The West is living through a period of radical uncertainty and has no clue how to respond
TThe rise of wokeism and decline of conservative values may be linked to a sense that our dominance as a political and economic civilisation is dying
Although wokery and Brexit are pretty much opposite causes, they have this in common: they are both in revolt against the ruling elites
his week, I spoke to an informal dining club whose selfexplanatory title is “The Brexit Dinner”, though Brexit does not limit its full range of interests. Normally when one is invited for such evenings, the speaker receives little steer about the topics covered. In this case, however, my host proposed a bundle of issues.
Brexit, of course, and consequent divisions, came first; then other causes of division. In these, the chairman included “climate change and protests, the political divide, the impact of the BBC and its future, the grip of the Left on our universities, wokeness, the whole gender and diversity push, Scottish independence and the Union, the trend for historical revisionism, eg, Winston Churchill, slavery etc”. You could see where, as they say, he was coming from.
“Is traditional Conservatism dead?” he wanted to know. “Our Government seems to have no appetite to take concrete steps to roll back this Leftward, woke driven agenda ... Our governments have previously worked on the basis that they are there to serve the majority while being mindful of trying also to serve minority interests within that context. Now we seem to have a Government that only listens to minorities and those who shout loudest.”
And then for good measure, he threw in China as well.
It was, of course, impossible for me to do justice to all these themes in one speech. But I was grateful for the way he had linked them, because it got me thinking.
My first thought was how hard it is to answer these inquiries, much harder than it used to be.
If I had been asked to address a comparable gathering in, say, 1981, I could have given a fairly clear account of how Mrs Thatcher’s government was trying to change things, economically and in the contest with Soviet communism. If in 1991, I could probably have made a stab at the benefits of the West’s Cold War victory, while pointing out the accompanying danger, for Britain and the European Community, of creating a single currency, let alone a political union.
By November 2001, however, I would have found it more difficult. Did the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon signal a real shift of global power, or were they no more than outbreaks of a fanatical rejection of modernity which could never succeed?
By 2011, when the world was still dazed by the credit crunch of 2008-9, had Western civilisation just saved itself from its own excesses or was it merely finding ever more ingenious ways of living on borrowed time and borrowed money? It felt positively rash to come down firmly on either side of the argument.
And in 2021? Is my host right? Is there some thread which links the fallout from Brexit, the rise of wokery, the death of traditional conservatism (with a small or big C), the challenge of China and so on?
I don’t really know, which is a bad position for an after-dinner speaker to be in, but not, I hope, a dishonourable one. The world of social media insists on absolute certainty of view, expressed as aggressively as possible. Yet the real world bristles with radical uncertainty more than any period since the 1930s.
My embryonic thought is that something in Western political culture has for too long made our leaders look the wrong way. From Tony Blair onwards – through Barack Obama’s “Yes, we can” and David Cameron’s “Let sunshine win the day” to Boris’s merry boosterism – optimism, which is usually a political virtue, has broken away from reality. Victory in the Cold War removed the sense of threat. Globalisation made most goods, for Western consumers, cheaper than ever. The first generation of politicians that could not remember the Second World War thought it was time to come out and play.
It rarely is, unfortunately: politics is not a science which “solves” problems and then moves on, but an art which must never stop trying to reconcile the potentially conflicting wishes of millions so that we can live in peace.
It is annoying to be told that everything is great when it isn’t, particularly by leaders whose quality of life is better than your own. Although wokery and Brexit are pretty much opposite causes, they have this in common: they are both in revolt against ruling elites. The power of Brexit, which flummoxed all the political parties, though not Boris Johnson himself, is that it achieved constitutional change outside the conventional structures, yet by the legitimate means of democracy. The largest number of British people who ever voted for anything – 17.4 million – did what their leaders told them not to do, and won.
So elites find it easier to make concessions to woke movements than they do to Brexiteers. If you tell rich and powerful establishments that they are historically responsible for slavery and “colonialism”, they play along, blaming their dead forebears. But if you complain at, say, the universities’ or the BBC’S overwhelming bias against Brexit you strike much more at the roots of their power than, say, Black Lives Matter does, so they give you short shrift. Elites accord moral deference to woke revolts even when they do not really agree with them (look at their obsequiousness to Greta Thunberg). But even now that Brexit is accomplished, they hold it in contempt.
In this uneasy situation, Boris practices his famous “cakeism”. In short bursts of rhetoric, he indicates that he wants nothing to do with insulting Winston Churchill or spitting on our history; but he is even more careful to avoid anything that could be twisted to make him look racist or “phobic” of Islam, trans people, gays and so on.
Even though he has an enormous parliamentary majority, he lacks underlying confidence. The latest example is this week’s extraordinary back-and-forth about Owen Paterson and the Commons Committee on Standards. Boris knows he rose because of disillusionment with conventional politicians and could just as suddenly fall when the wind changes. He is trying to bestride a political culture which is built on weak foundations.
I floated before my dinner audience one thought about what may underlie the insecurity that is felt Left, Right and centre. It is that we now sense – even if we do not explicitly formulate it – that the dominance of the West as a political civilisation and economic entity may really be dying. If it is, that is the end not only of the post-war settlement, but also of a phenomenon which has existed since the 18th century.
Without that dominance, most of us have no alternative view of the world, so we are confused.
China, however, does have an alternative view. It thinks it has proved the West’s decadence, almost surpassed its economic dominance and developed a political system of what we call totalitarianism, but it calls “consultative democracy” far more harmonious than our own fractious cockpit.
We plan 2050 as the year of net zero. China has chosen the same year as its target for global military superiority. On present showing, China has a greater chance of hitting its chosen target than we do ours. (And one might add that if the West actually does achieve net zero by that date – which China has no intention of attempting itself – we will be unable to resist Chinese military might.)
Personally, I do not believe that China’s world domination is inevitable, but if we in the West continue to take more trouble to signal our green and woke virtue than counter that threat, it will happen.