TRUMP FARAGE AND THE PIGGY FACE OF FASCISM 2019

I

There has long been a genre of dystopian fiction speculating what ascendant fascism would look like in Britain or the US. We need to speculate no more, when you hear the message of Trump and Farage this is it, the real McCoy. No marching in uniform, no torchlight parades, no burning of books, [yet] and no militia. Just the lie, the big lie, the swelling lie of victimhood and nationalism. In Britain, the mantras of populist fascism are spoken in public school accents wrapped in the soothing certainties of an imagined past. Though don’t be fooled, the skinhead violence is just behind the curtain.

 In the US in the tones of the white corporate bully, the guy with the gun, who is on your side against the spics, the blacks, the yids, chinks and Japs. Dirty Donald with a magnum, selling MAGA snake oil.

Both figures are a product of failure, the failure of politics, economics, imagination. They rode out of the murk of 2008, saviours of the white Anglo Saxon world.

The scenario is familiar, history repeating itself, from catastrophic tragedy to dark farce. In 1933 it was the institutional failures of governing elites and constitutional safeguards, aided and abetted by a disease-ridden left and complacent liberal bourgeoisie. In defence of Weimar, its democratic constitutional structures were in their infancy and the judiciary neither believed in them or was prepared to defend them. The US and UK have no such excuse.

In their excellent book, ‘How Democracies Die,’ Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt convincingly demonstrate that rather than written constitutions and legislative guarantees the real gatekeepers of democracy are the accepted norms, the shared values, the willingness to compromise and abandon partisan trench warfare. When individuals in positions of power fail to uphold these values and norms the piggy face of populism, fascism, demagogue authoritarianism see can enter the mainstream. In the US, it has been the failure of the Republican party in the UK the Conservatives aided and abetted by a disease-ridden left, - sound familiar?    

Of course, Farage is not Hitler or Trump Mussolini, but both are crooks and both crave power before all else. Trump has achieved power, he is in the White House, but, as his petulant outbursts reveal, that for him the power he has is still far from being enough and his hatred of the free print and broadcast media throws a dark shadow over his real ambition for power and control.

Farage, one suspects, is not that interested in holding formal office, though he might like to be Prime Minister, holding office is not really his forte. He is happiest as the real power in the background, the Al Capone who pulls all the strings at the town hall.  

Where Fascism 2019 style differs from its 20^th century forebears are in its lack of an overall strategic vision, Farage, and to a lesser extent Trump, has little interest in how society should be structured, their motives are purely destructive. They despise international cooperation divorced from the profit motive, they have excoriated organisations like NATO, the UN, and loath international aid and regulations designed to protect the climate, and,  of course, both particularly hate the EU. The EU is enemy number one. It represents everything they both despise, - cooperation, compromise, good faith, the search for common ground and harmonisation. Both would like to destroy the EU. 

Both too are hostile to concepts like the NHS, redistributive tax, limits to wealth and regulation of business. Beyond this hatred, there is no wider vision just a desire to destroy constraint.  If you want to understand the kind of world they would like to bring about look to the Chile of Augusto Pinochet.

AND THEY ARE YOUNG

II

As I write this it is being reported that John Redwood, a leading member of the Leave faction within the Conservative party, has stated that the conservatives should seek to work with the Brexit party. He has not the first. This is how it begins, the slow slide into a fascist administration.

In Germany, it was the Conservatives who facilitated the fascist takeover, just as the Republicans have destroyed any constitutional constraints standing in Trump's way. I see no reason why the British Conservative party will not play a similar role with respect to Farage and his eager co-conspirators on the Tory right.

  As for the Labour Party, ridden by antisemitism and led by a neo-Marxist clique, they are closer to Farage’s destructive vision, albeit for different reasons than they care to acknowledge. Certainly, closer than any centre ground liberal with a desire to maintain economic and democratic stability.

Here however the scenario begins to shift. One of the great ironies of the Brexit age has been the emergence of a passionate, vocal, committed and politically savvy pro-EU movement. Hated by both the Corbynites and Brexiteers they are derided, falsely, as I can attest, as being exclusively middle class and London centric. However, to the dismay of the Leave camp, - for this was not in the script,- it has become a potent force across the UK and Northern Ireland, and is not going away anytime soon. If we do leave the EU it will provide the core resistance to Faragism, if we don’t it will provide the foundation stone for a new politics, cosmopolitan, internationalist and liberal-minded. Most important of all, and this is what keeps Brexit supporters and Corbynites, - sometimes the same people, - awake at night, it is dominated by the young.  

Orwell understood as few others have that Britain is not immune to the bacillus of fascism, though for understandable reasons he always saw the greatest danger coming from the Communist left. In well-developed democracies, like Britain or the US, fascism does not enter with a bang or with trumpets blaring and torchlight parades through Whitehall or in front of the White House, it creeps in. Brexit and Trump represented the best opportunity to destroy the political consensus in a generation and the right seized it. Though not expected to win they used all the weapons available to the populist right, legal and illegal. It paid off. However, in the UK their very success created a movement with the power to stop them. If the Remain movement holds on to its vitality and continues to hold firm it can stop Farage in his tracks. It is, at the risk of hyperbole, all that now stands between a healthy democracy and the dimming of the lights.