What do we do now?
Well, we start organising and campaigning and winning arguments so that the next time there is an election, we do not lose.
But one of the things which has been lost is any real belief in the legitimacy of elections. It is an object of faith for the MAGA cult that the 2020 US election was “stolen” (and therefore January 6 was not an insurrection.) The British Right started to deny Kier Starmer’s legitimacy on the day he was elected. Real Americans support the Dark Lord; only Real Americans should be allowed to vote; so votes against the Dark Lord don’t count. The British version, that there has to be an election the minute the current incumbent performs badly in a straw poll, is scarcely any better. [1]
What has been lost is not one election. What has been lost is a way of looking at the world. Yes, it is possible that Kamala Harris could take back the White House in 2028. It is even possible, if the cult is serious about repealing the Twenty Second Amendment, that Barack Obama might come back for another go. It is just barely possible that Starmer can still defeat Farage in 2029, although I think it is overwhelmingly unlikely. But an administration which is Not Actively Fascist is no help if very-nearly-half-the-population are actively fascists. Or at least; fash-curious.
And that pre-supposes that there will be another election. It is, I grant, hard to imagine a scenario where the US President suspends democracy. I still believe in an America where, if that happened, some military officer—someone way to the right of me, probably, who doesn’t believe in evolution and thinks that American gals should stay at home all day and cook pancakes for their man and whops his kids when they are bad—marches into the Oval Office with a phaser and says “I am sorry, sir, but my oath is to the Constitution and as a matter of military honour and patriotism it is my duty to relieve you of command.” But then my America, the America of Steve Rogers and James T Kirk and Gary Cooper has never had much more to do with America America than the London of tap-dancing chimney sweeps, pearly kings and fog-enshrouded cottages has to do with Actual London.
In which case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Remind them if they’ve heard the tale and tell them if they’ve not, that once there was a spot… I am loyal to nothing, Colonel, except the Dream.
If the British Prime Minister abolished elections, I find it impossible to believe that the people or the press would put up with it. But it was impossible to imagine Boris Johnson as Prime Minister of the UK: I used to literally make jokes about it, in this forum. It was impossible to imagine a US President who seriously talked about annexing Canada and invading Greenland. That is literally the stuff of Simpson’s parody.
I think that Nigel Farage in Ten Downing Street is the least worst outcome we can realistically hope for. I think that there is a serious danger that Elon Musk will buy the 2029 election for Tommy Robinson or Lawrence Fox or even Andrew Tate. I was about to write a joke, along the lines of “That’s assuming that he hasn’t bought the whole country as part of a buy-one-get-one-free deal with Greenland” or “That’s assuming that we haven’t dissolved parliament and installed Charles as absolute monarch” or “That’s assuming that Europe hasn’t been annexed and turned into a beach resort” but I realise that there is no longer anything I can write which wouldn’t invite the response “Actually, that’s a very real possibility.”
Sometime in, I guess, 2027, Nigel Farage will cross the floor, join the Tory party, and wind up Reform. In 2028, he will challenge Badenoch (who was only ever a kamikaze lettuce) become leader of the opposition, and call a general election.
Every time someone says that there are no longer any ordinary decent Conservative MPs, an ordinary decent Tory MP drops dead. I think they do exist and I think that a remnant would cross the floor in the other direction and join the Labour Party. Starmer is—and I say this entirely without malice—the very personification of an ordinary decent Conservative. So what follows would be a straight electoral fight: on one side, a Reform/Conservative coalition, presumably called MUKGA. On the other side, the Rest of the World: Starmer’s Labour, all the Liberals, both the Greens, the Celtic Nationalists and Lord Buckethead. The charities and the churches and the arts would support the Not-Fascist-Alliance; most of the press would support the MUKGA. (The Guardian would urge readers to think very seriously and make their own decision.) Even with the Dark Lord’s apprentice bankrolling MUKGA, it ought to be no contest.
But there will be a contest, and the progressive alliance will lose. It will lose for the same reason Jeremy Corbyn lost. Progressives hate other Progressives much more than they hate Conservatives; but Conservatives hate Progressives much more than they hate other Conservatives. Last time it was the sensible moderate Centrists saying they couldn’t possibly support Corbyn; this time it will be the salt-of-the-earth old fashioned Leftists saying they couldn’t possibly support Starmer.
And let’s be clear: the Anti-MUKGA and the Never-Faragists will not have precisely the same views as me on Israel. They will have gone either a little bit too far or not quite far enough on gender. One of them will either be, or will not be, a vegan. One of them will believe in God; another one won’t. It will turn out that my candidate still owns a Neil Gaiman comic book or once laughed at Ricky Gervais. And with complete integrity I will say “I cannot possibly cast my vote for a party which doesn’t hate JK Rowling as much as JK Rowling ought to be hated.” And we will abstain, or found a breakaway Popular Front of Judea, and the Left will split, and the Right will win, and there will be torch-lit parades and book burnings and a life sized hologram of Dame Vera Lynne.
Are you prepared to say “You want Private Schools to retain their charitable status; I want Private Schools to be abolished altogether; but right here right now what matters is defeating fascism?”
Are you prepared to say “My deity of choice thinks that your entire lifestyle is sinful and would like you to be illegal—but right now, what matters is defeating fascism?”
Are you prepared to say “I think your deity of choice is a pernicious superstition and would like it to be banned—but right now what matters is defeating fascism?”
Obviously, you aren’t. No more am I. No more, on that particular issue we both agree is the most important issue, should we.
So let’s go break away and form a party that stands up for proper progressive values.
YODA VOICE: “That is why you fail.”
Wasn’t the Disruptor a 1970s Spider-Man bad-guy?
Not everyone who voted for the Dark Lord was actually a Sith. Quite a lot of people—including, astonishingly, some young people, some not-male people and some not-White People voted for him because they believed that he would shake things up.
Something must be done: this is something: therefore this should be done. True leadership involves not listening to anyone else and doing the first thing which comes into your head. Say what you like about Adolf, but he made the trains run on time. [2]
There are circumstances, for example, in a war or a football match, under which it is more important to have a guy at the front shouting “Make for those woods! NOW!” than to have a committee meeting and decide Sun Tzu would have actually made for the hills. Nelson said that no naval commander can go very far wrong provided he points his boats in the general direction of the enemy.
But have you noticed that only the Right get to be Disruptors, in the same way that only the Left get to be Virtue Signallers?
If you made me Prime Minister, I would impose a 100% tax on the profits of the Water Companies and prohibit the payment of bonuses to directors and dividends to shareholders unless and until they stop pumping human shit into the rivers. I would also calculate what it realistically costs to live a Decent Life [3], divide that figure by one thousand eight hundred and twenty, and make that the legal hourly minimum wage. Would I be called a Disruptor? Would people say that I wasn’t necessarily doing the right thing, but at least I was doing something? Or would they say that I was a lunatic, a communist, or unelectable and start planning a coup? And neither of those things are as obviously deranged as colonising Mars or invading Greenland.
And what if we win?
Would an incoming coalition of non-Fascists in 2028 or 2032 actually role back all the crazy stuff that the Dark Lord and his minions have enacted?
Or would they say “Well of course you can’t turn back the clock and you have to be realistic and the people have spoken. Being less racist was a fashionable idea in the 2020s, just like student grants were a fashionable idea in 1980s and taxing rich people was a fashionable idea in 1970s and not hanging people was a fashionable idea in the 1960s, but they wouldn’t work in the modern era because of chat-bots. Obviously the Dark Lord’s racist laws will have to stay in place for ever and ever and ever but we promise not to make them any worse.”
John Lennon said that Flower Power failed.
Steve Earl, on the other hand, said that songs helped to end the Vietnam War.
Certainly, Yoko’s theory that if everyone pulled their knickers down on an album cover, all warfare would cease proved to be a little ahead of its time. Although perhaps she would have cited GK Chesterton’s wry comment about Christianity: we will never know if it would have worked, because no one ever tried.
Nearly everyone now sees Viet Nam as having been a Bad Thing. Hippies and Leftists singing Give Peace a Chance in expensive hotel rooms contributed to that perception. Rowan Atkinson didn’t invent the idea that the First World War was an absurd and tragic disaster; neither did Joan Littlewood’s theatre workshop. But you can’t think about World War I without thinking of Oh What a Lovely War and Blackadder.
We still believe that the Second World War was our Finest Hour and the Spirit of the Blitz showed England At Her Best and that the War was very largely won by plucky English housewives with no help at all from the Americans or the Russians or that nice Mr Oppenheimer because that is the story we continue to tell ourselves.
The victory of the Right was achieved by an act of story telling. If I were Alan Moore or El Sandifer I might say that the victory of the Right was achieved by an act of magick, a summonsing. Certainly, it occurred at a conceptual level, in what Alan More would call idea space and what Neil Gaiman would call The Dreaming.
Their spell transformed “good manners”, “human empathy” and “not being a Nazi” into negative qualities. To say that a book “promoted good manners” was to say that it was a dangerous book; to say that a teacher had “human empathy” was to say that she was a bad teacher. Even those of us not subject to the spell still caught ourselves using formulations like “I know this implies that I have human empathy, but…” or “I don’t want to sound like someone with good manners, but…”
Alan Moore says that magick and storytelling is all about making connections between concepts; once you have cast the spell or told the story, the connection is real, even if it wasn’t before. The Right Wing spell drew a line between good manners, human empathy and not being a Nazi and a plot by Jewish-Satanist-Communist-Alien-Lizard-People to destroy the world. So that to have empathy or good manners or not be a Nazi marked you out as a traitor and a quizzling. Manners, empathy and anti-Nazism turned out to be the exact things that we have only ten years to save the West from.
The Dark Lord’s Apprentice believes that there is something called the “Human Empathy Mind Virus” which colonises people’s brains and will prevent him sending a space ship to Mars.
And we sat back and let it happen.
Maybe the geologists really did start using “Before Present” instead of “Before Jesus” in dates because they wanted to show good manners to people who were not Christians, and maybe there was a Good Manners Brigade egging them on. Maybe when Birmingham City council abolished Christmas it was an example of Good Manners Gone mad. [4] Maybe it was indeed human empathy that caused the National Trust to start making scones with margarine instead of butter; and maybe there was a Human Empathy Mob putting them under pressure to do so, and maybe that is a reason to boycott all their stately homes and castles in perpetuity. Maybe every time a non-White non-male writer wins a science fiction award it really is the result of an orchestrated campaign by the Not Nazi Warriors.
Anyone might think that people who won’t eat dead animals are a bit silly and a bit faddish and a bit holier than thou. I am certainly not going to stop eating sausages, although I might cut down on the red meat and try to buy from free-range farmers. But the Right’s conceptual magic means that the person who orders soya milk is threatening the person who prefers the old fashioned kind squeezed out of cows; and the bakery that sells sausage rolls made with lentils is threatening the freedom of those of us who prefer emulsified high fat offal tubes. [5] And the lentil eaters and the oak milk drinkers have Too Much Empathy, and are therefore in league with the communist Jewish alien Satanists, and the next government is going to declare war on them.
When the Far Right attempted a pogrom against Muslims in the UK, we didn’t see a people’s militia rising up to defend them. It was mostly the police, and Two-Tier Kier who did that. But quite a lot of people volunteered to help clear up the mess the next morning.
Not everyone my age is a fascist, but most of the fascists are people of my age. Most young people are very firmly, even aggressively, in the Not A Fascist camp. The Millennials I interact with seem uniformly nice and in some cases have educated me about inclusivity. But then, Andrew Tate reading Tommy Robinson agreeing Mosque burning girlfriend murdering twenty somethings probably don’t come into libraries or sing sea shanties. It is certainly young people who are taking down statues of human traffickers and throwing soup at oil paintings and sensible middle-aged centrist politicians who are telling them that they mustn’t.
I think that there is some chance that when a future Faragist or Robinsonian regime starts making egregiously fascistic laws, some young people would simply stick their heels in the ground and say “no”.
I think that there is a chance that if someone made a law that said people are not allowed to refer to other people by the other people’s preferred pronouns; or that teachers were not allowed to talk about the slave trade or the Bristol bus boycott; or that books displaying too much empathy had to be removed from public libraries, then these laws would simply be disregarded.
I am not envisaging a full-on counter-coup. Ten thousand people saying “No, we aren’t going to do that” might do the trick very nicely?
How far would it go? Would a British youth uprising lead to a British Tianamen square, with English bobbies riding their bicycles over the protesters bodies? I think there is some hope that even a MUKGA government would retain some sense of good old fashioned British fair play and decency, and use sarcasm rather than violence to put down the insurrection. But maybe by then we’ll be a vassal state of the American Empire and all the policemen will have guns.
If it comes to it, then of course I would hide my trans and gay friends in the annex and lie to the gestapo about their whereabouts. And I do wonder how long it will be before civilised countries have to start offering asylum to American trans people and American gay people and American women with unwanted pregnancies and American academics with unwanted opinions.
But I think that we will mainly have to launch our counter-attack in Idea Space.
“Are you talking about Cultural Marxism, Andrew?”
No, not Cultural Marxism. But maybe some kind of Organised Cultural Niceness?
[1] King Charles no more has the power to dissolve parliament than the Queen of the May has the power to levy taxation.
[2] He did not in fact make the trains run on time.
[3] Rent or mortgage on modest two-bedroom house; three meals a day; replacing shoes and clothes a couple of times a year; cost of medicine, dentistry and glasses; running costs of a small car and/or bus and train fairs as appropriate; a little bit left over for nice things
[4] Birmingham council did not in fact abolish Christmas.
[5] It is the same logic that says that if two gay people get married, all the straight people somehow become less married.