Nationalism, the mob and left dreams.
| Author | James, Malcolm |
The left cannot and should not compete with the right's nationalist politics; but the current 'clamour for nationalism' does also suggest a popular desire for a form of politics more ambitious than the inhibited technocracies of the 1990s/2000s. The left must construct a coherent anti-nationalist politics allied to a vision big enough to meet the scale of the current crisis.
At the recent Tory Party Conference, Chairman James Cleverly ominously warned that civil unrest awaited Britain should Brexit be frustrated. Setting in train a shift in Britain's post-war political settlement, a mob was being quietly called to defend the nation--to right the wrongs being done to it.
But this should not be read as simply another unanticipated symptom of a purportedly 'polarised' and 'extreme' present. Cleverly's politics has in fact been many decades in the making.
Forty years ago, Britain was experiencing a structural crisis of capitalism. That crisis was rooted in a declining manufacturing base, diminished technological competitiveness, a weakened global trade position, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and deepening regional inequalities. And out of the stagnation of this era-defining crisis, 'Thatcherism', as coined by the late Stuart Hall, began to forge its infamous campaign of pro-market transformations. (1)
This was a transformation whose common-sense purchase was not only sourced in the purported virtues of capitalist merit, but was also tied to a populist-nationalism characterised by an authoritarian appeal to 'law and order' and its attendant logics of national identity. (2) This was, in other words, a political project that traded on an aggressive modelling of the normative national subject--white, petit-bourgeois and provincial--and the threats allegedly posed to it by, amongst other things, Black youth, immigrants 'swamping' the realm, unions, and the IRA. (3)
The broader ideologies of deviance--through which Britain had legitimated its rule in the colonies, through which Eurocentric modernity had mapped its racial Others, through which nationalists (of different ideological formations) had railed against outsiders, and through which the Victorian establishment had designated the working classes--provided a deep archive for this populist theatre. However, as Hall again took great care to explain, this is not to say that Thatcher's Tories did not have an electoral base that remained confident about the aggressively pro-market projects being introduced. On the contrary, while the Tories worked hard to split the working class, as well as leveraging the spectre of the outsider to optimal electoral effect, they also located their project in the capitalism of the high street. In short, their market evangelism depended electorally on the proverbial 'Little Englander' imagining an economic stake in a more profitable Tory future.
Capitalism after the high street
For Thatcher and her immediate successors, a symbolism of British business was part and parcel of the nationalist project. Today, however, the Tory Party is not remotely connected to the high street;(4) its economic affinities are instead more firmly aligned to a small smattering of opaque hedge funds, as Boris Johnson's campaign war chest attests. (5) As this Conservative Party becomes...
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