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A US gay couple asks Madrid passers-by to translate a homophobic note. The film is part of gay rights group’s awareness campaign encouraging people to report hate crimes. A gay couple from the United States makes a reservation online to stay at a hostel in Madrid. When they ask for directions on how to reach it, they receive a message in Spanish from the owner and, not speaking a word of the language, ask for help translating it from passers-by. The note is filled with homophobic insults, including a threat to punch them in the face if they even think about kissing each other inside the hostel. The spontaneous reactions of the people reading out the note to them are recorded in an English-language, Spanish-subtitled video produced by Spain’s State Federation of Lesbian, Gays Transsexuals and Bisexuals (FELGTB) for its new awareness campaign, Con la voz bien alta (With a loud voice). Two actors were hired to play the couple, but the reactions of the passers-by were genuine. The aim of the campaign is to remind people that they have the right to file a police complaint against anyone who threatens, insults or physically assaults someone because of their sexual orientation. According to the group, 38 percent of the LGBT community in Spain has been a victim of some kind of assault, but only 10 percent report such incidents to police. FELGTB wants the new campaign to educate people about the hate crimes that many suffer because of their sexual orientation and also to pressure the government into passing a law against what it has labeled “LGBT-phobia.”
US election and EU referendum drive popularity of adjective describing situation ‘in which objective facts are less influential than appeals to emotion’
In the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” to be its international word of the year.
Defined by the dictionary as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, editors said that use of the term “post-truth” had increased by around 2,000% in 2016 compared to last year. The spike in usage, it said, is “in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States”.
Oxford Dictionaries’s word of the year is intended to “reflect the passing year in language”, with post-truth following the controversial choice last year of the “face with tears of joy” emoji.
Contenders for the title had included the noun “alt-right”, shortened from the fuller form “alternative right” and defined as “an ideological grouping associated with extreme conservative or reactionary viewpoints, characterised by a rejection of mainstream politics and by the use of online media to disseminate deliberately controversial content”.
But the increase in usage of post-truth saw the term eventually emerge ahead of the pack. “We first saw the frequency really spike this year in June with buzz over the Brexit vote and Donald Trump securing the Republican presidential nomination. Given that usage of the term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn’t be surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time,” predicted Oxford Dictionaries president Casper Grathwohl. (The Guardian, November 15, 2016)
So now the challenge is in plain view: we face the globalisation of anti-globalisation, a popular front of populists, an International of nationalists. “Today the United States, tomorrow – France,” tweets Jean-Marie Le Pen. It will be a long, hard struggle to defeat them, at home and abroad, and we may now have to look elsewhere for the “leader of the free world”. But defeat them we will.
In Vladimir Putin’s Russia we have something very close to fascism. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey is rapidly crossing the line between illiberal democracy and fascism, while Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is already an illiberal democracy. In Poland, France, the Netherlands, Britain and now the US, we have to defend the line between liberal and illiberal democracy.
In Britain that means standing up for the independence of the judiciary, the sovereignty of parliament and the impartial strength of the BBC. In the US we shall now witness the biggest test of one of the strongest, oldest systems of liberal democratic checks and balances. Even though Republicans dominate Congress and, fatefully, Donald Trump will be able to make key political appointments to the supreme court, that does not mean the new president will have it all his own way.
What we see in all these nationalist populisms is an ideology that claims that the directly expressed will of “the people” trumps all other sources of authority. And the populist leader identifies himself – or herself, in the case of Marine Le Pen – as the single voice of the people. Trump’s “I am your voice” is a totemic populist line. But so is the Daily Mail’s front page denouncing the three British judges who ruled that parliament must have a vote on Brexit as “enemies of the people”. So is the Turkish prime minister rebuking EU claims that a red line has been crossed in his country’s brutal repression of media freedom by saying: “The people draw the red lines.”
On closer examination, it turns out that “the people” – Volk might be a more accurate term – is actually only a part of the people. Trump perfectly exemplified this populist sleight of hand in an impromptu remark at a campaign rally.
Pint
“The only important thing is the unification of the people,” he said, “because the other people don’t mean anything.” It’s not the Others, you see: the Kurds, Muslims, Jews, refugees, immigrants, black people, elites, experts, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, cosmopolitans, metropolitans, gay Europhile judges. Ukip’s Nigel Farage announced that Brexit was a victory for ordinary people, decent people, real people – 48% of those who voted in the referendum being thereby declared neither ordinary nor decent nor real.
Does history teach us anything about such wave-like phenomena, appearing at roughly the same time in many places, in different national and regional forms, but nonetheless having common features? Nationalist populism now, globalised liberalism (or neoliberalism) in the 1990s, fascism and communism in the 1930s and 40s, imperialism in the 19th century. Two lessons perhaps: that these things usually take a significant period of time to work themselves out; and that to reverse them (if the wave is of a kind you want to see reversed) requires courage, determination, consistency, the development of a new political language and new policy answers to real problems.
A great example is the development of western Europe’s combination of market economy and welfare state after 1945. This model, which finally saw off the waves of communism and fascism, needed the intellectual genius of a John Maynard Keynes, the policy know-how of people like William Beveridge and the political skill of people like Clement Attlee. I say “people like” because other names could be inserted for the versions adopted in other west European countries. But what an ocean of blood, sweat and tears we had to swim through to reach that point.
We must therefore brace ourselves for a long struggle, perhaps even a generational struggle. This is not yet a “post-liberal world”, but it could become so. The forces behind the popular front of populism are strong, traditional parties are often weak, and such waves are not reversed overnight.
For a start, we need to defend pluralism at home. We also need to understand the economic, social and cultural causes of the vote for populists. Not just the left but liberals and moderate conservatives must seek a new language to appeal, emotionally as well as substantively, to that large part of the populist electorate that is not irredeemably xenophobic, racist and misogynist. (Not calling half of them a “basket of deplorables” is a good place to start.) Rhetoric alone obviously won’t do it. What are the right policies? Is it really free trade agreements and immigration that are undermining people’s jobs, or is it mainly technology? If the latter, what do we do about that?
PinElsewhere, the first challenge is to prevent the erosion of existing elements of liberal international order – hard-won agreements on climate change, for example, and current free-trade agreements. Philosophically, presidentXi Jinpingof China might welcome a Trumpworld of strong, assertive, nationalistic sovereign states, but practically both leaders should recognise that a return to the economic nationalism of the 1930s – 45% tariff barriers on Chinese imports were promised by campaigner Trump – would be disastrous for everyone. The one good thing about an International of nationalists is that it’s ultimately a contradiction in terms
We must also hope that serious, experienced Americans do go to work shaping the foreign and economic policy of the new administration, however morally distasteful Trump is. It’s time for holding your nose and Max Weber’s “ethics of responsibility”. Yet even if they do, this is likely to be a bombastic, erratic and unpredictable presidency.
A greater burden therefore falls on other leading democracies: many in Europe, but also Canada, Australia, Japan and India. If we in Europe feel it is vital for the Baltic states to be protected against any possible kind of aggression by Putin’s Russia, we must work through Nato and the EU to ensure that. We can’t rely on a Putin-praising Trump.
If we Europeans think it important to keep an independent Ukrainian democracy alive, we must see to that ourselves. Britain having sidelined itself as a result of its own version of nationalist populism, a special responsibility lies with French and German voters. If we have a French president Alain Juppé and a re-elected chancellor Angela Merkel at the end of next year, Europe may still be able to pull its weight.
Merkel made by far the most dignified response I have seen to Trump’s election. “Germany and America,” she said, “are tied by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and human dignity, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views. I offer the next president of the United States, Donald Trump, close cooperation on the basis of these values.” Magnificent.
The phrase “leader of the free world” is usually applied to the president of the United States, and rarely without irony. I’m tempted to say that the leader of the free world is now Angela Merkel.
