by RICHARD SEYMOUR
To fully grasp the rise of the new authoritarians, we must engage with psychoanalysis as well as economics
‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ This was the brash, buoyant, campaigning slogan of Bill Clinton in 1992. The slogan seemed to summarise the prevailing Weltanschauung of a neoliberal order, a vulgarised version of ‘enlightened self-interest’ inherited from classical political economy. More than a quarter of a century later, amid neoliberal collapse, nothing could be less apposite. Enlightened self-interest, from London to Mumbai, no longer rules. It isn’t the economy, stupid.
Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have been re-elected with a big majority after a decade of austerity and income stagnation, as though Johnson were not the incumbent. His almost sole promise was to ‘get Brexit done’, a goal for which 60 per cent of Leave voters say they would be happy to see the economy damaged. Forty per cent even say they would be willing to lose their own jobs.
These are minorities, but minorities of millions, enough to make the bedrock of the Conservative vote. Tory activists are a smaller minority, but more influential. When asked what they would sacrifice to ‘get Brexit done’, they answered clearly: the economy, the union, even their own party.
Much was made of Brexit voters being ‘duped’ by promises of more NHS spending, but the collapse of that claim hasn’t damaged Brexit. And in any case, this is not what the Leave campaign led with when it was winning. Vote Leave talked about the threat of migration from Turkey and, implicitly, Iraq and Syria. Leave.EU compared immigration to an ‘invasion’. The infamous UKIP poster unveiled by Nigel Farage, who had previously argued that he’d rather be poorer if it meant fewer migrants, represented a brown mass of humanity driving Britain to ‘Breaking Point’.
Nor is this effect local to Britain. Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist leader of India, has been re-elected with a bigger majority after a dire economic record, on a promise to invade Kashmir and repress Muslims. Rodrigo Duterte, the ‘thug life’ president of the Philippines, was elected in a country with growth at over six per cent. His main promise was to fight the ‘war on drugs’ by unleashing death squads. At one stage, he even promised he would kill up to three million, comparing himself to Hitler. After two years of death squad chaos, he won the mid-terms. Benjamin Netanyahu, up to his neck in corruption and war crimes, opposed even by Israel’s notoriously racist courts and military, keeps squeaking back in by calling his opponents ‘Arab-lovers’, allying with the far right and promising the annexation of West Bank settlements. ‘It’s us or them,’ Likud’s posters say.
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