First off, many thanks for the shout-out! Very kind of you.
Second, I just want to illustrate how difficult this is. I am originally from the US and emigrated to the UK and I can attest the conditions are similar economically. I would argue that for the past 20 years or so, the standard of living in America for the vast majority has gone down a little bit, almost imperceptibly, every year. It's like the story of the frog gradually being boiled and it doesn't realise it until too late. When I went back a few years ago, even the small upper middle class suburb that I lived in as a teenager now has roads so bad it's like driving on the moon. Daily life has become an expensive pain in the butt to do. No leader or political party has been able to fix this - not Obama, Bush, or any governor or senator or congressperson. So the frustration is real. And the USA still has more of a public forum than the UK - the high streets are equally devastated but the USA is far more religious so at least has that kind of place to feel belonging (churches, synagogues, mosques, cults, you name it). But all that happens is that it gives the people a chance to vent their frustrations together. And those are increasingly populist.
Third, I just don't share your optimism that there is some kind of enlightened working class just waiting for their progressive instincts to be awakened. These people are not, by and large, anything associated with liberal. I used to laugh at this assumption when I read the Guardian as a student in the 1980s. In fact my very first political memory is hearing my older cousins, university age at the time, talking about how they were beaten up by some union lumpenprole thugs when they were legally protesting the Vietnam War. The police, who have a union more powerful than the city government (as we saw post-George Floyd), of course did nothing:
These people have stood against any kind of progressive change for my entire life, including integrating their own members. To this day, they are mostly male with a few token black guys and broken down ethnically: Italian-Americans are in the sanitation union, Jewish-Americans are in the teachers unions etc. I myself was threatened by one of these sanitation orangutans when I was demonstrating in favor of Obama's initial plan to introduce universal health care. The guys stopped their garbage truck, got out, smashed our signs, threatened us with the "love it or leave it" doctrine and drove off. And why not? They can't be fired, or it seems, arrested and fined. It was the first and last time I will ever publicly demonstrate for anything. I don't need the agro and now with social media, it must be on steroids.
In conclusion, I am in considerable despair about my situation. Farage has said he will remove permanent residency from people like me, which means I will have to reapply for a UK visa forever and be at the whims of the current government. Meanwhile both Reform UK's thinktanks and Trump's (in particular Stephen Miller, who is occupies the same role in the White House that Merlin filled in Camelot) both want to make it illegal to have dual citizenship in case I do become a UK citizen. So I will have to give up one. I would probably give up my American citizenship since I live in the UK, but my pensions are split between both countries and if I renounce the US, they get half of it. I don't even want to know how much the UK would take but its probably similar. So populism has some very real consequences of stuff that all but the hardest line Trump and Farage supporters might think about when they are attaching flags to poles.
Sorry to rant, but I've literally been fighting with this stuff my whole life in one way or another and I feel the end game is closing in.
No need to apologise. I don't mean to sound glib in any way about there being easy solution to the hideous state of both US and British politics and society. And I'm not especially optimistic either. I'm just not sure what else I can except write about this stuff.
And I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought things might be turned around by the working classes suddenly learning the values of liberalism. I've long thought that the political ignorance of less well-educated people is a huge problem for democracy. I have a sense that the expansion the the middle classes in Britain in the second half of the last century contributed to a period of stable politics and generated some consensus about how things should be run, and if we could kick-start that process then maybe more people would recognise the advantages for everyone of keeping society free and open. But without increased public investment in education and a widening of the goals of education beyond the purely vocational, I struggle to see how it could happen.
As for Stephen Miller, yes a total crank, but a very dangerous one. Tim Snyder's latest video on Miller is worth a watch.
First off, many thanks for the shout-out! Very kind of you.
Second, I just want to illustrate how difficult this is. I am originally from the US and emigrated to the UK and I can attest the conditions are similar economically. I would argue that for the past 20 years or so, the standard of living in America for the vast majority has gone down a little bit, almost imperceptibly, every year. It's like the story of the frog gradually being boiled and it doesn't realise it until too late. When I went back a few years ago, even the small upper middle class suburb that I lived in as a teenager now has roads so bad it's like driving on the moon. Daily life has become an expensive pain in the butt to do. No leader or political party has been able to fix this - not Obama, Bush, or any governor or senator or congressperson. So the frustration is real. And the USA still has more of a public forum than the UK - the high streets are equally devastated but the USA is far more religious so at least has that kind of place to feel belonging (churches, synagogues, mosques, cults, you name it). But all that happens is that it gives the people a chance to vent their frustrations together. And those are increasingly populist.
Third, I just don't share your optimism that there is some kind of enlightened working class just waiting for their progressive instincts to be awakened. These people are not, by and large, anything associated with liberal. I used to laugh at this assumption when I read the Guardian as a student in the 1980s. In fact my very first political memory is hearing my older cousins, university age at the time, talking about how they were beaten up by some union lumpenprole thugs when they were legally protesting the Vietnam War. The police, who have a union more powerful than the city government (as we saw post-George Floyd), of course did nothing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot
These people have stood against any kind of progressive change for my entire life, including integrating their own members. To this day, they are mostly male with a few token black guys and broken down ethnically: Italian-Americans are in the sanitation union, Jewish-Americans are in the teachers unions etc. I myself was threatened by one of these sanitation orangutans when I was demonstrating in favor of Obama's initial plan to introduce universal health care. The guys stopped their garbage truck, got out, smashed our signs, threatened us with the "love it or leave it" doctrine and drove off. And why not? They can't be fired, or it seems, arrested and fined. It was the first and last time I will ever publicly demonstrate for anything. I don't need the agro and now with social media, it must be on steroids.
In conclusion, I am in considerable despair about my situation. Farage has said he will remove permanent residency from people like me, which means I will have to reapply for a UK visa forever and be at the whims of the current government. Meanwhile both Reform UK's thinktanks and Trump's (in particular Stephen Miller, who is occupies the same role in the White House that Merlin filled in Camelot) both want to make it illegal to have dual citizenship in case I do become a UK citizen. So I will have to give up one. I would probably give up my American citizenship since I live in the UK, but my pensions are split between both countries and if I renounce the US, they get half of it. I don't even want to know how much the UK would take but its probably similar. So populism has some very real consequences of stuff that all but the hardest line Trump and Farage supporters might think about when they are attaching flags to poles.
Sorry to rant, but I've literally been fighting with this stuff my whole life in one way or another and I feel the end game is closing in.
No need to apologise. I don't mean to sound glib in any way about there being easy solution to the hideous state of both US and British politics and society. And I'm not especially optimistic either. I'm just not sure what else I can except write about this stuff.
And I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought things might be turned around by the working classes suddenly learning the values of liberalism. I've long thought that the political ignorance of less well-educated people is a huge problem for democracy. I have a sense that the expansion the the middle classes in Britain in the second half of the last century contributed to a period of stable politics and generated some consensus about how things should be run, and if we could kick-start that process then maybe more people would recognise the advantages for everyone of keeping society free and open. But without increased public investment in education and a widening of the goals of education beyond the purely vocational, I struggle to see how it could happen.
As for Stephen Miller, yes a total crank, but a very dangerous one. Tim Snyder's latest video on Miller is worth a watch.
A truly excellent piece, Mark. Thank you for your thoughtful analysis. I agree with you on every point.
Thanks Christina. Much appreciated.