Embattled Conservative MP Suella Braverman is taking a leaf out of the American right-wing reactionary playbook, and it is time to reach into the populist playbook for a response, argues Dr David Jenkins
Opinion: It has always been a mistake to regard the current American right as conservative, if what we mean by conservative politics is something like a commitment to certain settled ways of doing things, a spirit of pragmatic adjustment to change or a disposition that emphasises the limits of our all too human capacities to know, impose and control complex large-scale processes.
Far better to view American conservatism as the vanguard of a particular breed of reactionary politics, the members of which have successfully experimented with a repertoire of tactics – rhetorical, institutional, terroristic – to respond, as American political theorist Corey Robin describes, to “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back”.
Viewing the United Kingdom’s right-wing politics through this lens of vanguard reaction casts some important light on Conservative MP – and current Home Secretary – Suella Braverman’s recent speech at the National Conservatism conference.
In this speech, Braverman manages to hit all the buttons with which observers of the contemporary American scene are by now familiar. There were the swipes against "self-appointed gurus, experts and elites", the full-throated castigating of the “radical left” for its “politics of pessimism, guilt, national division, resentment and utopianism”, and mocking Labour leader Keir Starmer for his definition of a woman.
In some ways then, it might be thought heartening to see a number of Tory MPs come out against this speech. Fellow Conservative Michael Gove appealed to “gentleness and stability and discourse” affirming that the Tories would not win the next election by sending its platoons into a culture war. Following such a reading, it might that Braverman has overplayed her hand, trying to pivot the party to the right and, most specifically, toward a perceived base of actual and potential swivel-eyed loons.
However, it is notable that the event was funded by the right-wing populist US thinktank the Edmund Burke Foundation, a group certainly familiar with the American rights’ recent history, with some idea of how to devise and read a successful reactionary playbook that orients itself beyond a single election cycle, geared for the long- rather than the short-term.
A case in point: Republican Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful 1964 run for president, which saw the Arizona Senator lose by a landslide to incumbent Lyndon Johnson, is now regarded as ‘a glorious disaster’, paving the way for the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior. Having only carried six states in that 1964 presidential election, we are now all living in, or in the shadow of, Goldwater's America.
Braverman is best understood here as testing the waters, seeing how far she is able to draw from the right populist playbook, in what many see as a push for the party’s leadership.
Taking this longer view of a reactionary ‘war of position’, how precisely should those who, first and foremost wish to reject this right populist variant, respond? First, it has to be recognised that a progressive left does not have the luxury of losing elections a la Goldwater – austerity, as launched by the Tories in response to the global economic crisis, precipitated suffering on an enormous scale; their handling of Covid; and their border politics, are all murderous.
With a Tory government, more people will suffer and more people will die than with a Labour-majority government. Labour, as the only other political party with a chance of forming a government, must get elected to reduce suffering and keep death down.
However, Labour’s abandonment of party democracy, the blatant coverups of critical Al-Jazeera documentaries, the alienation of the party’s left, the Blairite appeals to technocratic and managerial expertise, all testify to a pivot away from the populist terrain established by Braverman, ostensibly accepting Gove's argument that elections will be won on public services and economic issues.
Perhaps this is a sensible strategy. After all, the United Kingdom is not the US, lacking as it does the network of far-right, religious-inflected fusionism that feeds into a mobilized base of grassroots activists. Using the left-populist repertoire of a Bernie Sanders or a John Fetterman might exacerbate the divisions within the UK context where Braverman occupies, for now, a somewhat fringe position.
Nevertheless, voiding the terrain altogether allows for Braverman and others to fill it up with their unreflective, myopic and historically illiterate understanding of UK history, and reduce to trickles the complex streams of working-class life that have contributed to everything from the abolition of slavery – Abraham Lincoln himself described Lancashire workmen’s "decisive utterances on the question (of slavery) as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country” – to struggles for decent housing, voting rights and comprehensive education.
A more uplifting popular history about this country would involve reanimating those struggles, not only to reignite a more truthful appraisal of progress’ engines, but to pitch the people against a coterie of incorrigible elites, many of whose members remain committed to the idea that universal suffrage was the death knell for all that is wholesome in the world.
With that in mind, a British people more aware of its own history might insist that the England Coast Path be renamed after the Jewish communist Benny Rothman, a leading figure in the Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout, rather than King Charles III, member of a class that worked tirelessly to deny working people access to England’s green and pleasant land.
Although proposing Rothman’s name would, in light of Labour’s committed genuflections to the Israeli-supporting Jewish right, have thrown a really interesting spanner into British politics, neither Starmer, nor even Labour, are necessarily the correct venue for a left-populist resurgence.
However, it is precisely because populism has the potential to reach beyond the formal arenas of politics that makes it a useful framework for a broader, left political project, in which Labour is but one site of power.
Although political theorist Jonathan Dean prefers to call it ‘popular leftism’, thinking of the wider terrain of “popular cultural production and consumption” might be an alternative mode of advancing a more progressive set of dividing lines.
For example, the American political analyst Thomas Frank celebrates the way the American populist tradition celebrated "the vernacular of the everyday in order to describe the nobility of the average", the "basic optimism about Ordinary People (it) expressed ... in Hollywood movies and plays, in popular poetry, in Radio Pro programmes in art photography in strike manifestos in folk music in WPA murals".
Accompanying this celebration of the average was the violent castigation of the moneyed, the bosses and the political class.
Such populist cultural under-labouring can only ever be one part of politics. Too much is at stake to uncritically launch on ferocious left-populist missions with sights clamped only on those horizons that sit beyond the next election cycle.
But, so long as the left, broadly speaking, imagines itself as an insignificant angel whispering in the ear of a British people it secretly believes is racist, xenophobic and hateful, with devils like Braverman screaming in the other one, the revanchist wing of British politics is likely to keep winning the day.
