Extreme nationalist rule could stabilise
It’s a thrilling autumn for British and US liberals. The UK’s Conservative Party is so mishandling Brexit that the whole thing might never happen. US liberals — already uncharacteristically energised for November’s midterm elections — are rooting for the torpedoing of Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court.
Liberal NGOs raise fortunes, while newspapers pile on subscribers. The liberal dream is that Anglosphere populism — an old people’s movement — will fade away.
But we may be hitting peak liberal resistance. It’s still likely that Brexit happens next March, and highly plausible that Trump will get re-elected in 2020. Longer term, it could be the liberals who fade away, to populist cries of “good riddance”. In this scenario, the urban, educated class abandons politics, just as the white working class did in previous decades.
Brexit is likely to happen because the leaders of both main British parties intend to deliver it. Either Britain strikes a deal on the EU’s terms, or it initially gets no deal but then probably crawls back to Brussels and agrees to whatever the Europeans are willing to offer.
Trump could easily win in 2020. If the economy is still growing by then, the 11-year expansion would be the longest yet measured in the US. Democrats could win the most populous liberal states of California, New York and Massachusetts by even larger margins than in 2016, piling up millions more essentially useless votes, and still lose the electoral college (while Republicans in swing states such as Wisconsin and Georgia suppress minority votes).
Meanwhile, Trump will see either Kavanaugh or another conservative justice confirmed, and possibly others too, given the ages of liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 85, and Stephen Breyer, 80. Then the Supreme Court would be reliably conservative for decades.
There is such a thing as stable long-term extreme nationalist rule. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in office since 2010, won another four-year term this spring. Benjamin Netanyahu has governed Israel since 2009, while the liberal secular left has collapsed. Poland’s PiS government looks set for reelection next year.
Extreme nationalism is selfreinforcing, because urban liberals are emigrating.
Hungary is exporting the highly educated, feminists, gay people, NGO staff, cultural workers and Jews. The ageing country suffers a net loss of one inhabitant every 16 minutes. Ironically, the émigrés’ remittances — along with subsidies from Orbán’s hated EU — help keep the economy going.
If Trump and the Brexiters can find the competence to establish long-term populism, liberal Britons and Americans will have to choose a response. Most will stay put. In 2016, over a quarter of Americans polled by Vox said they would consider moving to Canada if Trump won, but in the event hardly anyone left.
It turns out that well-off urban liberals (unlike, say, poor Hispanics) can live well under Trump. They are on the right side of rising US inequality.
As one rich New Yorker told me: “If people in red states want to give me a big tax cut, I didn’t vote for it, but I’ll take it.” Moreover, being anti-Trump gives liberals a purpose in life, a common identity. They are feeling bad about the US but good about themselves.
British urban liberals will suffer relatively more from Brexit. If freedom of movement with Europe ends, their passports will be downgraded. Brexit will also devalue one of their favourite career paths, the civil service: the fresh graduates who traditionally flood into Whitehall each year are exactly the cohort who despise Brexit and won’t want to spend years trying to make it work. Still, educated people will continue to find good jobs in London.
But they risk being politically sidelined after Brexit. Liberal debates in universities, media, political parties and think-tanks will feel irrelevant. Former centre-left politicians will migrate to TV shows such as Strictly Come Dancing, or make money consulting businesses on how to navigate Brexit.
If Trump and Brexit establish themselves, educated urban liberals will go into internal exile, cultivating their roof gardens, getting their kids into the right schools and doing the odd spot of local activism — for bike lanes, say. They will detach from populist relatives and from a sense of shared nationhood. “Not my government,” will be the attitude. If the Supreme Court allows red states to drive out abortion, that won’t affect New York or San Francisco.
Urban liberals across Europe led comfortable, apolitical lives before 1848; their Chinese and Russian peers lead them now. I saw it in Moscow this summer: the liberal elite gets its playground (hipster cafés and rollerskating in Gorky Park) and is allowed to prosper on condition it doesn’t get political.
I saw an earlier version of this on childhood visits to my grandparents in apartheid SA: urban liberals sat around their swimming pools mocking the government that privileged them, while black maids served cake. It’s a surprisingly sustainable way of life. /© Financial Times 2018
IF TRUMP AND BREXIT ESTABLISH THEMSELVES, EDUCATED URBAN LIBERALS WILL GO INTO INTERNAL EXILE, DOING THE ODD SPOT OF LOCAL ACTIVISM