A symptom of our alienation (Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)
The Opera House, the Winter Gardens, Blackpool: here, in this magnificent theatre, a metaphor as good as any for decline, Russell Brand meditates on the stage, which I think is another metaphor for decline: not of buildings, but of a political system. Brand is on his knees, sideways to the stage by a single candle, eyes closed, hands on his knees, as if in prayer.
Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.
Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.
I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.
What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”
The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”
The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”
I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”
For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”
I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.
The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.
The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”
“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”
Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.
The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.
At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.
At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”
But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.
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Dear oh dear! I don’t particularly like some of the old FN’s politics, but it’s a shame that UnHerd has descended to recruiting this centrist and unoriginal hack to utter platitudes in a pursed lip fashion.
The huge Muslim population in France is a massive problem. Immigration has transformed the country. This is what many French believe – and they have a great deal of evidence on their side including numerous islamist terrorist attacks. So many left liberals hysterically react against anyone even uttering such thoughts.
Why has this article been completely ignored BTL? I’ll take a stab at the person I hope to be this year by admitting I’m not knowledgeable enough to support or reject most of Jackson’s individual claims. But the writing is strong, the assertions direct and clear. Never a peep? No Le Pen Sr. apologists?*
*I see that I needn’t have worried about any of that!
Something on my side was showing zero comments when there were already dozens.
Brittany is not part of the “ancient soil of France”: it became part of France in 1532.
So much for “Emeritus Professor of French History at Queen Mary, University of London”.
The French right have never been strict economic liberals (neither has the American or British right tbh). The free marketeers in the 18th century were the Girondins who supported the revolution (the Jacobins were more proto-socialist). Later French economic liberals like Bastiat sat with the left in parliament. Both socialists and liberals sat on the left, monarchists on the right.
So Le Pen not being a neoliberal doesn’t make him a left-winger per se.
So Le Pen was all that JJ portrays. But what were the opportunities that a gifted politician like him was provided by the 4th Republic, and then-once de Gaulle had gone- by the Vth Republic? Hint: de Gaulle spoke for the nation; Giscard then Mitterrand spoke for right or left. The national space was left open, previously held by the unassailable authority of de Gaulle.
This rant against J M Le Pen unfortunately omits some very interesting aspects of his personality and its contradictory influence in French politics.
However distasteful some of his opinions (antisemitism, homophobia) he foresaw with accuracy both the dire situation France is in, as well as its causes.
His diagnosis of the consequences of muslim mass migration is universally accepted in France , except by the extreme antisemitic left.
BTW, he tried to enroll in the Resistance in 1942 and was refused, being only 14.
Julian presents the woke Orwellian case predictably.
Still convinced that people who don’t agree with you are poisoning politics? Remember when we had to fear a certain “existential threat to democracy” ?
I’d advise the author of this article to open a newspaper… and smell the roses.
A hit piece on a man the day he died before his funeral is even conducted strikes me as very poor taste. Further, this is a lengthy article. I wonder if it wasn’t already written well before and the author was just waiting for Le Pen to kick the bucket so he could maximize its impact and be as disrespectful as possible. This seems to go beyond reasonable criticism of a man who probably deserved quite a lot and into the realm of the vindictive. Guilt by association is not something I particularly appreciate and this author can’t seem to write more than about two sentences without mentioning some thread that connects Le Pen to Vichy France or the Nazis. Everything that was built or happened in Germany from 1932-1945 is not automatically evil because Nazis. Should we have bulldozed every building and burned every book, song, or piece of art produced in Germany from 1932-1945? I’m not entirely sure why the Vichy connections should even matter. It was a puppet government controlled by the Nazis and I doubt Hitler gave them much autonomy. The hard reality is there are consequences to losing wars, and someone was going to have to do the administrative work of running what was left of France and it strikes me as unfair to blame them for basically doing what they were told so the Gestapo didn’t show up at their doorstep. A man who kills someone because another man has a gun to his head and tells him to wouldn’t be held responsible in most places.
I finally understood where this author’s anger is coming from when I read the last couple paragraphs and then reread the subtitle. He describes Le Pen as the “precursor to populist and nationalist racism that has become the common currency of democratic politics”. Now it makes sense. He’s blaming Jean Marie Le Pen for the rise of populist parties, like that of Le Pen’s daughter, while simultaneously implying that they’re all Nazis and racist nationalists. That’s the real target of his anger, but it’s a lot easier to scapegoat a very recently dead man and run through a list of disreputable people and activities associated with him than it is to seriously argue in favor of open borders and more of the same globalist policy. One man in France cannot be the scapegoat for populist movements emerging basically everywhere in the Western World at approximately the same time. Neither can Donald Trump or Geert Wilders or Victor Orban or any of the other boogeymen of the political establishment. The men and women are incidental. They don’t elect themselves. Angry people elect them, and most of them are angry because neoliberal globalism has failed to maintain standards of living across all social classes while simultaneously pushing an ideology that marginalizes their legitimate concerns, undermines the cultures they value, and then calls them racists for daring to disagree. The reality is that populism is a consequence of neoliberal failures and little else. After all, they’re the ones whose policies got us where we are now. They’re the ones who had the power to do something to forestall populist uprisings. They held power. Neither Le Pen ever has. It’s distasteful to blame others for your own failures. This attitude, not the political activities of a dead man who was run out of politics by his own daughter a decade ago is what’s poisoning politics, and this is a big part of the reason establishment politicians are losing. Surely somebody can do better than this.
Hear hear.
Yes
Its the same over Brexit: Remainers deeply ignorant of Europe lost the June 2016 referendum, rather than garage and Johnson won.
Unfortunately, it seems nowadays, being against a fanatic, obscurantist, misogynist religious ideology is being “racist”.
Yep – this should have been in that other magazine ‘Alwaysherd’
I definitely agree. To me, it is difficult today to criticize acts, convictions and values held in the 50-ies by a man who fought for what he belived was right.
What about Enoch Powell, whose values and ideas likewise were shaped in the 50-ies? Enoch Powell was certainly much more intelligent, better educated and on the whole more “civilized” – had more of style than Le Pen. But for instance his memo to Churchill about how many divisions would be needed to reconcur and retain India clearly shows that his judgement at the time was confused. Probably, by Powell’s own former stay in India and his apriciation of India.
Enoch Powell later turned out to be a firm standard-bearar of the viewes of the people in his constituency. He met them and heard their worries of being outnumbered and bullied by the inflow of immigrants from the former colonies, the West-Indien islands. He sensed their fear which he brought to knowledge and he fought for the public acceptance of a very true problem. For this he payed a very high price.
Like Le Pen, Enoch Powell was rebellious although more sophisticated and less ferocious. Both of them had strong convictions. Convictions that were shaped in an other time. Some of them have lost their validity or become obslete, others, however, are still hunting us. It’s for example interesting to note that another idea and very firm conviction of Enoch Powell, has not only survived but also has been revived, namely Powell’s conviction that the rule of the UK is always to be created in the Houses of Parlaiment only – and not by the EU.
Aye. Pretty much every country has national heroes that did a lot of things that were questionable now and sometimes even at the time they did them. Americans have one as well, Andrew Jackson, President from 1829-1837, whose portrait appears on every twenty dollar bill. He was very much in that vein himself, an ardent and unapologetic expansionist and nationalist politician who branded himself as a man of the people despite being quite wealthy. He brought in outsiders and various friends in to fill his cabinet posts which enraged the political establishment of the time. He feuded with Congress on many issues and was considered crass and uncouth. Some said he was unfit for the office. Sound familiar? When I say Donald Trump is consistent with America’s history, I’m not just making stuff up. Most Europeans, and sadly many Americans, don’t have much knowledge of American history prior to the World Wars when the US became a major power. The period from 1945-2016 is easily the most prolonged period of political stability the nation has had.
There’s been considerable argument about removing Jackson from the currency and removing other monuments to him. It’s the same revisionist historians and activists that have tried to get Confederate monuments taken down of course. He’s also regarded as one of the forerunners and precursors to the first populist movement in the 1890s and these days described as a populist himself.
The Vichy régime actively collaborated with the Germans. It is misleading to describe it merely as a “puppet régime”.
I admit I am not intimately familiar with that particular topic. I know a lot of world history but not much of France specifically. I knew Petain was basically chosen because he had fascist/Nazi leaning politics but not much beyond that. Of course people who actively aided the Nazis have culpability. I will admit to not being terribly familiar with how extensive the collaboration was.
Well said. The headline says it all. These lefties just can’t help themselves spilling hatred no matter the occasion. They just don’t see themselves being the vile ones, the vicious parasites on the right. Without people like Le Pen, including his daughter the brave!!! or Trump or Musk, we would still be living in the delusional and senile world of Biden, or the deranged world of Trudeau, or the new Labour eco terrorist / communist / stazi state. The world is changing, fast, but these brainwashed imbeciles just can’t wake up to smell the right coffee world.
I see. What happened to live and let live? Not agreeing with someone should not make them a criminal
Le Pen had many faults, but the greatest of them was that he was a Vichyist, which is probably the worst thing a Frenchman can be.
I don’t get it. France lost the war. The people in the Vichy government basically had a gun to their heads. They had to do what the Nazis told them or the Gestapo might show up and kill them and their whole families. Are they really guilty of something because they did administrative work or collected taxes or shoveled snow or built roads or did whatever other civic job they were assigned so they wouldn’t be murdered in the night? We didn’t even prosecute or blame people who were actual Nazis for being Nazis unless they directly participated in the Holocaust or other proven crimes.
Collaboration is far worse than defeat. Decent French people would admit that. Don’t forget that Petain was convicted of treason and sentenced to death after the war, although the sentence was commuted due to his age.
We musn’t forget that Pétain’s personality and destiny was formed at Verdun. There ha came and saw the desastrious results of his predecessors acts, thousands of dead and wounded soldiers without any cure and care whatsoever. There, he took as his main task to help and save the lives of Frensh soldiers.
When the Germans attacked France in 1939 and the Nazi’s came in command. Pétain was then sent for and asked to govern the part of France that had not been occupied. The alternative would probably have been an occupation and a pure Nazi rule which I belive Pétain considered to be the worst alternative.
The Vichy period was the lowest period of the French as a people. All those old jokes about how the French Military Manual of 1940 contained only two sections, headed “Surrender” and “Collaborate” must have stung, because of their inherent truth. It now seems beyond doubt that Petain was an enthusiastic participant in the worst aspects of the Holocaust. On a personal level, it think it would have been better had they not commuted his sentence.
It was abit of a show trial, the reality was France was politically divided before the war, right and left were tearing themselves apart. Half the country supported the right against communism , the right had the milice which was an anti communist militia supported by Vichy, the resistance were mainly communists fighting against the Nazi’s and German occupation and Vichy as well. Petain was collaborative with the Nazi’s for sure, but what they feared most was the communist takeover of France. The trial of Petain in many ways was to cover up those divisions which France had difficulty to accept postwar. The French even had a division of troops in the waffen ss, the Charlemagne, which fought for Germany on the eastern front including the battle of Berlin. History is complicated, the victors usually control the narrative
Pretty much every nationality had a unit of troops in the Waffen SS. By the end of the war, it had more foreigners than Germans in it (some of whom were Muslims).
The 3rd Republic was hated. Conservative forces were in shock after the 1936 Front Populaire drastic social measures and nationalisations.
A very good book to understand the French “defeat” is “A Mort La Gueuse” (Boulanger). The Nazis were welcome by a substantial part of the establishment, especially by la grande muette, the army. As for Vichy, they were not recalcitrant interim leaders. They were enthusiastic ideologues who embraced much of national socialism on a voluntary basis. Much of today’s France still rests on fondations laid between 1941 and 1944.
De Gaulle did not reverse any of these state power grabs. Much like the rest of continental Europe, these domains (education, unions, energy, transport, health, gun control) became sacred cows, quasi religious subjects. Anyone questioning the status quo is to this day isolated, ostracised and accused of being, wait for it, a fascist. Lepen was an economic libertarian.
The irony, Le Pen and his party being portrayed as being on the far right of politics, when in reality they were /are socialists.
Nationalisation by the State of the big corps and institutions was always their ambition,
The FN is simply a reactionary conservative movement. Its economic policies are famously flexible – look at its attitude to France and the EU – and designed around gaining power. Similar to Reform whose practical prescriptions are designed to peel off distinct voting blocks, rather than being a priori statement of principle. The only overriding objective is a vague idea of turning back the clock to an imagined past. Both look heavily to win over traditional left wing voters who are socially conservative, and alienated by their parties.
The left itself was much more likely to have a distinct economic philosophy as its roots are grounded in an economic analysis of society. The only far right groups with a distinct a priori economic theory were the fascists and the Nazis themselves. Mussolini was famously a leading socialist who broke with his movement over Italy’s entry into WW1, and Hitler detested both capitalism and socialism.
Despite all the labels thrown around, the modern far right are almost all just reactionary conservatives.
Can’t speak for others, but I’d rather not have politicians be limited by an economic ideology. I’d rather they be flexible, open to new ideas, and listening to the people. I’d prefer they focused on defending the nation and its people and solving whatever problems pragmatically using whatever method happens to produce the desired results with as few as possible side effects. Nothing more and nothing less. If that’s actually what the establishment is trying to do, then they’re failing and we may as well let somebody else have a go. If they’re simply tied to their ideology, that’s actually a worse problem to have and I hope they keep losing elections until they’ve discarded their ideological hangups and gotten back to a more sensible and practical attitude that listens to the people’s actual concerns.
The reactionaries are in power, shutting down political dissent to conine their woke ruinous policies. The woke go to tactic of labeling their opposition as wicked fascists is obvious and self revelatory.
Is everyone just a socialist in your book?
Socialism is being dumped on its backside ,,, it is increasingly found out ,,, none more so than this Starmer Govt will be also ‘dumped’ before the end of 2025
That is true of the movement today under Marine. A lot of commentators for that matter ignore this very relevant fact: all ascending right wing continental parties advocate even stronger state control and state economy _ Reform is thankfully different.
But you are wrong about JM Lepen. In fact his pro market stance made it near impossible for the pathetic libertarian party under Alain Madellin to exist. One of the main bones of contention between JM Lepen and his daughter was economic policy. She adapted to her audience, economically inept, in order to gain power. He always refused to do so.
He was a very complicated man. Not sure I know how to judge him, between his childish provocations and the establishment abject behaviour towards him. His message was messy to begin with, the distortions and diabolising in the pre internet area proving remarkably effective.
At a guess, I would say he was a genuine nationalist, and a genuine bigot. There is no equivalent in today’s political scene.