“Once capitalism invades the whole of life, then struggle involves the whole of life.” Rick Roderick, The Emancipatory Challenge of Critical Theory (interview), 1987

“There’s too damn much politics in this country. It’s infecting everything.” Jay Nordlinger, Need to Know (podcast), episode 203, 2017

 

BATTLE is joined, and the last defenders of liberty and decency make their final stand against the aggressor. What liberty, you may ask? This decency, or that? And defended against whom? Well you might wonder. The liberty and decency in question are, respectively, the freedom peaceably to enjoy private pleasures and pastimes, and the standards of civility, honesty and kindness shared even amongst strangers in private life. The aggressor is politics, and those who seek with barbed spear to penetrate the private bubble, and drown in politics everything inside. Each of the two opposing armies is a coalition of left and right, populist and elite, conservative and feminist. In this struggle everyone is, by the weight of the aggressor’s ambition, conscripted for one side or the other. At stake is the right to live a life even partially sheltered from the ceaseless bitter intrigues of politics, and the possibility of keeping common decency and conviviality in our dealings with others based on an unconscious agreement to leave our politics, and all our stupid petty tribal rancour, out of it.

The battle goes against us. The dysfunctional news cycle – a true perpetual outrage machine comprising cable news, talk radio, social media and pop-up news websites – spins faster and faster, ceaselessly politicising everything. In Scotland, Twitter Bravehearts (“cybernats”) find fault and conspiracy everywhere, from the treason of Tunnock’s Tea Cakes to the orientation of Great Britain on the map used in the BBC weather forecast (yes, really). Inevitable demands for protests and boycotts follow. (The full list of companies patriotic Scots are instructed to boycott would fill a heavy book). My own poor girlfriend (Scots, but a pro-British Boudicca) succumbs to a complete transformation whenever she meets a fellow-exile in London, treading with utmost delicacy for fear of saying the wrong thing. In England, meanwhile, things have got so bad that a deadly fire in a neglected social housing block – modern-day London’s vertical slums – ignited debate not on the inadequacy of British building regulations or the parlous provision of social housing, but on the fairness of the unhinged and shameless accusation that the victims of the fire were “murdered by the state”. In Northern Ireland, coalition governments are paralysed over the naming of parks. And in America, no niche is safe from invasion by politics, however small: Halloween costumes, video games and comics are all now theatres of a raging culture war.

The right is as much to blame as the left. They have their own form of political correctness, with its own identity politics, echo chambers, sacred cows and parade of endlessly self-pitying victims[1]. They too engage in “virtue signalling” (conspicuously sharing an opinion fashionable amongst one’s peers), and are delighted to engage the far left on their own terms: that is to say, by politicising everything. The antics of the right’s culture warriors far exceeded mere resistance to the perceived politicisation by feminists of their pastimes – their movies, comic books, video games and the like – when they stopped merely defending and began pre-emptively attacking anything they suspected of having succumbed to feminist influence. The reaction to a remake of Ghostbusters starring an all-female cast by right-wing culture warriors – a display for which the label “hysterical” is woefully inadequate – is only the most notorious recent example, culminating, as it did, in the actress Leslie Jones being sent death threats and vicious racist imagery by internet trolls and the subsequent Twitter decapitation of the online right’s favourite shrieking diva, Milo Yiannopolous. The furious politicisation of mosque building by the far right in Europe and America is a lower-profile but perhaps more sinister trend. Here I remind anyone thinking me one sided that the litany of stupidities attributable to the far left in the cause of politicising everything is sufficiently well-covered by the press for my purposes, but, for the sake of balance, I invite you to slack your jaw watching the bizarre spectacle of a deranged young woman upbraiding a (probably also very left-wing) fellow student over his hair.

Of course, the truth that is so often missed is that the people who talk about politics reliably overstate the importance of the subject. Engaging with politics is like using a computer: unwise to do without, undoubtedly a marvel in its complexity and accomplishment, but very much the squeeze and not the juice. Computers are for business, entertainment and communication and, apart from a few technical professionals and amateur enthusiasts, few of us are interested in reading error messages or tinkering with the code. Those who comment sometimes forget that there are many things in life more important than politics; more beautiful, more worthy, more fulfilling and more beneficial to others. The purpose of politics is to provide these other things – justice, peace, liberty and the space for human creativity to flourish – and a political system is judged favourably in so far as it succeeds in doing so. The breakfast table is a happy place is spite of the newspaper resting on it, not because of it. Political enthusiasts are rare, and this is not exclusively a bad thing. The most active citizens reliably propagate the most poisonous and delusional beliefs, nearly always based on some insatiable identity grievance (the tea party, Brexit, Scottish independence and Trump movements leap to mind). And low voter turnout – furrowing brows in liberal circles across the land – can reveal satisfaction as much as despair, as was surely the case in Britain’s no-show elections of 2001 and 2005. Indeed, the most obvious explanation for the failure of radical plans for reorganising politics – radical feminism, radical socialism, radical democracy, radical populism – is that they demand more time and commitment to politics than anyone other than a fanatic can give: the real trouble with socialism, in other words, is that it “takes up too many evenings”[2]. The prats who tweet day and night about how offended they are by the latest sexist toothpaste ad/example of BBC left-wing bias (delete as appropriate) are just as blind to the public’s indifference as the pundits and political scientists.

The awful dream of re-ordering society on a hyper-political basis may be doomed, but their effort is already making life miserable for the rest of us. The liberty to wish a stranger good morning or to buy a cup of coffee without acrimony, tribal suspicion or the risk of stepping on a political landmine is one not be surrendered lightly. It matters if you are unable to walk around with your hair tied in matted knots without being accused of colonialism and oppression. So let there be some neutral spaces. Protect the sanctity of the pub, the playing fields and the home from the perpetual partisan whinging of the professionally affronted. These people are experts at finding malice where there is none, but sometimes – sometimes – a film is just a film.  Don’t let them ram their ill-informed, tribal, prejudicial politics where it does not belong.

[1] Respectively consider: (1) the Fox News-Drudge Report/Breitbart/World Net Daily-MAGA Twitter ecosystem; (2) the insistence that all differences in male and female behaviour are explained by biology; and (3) the “conservative” blogger Lauren Southern – in every aspect of her conduct the archetypal narcissistic, whiny and precious Millennial.

[2] Oscar Wilde.

(The essay below was submitted – fruitlessly – to an essay competition earlier this year. I have since edited it a little to publish here).

 

“I just want to be perfect.” Nina Sayers, Black Swan (2010)

 

PERFECTION is the dominant theme in the 2010 film Black Swan, a lurid psychological thriller starring Nathalie Portman as Nina, a fragile, uptight and rather wet ballerina at a dance school in New York. She is obsessed solely with mastering her art, and this fixation, alongside her looming lead performance in a production of Swan Lake, pushes the story along by spectacularly shredding her sanity. The film is notable for daring to question the cult of perfection to which we are all, with greater or lesser fervour, inductees. This matters: the ancient concept of perfection is rarely seen as the menace it is. (The customary apologetic “he’s a bit of a perfectionist” is notable for being only semi-censorious). The evidence of our obsession with perfection is everywhere and obvious for those who care to look; from the design of your smartphone to the ideals of your faith (if you have one) to the idea of the nation you call home. There are few spheres of human endeavour it does not touch, and few cultists are fully aware of their devotion. At its best, perfection is a powerful cognitive tool for unpicking a world knotted through with complexity. Carefully dosed, it motivates and inspires. Run loose, people charge down rabbit holes of their own making, wasting what little time they have pursuing illusions: Truth, Fate, the soul-mate, their life’s purpose. And wherever the cult of perfection attains political power, the space between an imperfect world and the perfect ideal is filled with violence. In moments of mass neurosis, it unleashes intolerance, cruelty and oppression, reaching its purest expression in the totalitarian states of the 20^th century – states animated by a zealotry that did not suffer the imperfect to live.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines perfection as the “state or quality of being perfect”, where “perfect” means “having all the required or desirable elements, qualities, or characteristics; (being) as good as it is possible to be”. More simply, I would suggest perfection is “the state of being complete and without flaw”, while perfectionism is “the quality of expecting, seeking or assuming perfection”. Perfection is a simple idea, and is integrated into many more advanced concepts: in mathematics, see the sphere, the cube or the equilateral triangle. In philosophy, consider the ideas of Truth or Justice (Plato), the Divine (Spinoza), the soul or even the now-ubiquitous belief that all persons are born sharing a perfect political and moral equality. Perfectionist ideas in economics include the theories of price-signalling, market clearing, perfect information and perfect competition. The notion of perfection appears too in art and design, in music, science, cooking, engineering, psychology and literature. Even history has a place for perfection, in so far as historians seek to generalise the specific by building models to describe apparent historical currents. None of this need alarm us: perfection’s practical function is to simplify the Universe, because the idea that something could be complete and without flaw opens the door to concepts that can be described by essential, highly precise laws from which there is no deviation. The sphere, for example, is a solid object whose surface is an equal distance from its centre at every point. Spheres do not occur in nature – the Planets are not perfect spheres any more than their orbits are perfect ellipses – but the idea of spheres makes calculations involving roughly-spherical objects possible. The impossible complexity of the observable Universe demands simplification.

It bears repeating: perfection is not of nature. Not only do spheres not occur in nature, but even in the perfect abstract their volumes and surface areas can only be calculated using a number that cannot be perfectly expressed in any numerical form (Pi). Human bodies, far from being perfect, are riddled with evolution’s design compromises: consider how our large brains make childbirth very dangerous for both mother and child. Moreover, notice how inherently subjective is the idea of perfection: whether the given feature of an object, such as the smoothness of a sphere, is an imperfection or a necessary component of perfection is for humans to decide. This point is not always obvious. The subjectivity of perfectionism is greater when it is applied to more complex ideas, such as political ideologies or the nature of God (where there is immense disagreement), but almost invisible when applied to elementary concepts like the sphere. To say that perfection is not of nature is to recognise that the subjective qualities humans choose to associate with perfection and imperfection for any given concept have no necessary connection to the unruly chaos of reality. This is significant because perfection and nature are often conflated, in part because perfectionist assumptions are sufficiently indispensable and plentiful to often pass unnoticed, priming our brains to invert perception and reality where, instead of seeing the complexity of nature and using perfection as a tool to simplify it, we see perfection where it does not exist, take it for a feature of nature, not artifice. One such example is the long history of religious believers taking the fruits of science, such as the apparent elegance and perfection of the mechanical laws governing the movement of celestial bodies, as evidence of a Divine Creator. I will not dissect this argument here: suffice to say that it demonstrates a common misconception about what science is. Science does not describe reality in its raw, unprocessed, pullulating detail. Instead, scientists build models of greater or lesser reliability and complexity to simulate observed reality. The elegance of Newtonian Mechanics is made possible by the perfectionist assumptions it makes, allowing it to model exclusively the interactions between matter and gravitational force. Simulating the movement of the Planets more accurately requires a vast and complex computer model that can account for more of the innumerable specifics pertaining to each body. Compared to Newton’s formulae such models are anything but elegant, and their flaws and design compromises are rather more obvious. The danger is the conflation of useful simplifications with the reality they serve. A useful scientific tool; outside of the lab the creature sows havoc.

The threat of perfectionism is not a character flaw, consigned to a few unfortunates. The proof of mass perfectionism is everywhere. Consider the defining modern accessory, the iPhone: Apple supplanted the chunky and the drab with an elegant device, designed and manufactured with consummate exactitude. The very essence of Apple’s entire brand is perfection, not just in the exterior design, but in the exact marriage of software to purpose-built hardware, in the completeness of the packaged solution and in a user interface carefully designed for the user’s intuition, to blur as much as possible the line between accessory and organ. All brands are to a greater or lesser extent perfectionist (demanding uniformity), and it works because people like to order their lives and their thoughts around perfectionist ideals. Marketers understand this: most people don’t buy an iMac to go with their iPhone to exploit the integration points between Apple devices, they buy an Apple computer to go with their Apple phone because that feels neater, cleaner and more consistent (consistent both with their other device and with who they imagine themselves to be). There are other examples. The hideous food craze “#Eatclean” should really be called the iDiet. No different is the growing industry of lifestyle quacks writing on how to “streamline” one’s life by “downsizing” or decluttering the mind and home, throwing out the superfluous and the imperfect (a goal that, if achieved, could only be described as attaining the iLife). Graduates in top jobs agonise over how they can “find their passion”. Fully-grown adults pursue the chimeric “soul mate”, and at that hunt’s end switch to swotting up on becoming the perfect mum or dad. Vegetarians and vegans wrestle with which animal deaths they can consistently accept; from leather to rennet to modern medicine to non-organic crops. People seek perfection in the everyday doing, the glistening slice of buttered toast, the pristine house, the crisp ironed shirt. In public affairs, the political left’s obsession with ideological purity is a clear expression of frustrated perfectionism, but ideological puritanism is hardly exclusive to the left. Nationalism, which demands a more perfect unity of statehood with nation, culture, language and (at its most tyrannical) race, is a yet more blatant example.

The examples above are necessarily generalisations, but perfectionism infects almost all of us, if not always to the same degree. Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme – which applied evolutionary logic to the spread of ideas – is controversial, but makes well the point that not all ideas are equal, psychologically speaking. Some concepts are more compelling to human beings than others, and are faster replicated and spread by their human hosts. The notion of perfection is one such example, not merely for its utility, and its spread into every facet of human life is suggestive of a deep psychological need for the world to be simpler, more ordered and perhaps fairer than it really is. And perfectionist ideas are at their most powerful and dangerous when combined with other primal needs, such as the craving for simplicity, leadership and a tribe in which to belong. Perfection is obviously a powerful motivating factor: people are willing, even anxious, to invest additional labour to attain something closer to perfection, with satisfaction their only reward. Whether the labourer is a banker toiling into the night to build the perfect spreadsheet or a cleaner working late without pay to ensure they “do a good job”, the motivation is the same. The same is true of the hours of practice we pour into mastering our hobbies, from cooking to golf. Nor are these efforts purely unthinking and compulsive: lurking beneath are the assumptions that (first) perfection is real, natural and attainable, and (second) desirable.

Alone or in tandem, the effect of these two assumptions (“perfection bias”) on the thought process is to distort our perception and our reason. For example, when a moral conservative says or thinks that “it cannot be possible that some people are born gay”, the underlying assumptions are that homosexuality is imperfect, and that therefore it cannot exist in nature. Similar silent assumptions support the resistance we see to many other uncomfortable facts, whether that fact is the challenge of global warming for libertarians (“it cannot be the case that there could ever be a problem that would justify government intervention in the economy”) or the superiority of capitalism to socialism for leftists (“capitalism is imperfect, so a perfect alternative must exist”). The tendency to assume that the Universe must somehow be ultimately good or perfect or moral or otherwise ordered and purposed traps us in a cycle of delusion and reasoning from consequence. The same bias applies to the frustrated twenty-something solicitor who asks how he can “find his passion”, as if he didn’t already know what he was passionate about (probably something difficult or impossible to monetise, like hiking or poetry), as though the perfect job must exist, as though life were not a series of unsatisfactory trade-offs between different concerns. Just as there is no reason to assume that such a thing as the perfect spouse (the chimeric “soulmate”) exists, or the perfect job, there is no reason to suppose that the political or spiritual beliefs you hold must necessarily be vindicated by nature.

In politics, the Left’s tendency to fixate on ideological purity, to the extent to which left-wing parties and movements are prepared to war amongst themselves, to split over the placement of a single comma in a pamphlet, to implement policies that are known to fail, to stand on unelectable manifestos and so on (all to the detriment of winning power or wielding any influence) is an extreme case of perfectionist fantasy trumping reality. Such behaviour is more than just a Leninist hangover: it is an example of double perfectionism, one of assuming and one of desiring: the first is a desire for perfect consistency and rightness. The second is an assumption that only absolute purity and rightness will bring ultimate victory, a perfectionist bias here combined with the well-known bias towards believing what we want to believe. On the political right, the most obvious ideological equivalent is nationalism. All ideologies are perfectionist in the same way, in that they boil the vast complexity of human political life down to a pure essence such as “freedom” or “equality”, but they are not all perfectionist to the same extent, and nationalism is an extreme case. Nationalists impose onto history the perfect ghost of a nation, a vision impossibly simple and pure, and push it ever backwards in time, describing something that has never existed and insisting that it has always existed. (Or did always exist, until it was polluted by imperfect foreigners in league with treasonous elites). The project of restoring this false “Golden Age”, transmuted from the dirt in history’s winding entrails, can only proceed by twisting real lives to fit the illusion: everyone in France must be made French (or at least made to speak French); every place where French people live must be emptied of them or become part of the French State; French people must become pure, culturally if not racially, and free from un-French influences; nothing must come above being French. Immigrants must be pushed out or assimilated, regional languages and customs must be co-opted or suppressed, foreign ideas must be eliminated and dissident artists and thinkers must be shut up or shown the door. And of course, nationalism and the nation it asserts are widely assumed to be natural.

There are other effects. The need for perfection is likewise behind the mental acrobatics people perform to preserve consistency in their beliefs. Such efforts are ultimately wasted for those unwilling to become single-minded fundamentalists, but nonetheless manufacture immense stupidity in otherwise intelligent minds. Another perfectionist tic is that we expect perfect explanations and treat incomplete explanations with suspicion, as though the facts of the case were obliged to present themselves to us in full and intuitive manner. This explains much of the appeal of conspiracy theories: in place of the incomplete and messy facts behind the 9/11 attacks or the global warming phenomenon, events driven by a dozen different forces and still riddled with unknowns, they offer a complete and compelling story, with a single, simple explanation. (Tediously, the single explanation offered by conspiracy theorists tends to vary only in the specifics: whether the greedy villain du jour is the Government, the Bankers, the Scientists or the Jews.) The perfectionist appeal of conspiracy theories is demonstrated by the tactics their peddlers employ, where they simply ignore the mountains of evidence supporting the “official” version of events and instead laser in on the imperfections, gathering together fragments of evidence that don’t appear to fit with the rest and holding them up as proof that the whole thing is a lie. That such people call themselves “sceptics” and “free thinkers” is the biggest joke of all: they apply scepticism exclusively to the official version of events, giving even the wildest claims of their fellow-travellers a free pass, and are free thinkers only in so far as they are free from any obligation to make their theories fit with the evidence. I digress.

The tension between our perfectionist instincts and our imperfect world means that, generally speaking, perfection can be satisfied only in highly artificial scenarios. One might achieve a perfect score in a video game, for example, or lavish sufficient time and attention on a small personal project or hobby to declare the result – a garden, a book, a collection, a picture – perfect. At school, too, a small elite of motivated children manage to project an illusion of perfection by attaining top grades in every subject (less brilliant children must satisfy their inner perfectionist by scoring full marks in the odd test). These environments are obviously exceptional, and offer the perfectionist a rare haven. Even that most conspicuous relic of perfection’s cult, the iPhone, fails to conceal the mass of design compromises required to satisfy its three masters (appearance, functionality and profitability). The same is true in business in general: thanks to the law of diminishing marginal returns, perfection is the enemy of efficiency in most economic contexts. (In business, “just about good enough” and “just in time” are the golden standards of excellence and efficiency. True perfectionists are forever frustrated in their working lives.) In our personal lives, we suffer agonies and inconveniences both great and trivial because of our inability to let go of the perfectionist dream. Too often, we hold ourselves and others to an impossible standard, and feel aggrieved when that standard cannot be met. We pretend that we can “have it all”, without sacrifice or choice, as though life could mimic Disney. Of course, we know that perfection is unattainable. So why do we pretend otherwise? We’re all willing to say the words “no-one’s perfect”, but who really believes it when it comes to their own love life, or the upbringing of their own child? And how many of us are prepared to admit that our lives are ever-shifting trade-offs between different goals, rather than an all-consuming and exclusively-focused mission? The most that can be said is that some people are more honest with themselves than others.

Perfectionism does not merely undergird lunacy, neuroticism, conspiracy mania and dogmatism. Perfectionist ideals and the human perceptions and desires they set directly create intolerance, violence, tyranny and oppression. Consider intolerance: the impulse to constrict the peaceable behaviour of others depends on both the immediate perfectionist urge of the intolerant and on the perfectionist ideas they hold. When an illiberal conservative seeks the recriminalisation of homosexuality, their inner perfectionist has asked: Why must gay people exist? Surely it would be better if they did not. Homosexuality is imperfect; therefore gays cannot be born, they must be made. They have chosen imperfection. Calls for a “British Britain” or a “Christian Europe” can be seen in the same light. The commonality is an intellectual refusal to accept that the world – women, men, foreign peoples – could be richer and more complex than their ideology admits, and an emotional refusal to allow others to be imperfect.

It should be obvious from the above that perfectionism applied to politics is necessarily tyrannical, because it can accept neither compromise nor delay. Whether the issue in question is an education reform bill or the revolutionary transformation of a society wholesale, perfectionism demands that resistance and dialogue, the very essence of politics, be suppressed. Perfectionist ideologies seek to force reality into a preordained pattern, and the greater the expanse of human life an ideology claims as its own, the more vaulting its ambition, the more complete the final pattern, the more total the submission it demands of others. As the great libertarian Robert Nozick famously observed: “liberty disrupts patterns”. Freedom is a threat to perfectionists because it permits people to be imperfect. The apex of ideology is totalitarianism, a doctrine that makes imperfection, be it racial, spiritual or ideological, a crime. Such ideas are inherently murderous: genocide is perfectionist not only in the expressed desire for racial purity but in the very racial categories upon which the evil dream of purity rests. The mass violence totalitarian states reliably unleash is a necessary consequence of the unlimited authority they claim and the chasm between reality and their beliefs, a void that, though filled with bodies, is never full. Do not suppose that the menace of political perfectionism died with the fascist and communist regimes of the 20^th century. The interlinked phenomena of Islamic fanaticism and the authoritarian-nationalist movements of Trump, Putin and Le Pen are a dreadful warning of what could easily return.

Perfection dominates the brain, and the pursuit of perfection blights lives. This condemnation should not be read as total: perfectionism is indispensable and probably ineradicable. The world cannot be understood without simplification, and perfectionism is no threat when so applied. Indulging perfectionism in hobbies and other trivial pursuits is a source of immense pleasure. Nor can the concept provide the whole explanation for human oppression and stupidity; that theory would be too perfect. My point is rather that the influence of perfectionism should be noticed and resisted. Marx (himself a master perfectionist) observed that man projected abstractions onto the world – God, money, ideology – only to be enslaved by them, and I think this is a good way of looking at our relationship with perfection. Though man-made, perfection is alien to our world; cold, artificial and callously indifferent to the fine texture of the human experience. And this is the final peculiarity of our fascination with perfection: as we all know, perfection is rarely what we want. Perfection is boring, and oppressively so. (Indeed, the whole point of Black Swan‘s critique is that, besides driving her crazy, Nina’s obsession with perfection made her dancing lifeless and mechanical.) The perfect likeness is artless art; the perfect spouse would be a creepy inhuman femmebot (manbot); the perfect life would not be worth living; genuine saints would be intolerable bores; the perfect society would be a stifling playpen of indolence and decay (or, in our imperfect world, a revolutionary killing zone of ceaseless horror). This is the perfectionist’s paradox: sometimes, he pursues perfection safe in the knowledge he cannot catch it. The time is long past to let it go.

 

Nathan

Thursday July 6^th, 2017

London

UNTIL now, the conduct of this election has been so utterly tedious, the outcome so predictable and the dearth of talent and good ideas on offer so total that I have been paying almost no attention at all. I did not expect to get involved, beyond voting, and certainly did not expect to be making an endorsement. Only the caprice of the polls forces my hand, so I will keep it brief: vote Tory.

There is no enthusiasm behind this injunction: I am a leftist, albeit a slightly unorthodox one. I voted and campaigned for Remain, and despair of the recent tilt of our politics towards paranoid nationalist demagoguery – an omen far more ominous than Brexit itself. The defining transformation of this new era is the supposedly conservative Daily Mail’s reinvention as a Pravda, whose hysterical headlines now scream for the blood of the enemies of the Revolution. Theresa May has failed to resist even the worst excesses of this dynamic, such as the frenzied attack by the right-wing press on the judges who ruled against the government in the Article 50 case. Perhaps she subscribes to the Yes Minister take on democratic leadership: I must follow them; I am their leader! I have other objections: by her jeering speech on “citizens of nowhere” and attacks on the obligingly villainous “liberal elites”, egged on by the usual unsavoury newspapermen, she and her supporters have made clear that they hate people like me; that they hold us and our values in open contempt. As Home Secretary, she displayed all the maladies we have come to associate with that office: obsessive secrecy and paranoia; a disregard for the rule of law; hostility to basic liberties; constant efforts to expand the state’s snooping and prying; and a fondness for scapegoating more junior officials for departmental mistakes. Her pitch for the leader’s job at the 2015 party conference, where she devoted her speech to bemoaning the high levels of immigration for which it was her own department’s responsibility to regulate, was seen as tawdry and self-promoting, even within the conservative press. She is a drab and dismally provincial politician; more often clumsy than adroit; holding her present office by a chain of lucky events: Cameron’s need to keep a senior woman in the cabinet, and his lack of alternatives to her; and the ineptitude of her rivals in the leadership race last year. I have little faith in her ability to govern, but what alternative exists?

The Liberal Democrats? The Party is merits a protest vote, but only where it is safe to do so: I live in a safe Labour seat, so the Liberal Democrats have my vote. But understand that they have no hope of winning, and that stopping Corbyn or the chaos of a polarised Parliament takes priority. Their strategy and animating force is the campaign for a second referendum – a hopeless cause. Forget for a moment that the vast majority of voters, including most Remain voters, are resigned to Brexit and just want the government to get on with it. Imagine a sudden reversal of fortune, and Tim Farron sweeping to a shock victory, or winning enough seats to force a referendum on the Brexit deal. Even were such a referendum winnable, which I doubt, there is little reason to believe the Article 50 process can simply be reversed. Doing so would require the unanimous agreement of all 27 remaining EU states, which would take a decade or more of negotiations to achieve, and would without doubt demand the loss of our traditional opt-outs and privileges within the EU. Brexit cannot now be stopped.

And Labour? There is much to praise in his manifesto, but Corbyn is not fit to be Prime Minister. Forget his shambolic management of the opposition; forgive his fundamental ignorance of the modern world; overlook his benevolence towards blatant antisemitism within the Party; ignore his decision to accept money from Press TV, the Iranian state’s foreign propaganda arm. He is unfit to govern because his entire world view is delusional and poisonous. He has repeatedly sided with and supported the vilest terrorists and religious fanatics not by accident, but because of his ideology. He genuinely sees Western states as “imperialist” and, by farcical deduction, their enemies as heroic revolutionaries. Never mind that the Provisional IRA ran large sections of Belfast and Derry in the manner of a Soviet Republic crossed with mafia state, killing, stealing and torturing as they pleased: the important thing is that they were resisting British imperialism. The same logic excuses Hamas and Hizbullah: their genocidal pretentions mean nothing to Corbyn, because they’re bravely resisting Israel and America. Are you some kind of Zionist? Whose side are you on? I know this is how he thinks, because when I was a sixteen year-old bourgeois Bolshevik my comrades and I thought the same way. Every bomb that rips through a British nightclub is the fault of Blair and Brown, Churchill, Thatcher or Cameron; anyone but the bomber and his friends. After all, they’re probably brown – and it’s hardly their fault they were victims of imperialism, is it? There is no despotism he would not excuse, however monstrous, so long as it stood in opposition to “the West”. (Indeed, he’s all in favour of aggressive imperialism, so long as the invading power is Russia, Iraq or Iran). As Prime Minister, his anti-Western and isolationist stance would catastrophically weaken NATO at a time of American withdrawal and Russian revanchism, further jeopardising European peace. He must be stopped, and the members must be punished for electing him. The latter point is very important: even in a safe seat, do not vote Labour. Every vote for Labour in this election is a vote for Corbynism, and will stiffen the hard left’s resistance. Understand that they seek to use your loyalty for their own ends: their priority is not winning this election, but consolidating control of the Labour party. Only when the traitors within are defeated, their thinking goes, can we take the fight to the Tories.

As leftists, Corbyn is our responsibility. The most sinister feature of the Trump phenomenon (“administration” does not adequately capture the spell he has cast over American politics) has been the astonishing spectacle of hitherto respected and independent conservatives fawning at his feet. No outrage is too egregious for them to defend; no lie too blatant to repeat. Nothing – not the open corruption of his government; nor the profiteering of his foul family; nor its shredding of traditional alliances and flirtation with tyrants; nor its brazen contempt for due process and the rule of law; nor its war on free and truthful journalism – warrants more than the most hollow rebuke from these writhing invertebrates. The elite of the Party – men like Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnel, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John McCain, all senior lawmakers or former Presidential candidates – cringe on suppliant knee before the omnipotent cretin. Besides the courts, they are the only check on Trump’s excesses, and their failure to resist his corrosion of American democracy sinks them in deep disgrace. One could not ask for a more strident parable on the consequences of unthinking tribalism. It falls to us to rise to the standard that America’s self-proclaimed Republicans has so woefully fallen short of. Corbyn is not fit to govern, and it is the duty of we on the left to point this out. So it is with great reluctance, and no small self-importance, that I urge you: vote Tory where they can win, and Liberal Democrat where they can’t.

Nathan

Saturday June 3^rd, 2017

London

HOW can one respond to the murder of schoolgirls? Here I do not credit the anodyne expressions of outrage at “terrorism”, which all but the most fervent Islamists and their far-left enablers seem capable of. Above the natural emotive – horror, fury, despair – rises the clamour for retaliation, sounding with each atrocity louder. Mass deportation, mass incarceration, mass surveillance: the tyrannical solutions demanded by the radical right are as stupid as they are cruel. Monday’s outrage would not have been stopped by such measures, even were we to discard our traditional reluctance to lash out at innocents. The proponents of such schemes know this. They are proposed chiefly to express anger and to generate headlines, clicks and book sales. But it bears remembering, as the Conservative MP Dominic Grieve observed today, that authoritarian states are little safer from terrorism than free ones. Indeed, the entire point of terrorism is to provoke such an overreaction. Recall that one sect of Islam has declared war – total war – on all non-Muslims and on every Muslim it finds heretical, impious or merely insufficiently supportive. Those who would treat all Muslims as the enemy become the enforcers of the Islamic State’s most overweening claim: that it is the rightful sovereign of all Muslims, and that they are either soldiers of the Caliphate or infidel lackeys. The howling voices on the radical right wish to lend to ISIS the Muslims living here, in the West – alien or native, fanatic or cynic, they discriminate not. They would press them into the service of the Caliphate without a moment’s hesitation, and deny them any chance to choose. That this murderer was motivated by his Islamic beliefs is obvious. That we are at war with his evil ideology is equally obvious. Most obvious of all is that none of this need be so. Through their actions, British Muslims can and do choose, every day, what it means to be a Muslim, and the path of the suicide bomber remains mercifully unpopular. This is true even though a great many British Muslims, perhaps even a majority, hold reactionary and antediluvian views. Indeed, a formidable portion of these sympathise with the aims and even the means of jihad, though they do not practice it, and it is precisely for this reason that we must respond with care. For those who harbour a spark of sympathy, however dim, for Salman Abedi’s cause form a reserve army – thousands strong, and with garrisons and advance camps in every major city in the Western world. If our policy is brought in line with the Islamic State’s, that every Muslim must choose between the Caliphate and the West, how many thousands will choose the former over the latter?

 

Another response, one less dangerous but equally wrong, is to look inwards, and find blame in ourselves. We are attacked, the argument goes, not because the Islamists pursue a totalitarian ideology with pretensions to world conquest, but because of our aggression overseas. This claim is popular and superficially plausible, but wrong. Those who imagine, as do the isolationists of left and right, that the terrorism haunting Europe and America is the ghost of our crimes against the Islamic world are fooling themselves. There is a persuasive symmetry to the idea of “blowback”, and many find comfort in the idea that we could keep ourselves safe merely by withdrawing from the affairs of the world and leaving well alone. It is also true that our foreign policy decisions can inflame radicalism as well as soothe it. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 almost certainly was a propaganda gift to violent Islamists. But the notion that we would not be targeted if we steered clear of foreign entanglements is sadly deluded, for some fairly obvious reasons. First is the trivial point that we do not know what would have happened had we not invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, or chosen not to support the Libyan rebels. The primary reason critics like Simon Jenkins assert with such confidence that we wouldn’t be in this mess if we had just left well enough alone over the past decade is that we have no way of checking. Similarly, the specifics of a given excuse for terrorism – the invasion of Iraq, for example – obscure the disingenuous generality of the strategy of justifying terrorism by excuse: if it weren’t Iraq, it would be Afghanistan, or Bosnia, or the occupation of Palestine or the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire; even the British occupation of Egypt or the Crusades. Now, the British Empire’s mishandling of the Palestinian mandate and other former Ottoman provinces like Iraq is a more worthy topic of discussion than most, but it is nothing more than that, since any mistakes Britain made in that period cannot be reversed. Blaming the Balfour declaration of 1917 for Islamist atrocities committed today is an ambitious historical argument, but is not particularly helpful for deciding what to do about it now. (Incidentally, the proof that excuses such as Iraq are hollow is that Islamists have recently attacked France, Sweden, Belgium, India and Germany, all of whom opposed or stayed out of the invasion of Iraq.) Consider too the other horn of the dilemma, entirely ignored by the isolationists, that often we are damned if we intervene and damned if we don’t: the genocide against Bosnia’s Muslims by Serbian and Croat forces was an incomparable recruiting tool for radical Islamists, and one enabled entirely by NATO’s failure to intervene earlier. Similarly, the suggestion that an Islamist like Salman Abedi was radicalised by Britain’s support for the heavily Islamist Syrian and Libyan opposition movements against their respective, non-Islamist dictators is entirely implausible. But even if all the above were untrue, understand that the price of never being able to intervene militarily or politically in the Islamic world for fear of retaliation is unacceptably high. The catastrophic collapse of Iraq into ruin and bloodshed overshadows interventions that were both successful and necessary: recall the French invasion of Mali in 2013 to clear out the local Al Qaida affiliates who had recently seized the north of the country; the multinational operation in 2014 to prevent ISIS’s genocide of the Yazidis; or the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam’s invading armies in 1990-1991; to name just three. The reality is that, had we let our fear of angering Islamists dictate our actions, we would have of force stood by to watch countless innocents suffer torture and death, and their murderers enjoy the spoils of their aggression without fear of justice or reprisal. The isolationists demand we surrender any claim to moral leadership in the world, and that is a price we cannot pay.

 

What, then, is to be done? We are fortunate in that, having defeated the Provisional IRA, we know what we need to do. The analogy is not perfect, but the basic strategy remains the same. First, we must refrain from handing our enemy needless (as distinct from unavoidable or justifiable) propaganda victories. Refraining from demonising Muslims is not merely the just thing to do, but the prudent thing to do. For this reason, crude and oppressive measures such as banning Islamic garb should not be entertained, however politically tempting they may become. Second, we should rely on good policing at home. This requires patient investigation, plentiful resources and – crucially – extensive co-operation with friendly Muslim informants and intellectual leaders. Third, we must aggressively counter Islamist propaganda and confront the sources of such propaganda, at home and abroad. On the home front, this might well require mandatory secularism in British schools, perhaps even including private religious institutions, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Abroad, a harder stance on theocratic terror states such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan is long overdue. Fourth, we should work to reduce long-term immigration from the most retrograde Islamic societies such as Afghanistan and Pakistan (although we should continue to accept what genuine refugees we can, prioritising the most vulnerable). Fifth, we must intensify our efforts to assimilate the Muslims already living in the U.K., including second and third generation immigrants, many of whom live in deep poverty and in isolation from white British society despite living in the heart of our great cities. The struggle will be long, but under no circumstances should we accept Monday’s attack on Manchester as normal, excusable or inevitable.

Nathan

Saturday May 27th, 2017

London

​THE sensational firing of controversial FBI director James Comey on Tuesday has stoked the long-smouldering inquiry into the Trump campaign’s alleged electoral collusion with Russian intelligence into a towering firestorm. The Administration’s critics cry foul, seeing an attempt to deflect the investigation, and thereby undermining the rule of law and by extension, the entire constitutional order, while its defenders insist that the Comey had acted improperly with regards to the earlier criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and that his departure was long overdue. The Democrats’ own criticism of the Director for his handling of that case has since come back to haunt them, gleefully repeated by insincere mouths. But what is the truth?

The first thing to acknowledge is that Comey was a fool. There is no question that he was too big for his boots, and sought a role on the political stage that was improper for a man in his office to seek. His decision, at a public hearing in July of last year, to heap invective on Hillary Clinton before clearing her was not, any more than his catastrophic decision to announce the re-opening of the email server investigation just days before the election, the calculation of a secret Trump sympathiser, but the blunder of a self-important buffoon. As much is revealed by his insistence, when offered an opportunity to denounce his decision to inform Congress of the re-opening of the email probe, that it was by his grace alone that the Bureau’s sacred obligation to not meddle in politics would be observed (or not, as was the case). He has no-one to blame for his humiliation before the eyes of the world: his own recklessness and stupidity left him open to persecution.

But the Administration’s pretext – that Trump sought to defend the honour of Crooked Hillary – is a lie so ludicrous as to be insulting. The lie is blatant but insistent, and believed by no-one, least of all those who most vociferously defend it. Why else have Trump loyalists resorted to deflections, hollow charges of hypocrisy and invidious comparisons with Bill Clinton? (Suffice to say, the disingenuous and farcical attempts to compare this sacking to President Clinton’s firing of then-serving FBI Director William Sessions – a man whose misdeeds in public office were documented in a 161-page Department of Justice report, backed by the sworn testimony of more than 100 serving FBI officers – deserve only ridicule.) Nor is Comey’s dismissal the action of an innocent man: if Trump is as eager as he should be to prove his innocence of collusion with Russia, he must do two things: first, he must replace the Director with a serious and credible figure – one boasting unimpeachable integrity and bipartisan support. Some pliable non-entity or obsequious hack will not do. Second, he must appoint a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of the Trump-Russia connection, and make public whatever there is to find. And the Republican Congress, if they truly believe their man to be innocent, should demand these steps too. Their effort to block a genuine investigation reveal their true estimation of this Administration’s integrity.

They are as delusional as they are desperate. This scandal will not simply expire with time, because it cannot: if the President successfully thwarts an investigation into his campaign by firing the chief investigator, the United States will have become a banana republic. Recall what is at stake: there exist credible allegations that Trump’s inner circle engaged in common endeavour with a foreign power to corrupt an American election. If such collusion did take place, it is a matter of treason – and someone must swing for it.

 

Nathan

Saturday May 13^th, 2017

London