The politics of nostalgia

 Our politics are now dominated by the prejudices and fears of the elderly. When I was a young man in the 1960s, half the population were young adults under 40 years of age. There was a spirit of youthful idealism and optimism, as these young people looked forward to a better future. There was a ferment of ideas, usually on the left, as the new generation saw themselves as challenging those who came before. Now these same people have become old, and many of them regard the present with fear and dislike. Their response is a powerful yearning for the past - the time when they were confident and energetic and the world was comprehensible. At its most extreme, they reject any ideas which arose in the last fifty years, as if their capacity to absorb new information ceased when they were 25. These new and rejected ideas include global warming, racial and sexual equality, the rights of gay people, the globalisation of the world economy, the metric system and international mobility. New ideas often emerge from universities and from abroad, and so there is a preference for ‘common sense’ over scientific knowledge, and for isolation over international organisations. The generation which grew up after 1945 was the first to become largely immune to the common infectious diseases of childhood, largely because their parents had eagerly accepted advances in medical science. This meant that some members of the new immune generation had no experience of epidemics and therefore reacted with suspicion to immunisation against COVID. This too was, for them, a new idea to be rejected.

The population of the nostalgic has been successfully mobilised in many countries by political movements which promise a return to an imagined golden age. The chronological location of this golden age is never made specific, but it defines a policy agenda of systematically dismantling all the hated changes that have occurred in the last 50 years. The most extreme example of this is of course in the USA. Green energy policies have been repudiated in favour of oil dependency, even though the former now is cheaper and employs many more people. There is a suspicion of medical science and people are advised to avoid life-saving vaccination. Funding for scientific research has been slashed and world-famous universities are under attack. Engagement in international co-operation and trade is replaced by bullying and threats, and foreign visitors are treated with increasing hostility. There is a bizarre hostility to people who have changed their gender identity, and a desire to confine women to child-bearing by banning abortion. Women and black people in senior positions are being systematically dismissed so that promotion will once again become easier for white men of limited abilities. These policies have rarely been debated or explained beyond a kind of sneering at hated catch phrases such as ‘net zero’ or ‘DEI’.

In the past, peoples who failed to adapt to new technology or to modernise their society fell behind their neighbours and were eventually conquered. The Ottoman sultans banned the printing press for 250 years - years in which Europe sped ahead in scientific knowledge and military technology. In 1717, the Chinese Emperor banned Western books as part of his campaign against Jesuit influence. In 1793, a later Emperor rebuffed a British trade mission, responding that China set “no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.” Forty-seven years later, the entire Chinese navy was sunk by two British warships, and the country forcibly opened up to British opium sales. Thus began more than a century of humiliation and civil war for the most populous and civilised country on earth. It is rarer for societies to actually go backwards, dismantle their achievements and repudiate their scientific knowledge, but it has happened. The great libraries of the Eastern Mediterranean were destroyed in the fourth century by Christian zealots, who murdered Hypatia, the greatest mathematician of her day.

Will the USA follow this path? The country will eventually recover from Trump, just as China after many decades recovered from civil war and the cruel insanity of Mao Tse-Tung. But people will fear that the political forces that created Trump could rise again, and investors and visitors to the USA will therefore regard it with suspicion for many years to come.

Tales from Long Ago No. 2

Sometime in the early 1970s, I decided to backpack in the Scottish Highlands. I took a train and then a bus to the pleasant market town of Callandar. I then trekked through a pass between the hills to Comrie. This was a splendid walk of 26km, and I felt young, energetic and fit. Comrie is one of the fine small market towns at which Scotland excels. I found a campsite, and the next day set off over the hills along Glen Lednock for Killin. I reached Loch Tay and then plodded along to the village. I arrived in early afternoon and my next destination was Bridge of Orchy. I should have stopped at Killin for the night and enjoyed staying in such a scenic location, but I had caught walker’s disease - the desire to keep moving at all costs - and decided to plod along Westwards. This turned out to be a foolish decision. Scotland dose not have the English system of rights of way. As a result, Ordnance Survey maps of Scotland show few tracks or paths. I followed instead a book on Scottish hillwalking, which showed a clear track across to Bridge of Orchy. This turned out to be narrow road which became an increasingly fictitious track along Glen Lochay, through a landscape ever less inhabited. It got dark and I needed to find somewhere to pitch a tent.

My tent was the one I had used in an earlier walk in the Dordogne. But what sufficed for late summer in South West France proved inadequate for a very stormy night in the Highlands. I was forced by condensation to abandon the tent, and instead found shelter on a concrete floor in a large open-sided Dutch barn which was used for sheep-shearing. The metal sides of the barn rattled and the sheep fleeces hanging from the rafters swayed in the wind. Miles away, across the Glen, I could see the lights of a house. In the morning, I rose, packed, and headed off for Bridge of Orchy.

I soon encountered a burn which proved difficult to cross without getting very wet feet. Eventually I reached a track which led me to my destination in mid-afternoon. I decided to abandon life in a tent (as, it turned out, forever), and stay in the hotel. I ran the bath in my room, jumped in, and found it icy cold. I went to the reception desk and was told “We don’t run the heating until the evening”. This example of Scottish hospitality was all I remember of the hotel. I am sure it is much more welcoming nowadays, but even in the time of my walk its great saving grace was proximity to a railway station. I decided to end my walk and catch a train to Glasgow.

A few years later, the West Highland Way opened. I completed this in splendid weather one summer. I stayed in small hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. The Way passes through Bridge of Orchy, but I avoided the hotel and continued on the Way up a hill to see one of the greatest sights in Scotland. In front of me was the great expanse of Rannoch Moor, encircled by mountains. Below, was Inveroran Hotel surrounded by a copse, next to a lovely burn. Some tents were pitched nearby. I was greeted by a  hospitable landlady (with a very posh voice) and placed in a comfy room. The dining room was crowded and friendly, and the food was excellent. The next day, I strode along the old military road across Rannoch Moor to Kinlochleven, and the next day on the Fort William.

The new diplomatic revolution

 The ‘Diplomatic Revolution’ of 1756 was a major change in the alliances between European powers. Britain allied with its former enemy Prussia and went to war against its former ally Austria. Austria allied with its former enemy France. The Dutch Republic dropped its alliance with Britain and a few years later became its enemy. We are now facing a similar diplomatic revolution, with the USA moving away from its longstanding membership of NATO into a de facto alliance with Russia. The remaining NATO powers will probably respond by moving closer to China, initially in the form of an economic alliance.

These changes are happening because of an alignment in the moral values of the leadership in the USA and Russia, and, to a lesser degree, because both countries are experiencing similar problems. Trump and Putin are both crudely-spoken amoral gangsters, who portray themselves as upholders of ‘masculine values’, and depend on the support of a coterie of favoured and very wealthy oligarchs. ‘Masculine values’ for them involves despising women in any but a supporting or procreative role, glorifying the bullying and humiliation of the weak, and preferring religion or ‘common sense’ to scientific knowledge. Both leaders have undermined democratic institutions, and their regimes depend for legitimacy on the actual or threatened use of military force. The USA has of course a far stronger culture of legality and democracy than Russia, and these traditions may well survive Trump’s attempts to undermine them. But the USA and Russia have encountered similar problems that make authoritarian rule attractive to many of their people. Both countries are vast land empires that have expanded through conquest and the extermination of indigenous populations. Both have disproportionately large military forces which are regularly used to display the might of the country by invading foreign states. Both have seen a radical decline in industrial employment and the concentration of the wealth of the country into the hands of a few. This has created an understandable resentment and a longing for an imagined golden age, which authoritarian leadership has directed against foreigners, immigrants and the educated ‘elite’.

The other great territorial empire, China, has chosen a different route. Instead of the erratic economic policies favoured by Trump, China has successfully built its industrial base, becoming the world’s largest economy in all but name. It is challenging the technological lead of the USA, which is being undermined by Trump’s cuts to research funding. Again in contrast to the USA and Russia, it has expanded it influence through trade and the development of infrastructure in many parts of the world. This is usually funded by loans, making China the world’s greatest creditor nation. It even holds $769 billion of the US national debt, the USA now being the world’s largest debtor. China’s increasing domination of world industrial production makes it committed to stable and tariff-free trade. In this respect, its interests coincide with those of the European powers rather than the USA, where Trump is imposing an unpredictable range of tariff restrictions on trade.

We can therefore expect China and Europe to become ever-closer trading partners, but itt is not yet clear whether this will develop into a more formal defensive alliance. But Europe and China have few reasons for conflict. They do not have common borders or any territorial disputes, or any other conventional reason for conflict. By contrast, Russia has vast empty lands bordering China, while the USA regards the Pacific Ocean, right up to the Chinese seaboard, as within its own sphere of influence. A new Russian-USA alliance would therefore be united in regarding China as both an immediate and a long-term threat.

There is of course already a cold war between Russia and the rest of Europe, with Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, its occupation of parts of Moldova and Georgia, and its attacks on European maritime and electronic infrastructure. The new cold war is driven by the Russian leadership, which regards Europe as an existential threat because it demonstrates a more successful and appealing alternative model of government to its citizens.

We may therefore see a new diplomatic revolution in the next few months, although predictions of this kind can rapidly fall apart with unexpected changes of leadership.