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Showing posts with label Parliamentary Democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Parliamentary Democracy. Show all posts
Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ A simple answer to this not so simple question is a resounding No. 

However, the question requires a much more in-depth examination and answer than one word can provide. Parliamentary politics irrespective of which country a person resides in is a system of government whose primary and secondary role is to defend the interests of that country’s capitalism and capitalist class, the ‘ruling class’. This duty takes priority over all other considerations, including homelessness and the state of the population’s health and education. The needs of the population are very much secondary to the requirements of the ’people’ and this is not a contradiction. 

To clarify what I mean, as it does sound contradictory, the ‘people’ are the top ten percent of the wealthy, the ‘population’ are the rest of us. Of course, this fluctuates depending on whether an election is due then, at such time, all of a sudden, we all become the ‘people’ for about as long as the election campaigns last, it becomes inclusive. Then, all reverts back to the exclusive status-quo with the top ten percent resuming their role as the ‘people’. In times of war when the ruling classes want people to fight for them and their system is another example of inclusiveness when we once again all become ‘the people’. When said war is over once again we revert back to our respective places in society. The interests of the ’people’ usually means the interests of the wealthy, not the interests of all of us and the lower down the so-called social ladder somebody finds themselves the less the ‘interests of the people’ applies. It is a very ambiguous, and that’s to say the least, situation which we are led to believe is called liberal democracy which is another misleading term. If we were to put this ‘liberal democracy’ on a scale it would look something like this; Liberal democracy, with the democracy part of the title very much the junior aspect.

In all parliaments which practice this ‘liberal democracy’ which is, admittedly, better than a fascist dictatorship, are the party of government and those who sit in opposition. In the 26 counties at the moment, we have a Fianna Fail/Fine Gael/Green Party coalition executive or government, and the main opposition party is Sinn Fein with lesser parties, Labour, People Before Profit, Social Democrats and Independents also on the opposition benches. 

Sinn Fein are doing, what all opposition parties do, and that is making fancy promises which it is highly unlikely they will keep or, more appropriately, will be allowed to keep by the ruling class of the 26 counties. When Sinn Fein tell us they plan a ‘fully costed’ nationalised health service, ‘single tiered’ they genuinely mean it. What they do not tell us is all their plans, and the government know this, are subject to the ‘vagaries of capitalism’. Neither government or opposition will tell us this because they do not want us to know that our futures and wellbeing, employment, health and education to name just some, are dependent on the ever-changing needs of the wealthy. I have no doubt Sinn Fein have costed their plans perfectly based on figures indicating the state of capitalism in the jurisdiction at the time. They may have even allowed for some fluctuations, which are impossible to tell in an unstable economic system like ‘free market’ capitalism because things change overnight let alone a year. We all live lives of uncertainty because the economic system we live under is uncertain. The only factor which is constant is the rich will continue to be just that, increasing their wealth on a yearly basis as profits become profits on profits. Any decrease on the previous year’s profits calculated as an annual loss, when no actual loss has been made at all, they have just made a little less than the previous year! Sinn Fein's pledges on health will depend very much on the condition and needs of 26 county capitalism. When they tell us about this ‘single tiered’ health service they are not being dishonest. They are just not telling us the whole story including the ‘vagaries of capitalism’.

The same rule of thumb apples in Britain when what was once the Labour Party made promises about the ‘promised land’ which they meant at the time, omitting the ‘vagaries’ of British capitalism. The only time perhaps this rule did not apply so stringently in Britain was after the Second World War. Clement Attlee could confidently tell the population about the launch of the National Health Service (NHS) and the Welfare State, nationalisation of some industries because he could confidently see a clear path with few fluctuations within the capitalist system of the time, the condition of war-torn Britain was not going to change overnight. 

By the 1960s changes in the needs of capitalism and the capitalist class in Britain began to appear, hence the first round of serious cuts in the NHS. Unfortunately for Harold Wilson, a well-meaning man (for a Huddersfield Town supporter) the Labour Prime Minister of the day and, therefore the head of the party who introduced the NHS, he had to preside over these cuts, decisions exploited by the Conservative opposition who, if in government, would have done exactly the same. The NHS has undergone more cuts since those heady days of Harold Wilson and, at this rate, in decades to come the NHS will be consigned to the pages of history. Already there are 90 privately run health care companies owned by large capitalist companies all out to make profit out of people’s health. The last remnants of Clement Attlee’s parliamentary socialist experiment will be no more. British governments are doing nothing to prevent this grab of profits by the capitalist class simply because there is nothing they can do!

The misleading statements made by opposition parties, be it in Britain, the 26 counties, Germany’s Bundestag (now situated in the old Reichstag building in Berlin) in fact any country are the same. Honest at the time, to a point, but knowing they may not be able to keep their promises which is dishonest by not pointing that out! Already in Britain the modern excuse for Labour, their leader Keir Starmer, is beginning to backtrack on some of his earlier grand sounding promises, which if they were not promises they must have been lies? So far, I have tried in brief to look at the heads side of the coin, which allows for the opposition parties making statements they may or may not be able to keep. Not strongly dishonest but certainly not the whole truth.

The tails side of the coin is far uglier and involves the ‘nihilisms’ of the opposition and governing parties. After promising us the earth while on the opposition benches and not even delivering us a beach at Howth the former opposition gang becomes as morally bankrupt as their former governing foe. They will then tell us how, having promised us the world while they were in opposition, why they cannot deliver on said promises. They will tell us it is all the previous government's fault, they are to blame, the British Conservatives are still blaming the former Labour government which have been out of office for thirteen years! They will not, however, tell us they cannot deliver because to do so would endanger the interests and privileges of the wealthy, those who own the country’s wealth and means of production, distribution and exchange. They will not tell us the real reason for being in government which is not to look after the population as a priority, but to look after the interests and wellbeing of the wealthy, the exclusive ‘people’.

The truth is, opposition parties will tell us anything while they are in opposition to get elected into government. They are dishonest ‘nihilists’ whose sole interests are to govern the affairs of the wealthy. To paraphrase Karl Marx, governments are nothing but committees to run the “affairs of the entire bourgeoisie”. The leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Anas Sarwar, said on a Sunday morning programme some weeks ago; “I am not bothered about principles, I just want to get elected” - in other words policies and political pledges can go and whistle, I’ll say anything in opposition but in government do not expect me to carry out my election pledges!

Well over a century ago in Scotland, James Connolly was Secretary of the Social Democratic Federation. On an occasion his party had finished a respectable fourth in an election and had gained a larger than expected number of votes. He and his comrades could be heard celebrating the occasion. The larger parties wondered why, coming fourth, it gave rise to celebrations? Connolly informed them; “we came fourth on telling the truth, you won the election or came second on a pack of lies”. I wonder what James Connolly would have said had he heard Anas Sarwar’s statement about not being “bothered about principles”??

It can only be concluded that modern parliaments can only be viewed through one lens, the lens of reality. These so-called ‘cathedrals’ of virtue are the exact opposite full of ‘nihilists’ who hold no political principles, as openly admitted by the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, no genuine political positions except to fulfil their task of getting elected at any price to look after the interests of the wealthy, the bourgeoisie and, in the case of Britain, the landed aristocracy. They are paid well for maintaining this shroud of ‘democracy’ which is supposed to fool the rest of us. 

Well, you can ‘fool some of the people, some of the time’ but it cannot go on indefinitely. One day a generation will catch themselves on and see through these false elections. The problem may be, will the backlash lead to socialism, harmony and complete democracy on an international scale eventually and world peace or, and I hope not, could the situation be hijacked by an element of the present rich and powerful and a fascist takeover replace liberal democracy, as happened in Chile? That is the danger, a danger the bourgeoisie are well aware of and are, under certain conditions, prepared to exploit. 

Perhaps it is time for the would be revolutionary socialist and communist groups to stop bickering over unimportant things like what kind of state the USSR was and start thinking how the flaws in the present system can be exploited. The only force capable of replacing it, the organised working-class, shop steward’s committees, trade union rank and file and those presently not in unions but want to fight, must be kept informed politically by these groups. Start thinking strategic and stop putting the respective party line as the be all and end all because these lines are meaningless without the proletariat to fight and take power as a class. Catch yourselves on before it is too late!

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Are Parliamentarians Honest Brokers?

Barry Gilheany ✒ In the first of a series of articles for TPQ concerning the crisis of democracy, or more accurately, the liberal representative model that has been dominant in the Western world for roughly the past century and a half, I examine the threats to its long-term survival. 

These include the wave of illiberal populism that has swept various parts of the world over the last decade or so; the harmful effects of Big Tech on the quality of information flows and deliberation in democracies and the anomie created by growing disconnect between the governed and the governing classes and the associated distrust of ‘elites’ and ‘experts. I will also later pose the question whether it is possible to conceptualise the end of democracy as we have known it. But in this first article, I discuss, in the shadow of the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Anne Appplebaum’s model of the illiberal one-party state spawned by the Bolsheviks and how two ex-Marxist Leninist countries, Poland and Hungary, have become exemplars albeit from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. I discuss the role of clercs, writers, intellectuals, journalists, bloggers etc., in servicing the legitimation needs of these states and how the governance of Brexit Britain is being moulded by them.

US Democracy’s Near Death Experience

President Joe Biden’s powerful inaugural address was peppered by the frequent use of three words: “democracy”, “truth” and “unity”[1]. Spoken in the aftermath of American democracy’s near-death experience of the Trump presidency; his first statement after taking the oath of office was “This is democracy’s day. The will of the people has been heard … Democracy has prevailed”.[2] The problems with using “democracy” and “will of the people” in the same sentence, of seeing these notions (at least in the abstract) as interchangeable and with positing ‘democracy’ as a natural sequitur from ‘truth’ and ‘unity’ are that it sidesteps the question of what exactly democracy is and the starkly different perceptions of democracy that are held by many. For the founders of America thought that too much democracy would imperil unity and truth.[3] For them the point of establishing a republic rather than a democracy was to ensure that there were safeguards against populism, the base passions of the ill-informed, suggestible ‘crowd’, in all its forms.[4] James Madison, one of the founders, stated that the American constitution he helped to write would mean “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share [in the government].[5]

Biden was invoking the minimalist theory of democracy whereby democracy is defined by the peaceful transfer of power whereby it is sufficient for democracy if incumbents, who control the armed forces, hand over power to those who have defeated them at the ballot box.[6] The developing world is replete with examples where this minimal criterion for democracy has not been met; the military coups which overthrew elected left-wing governments in Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973 and most recently in Honduras as well as Myanmar in 2021 serve as four particularly egregious examples. That the USA came so close to failing this criterion after the Presidential election of November 2020 and the insurrection at Capitol Hill on 6th January 2021 lends urgency to the task of taking seriously the threats of populist demagoguery and persons of ill-character that so occupied the minds of the US founders.

The Illiberal One-Party State

Unlike ways of governing society such as monarchy, oligarchy and democracy that have been around for over two thousand years; what the writer and journalist Anne Applebaum describes as the illiberal one-party state has been with us for little more than a century. It was first developed by Lenin after the Second Russian Revolution (or more accurately the Winter Palace coup). It is a mechanism for holding power, not a philosophy although it happily functions as an accompaniment to many ideologies. It works because it clearly states who is to be the elite and maps out their pathway to it – the political elite, the financial elite, the cultural elite (Applebaum, 2020).

Lenin’s one-party state and its replica models were based on different values to those of meritocracy (notwithstanding the persistence of social hierarchies), electoral competitiveness, civil society autonomy, free press and political neutrality of the judiciary and civil service. It overthrew the aristocratic order but did not replace it with a competitive model. As well as being antithetical to democracy, it was also hostile to competiveness and meritocracy. University places and appointments in government and industry were awarded, not on talent or industry, but based on loyalty to and adherence to the rules of the party. These rules usually excluded the former ruling elite and their children, as well as suspect ethnic groups. They favoured the children of the working classes. Above all, they favoured the committed party member and the most obsequious participant in public displays of enthusiasm for the party; attracting, as Arendt observed in the 1940s, the resentful and unsuccessful types most enamoured to authoritarianism which led to the replacement of:

all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.[7] (Applebaum: pp.23-24).

Lenin’s contempt for the idea of a neutral state, for apolitical civil servants and for any notion of an independent and objective media, was intrinsic to his one-party system. He wrote that freedom of the press “is a deception.” Freedom of assembly was a “hollow phrase”. Parliamentary democracy was no more than “a machine for the suppression of the working class.” Freedom of the press and fair and just public institutions could only occur under the control of the working class – via the vanguard of the party. (Applebaum: p.24).

The far left’s mockery of the competitive institutions of “bourgeois democracy has had many far-right counterparts from Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile and other Latin American right-wing dictatorships like Argentina under Generals Videla and Galtieri from 1976 to 1983 and Apartheid South Africa, (Applebaum, p.24). Currently, there are many versions of the illiberal one-party state around the world from Putin’s Russia to Duterte’s Philippines to most of the African continent. Illiberal parties have formed parts of ruling coalitions in Italy and Austria and have monopolies of power in Poland (Law and Justice) and Hungary (Fidesz) where both have steadily eroded the independence of institutions such as the judiciary, academe and the print media and have delivered much largesse to their members consequently (Applebaum: p.26).

For example not only did Law and Justice change the civil service law, making it easier to fire professionals and hire heads of Polish state companies. People with experience running large companies were replaced by party members, as well as their friends and relatives. Typical is Janina Goss, and old friend of Kaczynski’s from whom the prime minister once borrowed a large sum of money, to pay for a medical treatment for his mother and who had held low-level party jobs before being nominated to the board of directors of Polsksa Grupa Energetyxczna, the largest power company in Poland employing 40,000 people. 

Some one-party states do license limited opposition, if only for window-dressing purposes. Many of the communist parties which ruled the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989, allowed opponents – peasant parties, pseudo-Christian Democrats, or in the case of Poland, a small Catholic party, to perform roles in the state, in the rigged legislatures, or in public life. More recently, de facto one-party states such as Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela that controlled state institutions and circumscribed freedom of speech and association did permit a token opposition to exist, provided that that opposition no threat to the ruling party (Applebaum: p.25)

Rule of the Clercs

Drawing on the work of the French essayist Julien Benda, Applebaum explores the role of a group of intellectual and artistic functionaries known as clercs in providing the bureaucratic backbone to one-party states. In his 1927 book La trahison des clercs – loosely translated as The Treason of the Intellectuals or sometimes The Betrayal of the Intellectuals who sought to promote either “class passion”, in the form of Soviet Communism, or “national passion”, in the form of fascism and scorned their betrayal of the mission of the intellectual, the pursuit of truth, in favour of particular political causes. He sarcastically called these fallen intellectuals clercs or “clerks”, a word whose etymology leads back to the category “clergy”. Benda tragically foresaw the role of the clercs in the forthcoming cataclysms of Nazism and Stalinism; these writers, journalists, and essayists who were to morph into the political entrepreneurs and operatives who incited whole civilisations into acts of violence (Applebaum: p.18).

It is around the role of modern-day clercs that Applebaum focuses her anxiety for the future of liberal democracy. The collapse of the idea of the West; “the Western liberal order” will require such an elite to bring it about. She envisions how thinkers, intellectuals, journalist, artists, bloggers and writers will undermine the liberal democratic value system and acts as midwives for a future new order. While the cultural power of the authoritarian left has grown in the Twitter sphere and on certain campuses and reached partial fruition in the rise and fall of the Corbyn project in the British Labour party, it has only been within governments of the right that the new clercs have found their calling (Applebaum: pp.18-19). And it has been a particular complexion of the right that has become hegemonic in Poland and Hungary and, arguably, to a lesser extent in Brexit Britain (and most definitely in the Trump presidency). A particular complexion that so alarms Applebaum in its less than coincidental resemblance to the Leninist project, that she calls its leaders or spear carriers “Neo-Bolsheviks”.

Rise of the Neo-Bolsheviks.

Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Jaroslav Kaczynski (and possibly Gerd Wilders and Matteo Salvino as well) are frequently referred to as belonging to the “far-right” or “alt-right”. However, there is little resemblance between them and the tradition or conventional right that has been such an important part of post-1945 European politics. They disparage the Christian Democratic parties of continental Europe. Nor do they endorse any aspect of Anglo-Saxon conservatism, which advocated free markets, free speech and a Burkean small-c conservatism that is suspicious of radicalism and believes in the importance of conserving institutions and values;[8] beliefs that spring from an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. Whether German or Dutch Christian Democrats, British Tories, American Republicans, former East European dissidents or French Gaullists, post-war Western conservatives have all shared commitments to representative democracy, religious toleration, ethnic and cultural diversity (in stages), economic integration and the institutions of the post-1945 international order including the EU and NATO.[9]

It is because that the leading figures of the Alt-Right do not want to conserve or to preserve what exists that Applebaum terms them “neo-Bolsheviks”. The neo-Bolsheviks are not Burkeans but radicals who want to overthrow existing institutions[10] or “drain the swamp” as former President Trump promised to do in his inaugural address in January 2017. Just as Lenin and Trotsky offered a false and misleading future in their bogus trilogy of promises of “Peace, Land and Bread" to the Russian masses in 1917, their offer of “peace” cloaked their belief in the coming world revolution and their determination to use force to bring it about; their offer of “land” concealed a plan to keep all property in state hands and their offer of “bread” masked an ideological obsession with centralised food production that would starve millions to death in the coming decades, so the Alt-Right offer a false and misleading image of the past. A fairy-tale past composed of volkisch, ethnically or racially pure nations, the factory, traditional gender relations and hierarchies and sealed borders. Their enemies are LGTBQ+ communities, racial and religious minorities, human rights advocates, the media, and the courts. They often use “Christianity” as a tribal identifier against usually either “Muslims” or “liberals”.[11]

In the world view of the Alt-Right; the checks and balances and formal separation of powers of liberal democracies are to be spurned in the manner of Lenin’s refusal to compromise and his hostility to parliamentary institutions. Just as Lenin elevated the “working class” over all other social groups and demonised his “illegitimate” opponents so the ruling Polish Law and Justice Party has divided its compatriots into “true Poles” and “Poles of the worst sort”. Trump spoke of “real” Americans as opposed to the “elite”. Trump’s speech writer, Stephen Miller in response from a reporter’s searching question, used the term ‘cosmopolitan’ with its echoes of Stalin’s “rootless cosmopolitans” epithet for Jews.[12]

Triumph of the “People”

The most ominous linguistic device used by the neo-Bolsheviks is the invocation of “The People”. Donald Trump notoriously used the expression “enemy of the American people” on one of his countless Twitter rants. While he himself may have been unaware of the historical context, the clercs in his immediate circle such as Steve Bannon, Miller, and several others, were perfectly cognisant of the path that the delegitimisation of political opponents as “un-American” and elitist and of the media as “fake news” leads to – in Bannon’s own words “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal to. I want to bring everything down and destroy today’s establishment.” This “insurgent” movement would “hammer this city (Washington DC), both the progressive left and the institutional Republican Party.”[13] The current state of the Republican Party, captured as it has by the Trumpian movement, would indicate that he and his acolytes have achieved one-third of this revolutionary agenda.

In his semi-apocalyptic inaugural address, much of it penned by Miller and Bannon, Donald Trump, who had lost the popular vote in 2016, proclaimed a transfer of “power from Washington DC and … back to you, the American People” as if foreign occupiers had controlled the capital city until 2017. The “People” is a mystical construct, quite different from the actually existing US populace but with strong resonances with the “crowd” that Leon Trotsky would address in St Petersburg ; the capital’s “oppressed under-dogs” comprised of workers, soldiers, hard-working mothers, street urchins”; the “stern inquisitiveness” of which “that had become merged into a single whole” in which “other arguments, utterly unexpected by the orator but needed by these people, would emerge in full array from my subconsciousness.”[14] The un-American idea of “The People” flaunted by arguably the globe’s greatest living narcissistic public figure in recent history smacks of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in its feeling of oneness with the masses; the sense of its living embodiment that Trotsky felt in such a bizarrely narcissistic fashion.[15] All this bluster, of course, concealed the facts that Lenin, Trotsky and Trump were/are pathological liars.

An even more ominous parallel between the neo-Bolsheviks and the original Bolsheviks is the romanticism of violence, real or imagined. Having persuaded a fanatical and devoted minority (the English translation of “Bolshevik” is minority after all), to kill for their cause in the chaos that followed the abdication of the Czar, the Bolshevik party leadership came to power through the Petrograd Winter Palace coup in October 1917 by as Stalin recalled by disguising “its offensive action behind a smoke screen of defences." Using their modus operandi of psychological warfare, the Bolsheviks convinced a mob of supporters that they were under attack and directed them to seize the Winter Palace where the ministers of the Provisional Government which had come to power in the revolution of February 1917 were meeting. From then onwards, the Bolsheviks began to consummate the mass violence in the class warfare they always envisaged leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the Russian and Ukrainian civil wars between 1918 and 1921 with millions more to die in the Holodomor famine and waves of terror in the subsequent decades.[16]

Yet many in Russia, in the belief that the “system” was so corrupt and so resistant to reform that it had to be smashed, welcomed the cleansing power of violence in this cataclysmic era. “Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood … let there be floods of the bourgeoisie – more blood, as much as possible” implored Krasnaya Gazeta, the newspaper of the Red Army.[17]

The blood curdling polemicism from a century ago in Russia is reincarnated in the “Ultra Violence” threads on Reddit, the white nationalist groups seeking “race war” and the NRA videos urging Americans to arm themselves to the coming apocalyptic struggle to “save our country”[18] all of which strands were consecrated in the Capitol Hill insurrection of 6th January 2021 at the prompting of a President as determined to thwart the will of actually existing voting public in the manner of a latter day General Franco or Pinochet.

Even more apocalyptic has been Steve Bannon’s visions of a coming war either with China or Radical Islam that will purify the West and restore its supremacy. “We’re gonna have some dark days before we get to the blue sky of morning again in America” he opined in 2010. In the HuffPost in 2011 he pronounced that “Against radical Islam, we’re in a 100-year war” and in 2016 he forecast “We’re going to war in the South China Seas in the next five to ten years, aren’t we.”[19] Fortunately with Joe Biden at the helm in the White House and with Bannon himself under arrest for fraud (a not uncommon outcome for Alt-Right rabble-rousers as Tommy Robinson’s arrest for similar offences shows) the active possibility of such scenarios has hopefully receded somewhat.

Power Speaks to Truth

Before he became an intellectual beneficiary of Orban’s regime largesse, the philosopher Roger Scruton pronounced a verdict on Bolshevism that could be the eventual epitaph for contemporary populist movements and governance. He observed that it had eventually became so cocooned in layers of dishonesty that it lost touch with reality. He wrote that:

Facts no longer made contact with the theory, which had risen above the facts on clouds of nonsense, rather like a theological system. The point was not to believe the theory, but to repeat it ritualistically and in such a way that both belief and doubt became irrelevant… In this way the concept of truth disappeared from the intellectual landscape and was replaced by that of power.[20]

In conversation with Applebaum, Nick Cohen states that she ‘offers an overdue corrective’ to standard “root causes” narratives of populist moments such as Brexit and Trump be they those of the left around austerity and inequality or those of the right who blame woke politics and excessive immigration. Rather the answers are to be found in politicians hungry for office, plutocrats wanting the world to obey their commands, second-rate journalists sniffing a chance of recognition after years of obscurity, and Twitter mob-raisers and fake news/conspiracist fraudsters, who find a sadist’s pleasure in humiliating their opponents, propelled causes that would satisfy them.[21]

But the dominant characteristic of the virtual one-party states that Poland and Hungary have become is mediocrity. Cohen states that one-party states represent the anti-meritocratic society in its purest form. He then notes that among Applebaum’s friends who became servants of authoritarian movements, she sees the consequences of the lust for status among resentful men and women, who believe the old world never gave them their due.[22]

One of the most striking examples of this self-pitying vanity in Applebaum’s experience was when one of her closest friends, the godmother of one of her children, moved from comfortable obscurity to become a celebrated Warsaw hostess and a confidante to Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party by endorsing the conspiracy myth around the Smolensk plane crash in April 2020 in which Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president who controlled the party along with his twin brother, Jaroslaw, was among the dead. The plane had been taking the delegation to a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers by the Soviets in Eastern Poland in 1940 and the flight recorder showed that the plane had come in too low in thick fog. A seemingly open-and-shut case. However, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his minions insist that the Russians were behind the crash, or that political rivals in Warsaw, including her husband – onetime Foreign and Defence Minister Radek Sikorski – allowed the president to fly in a faulty plane, or that it was an assassination. As a consequence, repetition of the lie became the admission price to Law and Justice’s ruling orbit and the public sector jobs they controlled. As Applebaum herself notes: “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie – it’s to make people fear the liar.”[23] Acknowledge the liar’s power, and your career takes off without the need to pass exams or to display an elementary level of competence.

Other friends from the halcyon occasion of the Millennium party she hosted at her Polish home on New Year’s Eve 1999 demonstrated their loyalty to the new order by promoting antisemitic conspiracy myths; the darker they became the more airtime they were afforded by Polish state broadcasters. Eventually, because of her critical pieces in the international press and because her husband was a political opponent of Law and Justice, Applebaum became a target for the propaganda sites that her erstwhile friends happily worked for and was turned into the clandestine Jewish coordinator of “anti-Polish activity”.[24]

Britain’s Brexit Revolution

In his accusatory polemic about the assault on truth in Trump’s America and Brexit Britain under PM Boris Johnston, Peter Oborne makes a striking contrast between traditional British conservatism and the neo-Bolshevik character of the current Tory government clothed as it is in the populist, (English) nationalist garb of Vote Leave. Oborne cites the importance which Edmund Burke placed on institutions which, in tune with the traditional conservative view of humanity as frail, imperfect, corruptible and, sometimes, capable of great evil, embodied wisdoms and truths beyond the comprehension of ordinary individuals. He notes the observation of Michael Oakeshott, the towering conservative thinker of the 20th century, that there was no Conservative ideology. Instead, there was a Conservative disposition which ‘understands it to be the business of government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed on, but to inject into the activities of already passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile.”[25] (Oborne, 2021).

It has been the tearing apart of this fabric of traditional conservatism by the Brexit warriors in the shape of Vote Leave and Boris Johnson’s embrace of them with such insouciant instrumentalism which has so upended British politics and has, in the opinion of Peter Oborne, had such deleterious effects on probity in public life; the operation of parliamentary democracy and regard for truth. Just as in Trump’s America, they have sown division by waging culture wars draped by ostentatious flag-waving and, just as in Poland and Hungary, have tried to create nationalist populist folk devils in independent minded judges, “saboteur” MPs who merely sought parliamentary oversight of the Brexit process; “Remoaner” liberal metropolitan elites and wokeism.

Upon Boris Johnson becoming PM, Downing Street was at once captured by Vote Leave, a tiny organization with no members, a handful of executives a powerful donor base. This group despised the Conservative Party and hated British institutions. They had their claque of clercs including Dominic Cummings, Vote Leave director and former Special Adviser (SPAD) in the Department of Education, who became senior adviser to Johnson and Lee Cain, Downing Street director of communications. Cummings denounced non-compliant MPs as narcissist, delusional[26], and idly speculated about ‘bombing Parliament’[27] (Oborne: p.144)

Under the Johnson/Cummings regime, ‘Whatever it takes’ became the motto in Downing Street. In that context that meant lie, cheat, bully, threaten. Loyalty to the Vote Leave project became the only criterion for promotion (Oborne: p.145). A dissenting Spad in the Treasury then headed by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid was dismissed and escorted out of her office by armed police (she was subsequently compensated for unfair dismissal at an Employment Tribunal). 21 Tory MPs were either sacked or resigned for their opposition to a no-deal Brexit. There was an outrageous attempt by No.10 to prorogue Parliament which was eventually adjudged to be unlawful by the Supreme Court.

At the core of the Vote Leave project was its willingness, in true Leninist fashion, to put ends before means; to ignore due process, willingness to mislead and an obsession with ideological purity. Cummings, who had spent a few years in Russia after leaving university, was smitten with the Leninist propagandist Willi Munzenberg and his aphorism ‘lying for the truth’; the truth for him being the communist cause. Munzenberg sought to ‘instill the feeling like a force of nature,’ that any serious objection to Soviet policy ‘was the unfailing mark of a bad … and probably stupid person’, while support was conversely ‘infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.’[28]

The Brexiteer clerc par excellence is David Frost who in February 2021 was elevated as Baron Frost of Allerton to the rank of cabinet minister with responsibility for dealing with the EU. In his potted biography of Frost, Nick Cohen paints a picture of ‘the frustrated middle manager whose resentment of a world that overlooks him gnaws at his pride. His performance as UK Ambassador to Denmark is described by John Kerr, former head of the diplomatic service, as ‘very diligent and conscientious, good at carrying out instructions, not always as good at querying institutions’. This non-compliment characterizes every man or woman who has ascended a hierarchy by sucking up to the boss.[29]

Brexit opened doors to Frost, He curried favour with the Tory Brexiteer right after the EU referendum by writing pieces in The Telegraph which called for the government to ‘stop flapping around about Brexit’ and realise that ‘this great country would be successful whatever we do’. As Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson recognized a useful servant and appointed “Frosty” as a special adviser in 2016. His subsequent ennoblement of “Frosty” in 2020 was an extraordinary breach of the constitutional principle that a government adviser should not have a place in the legislature.[30]

Rafael Behr writes that:

Euroscepticism is a machine for generating perpetual grievance. It works by making Brussels the enemy, spoiling relations and serving up the sour mood to a domestic audience as proof that the other side does not want to be friends.[31] 

David Frost’s rapid elevation was propelled by dogmatic Euroscepticism (I prefer “Europhobia”) and devotion to the PM. He truly worships at the altar of the cult of sovereignty. He was converted when his career in the Foreign Office stalled then made zealous by the pursuit of an alternative career clinging to Boris Johnson’s contrails. Nowhere did his record speak of subtle diplomacy; the consequences of appointing true believers such as “Frosty” has been the strangling of British export led businesses in such Kafkaesque dimensions of bureaucracy as the 71 pages of paperwork that British fisherman and women to export one lorry of fish to the EU.[32]

Conclusion: Liberal Nostalgia Betrayed?

Anne Applebaum’s grief at the descent of Poland and Hungary into at least “illiberal democracies”, if not full blown “illiberal one-party” states and her alarm at the rise of their neo-Bolshevik, populist nationalist Alt-Right counterparts in Western Europe is part alarm for the future of liberal democracy globally; part a cri de Coeur at the journey that many of her guests at her new millennium party have taken towards the zeitgeist of Trump, Brexit and the anti-liberal counter-revolution in Poland and Hungary[33] (as well as the loss of their personal friendships).

Anne Applebaum is a classic ‘89er. For her the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold war was a moral story, a verdict pronounced by history itself. Her political identity was made by her moral courage of East European dissidents and her belief in the capacity of the United States to make the world a better place. Just as the events of 1968 represented a time of inspiring heroism and moral clarity for the ‘68ers the Cold war represented the same for the ‘89ers. She tends to see the post-Cold War world as an epic struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, between freedom and oppression.[34]

However, the moral clarities of 1989 no longer apply; nor does the certainty of linear progress of liberal democracy. The angst of Anne Applebaum’s brilliant writings do challenge Western liberals to confront these questions – how to uphold Western universalism while Western power is in decline. Will the West remain emboldened to free markets as non-Western economies become more competitive? Will the West continue to uphold free elections if they bring to power anti-Western governments? Is the democratic majoritarianism of leaders like Orban anti-democratic- or does it represent the dark side of democracy that the founders of the US constitution feared?[35]

These questions are even more relevant in the era of the Covid-19 pandemic which is blurring the distinction between democracies and authoritarian regimes in that the exigencies of lockdown reveal the priorities of politics are ultimately about power and order no matter the political and ideological complexion of a country is and that the pandemic has further polarized societies. The pandemic has made it clear that return to the ideals of 1989 cannot be the point of departure when it comes to reforming the world.[36]

Bibliography

(1) Applebaum, Anne (2020) Twilight of Democracy. The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends. London: Penguin Random House

(2) Oborne, Peter (2021) The Assault on Truth. Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and the Emergence of a New Barbarism

[1] David Runciman “In the US, unity and democracy have always been in conflict” Guardian 25th January 2021.

[2] Ibid


[3] Ibid


[4] Ibid


[5] Ibid


[6] Ibid.


[7] Hannah Arendt, 2017, The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Penguin Classics


[8] Anne Applebaum, '100 years later, Bolshevism is back. And we should be worried.' Washington Post 6th November 2017.

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid

[12] Ibid

[13] Ibid

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid

[16] Ibid

[17] Ibid

[18] Ibid

[19]Ibid

[20] Ibid

[21] Nick Cohen. 'Interview. Anne Applebaum: how my old friends reveals how her former friends and colleagues paved the way for Trump and Brexit.' The Guardian, 12th July 2020.

[22] Ibid

[23] Ibid

[24] Ibid

[25] Richard Cockett, ‘Oakeshott's lessons for a warring party - Standpoint, 30 May 2019.

[26] Sam Coates, Leave campaign chief Dominic Cummings in tirade at ‘narcissist-delusional’ Brexiteers | News | The Times. 27th March 2019.

[27] Jonathan Heawood, ‘Monster or guru? What Dominic Cummings’ blog tells us about him | Dominic Cummings | The Guardian’. 15th August 2019.

[28] Stephen Koch, “Lying for the truth: Münzenberg and the Comintern | The New Criterion’, November 1993, pp.16-35.

[29] Nick Cohen, “ How David Frost’s dizzying ascent of the greasy pole damaged Britain.” The Observer, 21st February 2021

[30] Ibid

[31] Rafael Behr “Brexit is a machine for perpetual grievance. It’s doing its job perfectly” Guardian 23rd February 2021


[32] Nick Cohen “How David Frost’s dizzying ascent of the greasy pole damaged Britain” The Observer. 21st February 2021


[33] Ivan Krastev, “The Tragic Romance of the Nostalgic Western Liberal” The Atlantic, 15th August 2020.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

Democracy In Peril ➖ The Breach Of Its Defences By The Revolutionaries Or Neo-Bolsheviks Of The Early 21st Century

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