In the mid-1980s, a remarkable German television series became appointment viewing in my house each Thursday evening. Heimat, an epic portrait of the life and times of a fictional Rhineland village, tracked the inhabitants of Schabbach as they navigated the tumultuous 20th century. Across the course of 15 hours, Edgar Reitz’s drama conveyed a romantic, almost religious, sense of rootedness and love of place. As the aged local gravedigger liked to tell outsiders: “Down on earth as you all know, there’s high and low German, but in heaven – as you’d expect – they speak the Hunsrück dialect.”
Half-playful, half-serious, those words express something both mysterious and beautiful about belonging. But on the political spectrum, where does such a vision sit? James Orr, recently recruited as an intellectual outrider for Nigel Farage, would have a ready and confident answer to that question. A professor of the philosophy of religion at Cambridge, Orr has been trying to lend some highbrow lustre to Faragism. In a recent piece for the Times, he argued: “Reform is beginning to articulate what is routinely dismissed and demonised as rightwing populism, but which is much better understood as a vision animated by the politics of home.” Other parties, his column continued, have governed Britain as if it were “nowhere in particular”, managing a zone rather than cherishing and protecting a place.
