw dollars and euros from Russian banks this week. The urban working class and pensioners bore the brunt of the shock therapy of the 1990s, but they are less exposed in today's economy because basic needs can still be supplied domestically in rubles. 

If Putin is to be challenged, it will come about through the anxiety of the class most likely to suffer from continuing economic sanctions by the West because of their restricted buying power. The Russian Central Bank can potentially hold out for a long time if oil and gas revenues (which aren't currently affected by the SWIFT embargo) continue to provide a flow of foreign exchange to offset frozen foreign assets, but the middle class will struggle to maintain their living standards in the face of rising prices for imported goods and high interest rates on mortgages and bank loans. This is also the class most likely to welcome a liberal future and thus urge a compromise with the West. The internal opposition to Putin, which coalesced around the mercurial Alexi Navalny, is a contradictory mix of a working class that wants protection from neoliberalism (which it identifies with the 1990s), a growing middle class that would happily embrace it (and which identifies it with the relative prosperity of Eastern European members of the EU), and an elite layer imbricated with the oligarchs and the upper classes of the media and culture that remains pro-capital and unenthusiastic about reducing inequality (e.g. by introducing progressive taxation).

But just as the domestic opposition to Putin is fragmented and largely incoherent (repression and the corruption of Putin's inner circle have been the unifying factors), so the West hasn't presented a consistent front. This isn't simply a matter of the hypocrisy (or realpolitik, if you prefer) of Western leaders first cultivating Putin after the Second Chechen War and then admonishing him over Georgia and Crimea. Nor is it just about the different attitudes in the European Union correlating with dependency on Russian gas imports. More fundamentally it reflects the tension between the realist and liberal worldviews and their internal contradictions. For example, this week we have seen liberals eulogising Ukraine as a bastion of democracy but also demanding that NATO impose a no-fly zone at the risk of triggering a nuclear exchange on its territory: the perpetual peace of the grave. Meanwhile, realists have not been shy in blaming NATO, the EU and Ukraine for allowing the Minsk Agreements to curdle, yet seem almost blasé at the prospect of a massive increase in German military spending and the EU becoming a military actor.  

The left is divided on Ukraine. Though this has been portrayed by both media participants on the left (e.g. Paul Mason and George Monbiot) and critics on the right as a division between the instinctively anti-American (to the point of dismissing some of them as neo-Stalinist "tankies") and those demanding solidarity in support of national self-determination (in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky), it is better seen as a more straightforward divide between liberals and realists. This isn't new. The left has always had this tension, founded on a materialism that bends towards realism and an idealism that bends towards the revolutionary and utopian urges of Kantian liberalism. The divide is perhaps more evident in the US than in the UK, the latter discourse being polluted by the opportunism of the current Labour leadership in labelling any call for peace a one-sided attack on NATO and grounds for expulsion. Ben Wallace-Wells describes the opposition to the liberal school in the US as "composed of China hawks, doctrinaire realists, anti-imperialists, and people exhausted by the forever wars. ... Their sensibility is tragic rather than romantic, and they come together conditionally, declaring all the while how much they can’t stand one another." The point is not merely the heterogeneity but the idea that an ecumenical realism is being constructed in opposition to the liberal orthodoxy.

That comment about the tragic and the romantic captures something essential about realism and liberalism respectively: the one pessimistic, the other optimistic (note the Gramscian echo). But the paradox is that it is optimism and romanticism on the part of the West that has led to disaster in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. This isn't because, as thinkers such as John Gray would have it, liberalism in international affairs (or neoliberalism more broadly) is a teleological mania whose roots lie in 1789. If it were, NATO would now be approaching the gates of Kyiv just as it would have entered the gates of Damascus ten years ago. In reality, the US remains fundamentally realist in its outlook despite the liberal rhetoric. This is most obvious in its dealings with China and the wider Asia-Pacific arena. The truth is that there are certain parts of the world where the liberal worldview can be indulged, even through to strategic failure, simply because the consequences are limited (the War on Terror has produced relatively few casualties in the West while boosting the security state and military-industrial complex). Ukraine sits on the conceptual boundary between the liberal and realist worlds, and is further complicated by a constructivist adversary, which makes liberal adventurism too risky (though it also suggests the conflict will be contained).

Though the different schools of international relations seek to explain the world, we should also recognise that they have an instrumental value: that they are tools for changing the world. As the global hegemon, the US will employ both realist and liberal perspectives to suit the circumstances (you could even map this onto the Gramscian framework of the war of manoeuvre and the war of position). In Europe it remains liberal, in the Pacific it remains realist. Likewise, China will always bias towards realism. It does not share the idealism of the West, which reflects both its cultural chauvinism and a historically-conditioned respect for non-interference. While some commentators have worried that NATO's unwillingness to intervene militarily in Ukraine will embolden China in respect of Taiwan, it should be obvious that the Chinese dismay at Russia's actions suggests a healthy realism about the dangers of destabilisation (also, China has never swayed in its belief that Taiwan will eventually be reunited, but it remains, for now, strategically patient, as it was with Hong Kong). Russia is likely to remain imbued with a constructivist viewpoint because material reality hinders its ambition to operate as a global power within a realist framework, while its domestic politics will, short of a coup or revolution, stymie the adoption of a liberal perspective. 

As for the European Union, the epochal actions this week have been Germany's decisions on military expenditure and gas supplies, and the extension of the European Central Bank's disciplinary tools from EU member states to foreign states - a hybrid approach that shows its evolution from a purely liberal regime towards one with a new realist appreciation. It is likely that we will see an increasing congruence between the EU and NATO, which will suit the US, and the emergence of the idea that membership of the union entails security guarantees and corresponding obligations. In the UK, membership of NATO has this week clearly become a substitute for membership of the EU among the liberal political class. In other words, it has stopped being thought of in purely realist terms - we need to contain Germany in Europe and support the US globally so that they will support us locally - and has instead become the vehicle for a continuing idealist project on the continent. For some, which includes both Keir Starmer and Paul Mason, this is a transparent attempt to cleave to the EU, even if they might differ on operations outside of Europe in support of the US. For a disturbingly large number of liberals, it has revived dreams of regime change.

A Return to Class

The New Statesman has started to show a greater interest in leftwing thought since 2019, which might appear paradoxical given its clear support for Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party. This has also coincided with a turnover in contributors that has seen more varied voices - such as Rory Scothorne and Richard Seymour - added to the roster, though it has also seen the conventional if occasionally astute Stephen Bush recently replaced as Political Editor by the even more conventional and invariably obtuse Andrew Marr. Its foreign affairs coverage, which is what the establishment ultimately cares most about, remains decidely Atlanticist, whether in the form of Jeremy Cliffe's eurocentrism or Paul Mason's nostalgic social democracy. So what is going on? Are these tentative steps towards the left a recognition that the paper alienated many of its readers by its often hysterical opposition to Jeremy Corbyn? Or is this an attempt to confine the left to arid discourse, well away from the levers of power, as was the case in the 1990s? 

These respectively material and cynical explanations are plausible, but I think there's a case to be made for another: that this is part of a wider war of position that complements Starmer's war of manoeuvre. That doesn't mean promoting leftwing thought but absorbing it into a hegemonic project. A current example of this is provided in an interview with the communist academic, Jodi Dean, centred on her 2019 book, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. It's significant that the interviewer, Freddie Hayward, references the first part of that title but not the second. Dean's position is that organic political identity - the recognition of one's own oppression as a woman or an ethnic minority - can distract from a political belonging that has to be painstakingly constructed. But Hayward reinterprets this to mean that identity politics is a dead-end that undermines class politics, rather than a stage in a process of growing political consciousness (in Marx's famous formulation, towards a class for itself). The central premise of the article is that the left (never precisely defined) is divided by "arguments about race and gender" (again, assumed rather than explained or exemplified). 

In fact, Dean's argument is a more subtle one: that "communicative capitalism" - i.e. modernity and the way that self-actualisation has been commodified through new media - leads to the over-valuation of the personal and emotional over the collective and the rational. At heart, hers is an intersectional argument, not unlike Bernie Sanders' point in 2016 that being a woman was not enough - that class solidarity matters too. But you'd easily come away from the article with the suspicion that Dean didn't think much of Black Lives Matter or the Gender Recognition Act. You also have to put Dean's arguments into the context of a longer tradition dating from the 1980s that deplored the postmodern (or "post-Marxist", in the contemporary terminology) turn away from class analysis. This turn was seen less as the product of new technology or academic fashion than as the result of neoliberal hegemony. A notable example was Ellen Meiksins Wood's 1986 work, The Retreat from Class, which took issue with the intellectual tendency, exemplified by Marxism Today in the UK, to substitute a progressive universalism for class politics, something that appeared particularly questionable against the backdrop of the miners' strike.

The change between Meiksins Wood and Dean concerns the way that the neoliberal dream of a progressive universalism advanced by free markets and personal choice has been undermined, not only by imperial projects such as Iraq and Afghanistan but by the steady growth of inequality, the looming threat of climate change and the recrudescence of national chauvinism and xenophobia. In the conclusion of her book, Meiksins Wood quotes Michael Ignatieff (whom she describes as "the darling of the British literary press, their favourite repentant socialist and resident progressive") from a New Statesman article of December 1984, entitled Strangers and Comrades: "What the Left needs is a language of national unity expressed as commitment to fellowship among strangers. We need a language of trust built upon a practice of social comradeship". As subsequent history has shown, not least Ignatieff's political career, the use of "comrade" was about diluting class solidarity into a civic nationalism (the UK Labour Party's current appeals to patriotism show that this project continues). In contrast, Dean's use of the term is about surfacing class interests against the distractions of national identity as much as fragmented social identity.

Hayward doesn't mention Ellen Meiksins Wood but he does mention Mark Fisher whose 2013 essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle, he summarises as rejecting "identitarianism", but without explaining that Fisher's beef was more precisely with "bourgeois modes of subjectivity" and the "moralism" that this gives rise to (in other words, a well-established critique of liberalism) rather than identity politics tout court. Of course, many of Fisher's contemporaries made the same mistake and promptly formed a firing squad. Just as Meiksins Wood's analysis should not be divorced from its context in the repression of the organised working class in the mid-80s, so Fisher's lament reflected his frustrations with the anticapitalist protests that culminated in the Occupy movement, which he castigated for its unwillingness to organise and embrace power: "Because the anti-capitalist movements that have arisen since the 90s have ultimately done nothing, they have caused capital no concern at all — it has been so easy to route around them. Part of the reason for that is the fact that they have taken place out on the street, ignoring the politics of the workplace and of the everyday."

This was too pessimistic an analysis by Fisher. The contemporary context for Dean's book, published before Labour's 2019 defeat and the end of Bernie Sanders' second presidential nomination campaign, was of a resurgent left that was busy organising (and compromising) within the established centre-left parties and union movements of both the UK and US. In other words, there has been a conscious move by the left towards power, even allowing for the periodic recourse to emblematic street protest, such as Black Lives Matter marches and the toppling of statues, and this move has been marked by both a theoretical and a practical revival of class politics: from a push to get more working class (and female and minority) representatives in legislatures to fights for union recognition and a new workplace militancy. The context of Hayward's article, in contrast, is the steady black-balling of the left on both sides of the Atlantic, with Labour members expelled on the flimsiest of pretexts, or disciplined into silence, and the Democrat left marginalised by the party machine.

Amusingly, Hayward's article has two tags: communism and Dominic Cummings. The latter appears in the introduction purely in order to lever in a (slighting) reference to Jacques Lacan that in turn serves to allow Hayward to characterise the left as subject to a Lacanian "drive" - i.e. the repetitive circling around an object of desire that cannot give full satisfaction. This is pretty shallow pyschology that simply reframes the traditional dismissal of the left as unrealistic and obsessive. It also seeks to shift responsibility for what Hayward calls the left's "recent impotence" onto its own shortcomings and away from the resistance and sabotage of the political centre. For example, "The Labour Party seems to enjoy endlessly arguing about its failures more than ruthlessly focusing on success. Conflicts over the legacy of Jeremy Corbyn and the disaster of the 2019 general election are filled with such passion you can’t help but sense a whiff of jouissance." 

This might appear a general criticism of the party except that the constant harping on about failure (and the studied amnesia over relative success, such as 2017) has been a characteristic of the party right more than the left in recent years. For them, the answer to every "disaster", real or imagined, is a further move to the right, even to the point of outflanking the Tories. In reality, the left recognised that there would be no Corbyn legacy two years ago when Starmer began to renege on his promise to build on it. Inasmuch as the left engaged in bitter recrimination after the 2019 defeat, it centred on the questions of whether more could have been done to cement its advance organisationally and whether a better Brexit policy was ever possible. Both were examples of a pragmatic perspective on power rather than the utopian delusion or self-indulgence with which the left is routinely charged by its critics.

In part Hayward is borrowing Dean's ideas on communicative capitalism to further damn social media as an antisocial development that breeds solipsism. So far, so typical of his profession. But his emphasis on the recovery of class politics, while simultaneously approving of nominally left parties that "have distanced themselves from the socialism of the past", presents something of a conundrum. This is clearly more than an attempt to hold the demands of identity politics at bay. It has a positive as much as a negative element to it. So what is Hayward arguing for? The answer appears to be a return to Labour's traditional economism, though in the more explicitly pro-business guise introduced by New Labour, thus: "Until the left refocuses on the economy as opposed to culture, Dean says, the inequalities that identity politics highlights are going to persist." That's not actually what Dean says. As a Marxist, she is very clear that the issue is ultimately the ownership of the means of production, not the fantastic object that we call the economy. This explains why an article on class finds no space for the role of trade unions, let alone more radical ideas such as workers' control. 

Living With Woke

A striking aspect of Oliver Dowden's speech to the Heritage Foundation think-tank in Washington on Monday was the employment of tropes familiar from the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus the Guardian tells us that "The Tory chairman has denounced what he claims is a “painful woke psychodrama” sweeping the west and sapping its confidence", and that "He claimed “woke” ideology was now “everywhere”." According to ITV, Dowden sees it as being pervasive in public life: "It’s in our universities, but also in our schools. In government bodies, but also in corporations. In social science faculties, but also in the hard sciences". Apparently the only safe space is the private home, but he isn't advocating lockdown, let alone inoculation. Consistent with the rightwing turn against Covid restrictions, the impeccably Thatcherite Dowden advocates a more robust celebration of freedom: "Conservatives themselves must find the confidence to mount a vigorous defence of the values of a free society". In the spririt of the Iron Lady they should "proclaim our beliefs in the wonderful creativity of the human spirit, in the rights of property and the rule of law and in the extraordinary fruitfulness of enterprise and trade".

It would be easy to dismiss this as playing to the audience. Conservative politicians from Churchill onwards have been happy to indulge the transatlantic view of the wider world as essentially decadent and a danger to the American way of life, with the UK as its sole reliable international partner, bound by deep cultural ties. Dowden isn't the first, and won't be the last, British politician to opine that "we are joined by the same fundamental values", or to cultivate the Heritage Foundation. But it's also true that these speeches have provided a vector whereby a more hysterical American interpretation can be injected into the British political bloodstream. Hence the tone of existential dread in the following, which strikes British ears as over-the-top but is routine in American conservative (and centrist) discourse: "We risk a collapse in resolve. If all we hear is that our societies are monstrous, unjust, oppressive why on earth would anyone fight to sustain them?" It came as no surprise to see a flurry of supportive comment pieces in the rightwing press, albeit translated into the more mocking British vernacular. 

But I'm not convinced it means the Tories are about to go big on the "culture wars" in any practical sense, as they once did with Section 28, though there will no doubt be symbolic moves, thus "our Conservative government in the United Kingdom is legislating to protect free speech on campus". The departure of Munira Mirza as a Number 10 advisor has been interpreted - correctly, in my view - as evidence that Boris Johnson intends to tack towards a more conventional Tory line on policy, whether in respect of tax (no more increases and future cuts to be pencilled in), public investment (the levelling-up plan looks dead on arrival) or social policy (more crackdowns on crime are promised in a bidding war with the opposition). That doesn't mean abandoning the rhetorical culture wars, let alone the needless antagonism of the university sector ("We will stop the sinister phenomenon of academics or students who offend left wing orthodoxies being censored or harassed"), but it does suggest that the revolutionary phase of the Johnson administration, with its dreams of a libertarian assault on liberalism's sacred cows, is all over bar the shouting.

Instead, it appears the intention is to leverage the rhetoric for party political advantage, e.g. claiming in the words of Dowden that Labour "has got woke running through it like a stick of Brighton rock" (an odd choice of metaphor for an American audience). This is partly an acknowledgement of the sterling work that Starmer and Reeves have done in assuring reactionary voters that they are on their side. Countering this move by the Labour leadership onto Tory territory requires a ratcheting-up of ad hominem attacks, and in this context Johnson's Savile slur was quite calculating, however much it offended centrist propriety. In this escalation, there is an inevitable focus on the sociology (and thus the questionable authenticity and integrity) of the Labour Party. According to Dowden, "The UK joined Nato under a Labour prime minister. And, when Left-wing parties were dominated by working people, rather than professional activists, they were just as patriotic as their conservative opponents. Sadly, the Left has abandoned the field. Its leaders are either too weak to stand up for our own common values or worse than that, they've embraced the doctrine of woke themselves". Starmer's I-heart-NATO interventions last week now seem knowingly pre-emptive, while Angela Rayner's embrace of shoot-to-kill this week looks like over-reaction.

The suspicion that this is a foretaste of electioneering to come is reinforced by the parallels Dowden draws with international relations, and thus implicitly with patriotism. For example, "Rogue states are seeking to challenge the international order. And at the precise point when our resolve ought to be strongest, a pernicious new ideology is sweeping our societies". The enemy within is lined up with the cross-hairs: "Just when our attention should be fixed on external foes we seem to have entered a period of extreme introspection and self-criticism, that threatens to sap our societies of their self-confidence. Just when we should be showcasing the vitality of our values and the strength of democratic societies, we seem to be willing to abandon those values, for the sake of appeasing a new groupthink". Dowden names the enemy as "social justice warriors" pursuing a "form of Maoism", though he's also careful to note that the enemy is multi-faceted and cunning: "It goes by many names". Perhaps your own children have been infected? Perhaps they would benefit from a posting to Ukraine's frontline?

This is obviously an absurd strawman, but a shadowy conspiracy with distinctly alien characteristics is not just the recycling of the classic antisemitic trope, it is also employs the form of the classic anticommunist trope in which the enemy is potentially everywhere and we are all vulnerable to brainwashing. That in turn reminds us that these tropes themselves were heavily influenced by older ideas about the spread of disease and its relationship to vice and virtue: the plague as the judgement of God on a world of sinners; the danger of the Bolshevik pandemic becoming a global pandemic through "useful idiots" (the phrase is often attributed to Lenin but appears to originate at the start of the Cold War in the late-40s). Just as racial integrity and the quarantine of the Ghetto were the defence against the Jew, so constant vigilance and (in an Orwellian irony) the policing of language was necessary to prevent the spread of the Communist bacillus. Resistance to "wokery", like "political correctness" before it, is a species of anticommunism. The absence of any unifying woke theory, despite the myth of Cultural Marxism, is no more problematic than the fact that neither Russia nor China is plausibly communist, or the idea that LGBTQI+ campaigners are in league with Muslim reactionaries.

The limited press pushback against the speech has focused on the questionable funding and advocacy of the Heritage Foundation, or it has accepted many of the premises ("there is an issue with cancel culture and an intolerance of views outside rather limited parameters") but also raised the spectre of rightwing populism. The connection between Dowden's conception of freedom's enemies and the pandemic restrictions has been overlooked. This is an opportunity for Labour, but one that they have predictably missed, despite their broadly careful and considered approach to the pandemic (the chief error being the early haste on reopening schools). That the Conservatives seem keener to protect society from the imaginary threat of "cancel culture" than from the very real threat of Covid-19 is surely worth mentioning, not least because it addresses popular concerns. The percentage of the population that care about the culture wars is actually tiny, and few of those who believe in the reality of "woke mobs" are likely to be swing voters. Instead, Labour seems committed to a campaign directed against its own version of the enemy within, namely antisocial elements and the left, and a small group of foreigners who have brought sickness to this island, namely Russian oligarchs.

The obvious question that any politician or journalist should be asking the Conservative Party Chairman is: If you think we should get used to living with Covid-19, why shouldn't we also get used to living with the woke? If an endemic disease, killing a few thousand more people a year than would otherwise die, is something we should tolerate, why should we be worried about a social tendency to be more sympathetic towards disadvantaged groups and to cultivate greater self-awareness? How many is that likely to kill or leave with chronic illness? Put like that, Dowden's concerns are obviously ridiculous, but why shouldn't it be put like that? One reason is that a sense of proportion runs counter to the very nature of our politics and media, in which claims of seriousness by "grown ups" barely masks the hysteria and irrationalism. But the reason this frothing nonsense is tolerated is that it reflects a more general human desire to avoid reality. Far too many of us would rather be angry at imaginary enemies than have to face the real threats of the world, such as climate change. We will accept creeping death and distract ourselves by fulminating against people's choice of pronoun.

Decadent Protest

The baiting of Keir Starmer and David Lammy on Victoria Embankment on Monday provided a spectacle open to multiple interpretations. The easiest, and laziest, was that this was all the fault of a local man, a certain Mr Johnson of 10 Downing Street, who has been spreading lies about the Labour Leader's negligence when he was Director of Public Prosecutions. A more hysterical reaction was the claim that this was a "hate mob", despite the fact that the chief interlocutor, from the Resistance GB conspiracy group (whose video has now been signal-boosted by the mainstream media), addressed the Labour Leader respectfully as "Mister Starmer" and asked questions ranging from the party's "failure to represent the working man" to the case of Julian Assange. Though some in the background were shouting "traitor" and "nonce", no arrests were made. My own guess is that the Opposition Leader and Shadow Foreign Secretary were walking back to the Palace of Westminster from the Ministry of Defence in Horse Guards Avenue, presumably having received a briefing on Ukraine. That Starmer subsequently gave an interview to the Times, in which he lauded NATO and Ernest Bevin, and authored an article in the Guardian, in which he labelled the left as fellow-travellers of the UK's enemies, is suggestive.

An even more hyperbolic reaction to the spectacle was Paul Mason's claim in The New Statesman that this is Fascism (specifically that the Savile slur is a "fascist libel"), though as he's got a book out called How to Stop Fascism, I suspect there's some self-interested exaggeration in the mix. What caught my eye in Mason's fulmination was the claim that the spectacle itself is an innovation that can be attributed to the Johnson era: "The existence of a small, semi-permanent fascist mob around Westminster is one of the innovations history will associate with the Johnson era. So is the total failure of the Metropolitan Police to deal with it." The second sentence is important because it indicates that Mason's critique comes from the left, hence the concern that not only is a senior politician enabling Fascism but that the Met is indifferent at best and complicit at worst. He goes on to say: "The police force that charged into a crowd of black teenagers on horseback, and which floored women mourning the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021, cannot seem to bring itself to arrest people engaged — live, proud and on camera — in threatening words and behaviour against left-wing politicians."

I suspect "history" will be more interested in the growth of semi-permanent protest in Parliament Square, irrespective of its ideological colouring, since the start of the century. It is little remembered now but the makeshift peace camp set up by Brian Haw in 2001 was originally a protest against the  punitive sanctions imposed on Iraq. This predated not only the 2003 invasion of that country but even the 9/11 attacks in the US, which would be used, along with spurious claims about WMD, to justify that invasion and all the human and material waste that followed in its wake. In 2005, the Labour government passed the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which placed restrictions on protests within a kilometre of the Palace of Westminster. In 2011, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government passed the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act, which defined a series of prohibited activities in the vicinity of Parliament that effectively outlawed the peace camp and similar semi-permanent fixtures.

Since then, we've seen a series of more fluid protests taking place around Westminster. Unlike the large-scale gatherings of yore, in which sheer numbers were necessary to attract any sort of media coverage, these have tended to attract smaller numbers but be more broadly viewed through videos disseminated via social media, bypassing the traditional channels who can only play catch-up by both literally and figuratively embedding the video in their own narrative. The ambush of Keir Starmer reflects the merging of the interrogative style of traditional media (i.e. striding up Whitehall with a microphone under the nose of a reluctant politician) with the flash-mob of social media, a process that has been under way since the EU referendum. Occasionally these protests attract larger crowds, as in the Black Lives Matter march and counter-protests ("save our statues") in 2020, but most of them remain spectacles that employ the mannerisms of traditional media (the shouted question, the chase, the almost comically fast walking), such as the badgering and insulting of high-profile remainer MPs in 2019 and now of Starmer.

Pace Mason, the move of the far-right spectacle to the Westminster stage probably doesn't indicate the advance of Fascism. In the UK is appears to reflect a decline in numbers as a standalone movement, or at least a decline in the ability to get numbers out on the street for explicitly far-right protests. Contrary to liberal media panics, far-right material circulated online can have a demobilising effect, leading supporters to become passive spectators, a process encouraged by the desire of many far-right provocateurs to monetise their fame via YouTube and other channels. As a result, the UK far-right is now piggybacking on other causes, such as anti-vax and anti-restriction protests, which both helps obscure its limited numbers and provides (some) opportunities for recruitment. This in turn confirms that the strategy of aggressive protests in Asian areas against "grooming gangs", which was favoured by both the BNP and EDL, has failed. The turn to the spectacle of Westminster is the strategy of a group that has given up on building a mass movement. 

For this reason I am also sceptical of the claims of those on the left, such as David Osland, who imagine that the changing social composition of Westminster protest is the harbinger of a new far-right threat: "The left behind have finally reached Westminster. Britain now has a permanently-constituted heap of accumulated social detritus that a serious figure on the right could set ablaze." It's too reductive to imagine that protests of old were mostly leftwing and middle-class - a characterisation that served the "anywheres" narrative of David Goodhart - while contemporary protests lean towards the native and rightwing - the corresponding "somewheres" of that narrative. The reality is that protest has always attracted a mixed bag. Brian Haw was neither middle-class nor particularly leftwing (his commitment to peace sprang from a Christian evangelical background). In contrast, much of the anti-vax movement today is clearly middle-class, having a significant overlap with anti-MMR protestors, while the leading champions against Covid-19 restrictions are Tory MPs. These aren't the left behind.

I think this point generalises. For example, my impression of last year's US Capitol riot, and also of this year's Ottawa truckers blockade and anti-vax protests in Auckland, is of a movement that is decadent rather than ascendant. While the number of participants has been significant - probably over 2,000 in the case of the Capitol riot - the turn towards symbolic protests against the national legislature suggests not that there is a desire to supersede the state any more but an intent (more in hope than expectation) to capture it. This could be attributed to the way Donald Trump has essentially taken over the American far-right and diverted it in his own interests, both financial and political ("Stop the steal" abuses the system but does not seek to overthrow it), but it also suggests a shift towards an agonistic theory of politics that is mirrored in the employment of protest forms more usually associated with the left: the march on the seat of power, the demand for change, the inevitable anticlimax. This is a significant departure from the US right's tradition of secession, states rights and the empowerment of militias, all of which emphasised the rejection of the federal state. 

To return to the UK. The evolution of far-right protest into a series of media spectacles that mimic the behaviour of the mainstream press has both structural and cultural drivers. By trying to outlaw protest in the vicinity of Westminster, while simultaneously needing to allow the operating methods of the fourth estate, the leading political parties have channeled the far-right into the form of media gadflys. This is why Tommy Robinson has been posing as a journalist. But that pose is made easier because of the style of the British press, which is accusatory, insulting and prone to smears. Just as Trump's pollution of the American body politic can be seen from another perspective as a process by which the establishment has absorbed the far-right into the political system, so the UK far-right's reinvention as a extreme version of British tabloid journalism can be seen as their absorption into the politico-media ecology. That there exists a clear pathway between the extreme right and the mainstream, via the likes of Guido Fawkes, GBNews and the Spectator, is evidence enough of the potential this gives rise to, but let's not imagine this is a new danger. Our politicians have been pandering to the far-right for decades and it doesn't appear that they intend to change, not least Keir Starmer. The decadent protest mirrors our decadent politics.

Déjà Vu

I haven't spotted a Downfall parody yet, but it's surely only a matter of time. The media has been awash for weeks with tired metaphors of a nautical nature to explain the Prime Ministers's predicament - holed below the waterline, rats leaving a sinking ship, lame duck etc - but that says more about the politico-media caste's lack of imagination (the ship of state goes all the way back to Plato, after all) than the reality of Boris Johnson's position. Even the sight of Bruno Ganz's Hitler railing against Dominic Cummings and Munira Mirza would be clichéd, but at least it would make a change. The premise of the media is that Johnson is fatally damaged and his departure from office is a question of when not if. But I wonder if this judgement is premature. Indeed, I wonder why the very journalists who oversaw his rise to power seem to have wiped his history of cyclical scandal and recovery from their collective memory. Johnson's career reads like a reworking of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall in which the protagonist is Captain Grimes ("in the soup again") rather than the naif Paul Pennyfeather, while the current shenanigans at Downing Street inevitably bring Vile Bodies to mind. There is a recurrent pattern to this history that can best be understood by considering Johnson's time as Mayor of London.

The blond beast's victory in the 2008 London Mayoralty election owed much to the mobilisation of voters in the Tory-leaning outer boroughs. His pitch to them was based on a combination of resentments: the supposed privileging of the inner boroughs by Ken Livingstone, the incumbent Mayor, particularly in respect of public transport; and the prominence of what would latterly be known as "woke" concerns, such as Livingstone's vocal support for LGBTQ+ rights and black community groups. This was augmented by a strident campaign in the media, with the Evening Standard to the fore, that sought to paint the newt-fancier as a menace to society. Notable examples of this were the emphasis on knife crime (though crime overall was falling), the fuss over the oil-for-advice deal with Venezuela (used as a vector to revisit the GLC's "loony left" internationalism), and flimsy accusations of antisemitism in which the hyperbole of the Board of Deputies and the Guardian would establish something of a template. Though he didn't use the term, what Johnson had promised the outer boroughs was levelling-up, while his pitch to centrists across the capital was the replacement of Livingstone's radical regime with a convivial liberalism in which his own well-documented libertinism was the guarantee of tolerance. 

Despite the substantial policy achievements of Livingstone over the eight years of his mayoralty, the 2008 election was largely conducted as a popularity contest between a prickly leftist with a history of rebellion against the Labour Party machine (he stood as an independent in 2000 after Blair stitched up the candidate selection contest, only being readopted by the party in 2004) and a media personality who was admired precisely because he wasn't too serious and who enjoyed grudging support beyond the ideological limits of the Conservative Party in London (where stardust was traditionally in short supply and its policies were often viciously anti-working class, e.g. under Shirley Porter in the Borough of Westminster). Livingstone regarded Johnson as a formidable opponent because of his populist manner and the media's decision to largely ignore his track-record of lying on the job, both as a journalist and an MP, and treat his messy private life as a joke rather than a fitness-for-office test. In this environment, Livingstone's attempts to call Johnson out on his racist and homophobic past statements had little effect. 

Johnson's approach to the role of Mayor was heavily influenced by his desire to avoid work, leading to him appointing multiple deputies to focus on the individual components of the job, such as policing, transport and planning. Where Livingstone typically had a single deputy, Johnson typically had six. On taking office, Johnson sacked most of the senior City Hall staff associated with the Livingstone era and brought in his own people, however he was also careful not to allow any one individual to become dominant, notably sidelining Tim Parker, an accomplished businessman and his initial choice of first deputy, within weeks. Though he reversed some of Livingstone's high-profile policies, such as the Venezuela oil deal and the expansion of the congestion charging zone, he mostly continued projects started or mooted in prior years, particularly those that entailed self-aggrandising press opportunities, such as Crossrail, the 2012 Olympics and what became known as the "Boris Bike" scheme. He did take a new broom approach to the Metropolitan Police, forcing the resignation of Ian Blair as Commissioner following criticism over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, however we was routinely supportive thereafter, notably over the death of Ian Tomlinson.

Apart from some crowd-pleasing gestures such as the New Routemaster bus (which proved to be something of an anticlimax on arrival), and crowd-baffling ones such as the single-stop cable car between Greenwich and the Royal Docks, his first stint as Mayor was marked less by policy initiatives or organisational novelty than by gaffes, complaints about the inadequacy of his salary and the fathering of another lovechild. This highlighted the extent to which a generally supportive media found itself running critical or even outright negative stories for want of anything better, a dynamic evident throughout Johnson's career (witness his underwhelming stint as Foreign Secretary). He was criticised for not curtailing a family holiday when the 2011 riots broke out, for the appointment of cronies to various plum jobs, and for a number of expenses scandals involving him and his staff. The overall impression, which hardly came as a surprise to longtime observers of the man, was of a louche regime of metropolitan chums who considered themselves exempt from the normal standards of public life and whose monuments, such as they were, predominantly benefited the inner boroughs. 

Johnson was a staunch supporter of the City throughout the financial crisis, and also of Rupert Murdoch during the phone-hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson Inquiry. This was repaid with financial and press support for his re-election in the 2012 contest in which Ken Livingstone was once more the Labour Party candidate. Johnson's campaign, informed as in 2008 by Lynton Crosby, was highly personalised, dismissing Livingstone as yesterday's man (not without justification by this point) and accusing him of tax dodging: a dubious claim (Livingstone pointed out his tax affairs were no different to Johnson's) but one that dominated much of the media coverage, along with another antisemitism scare against the former Mayor. Though his winning margin over Livingstone was reduced, Johnson was re-elected. His second term in office was notable for not much at all, outside of his zip-wire antics at the Olympics. He even had time to write a biography of Churchill and indulge his interest in IT with Jennifer Arcuri. There was a sense he was getting bored. Even his famed liberalism was starting to crack, as when he bought some second-hand water cannon in 2014, only to have their use banned by the flinty-hearted Home Secretary, Theresa May.

If you're the sort of person who reads this sort of blog, little of the above will be news. My purpose here is not to convince you that Boris Johnson is a lazy, conniving egotist but to note the recurring features of his career: his shamelessness, his symbiotic relationship with the press, and his desire to be the centre of attention. From his earliest days, he has been indulged and given preferential treatment. He has been over-promoted into journalistic and political roles that he invariably sabotages through indolence, deceit and sexual incontinence. Yet he also manages to hang on well beyond the point where most people would have been dismissed. The very fact that he has been sacked on multiple occasions is evidence not of his incompetence but of a lack of shame: he isn't the resigning type. He won't take a hint, or even an ultimatum, as Michael Howard discovered. Those imagining both that Tory MPs will have the integrity to unseat him and that he will read the room and go without a fight are ignoring history. He is probably the only Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher who could split the party, and unlike her may be tempted to do so.

His shamelessness is reinforced by his close supporters: the admiring cronies and hangers-on, the self-interested advisors (many of who, like Cummings and Mirza, apparently thought they could use him more than he used them), and above all the media. The role of the press in this is ambivalent for reasons I've already touched upon: that when the good news stories dry up, they are reluctantly drawn to the perennial scandals about his moral failings. The normally mutualistic symbiosis becomes temporarily parasitic. This is something that his idol Churchill experienced too, at various times, which leads me to suspect that Johnson isn't dismayed by the current turn against him and will simply bide his time. He knows the press will come back onside well ahead of the next election, and he also knows that his rivals for the party leadership are reluctant to become Prime Minister during a cost of living crisis when all they can deliver is bad news on the economy. A leadership challenge is more likely in 2023, assuming a spring 2024 general election, but by then partygate will be stale news.

Johnson's Jimmy Savile slur against Keir Starmer is a repeat of the tactic that worked so well in 2012 when he slurred Livingstone, but it's also a message to Tory backbenchers that he is up for a fight with both Labour and any possible party leadership contenders. In contrasting Starmer's supposed inaction over Savile with the CPS's prosecution of journalists, Johnson is also telling the latter that it is time to return to the mutualistic mode, and we shouldn't underestimate the desire of the Tory press to do so and focus on the Labour leader's shortcomings. Johnson appears to subscribe to Oscar Wilde's dictum that "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about". While the liberal media, with the pearl-clutching Guardian and Observer to the fore, thunder about standards in public life and his unfitness for office, the truth is that they're simply giving over the bulk of their political coverage to him, yet again. Labour's oscillation in the polls reflects the latest turn in the Johnson saga, not popular satisfaction that Rachel Reeves has ruled out nationalising utilities.

It would obviously be foolish to predict the future course of events too confidently. Johnson's career has had moments when he ended up flat on the canvas, notably after he withdrew from the Conservative Party leadership contest in 2016, and eventually one of these will see him counted out, but the current moment doesn't feel like that. What it feels like is 2011, when Johnson's popularity in London fell in the wake of the riots but then recovered in time to see him re-elected the following year. His period as Prime Minister has obvious echoes of his time as Mayor. Though he initially succeeded to the office by means of a party coup, the election of 2019 was based on a programme that emphasised the periphery's contempt for the centre. It was pushed over the line by an indulgent media and the preference of centrists for stopping a leftwinger (even at the cost of a hard Brexit). Since then, his time in office has been distinguished by a lack of drive, backbiting and jockeying among his staff and coterie, and a series of scandals in which the common elements have been cronyism and a disregard for the rules.  

While the pandemic has taken up much of the government's bandwidth, the lack of progress on levelling-up, trade and Northern Ireland points to a regime with few aims beyond self-preservation. Michael Gove's white paper is a long-winded admission that the government has no new ideas, let alone new money. Liz Truss's eulogies to global trade may enthuse Conservative party members but for most voters the reality is increasingly expensive shopping baskets. Meanwhile, Brandon Lewis has all but washed his hands of Northern Ireland as the DUP seeks to void the EU protocol negotiated and subsequently disdained by the Conservative government. Assuming no change in party leadership before the general election, Johnson will not have as easy a ride in the media as he enjoyed against Livingstone and Corbyn (though we all know there are more slurs to come about Starmer's history in respect of grooming gangs). Yet despite all this, self-preservation may still be an achievable goal, if only because it is Johnson's sole focus. Never underestimate the power of rampant egoism.