Last year, I said that I didn’t think it mattered which way the US election went. Trump, I said, would claim victory regardless of circumstance: he would either perpetrate the kind of electoral fraud that he spent four years accusing the Democrats of perpetrating against him, or else he would seize power in an actual coup. Either way, there would be a kind of civil war, and the UK would have to decide which side to support.
I now see that this was a comforting fantasy on my part. I wanted to believe that although Trump would certainly win, he would not win legitimately. That would have allowed me to say that the Prime Minister and the King ought not to treat with Trump and allowed nice Americans to say Not My President with some level of plausibility. I was, in short, in denial. I was not ready for Trump to actually win a second term.
Trump may not command the support of an overwhelming majority of the population. No party in a democracy ever does. Our own dear Kier had a landslide victory even though two thirds of the people who bothered to get up off their bottoms and cast their vote would have preferred a different Prime Minister. He won fair and square according to the rules he was playing by, but it would be futile to claim that he has a massive popular mandate.
Slightly more than half of America didn’t want Trump to be their President. But equally, slightly more than half of America didn’t want Harris to be their President. And slightly more Americans didn’t not want the white crook than didn’t not want the black woman. And seventy seven million people voted for him. Seventy seven million.
In 1987, about four million more of my fellow countrymen wanted Mrs Thatcher as their leader than wanted Neil Kinnock to do the job. But I didn’t see this as a metaphysical crisis. I saw it as a difference of opinion. Like Ronald Reagan, I was pretty confident that if the earth had been invaded by aliens, both sides would have buried their differences. I even thought that Mrs Thatcher probably agreed with me that it would be better if people were well educated and healthy and had somewhere to live.
You don’t need to explain to me that Mrs Thatcher’s theory—that the best way to bring about a Good Life for everyone was to sell the council houses, close the mines, cut taxes for the rich and abolish free school milk—didn’t work. I agree with you: that’s why I have always been a Trot rather than a Tory. But I am prepared to contemplate the possibility that Mrs Thatcher did believe it: that she was mistaken as opposed to actively evil.
Of course, the Tories did actively evil things. All politicians, by their nature, sometimes do. I don’t think that a conversation about how your lot tried to cosy up to General Pinochet, yeah, well, your lot had tea with Gerry Adams is particularly profitable.
Unless, I suppose, you think that the Right in general and Mrs Thatcher in particular have always been either corrupt or plain sadistic. Unless you think that the question was never about calcium deficiency in the post war era, and always about taking treats away from small people just for the hell of it. [1] And yes; the superstitious belief that if only we were allowed to hurt criminals than there wouldn’t be any crime does sometimes shade into a ghoulish enjoyment of the idea of torture. When they started to talk about hanging, you sometimes felt that there was something more than disinterested penal theory behind their eyes. No motive is ever pure. I imagine that they would say that we had a superstitious belief that if only you were kinder to hooligans they would miraculously stop hooliganing and that our approach wasn’t showing any particular sign of working better than theirs. But I am on the whole inclined to think that Olden Days Tories were not closing the mines because they had a fetish for unemployed Welsh people but because they thought it was economically the correct thing to do.
There was sex, of course: clause twenty nine and the Alton Bill. And there was race: Thatcher felt that Enoch Powell had made some good points but should have moderated his language. Everyone always thinks that the years when they were regenerating from kids into young adults were the best years. At least, they think that those years were the normal years; that the way things were done when you were a teenager is the way you would naturally expect things to be done and everything since has been a temporary aberration. I am as bad. I wonder why McDonalds replaced the perfectly good Wimpy Bar. I am inordinately fixated on the first twenty seven issues of one particular comic book and two seasons of one particular children’s TV show. If I imagine a school, I imagine a 1978 comprehensive school, and am surprised (often, but not always, pleasantly) to hear how much schools have changed in the last half-century. I don’t think that the 1970s and 1980s were a golden age. I think we normalised an awful lot of shit.
But I would make two claims:
1: I grew up in a world where politics was often an honest disagreement between two more or less plausible points of view
2: I grew up in a world where the people who were actually evil mostly pretended not to be.
But maybe, after all, they are not Fascists.
One of them made a Hitler salute at a rally. But that could have been a random hand gesture.
Then another one made a Hitler salute, but that could have been a joke about the first one making a Hitler salute.
Then a third one made a Hitler salute, but that could have been a gesture of defiance because the liberals had made such a fuss about the first two.
So maybe, after all, they are not Fascists.
The Leader described himself as a King, but that could have been a joke. “The King is dead, long live the King” is a well-known turn of phrase: if the Mayor of Bristol said “Traffic congestion on the Gloucester Road is dead, long live the King” I wouldn’t understand him to be making a play for Charles’ job. Quite bad taste to make that joke so relatively soon after the late Queen’s passing, and when the King hasn’t been so well, and where the young Prince of Wales can hear it; but perhaps these colonials aren’t as good at nuance as we Brit’s are?
The Leader put out a photograph of himself wearing a crown, but that could have been a joke at the expense of the people who complained about the first joke. The idea of a Republican King is quite funny, if you think about it. The idea of a Republican King who describes democratically elected leaders of other countries as dictators is also quite funny.
Maybe they are not fascists.
One of the Leader’s supporters proposed changing his country’s law to allow the Leader to stand for re-election in 2028, even though the law currently says you only get two goes. The Leader would be eighty-six in 2032 and a big part of his election campaign was that his opponent was too old for the job at eighty-two. But he isn’t responsible for what his supporters say.
Another group of the Leader’s supporters have formed an organisation to campaign to allow him to stay in power until 2032. They are using an image of the Leader in robes with a laurel crown, explicitly comparing him with a Roman emperor.
But the leader isn’t responsible for his over-enthusiastic followers. And they may also be joking.
They really may be joking. I said before that I can imagine speaking at a public meeting in the days when there was still a Labour Party and saying something like “I read in the papers that I am a Trot, so viva la revolucion”. I would be saying it because I am obviously not a revolutionary, not because I am.
I read the other day that a school teacher had been fired for threatening to smack a naughty pupil: he had been joking, the pupil knew he had been joking, everyone knew he had been joking, but everyone agreed that a teacher simply can’t make those sorts of jokes.
Maybe they are not fascists.
When a lessor elected official told the Leader that they would obey the federal law, the dear Leader replied “I am the federal law”.
The dear Leader said that if a person is fighting to save his country, then anything he does is legal. [2]
Some of the things we have read about the Leader and his supporters may not, in fact, be true.
It may even be that some of the things I have written here are not, in fact, true.
The Leader’s tame scientist did not, in fact, say that billionaires were an oppressed class and that other people had no right to entertainment and should roll about in the mud where they belong; although the fact that everyone believed it for a moment tells us something.
This kind of thing may be written by satirists. It may be published by the Leader’s opponents to make him look bad. It may, indeed, be published by the Leader’s supporters so they can accuse the Leader’s opponents of publishing them in order to make them look bad for trying to make him look bad. Or the fake reports may be published by the Leader’s supporters in order to sow doubt and make it easier to deny that the Leader has said something dangerous and stupid when he really has said something dangerous and stupid.
These tactics were widely used by the principled individuals who fought a noble campaign to keep women and black people from writing reviews of computer games and winning prizes at science fiction conventions. They called them “false flag” operations. There were also false false flag operations and false false false flag operations. It was bloody confusing.
Yes, I have, as a matter of fact, read George Orwell’s essay on Fascism. And he was right: in 1945, people applied that word much too widely, without any clear sense of what they meant by it. (Everyone always applies words too widely without any clear sense of what they mean.) But people should not be allowed to point to the essay and conclude that “Fascism doesn’t mean anything” or “People will shout Fascist at anything they don’t like”. That stops us from calling a right wing militarist populist authoritarian ethno-nationalist a right wing militaristic populist authoritarian ethno-nationalist.
The Leader and his Acolyte both openly celebrated the relative success of the Very Far Right Alternative Fur Deutschland party in the German election. The Leader’s Acolyte, indeed, stated that “only the AfD can save Germany.” [3]
The Leader and his Acolyte have both spoken positively about Nigel Farage.
The Leader’s Acolyte has talked about giving trillions of pounds to Nigel Farage.
The Leader’s Acolyte believes that a civil war in England is inevitable, and implied that last summer’s failed pogrom was the first stage of it.
The Leader’s Acolyte has spoken positively of Tommy Robinson Whose Real Name is Yaxely Lennon.
The Leader’s Acolyte appears to have endorsed Andrew Tate’s comedic bid to style himself unofficial Prime Minister of the UK.
But after all, they may not be fascists.
The Left bandy that word about far too much.
[1] I remember school milk. It was never a treat; always a ghastly lukewarm ordeal. One of the earliest punishments I remember was for wasting your milk.
[2[ Save his country from what? The current UK leader of the opposition says that only the Conservative Party can save western civilisation. Save it from what? The last Prime Minister but two wrote a book entitled “Ten Years To Save The West”. Save it from what?
[3] Save Germany from what?
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