Fear and Fumbling: Brexit, Trump and the Nationalist Surge
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Version 0 of 1. “May all your teeth fall out except the one that gives you pain”: It’s an old Yiddish curse, but as Fintan O’Toole explains in his slyly brilliant new book, it could turn out to be an apt description of the “English nationalist project” known as Brexit. An unsettled sense of national identity is like having a sore tooth, and Brexit is like taking a sledgehammer to the wrong side of your face. Once the “radically invasive” procedure of extracting Britain from the European Union begins in earnest, O’Toole writes in “The Politics of Pain,” the original toothache will persist — only this time amid the wreckage of a bloody mouth. O’Toole, an Irish journalist, is aware of the political and economic upheavals that have buoyed pro-Brexit forces, but with this book he explores what the critic Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling” — in this case, a mentality that likens the staid bureaucracy in Brussels to a monstrous occupying force. O’Toole dissects a number of myths peddled over the years by Britain’s most extreme Euroskeptics, including the specter of an overweening continent determined to outlaw prawn cocktail-flavored potato chips. Brexit and President Trump represent both sides of the Anglo-American nationalist coin — on this minimal observation, O’Toole and Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review magazine and the author of another new book about nationalism, would seem to agree. But where O’Toole warns of the dangers posed by indiscriminate eruptions of nationalist fervor, Lowry’s “The Case for Nationalism” exudes an untroubled sanguinity. Nationalism’s biggest problem, Lowry says repeatedly, has been the “smear” against it. “The Politics of Pain” is searching and elegantly argued. O’Toole isn’t unsympathetic to those who voted in favor of Brexit, but makes abundantly clear that he believes they were suckered into a raw deal. Being Irish, he knows “the worst agonies that zero-sum nationalism can inflict.” His tone is charmingly wry but never gleeful. He reserves his most withering indictments for elite politicians like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson — the “Brexit ultras” who successfully deployed the language of autonomy and wounded pride to cast Brexit “simultaneously as a reconstitution of Empire and as an anti-imperial national liberation movement.” This toggling between grandiosity and self-pity is a neat trick, and O’Toole says the absurd rhetoric has been so successful because England has never grappled properly with its experience of winning a world war while also losing an empire. The English have been unprepared to think of their country as just another among many, one that is relatively privileged but ultimately ordinary. (Seeing Brexit as primarily an English phenomenon, O’Toole takes care to focus on England, rather than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.) “In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized,” O’Toole writes, making a funny and surprisingly fitting analogy with the sadomasochism, tedious rules and fantasy of absolute powerlessness on offer in E L James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “The Politics of Pain” is not a celebration of the E.U. — a deeply flawed institution, O’Toole concedes, which has settled into an “arrogant, complacent” technocracy since the end of the Cold War, when it mostly gave up trying to encourage the “reasonable expectation that life will get better for ordinary people.” But he says that Johnson and the other reactionary members of the ruling class have abdicated their own responsibility to the very people they purport to serve. “A nation state is, first and foremost, a shelter,” O’Toole writes, likening it to an umbrella “in the hard rain of neoliberal globalization.” Brexit, he says, offers a garish but empty nationalism shorn of any protections. Promising to dismantle the environmental and labor regulations they denounce as “red tape,” the Brexiteers “want to sever the last restraints on the very market forces that have caused the pain.” To get a sense of what Lowry makes of Brexit in “The Case for Nationalism,” you can read one of his confident section titles: “The Neo-Imperial European Union Threatens Self-Government.” You won’t get much more substantive information by reading the section itself. After denouncing the E.U. as “too big and too sprawling,” Lowry declares that “Brexit was an appropriate reaction to this highhandedness,” without specifying what “this highhandedness” actually entailed. “Nationalism Is Natural,” “England Changed Forever and Seeded America,” “We Always Sought to Spread Across the Continent”: Lowry’s book is divided into numerous sections like these, most of them not much longer than a page or two. The book reads like a recitation of talking points, a paint-by-numbers manifesto. As befits an American nationalist, Lowry’s main focus is not on Britain but the United States. Underneath the book’s tidy, methodical structure seethes a fundamental incoherence, because Lowry has undertaken a seemingly impossible task: to try to square a Trumpian nationalism with an expansive view of American ideals. Yes, Lowry admits, the term “blood and soil” might be a rallying cry for white supremacists and “deeply inimical to the America project,” but he still wants to talk about ... blood and soil, even if he calls them something else. Yes, “our treatment” of indigenous peoples “was often shameful,” but “one way or the other, the tribes were going to give way.” (Lowry’s reflexive use of the first-person plural suggests who he assumes his audience includes, and who it doesn’t.) Yes, slavery was bad, but “the defenders of the interests of slavery were committed anti-nationalists” because “they feared the rise of national institutions.” Never mind that historians like Jill Lepore have called the secession of the Confederacy an act of “illiberal nationalism”; never mind that Lowry evinces a deep antipathy to federal power elsewhere in the book, especially if it offers to do something so nefarious as strengthen “the welfare and regulatory state.” He has a case to make, and he’s going to march along his trail of section headings to make it. There’s a kind of conservative thinker who needs to feel perpetually besieged, and with a Republican nationalist in the White House, Lowry has to scour the horizon for slights, which he proceeds to inflate into existential threats. In the section helpfully titled “A Campaign of Cultural Vandalism Threatens the Nation,” he warns: “John Wayne has been targeted, and so has Thanksgiving.” On the same page, he also bemoans that “we obviously don’t live at a time of careful distinctions.” Quite so. But that doesn’t stop Lowry from making his own less-than-careful generalizations. “Cosmopolitanism has always been open to the charge that — whatever its broad-mindedness or idealism — it cultivates a contempt for what’s near, immediate and tangible,” he writes, the halting and passive syntax functioning as a kind of “sorry not sorry.” Now where have I heard that caricature (or “smear,” if you will) of a contemptuous, deracinated cosmopolitanism before? Oh, yes. It’s the one long preferred by despots and autocrats the world over. Maybe Lowry’s nationalist paean to American exceptionalism isn’t so exceptional after all. |