Bloody emails

It was like being punched in the solar plexus. Just when you thought Trump was safely consigned to the relative obscurity of starting his own TV network to plug that gap in market between Fox News and the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI release a maddeningly vague letter to Republicans in Congress that "re-open" those bloody emails. The fact that the emails in question refer to a former congressman, whose name is a synonym for "Penis" who sent pictures of his OWN penis to younger women, including a fifteen year old...and that this creep is married to one of Clinton's key advisers, so that the antics of a sexual predator ex-Congressman may result in the elevation of a sexually predatory Reality TV Star to the Oval Office where the husband of the opposing candidate used to act as a sexual predator...takes the whole ghastly mess to levels where terms like "irony" and "House of Cards on Acid" don't come close to doing it justice - let alone that the FBI released this non-material material 11 days out from the election makes the 1972 "Watergate" election look entirely free of inappropriate interference.

When is this OVER? cry 300 million Americans, who must feel that they are trapped in a cross between Guantanamo Bay and a lunatic asylum. While the rest of us watch with our mouths open, feeling as sick and scared as Fredo Corleone in Godfather 2 when he confesses: "Questadt...the Senate lawyer...he belongs to Roth..."

Once again, however, I want to try and tie the semiotics of the email scandal to the way that politics in general seems to be going here in the UK, and here in Scotland. I want once again to observe that we are now living in an era of binary, tribal politics, when we desperately need to remember that we live in an analog world, where just because someone disagrees with you, they're not necessarily involved in an evil conspiracy with everyone else who disagrees with you. Paranoia, as Freud observed, is a form of narcissism...we flatter ourselves when we think we're important enough for the world to be against us. My pleading question, however, like Bob Dylan in All Along the Watchtower is : "There must be some kind of a way out here?!?"

We know how it goes. Hillary Clinton is both guilty of high handed carelessness in using a personal (and insecure) email account for government business, while AT THE SAME TIME, according to Trump, is clearly involved in a criminal enterprise where she attempted to hide "corruption" of a secret, non-government server.

Now, both things cannot logically be true. Doesn't matter. Absolutely doesn't matter. To the total "this explains everything" mind of Donald Trump, entirely contradictory conclusions are no hindrance. Kurt Vonnegut once described the mind of a fascist as that of a broken clock that ALWAYS thinks it is showing the right time. EVERYTHING proves you right. If the FBI now turn around and say "the investigation is NOT re-opened" Trump will say, "they WOULD say that...because the system is rigged after all"...for example.

I trust this is sounding familiar. British politics has followed Scottish politics into our own local versions of the madness of a binary world. Every economic report is read to be in support of pro or anti Brexit positions simultaneously. Liam Fox briefs against his own Chancellor to say that any measures her takes to protect the British economy from uncertainty are part of a Re-Moan conspiracy to talk Brexit down.

Likewise, in Scotland, many Nats take every criticism of the SNP government as proof of an anti-Scottish conspiracy, (Red Tories etc etc etc) while Unionists insist that the same government is only pretending to be interested in health (for example) as a cover for their real goal, which is Independence under any circumstances. Everyone seems to angrily reject the conspiracy theories about their own side while accepting as Gospel whatever simple minded crap anyone, no matter how barmy,  throws at their opponents.

Each side of each of these Manichean divides - Trump vs Hillary, Leave against Remain, Yes vs No, interprets every move their opponents make as proving the case against them. So I repeat my pleading, with the help of the Animals this time: "We gotta get out of this place". How do we do that?

We are here, I think, because there is no longer an arena which is deemed to be non partisan. Both God and the BBC are deemed to have taken sides these days...so balance, on the one hand this, on the other that, is now no longer an editorial principle, but an avoidance of judgement that has led, among other things, to the brute and inescapable fact of climate change remaining a "controversy". One can plead for civility, or course, but there is no going back to God or Lord Reith...or Walter Cronkite, for that matter...as the voice of reason to judge between the voices of increasingly shrill and tiresome partisans...in the US, the UK and Scotland. All that is left is the purely personal distance of irony...and a certain humility. "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, Consider that you may be wrong" said Cromwell...who should have listened to his own advice....

In plays, no one character has all the right answers. The characters argue, full and passionate, and the audience judge...probably not with unanimity...or as a dramatist, you hope not. So it may be that dramaturgy is the essential political paradigm de nos jours...where we no longer hope for certainty and healing in public life, because the only way that does happen is silence.( "if only everyone on the the other side would just SHUT UP" screams everyone on every side). Maybe we do all have to learn to be civil. And maybe we do need to look at referendums and elections as being stops on the way to somewhere rather than thinking "this explains everything" and "this will solve everything" - whether we're talking about Independence or Brexit or not.

We need to acknowledge our own doublethink, that it is partisans who get things done, but it is ironists who live better lives in the world that partisans die for. We have to be both. We have to learn to be wrong, we have to change our minds. We have to embrace nuance as a value in itself in life. While at the same time, in the arena of politics, we need to keep fighting like dogs...but with respect.

Is that beyond us? Maybe it is, sometimes...in the heat of a binary referendum in an analog world. Or an election between a rock and a hard place. But if Caesar had a slave in the back of his chariot whispering "Remember you are mortal"...maybe all of us who've been involved in Scotland's fevered political journey in the last few years, need someone behind us to whisper..."Remember, you may be an arsehole!" And who better to do that job than journalists and writers with whom we may not agree, but who we MUST read.

Britannia Hits an Iceberg

Even on the eve of the final Presidential Debate in this increasingly bizarre campaign, with, it seems, the Trump campaign finally imploding into a welter of conspiracy theories on late night twitter, the question, “Why Do They Like Trump?” remains, even if American women are about to save American Men from making utter arses of themselves. Actually, ‘liking Trump’ is secondary, more of a symptom than a cause of illness. After all, even if seventy percent of American women say they oppose Trump, that still means thirty percent of them support him. The primary question of this American election has been “”Why Do They Hate Hillary So Much that Otherwise Sane People Can Even Contemplate Voting in Large Numbers for an Egregiously Awful Person With Glaringly Dangerous Pathology…” who just happens to be a Second Rate Orange Berlusconi called Donald Trump. Trump will be gone soon, as an electoral factor, anyway.  But the malaise which afforded him the opportunity to stomp his revolting personality all over the airwaves will still be around.

He and his noisiest supporters, despite appearances, are little more than a handful of refugees from daytime television who have made it onto the News.  This in itself is as much a comment on what has happened to mainstream TV – that the medium has abandoned any pretense at being anything other than pornography that sells Viagra- as it is on the recent descent of the Republican Party into the status of The American Taliban raging impotently against the waning of the White Man’s testosterone and sperm count. An interesting blog by David Wong on his Cracked site put the question of Trumpland vs the Rest in an interesting context for me recently. http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/

Wong argues that the Culture War in the States, which has roots as old as the Civil War, has reconfigured under the pressure of globalisation from a simple question of race into a much more nuanced and yet classical dichotomy of “country” and “city”, the metropolis and the periphery.  The metropolis in connected to the world as much or even more than it is connected to the country in which it happens to sit.  It is fast moving, prosperous, exciting, multi-cultural, a bit lawless and Darwinian – everything there is in the present tense.  The periphery has been “left behind”, stripped of its employment and purpose, of any forward looking energy.  Crucially, it has been stripped of anything like ‘hope’.  That word, which was so central to Obama’s election in 2008 was an alien concept, and not just because it was being spoken by a black man.  The schism of race that was opened up by Obama’s victory is again only secondarily a question of racism: primarily the resentment of all those angry men and women is fueled by their exclusion from the global party of self congratulatory “good” people who flatter themselves constantly about how hip and smart they are.  Fuck You is a not entirely unintelligible response to the bland, careless and above all smug privilege that Hillary Clinton so charmlessly represents.

And it’s when this question is put in terms of ‘metropolis’ and ‘periphery’ that the dialectic expands to include not just what is happening in the US in this particular election, but what has been happening everywhere in the world for quite some time. The change in the world from nation states back to city states is the kind of thing that fans of the long view have been talking about for some time.  And within that dialectic it is indeed possible not just to link in Donald Trump and the Tea Party to Nigel Farage and UKIP, but ISIS and the SNP as well.

Now, in this age of Twitter, I realise that to put things in the same sentence is to appear to say “these things are the same…”  So no, everyone, I did not just make an equivalence between these phenomena, what I made was an argumentative connection between ‘responses to globalization’, or rather to the hegemony of the trans-national which was so radically challenged by the slow motion Wall Street/City of London/Hong Kong crash of 2008.  It is in the very nature of ‘localism’ that these responses take on ‘local’ character.

As it happens, the current tensions WITHIN our own particular localism, between Nationalist nationalists and Post-National nationalists, both of which were on display at the SNP conference last week is mirrored by the tensions, for example, within the Tory Party between those who have rather startlingly found themselves in the ascendency recently – the “Hang the Economy, (and a lot of other people) England for the English” brand of Tory on the one hand, and the Managerial Tendency (Market Rules) brand on the other.

Likewise, the ancient Bevan vs Gaitskell conflict informs the pre-history of the Labour Party’s current struggles between Management and Movement, but the pathology of what is happening to the British Progressive Tendency is as globally involved as its inflections are profoundly locally determined by the ‘metropolitan vs the peripheral’ model.

Within this way of looking at things, both Brexit and the surge of Scottish National politics are secondary assertions in response to a historical movement. Both are constitutional consequences of the Break Up of Britain which is itself consequential of the local concentration of all wealth and power in one corner of the islands within a wider, longer story of what we used to call “managed decline.”

Indeed, Imperial Hubris has been sinking since the Titanic ran into that Iceberg…we’ve been frantically bailing ever since.

Two other conversations, one on Twitter and one in Real Life are informing my thinking on all this at the moment. The first is a bit of trolling I’m getting online as to why I think that the EU is more important to Scotland in terms of trade than is the UK.  Of course, I think no such thing and have never said or thought any such thing. Neither the vote on Brexit nor a vote for Independence in and of themselves have anything like those consequences. What is useful about the question is figuring out what is wrong with it: why is it the wrong question? The second was a taxi driver telling me he had voted “Leave” in June in order to bring Full Employment back to the Clyde. That is, he had voted for a Time Machine.

The magical instrumentalism of both perspectives, that a vote is the prime cause of things happening, is one of the illusions that democracy is shedding right now, to all of our costs. Donald Trump, for reasons of purely personal pathology – he is always right and always “the winner” therefore the only possible cause of his NOT being right or the winner is black magic – is calling the election a fraud before he even loses it with possibly dire consequences for American democracy.  That’s what elections are like in far less fortunate countries. To return local questions, the truth of what is happening in Scotland right now is that we are dealing with the consequences, over a prologed period, of the decline from Empire to which British Membership of the EU was itself a stop gap solution. According to Angela Leadsom the other day, the answer is now to sell Tea and Jam to Johnny Foreigner on board the Royal Yacht Britannia.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/18/british-tea-jam-and-biscuits-will-be-at-the-heart-of-britains-br/

Scotland ceased to be the Prime Maker of its own destiny at 10pm on September 18^th a couple of years ago.  What we are doing now, just like everyone else, is attempting to stay afloat in very choppy water driven both by our cultural reaction against the crisis of globalism and in our wish to preserve the best of its values.  The Yes Movement, in that sense, was and remains a cake and eat it proposition. More than ever, we are looking into a crystal ball.  If the Tories make a fearful total hash of Brexit and Britain, , as seems more than likely at present, then the economic, political and cultural consequences for these weary islands will be incalculable.  If they make a slight less than total hash of Brexit while trying to SAVE the only bit of Britain they care about, if the City of London (for example) manages to negotiate its REMAINING a global city-state metropolis while leaving the rest of us to sink into the mid-Atlantic, that will be more a continuation than a schism in our recent history as an economy. But Britain as it was sold to us in 2014 will be profoundly damaged…but if anyone thinks that is unalloyed good news for the National cause they are already as damaged as Liam Fox.

The third option, whereby Brexit is used as the context for a properly reasoned re-alignment of local power and its relationship to the wider world, one of whose aspects is the EU, is of course devoutly to be wished. One can see an idealized federal solution to the “Scottish Problem” where a sovereign Scotland pools that sovereignty rationally with ALL of our neighbours while asserting itself as a small metropolitan centre of gravity and civilised values that is no longer dependent upon those neighbours and so can have a healthy relationship with them. True federalism has always meant mainly that power would be devolved in the other direction with a democratic mandate.  That, for me, was always the logical outcome of the ‘if wishes were horses’ element of the hope in which I participated in 2014.

Whether or not Brexit brings that consummation closer or pushes it further off is not entirely in my gift. Despite the magical thinking of the internet, life doesn’t really work like that. Indeed, those who took the Brexit vote as a signal of ‘job done’ on Independence are already disabused.  And despite being a Yes campaigner, I am no clearer on what ‘Independence for Scotland’ actually means in the 21st than I was two years ago.  What has fundamentally changed, other than the cultural shift that the referendum represented in making our future, at least in part, our choice, is that the alternative, Better Together, must surely look a lot less like a sure thing to its own supporters than it used to.

We have a choice, maybe, between chaos and chaos, and are more concerned about who the Captain is than exactly what we call the boat.  Which, to close the circle, is maybe why a lot of people on the other side of the pond, are looking for a Berlusconi and not a Prodi at the moment.

Still, with a bit of luck, in a couple of weeks we won’t have Donald Trump to kick around anymore, and we can get back to crossing our fingers over more local concerns – and hoping that we’ve got the right Captain, or at least the right second mate on the Titanic who will try to get as many of us as possible into the lifeboats.

  

--

Peter Arnott

The Perfect Storm?

Maybe this is just how history works.  The financial crisis of 1929 radically undermined faith in democracy all across the world. In countries where representative government well both new and old, “the people” lost faith in the electorate, as it were.  Democracy was weakened everywhere.  Britain had a “national” government, suspending democratic choice till 1945.  France spent the thirties changing governments so often that democracy was undermined by a different route…making the largest army in Europe helpless in 1940, when faced by a Germany which, of course, had voted democracy out of existence altogether (though the Nazis were very fond of referendums, as it happens). 

America got lucky, and got Franklin Roosevelt.  Faced with a choice between a candidate who embodies “old corruption” to a point beyond the dreams of Herbert Hoover, and a demented orange hate ball, America may not be so lucky in November.  

But the pattern is the same.  Capitalism suffered a "soft" crisis in 2007-8, and the people, across the world, entirely understandably… turned against the governors and institutions that were in charge at the time. 

But unless they get lucky, what comes along to replace the failed, corrupt states are people who are ruthless and psychopathic enough to take advantage of a temporary suspension in reason. 

(For the record, the relatively benign irrelevance to which Jeremy Corbyn seems happy to be leading the Labour Party counts as “lucky.”  An SNP government which until now has been able to ride the anti-establishment wave while enjoying electoral support for actually governing with a reasonable measure of competence counts as a big weekend in Vegas.)

But you can take the thirties comparisons too far.  There was a long and complex road even from the election of Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933 and the apocalypse of war and extermination ten years later…and Trump is, firstly, not ACTUALLY a fascist - he want to be one and have all the personal charm one would associate with such a thing, but he doesn’t actually have any armed, uniformed thugs at his command. Second, the American Presidency is only an effective wing of government if the Congress and the Courts allow it to be…ask Obama…and even if the worst happens, it seems unlikely that the Donald will actually be able to put Hillary Clinton in jail, for example.

No, in the US at least, history is repeating itself still, I hope, largely as farce.  For tragedy one has to look elsewhere…to the Middle East, where a surge of democratic energy in 2011 (in response to economic crisis) has led to wars ruthlessly stoked from within and without…

As for Britain, out little corner of the perfect storm, or the crisis of democracy as a culture, is taking the sudden and ominous shape of a government who have just declared that immigration matters more to them than economic prosperity. It is now the position of Her Majesty’s Government, of MY and OUR government, that the National Interest is essentially embodied in the listing and ejecting of the Foreigner.

It is hard not to feel included in that category of the other. In fact, a friend of mine, Alasdair MacCrone, has suggested that the only possible response is declare that “I am Spartacus.” I think he’s probably right about that.

But step back a moment and consider the change that is signified by the adoption of out and out English Nationalism as the governing principle of British Government.  Are those of us who supported “Yes” in 2014 really in a position to criticize? What, other than smug Scottish superiority really gives us the right to declare “our” nationalism better than “theirs”?  Aren’t they just catching up?

There are certainly some people, within and around the very British Institution of the Labour Party, who would make that equivalence.

For me, Nationalism in Scotland and Nationalism in England have different roots as well as manifestations.  The social politics of Nicola Sturgeon, the attitude to immigration for one, are very different to those expressed by Theresa May last week. But I can understand that they might be seen as the same thing by the despairing rump of the last standing (just!) very British institution of the Old New Labour Party.  This is why it is Ed Milliband (and not a Corbynista) who is touring the TV studios this morning arguing for UK parliamentary scrutiny of the Brexit process. It is also why I salute him for it. There is a lot about Britain that I miss too. “Britain” seems like a long time ago and very far away.

I came to “Yes” because I want to preserve the best of Britain and then do even better. I always felt that Scotland was not leaving Britain, but that it was Britain that was being left.  John Harris wrote movingly in the Guardian this morning about how England needs to recover itself.  How England can’t hide from itself behind Britain any more.

We must remember where we began, with a global crisis of democratic legitimacy itself precipitated by an economic collapse which, while nothing like as sharp or dramatic as what happened between 1929 and the mid –thirties, is nonetheless a cultural earthquake that seems to be shaking us, rather more gently for now, on a planetary scale.

It shook Scotland into resisting the decline of Britishness in its own paradoxical way.  In the referendum of 2014, and the elections that preceded and followed that moment, for example, the Scottish electorate opted for devolved government run by nationalists. This is exactly the kind of ironic, nuanced joke of which democracy is capable: it gets us the most competent coherent government for a time of crisis…while at the same time traps the SNP, against nationalist instinct, into making devolution work.

But now, with this government in power in Westminster, making a 180 degree turn about from the Blair/Cameron “Globalist” era into a full-throated defense of England First, the crisis of democracy is coming home. 

As I've said before, the Break Up of Britain was always too big a job for the Scots.  It was always a task for the English.

And I can't say it makes me happy, despite my past and present allegiances.

Rather, I fear, like the winner of last nights “debate” in Missouri, it’s going to be very ugly and challenge us in ways we can’t quite foresee. And that there is equally little I can do about what happens in London for the next few years as there is what happens in Washington DC

All I know for now is that for all of the difficulties that breaking up the UK in 2014 might have caused, we’re going to look back in ten or so years and wonder why we walked away from the hard way and chose the even harder way?