Trumpism has come to Britain. I don’t just mean that we are turning against markets, globalisation and immigrants. A certain rise in nativism is an understandable – indeed inescapable – consequence of years of failure on immigration policy.
No, I am talking about something else. I am talking about the negative polarisation, the desire to drink the other side’s tears, the tendency to see politics as a way to upset people you don’t like, the culture wars and the consequent downgrading of economic arguments.
I am talking, too, about the rise of personality cults – to me, the creepiest and most un-American aspect of the entire Maga phenomenon. The US constitution was expressly designed to ensure “a government of laws and not of men”. The founders had a horror of what they called “Caesarism”, meaning that a popular individual might regard himself as bigger than the system. Yet Donald Trump’s supporters demand not only that everyone should contract out their opinions to him but also that his wishes be the paramount end of US policy, bigger even than the Constitution.
When vice-president J D Vance was asked why the US was making a hostile territorial claim against Denmark, a loyal ally which had answered America’s call after 9/11 and suffered a higher proportionate casualty rate in Afghanistan than any other nation, he replied: “We can’t simply ignore the president’s desires.” Many Maga supporters, including congressmen and governors, took the same attitude to Trump’s interest in securing a third presidential term, in plain defiance of the rules.
Trump then renounced that ambition, pulling the rug, as he unfailingly does, from under his cheerleaders. Yet nothing dents their sycophancy. Every twist and turn of his tariff policy has had his supporters swithering back and forth in order to hail his genius. “Raising revenue! Clever negotiating position! Bringing jobs back to America! Making other countries reciprocate!”
As personality cults go, Trump’s is bizarre. Various dystopian novels and films down the years have imagined an autocrat rising in America, a man promising to rise above the petty, bickering politicians in Congress. But no one imagined such a man being so needy, self-absorbed, wheedling, childish, petulant and deceitful. They envisaged a tyrant who would lead the nation astray with powerful rhetoric, not someone who would tell petty fibs about how popular he was. As Prince Hal says of Falstaff: “These lies are like their father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable.”
No, the only way to understand Trump’s appeal is as a product of negative polarisation. People vote for him, in large measure, because of what he is against: immigration, foreign entanglements, politicians and what has come loosely to be called “globalism”.
And who can doubt that we are seeing the same phenomenon in this country? Here, too, an electorate weary of the failure of the established parties is looking for someone who can be, as Trump styled himself, “your retribution”.
Nigel Farage is not Trumpian in personality. He is more intelligent, more empathetic and more eloquent. And whereas Trump came late and malevolently to the Republican Party, Farage has been creditably consistent on his big-picture views (not even his strongest supporters claim that Farage is interested in policy details).
Yet who can doubt that the surge in support for Reform UK is largely driven by the same factors as Maga in the US? Above all, a sense that all the other parties are a failed cartel, that no one is serious about controlling the borders and that, yes, in order to shake things up, perhaps a slightly autocratic style is needed.
How many Reform supporters could tell you what the party’s health or education policies are, or who would be in a putative Farage cabinet? When your motives are essentially negative, in the sense that you want to punish the establishment, such questions become almost irrelevant.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump told a rally in Iowa in 2016, and he was right. Much the same is true of Reform, and for the same reasons. In July, the party expelled several of its selected candidates too late to have their names taken off the ballot paper. Yet those candidates got almost exactly the same share of the vote as they would have done had they still had the party’s endorsement.
One, in Barnsley North, who was disowned after it emerged that he has said that “black people should get off their lazy arses and stop acting like savages”, came second with 29.3 per cent of the vote. Does that suggest that Reform voters were looking for a local champion, or simply that they wanted to register their anger at the old system?
It was to Farage’s credit that he wanted nothing to do with such candidates. He has, so far, kept his party free from some of the crazier policies adopted by Trump and by anti-systemic parties in Europe. He has toughened his position on Ukraine, and is more of a free-marketeer than his American hero. But, to repeat, none of that has much bearing on his support.
Another thing Farage has in common with Trump is that he has made other politicians shift their positions. When British Steel was effectively nationalised last month, I was one of only two people who spoke against it in Parliament – who spoke, in other words, in favour of what was a cross-party consensus until 10 years ago.
There has been an even more hurried retreat from free trade, with the Conservatives joining Reform in pretending that the India trade deal will somehow mean higher immigration. Those of us who followed the negotiations, and who tried to argue that there were no such implications, were told to read the room. People were furious about immigration, we were told, and we should not insult them by telling them that they had the wrong end of the stick.
I was reminded of the demented summer of 2020, when any claim made by BLM supporters, however obviously false, had to be humoured in deference to their lived experience.
I can just about see, although I dislike it, the logic that made the Tories attack the India deal. Farage was going to claim that it undercut British workers, and no one would want to hear him being corrected. But the Tories went further and also attacked the US deal – not on grounds that it was incomplete and left the door open to EU control of our regulations, but on the ludicrous grounds that Britain was cutting its tariffs too sharply.
Where has it come from, this sudden fashion for strong men, statism and protectionism? When did we stop caring about civility, reason and pluralism? I think the answer has to do with the rise of smartphones in general, and the lockdown in particular. People say things online that they would never say to someone’s face. The online atmosphere is angry, aggressive, bombastic, conspiratorial and egotistical – in a word, Trumpian. People who are more comfortable in the virtual than the real world are not as put off by narcissism, rudeness or straightforward cruelty as those who spend more time rubbing along with flesh-and-blood neighbours.
During the pandemic, parents stopped telling their kids to put their screens away, and instead told them to get back online to finish their homework. Unsurprisingly, young men of that lockdown generation are some of the strongest supporters of the new style of politics.
Farage is a much more likeable and credible figure than Trump. But there would once have been a time when insisting on being a one-man band, and kicking out anyone in your party who grew too popular, would have put voters off. Not anymore. We are all in Trump’s world now.
Trumpism has come to Britain. I don’t just mean that we are turning against markets, globalisation and immigrants. A certain rise in nativism is an understandable – indeed inescapable – consequence of years of failure on immigration policy.
No, I am talking about something else. I am talking about the negative polarisation, the desire to drink the other side’s tears, the tendency to see politics as a way to upset people you don’t like, the culture wars and the consequent downgrading of economic arguments.
I am talking, too, about the rise of personality cults – to me, the creepiest and most un-American aspect of the entire Maga phenomenon. The US constitution was expressly designed to ensure “a government of laws and not of men”. The founders had a horror of what they called “Caesarism”, meaning that a popular individual might regard himself as bigger than the system. Yet Donald Trump’s supporters demand not only that everyone should contract out their opinions to him but also that his wishes be the paramount end of US policy, bigger even than the Constitution.
When vice-president J D Vance was asked why the US was making a hostile territorial claim against Denmark, a loyal ally which had answered America’s call after 9/11 and suffered a higher proportionate casualty rate in Afghanistan than any other nation, he replied: “We can’t simply ignore the president’s desires.” Many Maga supporters, including congressmen and governors, took the same attitude to Trump’s interest in securing a third presidential term, in plain defiance of the rules.
Trump then renounced that ambition, pulling the rug, as he unfailingly does, from under his cheerleaders. Yet nothing dents their sycophancy. Every twist and turn of his tariff policy has had his supporters swithering back and forth in order to hail his genius. “Raising revenue! Clever negotiating position! Bringing jobs back to America! Making other countries reciprocate!”
As personality cults go, Trump’s is bizarre. Various dystopian novels and films down the years have imagined an autocrat rising in America, a man promising to rise above the petty, bickering politicians in Congress. But no one imagined such a man being so needy, self-absorbed, wheedling, childish, petulant and deceitful. They envisaged a tyrant who would lead the nation astray with powerful rhetoric, not someone who would tell petty fibs about how popular he was. As Prince Hal says of Falstaff: “These lies are like their father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable.”
No, the only way to understand Trump’s appeal is as a product of negative polarisation. People vote for him, in large measure, because of what he is against: immigration, foreign entanglements, politicians and what has come loosely to be called “globalism”.
And who can doubt that we are seeing the same phenomenon in this country? Here, too, an electorate weary of the failure of the established parties is looking for someone who can be, as Trump styled himself, “your retribution”.
Nigel Farage is not Trumpian in personality. He is more intelligent, more empathetic and more eloquent. And whereas Trump came late and malevolently to the Republican Party, Farage has been creditably consistent on his big-picture views (not even his strongest supporters claim that Farage is interested in policy details).
Yet who can doubt that the surge in support for Reform UK is largely driven by the same factors as Maga in the US? Above all, a sense that all the other parties are a failed cartel, that no one is serious about controlling the borders and that, yes, in order to shake things up, perhaps a slightly autocratic style is needed.
How many Reform supporters could tell you what the party’s health or education policies are, or who would be in a putative Farage cabinet? When your motives are essentially negative, in the sense that you want to punish the establishment, such questions become almost irrelevant.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump told a rally in Iowa in 2016, and he was right. Much the same is true of Reform, and for the same reasons. In July, the party expelled several of its selected candidates too late to have their names taken off the ballot paper. Yet those candidates got almost exactly the same share of the vote as they would have done had they still had the party’s endorsement.
One, in Barnsley North, who was disowned after it emerged that he has said that “black people should get off their lazy arses and stop acting like savages”, came second with 29.3 per cent of the vote. Does that suggest that Reform voters were looking for a local champion, or simply that they wanted to register their anger at the old system?
It was to Farage’s credit that he wanted nothing to do with such candidates. He has, so far, kept his party free from some of the crazier policies adopted by Trump and by anti-systemic parties in Europe. He has toughened his position on Ukraine, and is more of a free-marketeer than his American hero. But, to repeat, none of that has much bearing on his support.
Another thing Farage has in common with Trump is that he has made other politicians shift their positions. When British Steel was effectively nationalised last month, I was one of only two people who spoke against it in Parliament – who spoke, in other words, in favour of what was a cross-party consensus until 10 years ago.
There has been an even more hurried retreat from free trade, with the Conservatives joining Reform in pretending that the India trade deal will somehow mean higher immigration. Those of us who followed the negotiations, and who tried to argue that there were no such implications, were told to read the room. People were furious about immigration, we were told, and we should not insult them by telling them that they had the wrong end of the stick.
I was reminded of the demented summer of 2020, when any claim made by BLM supporters, however obviously false, had to be humoured in deference to their lived experience.
I can just about see, although I dislike it, the logic that made the Tories attack the India deal. Farage was going to claim that it undercut British workers, and no one would want to hear him being corrected. But the Tories went further and also attacked the US deal – not on grounds that it was incomplete and left the door open to EU control of our regulations, but on the ludicrous grounds that Britain was cutting its tariffs too sharply.
Where has it come from, this sudden fashion for strong men, statism and protectionism? When did we stop caring about civility, reason and pluralism? I think the answer has to do with the rise of smartphones in general, and the lockdown in particular. People say things online that they would never say to someone’s face. The online atmosphere is angry, aggressive, bombastic, conspiratorial and egotistical – in a word, Trumpian. People who are more comfortable in the virtual than the real world are not as put off by narcissism, rudeness or straightforward cruelty as those who spend more time rubbing along with flesh-and-blood neighbours.
During the pandemic, parents stopped telling their kids to put their screens away, and instead told them to get back online to finish their homework. Unsurprisingly, young men of that lockdown generation are some of the strongest supporters of the new style of politics.
Farage is a much more likeable and credible figure than Trump. But there would once have been a time when insisting on being a one-man band, and kicking out anyone in your party who grew too popular, would have put voters off. Not anymore. We are all in Trump’s world now.