In the opening of E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, there’s a lovely metaphor of the work of an historian. History, he writes, is like a bottomless well stretching into eternity, visible only by human recollection falling through the generations like lighted piece paper dropped into the void, getting smaller and smaller as it falls and disappears.
I’m reminded of that image as I consider the sense of deja vu currently hanging over British life; it feels as though we have been here before, and on more than one occasion. To live in Britain today is to be gripped by a sense of overwhelming, unshiftable malaise, which in recent months has morphed into something darker and more violent: a mood of bubbling resentment and anger that feels ready to explode. In many respects, this atmosphere is entirely new: a reflection of the globalised, social-media age in which we now live. And yet, it also feels so jarringly, achingly familiar — a dim folk memory from our recent past. Poor, rainy Britain, once again unsure what to do with itself, buffeted by the ideological storms rolling in from the United States, humiliated by those to whom we cling closest.
Exactly how our American cousins choose to belittle us might be new, but Elon Musk and Donald Trump are characters with whom we are all too familiar. Who is Trump, after all, but some cartoonishly outsized version of Billy Bob Thornton’s déclassée commander-in-chief in Love Actually. To complete the picture, we now have Keir Starmer forced to cosplay Hugh Grant, who himself was cosplaying the Tony Blair of Middle England’s fantasy back in 2003.
Yet, Trump’s familiarity is not only cultural. Britain’s three great post-war lows came in 1956, with the calamity of Suez; 1976 with the humiliation of its IMF bailout; and 2003 with the invasion of Iraq. In each case, Britain’s shame was not alleviated by its alliance with the US, but rather compounded by it. At Suez, Dwight Eisenhower’s threat of economic ruin forced Anthony Eden’s retreat. During the IMF crisis, Gerald Ford’s administration refused to play “host to a parasite”, imposing an austerity Britain previously considered unimaginable. And then, in 2003, it was the desire to avoid a calamitous break with America that ultimately doomed Blair’s premiership. Are the indignities of the past few months really so different?
Of these moments, it is the late Seventies which — at first — appear the most obvious parallel. Battered by both our own economic failures, and the storms blowing in from the US after Richard Nixon’s decision to unilaterally abolish the Bretton Woods order, Britain suffered calamity after calamity until the Thatcherite revolution of 1979 changed everything. That, at least, is the story that is now told. Such, in fact, is the power of this Thatcherite fable — what we might call “Iron Ladyism” — that it has become the conventional account of Britain’s entire post-war history: First decline and then renewal. Now, of course, we are back to decline.
Yet, the more I stare down the well of our recent past, the more it seems necessary to look beyond the Seventies, to the tumultuous decade that came before, in order to glimpse of the real significance of our present turmoil. While the Seventies were the years when the post-war order finally spluttered to its end, it was the Sixties which paved the way for this collapse after years of imperial retreat, military humiliation, domestic violence, ideological upheaval and, finally, conservative rebellion. Sound familiar?
For much of the Sixties, the eventual turn to the Right under Nixon in the US, and Ted Heath in Britain, had looked anything but inevitable. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory over the radical conservative, Barry Goldwater, with a promise to bring forth “the Great Society”. In Britain, meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s hero Harold Wilson came to power promising to unleash the white heat of technology to burn away the stultifying amateurism of old Tory England. The future was liberal — or at least progressive.
By 1968, however, both the United States and Britain had entered a far darker world than that which had once been imagined; American prestige collapsed in Vietnam, Johnson announced his departure from politics, Martin Luther King was assassinated, Chicago burned and Nixon triumphed. In Britain, meanwhile, 1968 is the year Enoch Powell’s blood-drenched prophecies of ethnic war and national suicide prompted an explosion of street protest: previously considered impossible, somehow, in sleepy old England. In his diary, the Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman wrote that Powell had “stirred up the nearest thing to a mass movement since the 1930s”.
Yet, the real significance of Powell’s emergence in 1968 was not confined to Rivers of Blood, but what the Left-wing historian Tom Nairn prophetically saw as his ideological ground-clearing for a new politics of the Right. Writing in the New Left Review, in 1970, Nairn argued that Powell was the leader of the “New Right” then emerging to fill the void created by the failures of the old consensual conservatism typified by Harold Macmillan and his protege Ted Heath.
As Nairn had spotted, Powell’s ultimate aim was not simply to stop further immigration — and, indeed, to begin a process of repatriation (now euphemistically called “remigration”) — but to redefine British nationalism “in terms appropriate to the times”. For both Nairn and Powell, this meant creating a new post-imperial nationalism which attempted to recast Britain as a country somehow unchanged by its imperial adventures and, therefore, still bound to its ancient past. For Powell, the Britain of the Sixties was still a kind of Greater Shire, connected by a thousand years of unbroken history to its Saxon forebears. Nairn argued that Powell had combined this mystical vision of ancient England with an embrace of Hayekian free market radicalism and opposition to Commonwealth immigration to form a new conservative ideology.
Casting forward, Nairn wrote that Powell’s real significance, then, lay in the fact that he had created a “ready-made formula” for the future leaders of British conservatism to pull off the shelf when the next crisis came — as it surely would. Powellism, then, was little more than a “preliminary ground-clearing exercise” for a future administration. Today, it is hard to read Nairn’s essay without being struck by its clarity of foresight, accurately predicting the eventual triumph of Margaret Thatcher, almost a decade later, following Britain’s IMF prostration in 1976 and industrial anarchy of James Callaghan’s Winter of Discontent in 1978-79.
Today, that late-Sixties sense of social unease, ideological ferment and geopolitical upheaval prevails. The parallels to that time of war and strife are, of course, inexact. Though a victory for Russia in Ukraine would be a seismic strategic defeat for the United States, it is not equivalent to the calamity of the Tet Offensive of 1968. There are no American soldiers dying for Ukraine as there were for South Vietnam. Also, whereas in 1968 Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were both slaughtered — and Paris burned — Donald Trump avoided assassination by a matter of millimeters last year, and Emmanuel Macron crawls on despite widespread revulsion at his regime.
But the riots of 2024 are the closest thing Britain has seen to the outpouring of populist fury since Enoch Powell’s sacking in 1968. And if Powell has a political heir, it did appear to be Nigel Farage, the man whose first taste of political action was chauffeuring Powell around Newbury in a by-election for UKIP in 1993. Farage rose to influence combining two of Powell’s core passions: Europe and immigration. Farage has less time for Powell’s unionist purity on Northern Ireland — and none of his anti-Americanism.
Yet, for all of Farage’s evident political nous, he is not capable of Powell’s mystical recasting of conservatism “in terms appropriate to the times” as Nairn put it. Whereas Powell was creating a new Toryism for Britain’s post-imperial age, today that world has gone. In its place, we have a new age of imperialism and expansion, great power competition, technological revolution and even galactic exploration. It demands new ideologies on Left and Right to replace the glaringly inadequate answers offered by most mainstream politicians today — including Farage, who has yet to shed his loyalty to the old Thatcherite answers of his youth.
In Robert Jenrick, the boy from Wolverhampton raised in Powell’s political shadow, there are stirrings of something new on the Tory Right, in which Powell’s focus on questions of identity is combined with a new idea of cheap energy as the route to Britain’s reindustrialisation. Yet, Jenrick is not the driver of today’s new ideological upheaval in the way that Powell was of Thatcherism in the late Sixties. For that, we must look to the States and the twin motors of the zeitgeist today: Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
The significance of Musk’s partnership with Trump is that it has refashioned Trumpism from a set of inchoate instincts about lost American greatness into a starkly contemporary ideological response to today’s world. The old Trumpian nostalgia for the American glory years of the Sixties — when it put a man on the moon and reached for the stars — are there in this new “Muskism”. Yet it has been turbo-charged with an expansionary techno-futurism, embodied by Musk’s Space X and Trump’s imperial instincts to conquer Greenland.
In this new iteration of Trumpism, American glory is once again cast as being for the “Free World”, as it was during the Cold War, only now it has been redefined in civilisational terms against the digital totalitarianism of China, apparently alien fanaticism of radical Islam and even the domestic liberal extremism of “woke”. Somewhere in this jumble of ideas and instincts lies the essence of the new Trumpism. Its importance, though, lies not in its ideological coherence, but in the fact that it offers what Nairn described in 1970 as a “ready-made formula” for others to adopt as their own, and fill their own ideological vacuum.
Today, we do not know whether the beneficiaries of this new ideology will be Tory or Reform. In the end, the past is not a guide to the future. Yet, as we squint at the burning scrap of paper, falling down through the ages of our recent past, we can at least see the familiar conditions for a great upheaval to come. The Enoch Powell of our age does not appear to be Robert Jenrick or Nigel Farage. It is Elon Musk.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/