The child with the sword

When I was twelve years old a schoolfriend confessed to me that he would like to kill someone with his bare hands. “I wish people fought like that these days” he said wistfully as we walked across a sun-dappled schoolyard, oversized backpacks flung over one shoulder. “Bows and arrows, swords, spears. It was so much more manly when they fought like that.”

I probably nodded. In fairness to us The Two Towers had just come out in cinemas and if there’s anything that might get a twelve-year-old boy full of bloodlust it is watching men standing in the rain personally mowing down thousands of faceless orcs with a sword as they shout things and stand for the truth and justice and the like. Watching those movies had an overpowering effect for many boys of my age that wouldn't be matched until girls made their appearance a couple of years later. It is so embarrassing now that we don’t much want to interrogate it other than make the odd self-deprecating crack about grown men being overwhelmed by the sword fights on Game of Thrones. I contend that if we did we might understand our political moment a little better.

It can’t have escaped the notice of anyone who has trawled Wikipedia for history articles that those on military history are far and away the best-researched. Obscure battles from World War II have every regiment that fought in them with all their insignia perfectly accounted for. The equipment of a Sassanid infantryman from 500AD is lovingly detailed. I would commend the curators of these pages for their commitment to the full documentation of human knowledge if I didn’t recognise in that online imbalance toward all things martial the child in me who desperately wanted to wield a sword in a Tolkienesque battle. The idea that I am not the only one is slightly disturbing.

The modern wannabe warrior is a relatively well-documented and mocked stock character: think of Mark Corrigan of Peep Show complaining that his girlfriend would be more impressed if he took MDMA than if he had fought at Goose Green. While the sense of having missed a time when men were men is famously keen amongst internet dwellers who favour Trilbys and trolling, it is also probably present in the depths of far more men’s psyches than they would like to admit. The child who adores the violence of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings will perhaps never entirely leave us.

The sense of having lost a world of honour, manly single combat and heroic struggle is hardly new. The Greeks lived under the intimidating shadow of Homeric warfare: the futile suicide of Sophocles’ Ajax has all the hallmarks of a society anxious about the loss of an honour code in a new era of doubt and relativism. The political scientist Robin Archer gave a fascinating account of how the left wing movements of Europe opposed the outbreak of the First World War right up to the point where the language of medieval honour codes was introduced into public discourse, at which point the Victorian schoolboys inside them all appeared to cave in and they were foaming for war with the best of them.

The susceptibility of even intelligent and modern men (and I am talking about men) to these swords-and-sandals lapses is scary to me because of how rarely we might admit to it in public. We do understand how stupid it is, but show me King Theoden riding along his battle line screaming his battle cry and something deep inside me stirs. Were we to start talking about this little boy more openly, we might also be able to talk about two bogeymen of the modern liberal world, Donald Trump and ISIS, more effectively.

Imagine in two hundred years’ time you are an American citizen living in a nation dominated by China. Imagine a preacher comes along who tells you of the founding fathers and the war they fought against tyranny. Imagine the sense of the lost empire of greatness, the Númenor sunk beneath the waves that can be dredged up again by men of equal martial prowess and honour. It would be entirely to miss the point of Jefferson and Hamilton if America were to become the lost medieval kingdom of King Arthur, but that is what on some level Trump is offering: the return of the king. The return of a time when men were men, evil was confronted, swords

were unsheathed with a proper schiingg sound rather than the damp P.C. squelch they seem to make these days.

What I am painting is the birth of the American ISIS, with the founding fathers as the Salaf, the Rashidun, the rightly-guided: not because their argument was correct but because they won the war. The caliphate, we must remember, is as much a civilisational argument as a religious one. There is a reason jihadis carry swords, and have themselves photographed on horseback. They are historical re-enactment societies gone crazy. Their argument is that the caliphate once dominated the world, that it was run by proper honourable men, and that weakness, foreigners and effeminacy destroyed it. But it can be reclaimed. How far different other than by scale is that to Trump’s appeal?

In Moshin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist the narrator Changez (whose name appears to be a pun on what he does during the novel, but is more significant for being the Urdu version of “Genghis”) frequently suffers these kinds of reveries.

 We built the Royal Mosque and the Shalimar Gardens in this city, and we built the Lahore Fort with its mighty walls and wide ramp for our battle-elephants. And we did these things when your country was still a collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at the edge of a continent.

I read the book in 2009, and only now does Hamid’s real insight hit me. For Changez the reason to hate America was never religious. The point was about civilisations: it was about the pride of his civilisation dented by long supplication, it was wanting another Mughal Empire to rise and defeat its foreign conquerors, build more Tajs Mahal. The religious element is only important in this view as long as it supports that sense of cultural revanchisme, just as for Trump supporters Christianity has more to do with a lost America than it does with a pacifist Galilean carpenter. It is not for nothing that in the days following 9/11 Changez imagines New York as a castle, and the army heading to Afghanistan as an avenging horde storming out of its gates. He may think of himself as modern, but his imagination is thoroughly medieval, and his lack of self-awareness on this point will ultimately lead him down his path of vengeance.

If we are going to face up to the challenges in the new reactionary feelings that will continue to sweep the globe as globalisation and modernity continue to deny us our certainties, we will have to start by acknowledging these impulses in ourselves. Am I disgusted at the ultra-violence on Game of Thrones? Yes. Do I still feel a little childlike thrill at the drawing of a sword? Yes. Can I do anything about it? I have my doubts. But at least I can tell people I feel that sense of longing for a simple and confrontational world, shameful as it is. Half of our democratic polity is made up of women, who for obvious reasons have very little sense of connection to that world and won’t understand that pull unless we make it clear.

More than this we have to have an argument about dignity. If America is going to avoid the hypermasculine idiocy of a lost imagined past, and Sunni Islam is going to reject the empowering fantasy of a reborn Salafi civilisation, then the elites in charge of those societies have to work out a way to talk to the desires that make those visions attractive. 

White Americans want to find a sense of dignity in a changed world, and unless they are praised, loved and raised up by their media and government, they will look back to a time when they seemed to have that honour. Islamic society, prostrate under colonialism and economic stagnation for so long, will need to be praised and honoured as the successor to the Abbasids with the modern equivalent of the tolerance and learning of that society. In the end only being treated with dignity and as genuine equals will prevent young men from trying to force that respect with violence. From the ganglands to the Fertile Crescent this has proven true. If we were to seriously discuss the history of the caliphate we might be better at seeing wannabe jihadis from Bradford as the crazily misguided Tolkien re-enactors they basically are.

The honour society is gone. It is less than Falstaff’s air, the mere memory of a breeze. But those who think that they can just ignore the child within them calling for blood and dragons and sword fights and honour are missing the point. Ignore it in yourself and someone else will issue the clarion call for those who will still listen.

Towards a disunified theory of Trump

To the Trump steak, the Trump Tower, Trump University and a dozen other tawdry innovations associated with the man we can rather unexpectedly add a whole new genre of literature. The liberal hand-wringing Trump thinkpiece has been a boom industry not seen since the invention of the printing press led to everyone suddenly wanting to write a pamphlet. The spectacle of metropolitan liberal elites desperately trying to work out what has happened in America’s heartlands to make his nomination possible is only surpassed in entertainment value by the scolding of all the other liberal elites for being more out-of-touch than the writer in question.

The genre of the Trump-piece has gotten so out of hand that even the return of Andrew Sullivan from semi-retirement to give his hot take prompted boredom from me, something I never thought would happen given the Dish-shaped hole in my life and his exact fit for this subject. There are simply too many contradictory narratives, too much speculation, too much self-flagellation, too little experience of the lived lives of the people who vote for Trump. The kind of Americans who write for newspapers are finally coming to grips with their isolation from their countrymen, and they are panicking.

There seem to be two basic theories competing, with roughly equal numbers of adherents on both sides. The first reaction, probably the gut reaction for most liberals, is that this is an outburst of nativism and racism, pure and simple. The wall and the deportations were what launched his candidacy in the first place, goes the thinking, and so Occam’s razor suggests that it is simply a latent xenophobia given voice that explains the whole thing. This is quickly countered by a more lenient interpretation powered by liberal guilt: the white working class providing Trump’s support are frustrated by stagnant wages, declining industries, corrupt elites, a hollowed-out American dream, globalisation – take your pick, but these are not bad people, but rather the people losing out against historical trends and kicking out. This is the “Empathy” theory, and its chastisement of “people like us” is addictive.

Barely has the dust settled, however, when another counter narrative appears: it really is just racism, or at least a new incarnation of the Tea Party populism that dominated the first half of the decade.  This view was summed up by Matt Yglesias, who said that if America was in as much of a crisis as the Republican Party had said it was for the last eight years then a reaction as extreme as Trump would be necessary.

This is the “Frankenstein” theory, that the embrace of populist anger by the Republican Party in the Obama years created a monster it couldn't control, a talk radio logic-driven mob ranting against lost privilege that ended not as intended supporting a pro-corporate establishment candidate nor even a genuine small government constitutionalist like Rand Paul. Instead it embraced what had had been presented as the face of the movement: something authentically angry, unapologetically male and resolutely a-modern. For the proponents of this theory, Trump’s supporters couldn't give a damn about trade policy and stagnating living standards – they’re doing what they've been told.

John Harris, who has done so much to contribute to our idea of what ails Britain’s socio-political order, today published a piece from America where he has been doing something unfashionable in the hip data-driven US journalism scene: he’s been talking to people. Unsurprisingly given his previous work he fell directly in the Empathy camp, although his experience with the British working class means his writing lacks the kind of smug castigation of the left from New York-based journalists who have apparently only just discovered this story.

His article brought me back into the Empathy camp myself, though it also reminds me that I seem to be veering from one to the other from day to day – only two days ago Jonathan Chait’s argument, that perhaps it the liberal unwillingness to simply call a segment of the Republican base stupid that explains their confusion, had me swayed. Harris is an explicit rebuke to that sentiment. Any argument will sway me while I still haven't met any Trump supporters.

Maybe both are correct. The way in which this phenomenon seems to have come out of nowhere and knocked everyone for six has left us scrabbling to come up with a single explanation, one that we can decide on while we still have time and solve. Understandable. But wrong. Instead of coming up with a unified theory of Trump we should accept a disunified one, where different segments of his supporters want different things from him. Otherwise we have the unedifying spectacle of respectable liberals at dinner parties delivering speeches about the motivations of people they have never met nor intend to meet, and would not much like if they did. I appreciate they are trying to understand their fellow citizen, but it may be a bit late for that now.

There are two problems of macrohistorical importance here: what the working class is for in an era of automation and globalisation, and how to manage the expectations of citizens in their own media bubbles reinforced and hyped into fury with ease. Each of them correlates with one of the theories, but both will have to be addressed at some point. Sadly, it seems unlikely Hillary Clinton is going to be the one to deliver a start on either.

The Peace Process

The debate about anitsemitism on the Left has descended into a murky fog of war, familiar to anyone who has had to argue about racism, in which everyone is second-guessing every sentence’s true meaning, teasing out the implications of phrasing, attempting to grapple with the vast historical grotesque that is Jew-hate and wrestle it down into a soundbite that proves the others wrong. Nothing, in such a noxious brawl, will be achieved.

Cutting to the heart of the matter, this recurring problem has very little to do with how the Left thinks racially: I don’t think Livingstone actually dislikes Jews. We must take people at their word that this is about Palestine. Until the ghosts of the Cold War and the decolonisation period are effectively dealt with, this row will simply come back over and over again, a knife in the side of the centre-left that can be twisted whenever any antagonist wishes to do so. Let us lay it out this way:

• The Left sides with the Palestinian cause because it fits in with a number of anticolonial struggles of the past, the parallels with South Africa being most obvious
• The socialist Left has made common cause with Arab nationalism (which has occasionally also been socialist), Pan-Islamic nationalism and more worryingly Islamism in opposing Israeli policy
• Arab nationalism has never really left antisemitism behind since the days of Amin al-Husseini, and both of the other two lean on old antisemitic tropes to a massive degree
• The two bleed into each other very easily in situations like Malia Bouattia or Naz Shah precisely because it is where socialist and Pan-Islamist philosophies meet

The problem then is that too few people involved in UK leftism are capable of watching that boundary close enough. They are aware of the Israeli nationalist use of anti-Semite as a slur against them and so never seem to take action until things are too late out of pride. This latest episode may yet go some way to improving the reaction speeds in future, but until the above four points are all widely acknowledged, I think the problem will simply return with the next set of anti-Israel comments.

Once the problem is admitted, we’ll have to come up with a way of solving it: of ensuring that Arab antisemitism can never again be confused with liberal criticism of Israel, whether out of convenience or deception. What we need then, is a solid dividing line, a line that the conspiracist Islamists will not cross. I think I know what that line will be, and I doubt that many on the Left will like it.

We must make peace with Zionism. No longer can we describe ourselves as anti-Zionist as if that makes us better than anti-Semites. The right for the self-determination of the Jewish people in Palestine must at last be uncoupled from criticism of colonialism. Every criticism of Israel must become prefaced with a reminder that we want a liberal socialist Israel providing security for its citizens as many liberal Zionists would themselves argue for.

The modesty of the essential Zionist claim, that those Jews living in their ancestral homeland should have a state in which they are a majority large enough to ensure their own protection, can no longer be questioned by liberal people in the West. Rather we must view with suspicion those who use “Zionist” as a pejorative. Only by forcing that dividing line will we see where the NUS truly stands, since if they believe that in 1947 the Jewish population of Palestine would have been better served under the rule of an Arab government in Jordan or worse, one led by Husseini himself, then they are not serious about protecting Jewish people. If not, then they are Zionists.

This wrenching change for the Left, who have found worldwide solidarity by treating Zionism as an offshoot of the colonialism they defeated in the last century, will peel many from its ranks. But there is no other way to convince Israelis and Jews that despite criticism, we care for them. Only by allaying the understandable suspicion by Jews of those who would ally with their tormenters can we avoid having to answer these inquisitions in future. If we do not, Jews won’t care what we say we meant – they’ll have heard us loud and clear.