Britain is lost in Trumpland Revolution lingers in the air

One does not have to look far to discern a revolutionary atmosphere in the current West. The blizzard of executive orders from the new Trump administration resembles not so much a handover of power as a surprisingly bloodless form of regime change, in which the props of America’s Liberal International Order abroad, and the neoliberal progressivism which underpinned it at home, are being dismantled one by one. With the new regime disestablishing USAID, and highlighting its artificial boosting of progressive doctrine across the world, paid for by the American taxpayer, we see Washington taking apart the workings of its own empire and holding them up to the world’s contempt. The US is blowing up its own order and replacing it with another, yet to fully reveal itself. The signifiers of total ideological rupture now come so quickly, piling one on top of the other, that it is hard to keep track: like the administrators of America’s deposed regime, we feel disorientated by the pace of change. 

The Fox News interview with America’s Secretary of State, Mark Rubio, in which he remarked “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… that was an anomaly,” is one such historic turning point, almost lost in the sheer profusion of dramatic events. As Rubio stated, in a rejection of the Biden doctrine of the United States as the indispensable power, the guarantor of global democracy, America’s hegemonic era “was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet”.  

Rather than posing as their moral and strategic opposite, America is becoming more like China and Russia — a regional great power whose statecraft is increasingly amoral and purely self-interested. Critics of the moral cant with which post-Cold War America masked its quest for global domination will soon experience Washington’s successor ideology as threatening in a different way. Where the Biden administration failed to live up to its own self-proclaimed morality in Gaza — the war there was as much an American venture as an Israeli one — Trump’s scheme to depopulate and annex Gaza as a glitzy beachfront Outremer pays no heed to human rights, as historically understood, at all. Even for Realist critics of liberal internationalism, it is a proposal so outside the moral framework of the world we have known that it may as well come from some alien intelligence. Threatening Denmark over Greenland, and Canada with annexation, the new America is a revisionist power turning its strength on the client states it formerly flattered with the fiction they were allies. It is not enough for Trump to exert pressure on leaders like Trudeau: they must be humiliated too, as symbols of a repudiated order, as suddenly overtaken by history as the court eunuchs packed off into exile with the last Ottoman sultan. Trudeau, and our own European equivalents, simply represent the surplus elites of an extinguished political order. 

We see a local equivalent of Trudeau’s shock and betrayal in our own surplus elites, as represented by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart observing with horror on their podcast that the British armed forces, by design, cannot function except as an auxiliary to a United States they now view with anxiety. Campbell, who spun Britain into America’s disastrous war in Iraq, and Stewart, who served as an unsuccessful American colonial administrator in the same war, have both belatedly learned there is a downside to making your nation dependent on the whims of an imperial master. Their predicament is an existential one: Britain’s political and security apparatus is too tightly integrated into the American empire for the local comprador class to risk total rupture, and yet the statecraft and governing ideology of the Washington successor state is morally and politically unpalatable to our rulers, stranded by the imperial metropole’s shifting tides. The result, almost certainly, will be domestic turbulence.

The German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck observes in his recent book, Taking Back Control?, that, while the neoliberal order birthed by America’s unipolar moment is now firmly dead, we still inhabit a political “interregnum”, in Gramsci’s terms, where its successor order, whatever that may be, has yet to reveal itself: “a transitional situation without a foreseeable end and with an open exit.” Surveying the politics of the early 2020s, in which the guardians of the old order had lost the faith of their voters and still refused to relinquish their power, Streeck suggests that “the situation recalled Vladimir Lenin’s definition of a ‘revolutionary situation’: ‘when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way.’” 

It is not hard, after all, to discern a similar, increasingly angry, and almost revolutionary mood in Britain. The riots that marked Labour’s entry into power have set the tone for its time in office: the Government is constantly firefighting, unable to fund the grand infrastructural projects it promised in opposition and is forced into increasingly absurd and authoritarian postures — like considering blunting kitchen knives — to suppress a smouldering popular anger. An emergency state, Streek suggests, has developed in the post-Covid West; one reliant on fiscal giveaways drawn from burgeoning public debt to fend off collapse, while casting around desperately for new sources of prosperity to balance the books and prolong its popular legitimacy. Yet this can only be a transitional state, Streeck notes, “not a social order, like neoliberalism aspired to be, but a condition of disorder”. America may have moved on, but we in Britain are still trapped in this long and disorderly interregnum.

If the order now being born in Washington is the successor state to America’s era of unipolar empire, whatever follows here will be the successor state to the new Britain established by Blair in 1997, as our provincial franchise of the now-vanished globalised imperium. The Britain of the Nineties, the terminal form of the social-democratic state established in 1945, is as alien and unpalatable to our rulers as the replacement order now dawning across the West. So earnestly did our rulers plunge Britain into the borderless world of globalisation that Blair’s Britain — a more or less homogeneous Northwest European nation state notable to academic specialists as the West’s foremost “Zero Immigration Country” — is not only unrecognisable, but even to say it was preferable to its replacement is deemed extremist. 

Just as the new Trump regime repudiates its predecessor, our current Westminster has repudiated the values of its Nineties predecessor, the Britain of Britpop and Euro 96, as something entirely beyond the pale — even as much of the country remembers it simply as home. The “British Values” conjured by Labour from thin air to manage its new experiment are simply the rulebook for a globalised, multicultural polity that no longer exists. The top-down, state-enforced cosmopolitanism that has since become Westminster’s ideology has had its lodestar extinguished at source in Washington. And yet our rulers still cling to a dead project, with Starmer and the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, making extravagant offerings of Britain’s remaining overseas territory to placate a demanding god, international law, which simply doesn’t exist, and with the parallel unilateral commitment to Net Zero. Isolated by history, we are now trapped trying to implement globalisation in one country, the backwater Transnistria to America’s vanished imperial regime. 

There is a tendency on the younger British Right, representative of an age cohort now increasingly disenchanted with liberal democracy, to satirise the Britain created by Blair and vastly ramped up by his Conservative successors, as “the YooKay”. This successor state to the Britain of recent memory is as alienating in its strangeness and squalor, overlaid on a recognisable urban fabric, as the near-future Britain of Cuarón’s Children of Men which it increasingly resembles. There are surely few nationalisms which view their own notional state as a source of alienation and object of derision, but this is the threat Labour is forced to suppress for its own survival. The decades since the end of the Cold War were wasted, turning the country down a long and rutted dead end, yet the British state can neither admit its errors nor manage their consequences. 

As Streeck observes of the West’s emergency states: “all this adds up to a crisis of political legitimacy, with intense struggles over nothing less than the constitutive foundations of the political order.” Who is the British state now for? What is its purpose, other than keeping alive the lost order of the globalised era for as long as it can? The 1997 British state feels as if it is palpably coming apart at the seams: what will replace it, and when?

Since Brexit, the British electorate has been casting around wildly for total reform, bringing the legacy parties of the postwar British state into office with dramatic majorities and immediately destroying them, like ritual sacred kings raised to power purely to be sacrificed to restore the realm. The Conservatives have been brought to the brink of extinction; Labour look set to follow them into oblivion; as it stands, unimaginable though this would have sounded just a few years ago, the most likely next government increasingly seems to be the party that, significantly, chose to name itself Reform. Whether Reform can itself survive the volatile popular mood is another question entirely. Essentially Nineties Conservatives, as wedded to Right-wing Atlanticism as Labour was to its progressive equivalent, Reform will struggle to demarcate the space for a politics of British national self-interest, as distinct from the demands of a waning hegemon who may be an unpredictable ally at times, but is certainly no friend. 

The second largest party in Scotland and Wales as well as England overall, Reform reflect, in part, a nascent British nationalism which, largely unconsciously, sets itself against the current Westminster state. Yet it is hard to believe that Farage fully understands, or can fill the role that history has prepared for him, in ushering in the successor state to Blair’s new Britain. Like France or Germany, Britain may simply become ungovernable, adrift on historical forces it cannot control. 

In any case, the victory of Trump’s new American successor state is itself not guaranteed; it may yet itself collapse into chaos, as most revolutions do. It is futile to predict the outcome of any of this. Still trapped in the interregnum, we exist in a state of political unreality, torn between returning to a Britain that no longer exists, and yet to embark down a new road, as yet untravelled, whose final destination is unknowable. As the world reshapes itself in an unrecognisable form, Britain’s political life has become an endless, troubling dream from which we are unable to wake.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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