The calamity that struck Joan down some months ago has naturally presented us with practical as well as spiritual difficulties. I had already had to give up driving some time ago, and even my basic ambulation is seriously compromised. A one time student and colleague, and very longtime friend in the higher education business has been of inestimable aid and comfort to me both as an intellectual companion and as practical helper during the difficulties brought on by the situation. I leave this personal hero unnamed only because among his many other virtues a self-effacing modesty is so prominent. We frequently grocery shop together, and not infrequently dine while watching something on the tube.
One recent binge was devoted to the original British version of the political series called House of Cards. (This was the model, of course, for the excellent American series of the same name.) British politics, while in many respects no less depressing than our own, often display a stylistic and rhetorical elegance wholly foreign to Washington. It is clear that several British politicians have actually read books. Certainly the fictional Francis Urquhart, played by Ian Richardson, a Tory leader positively reptilian in his fatally smooth and eloquent sleekness, has mastered the whole library. You keep thinking you are hearing a Shakespeare play, and with good reason, for there is lots of Shakespeare, and especially of Macbeth, bubbling about.
I would like to say, and actually will say, that House of Cards is fantastic at the literal level. I mean it is robustly fictional. It is in the nature of fiction, including “historical” fiction, to impose specific imaginative interpretations on actual events. But it still is strikingly relevant to our current political scene. Mrs. Thatcher left the premiership in 1990, and a great deal has changed in the decades since. But the great social issues at the center of the current crisis in Britain, mass immigration and its social manifestations, were already more than sniffable in the political air in the Thatcher era. They had been at least from the late 1960s and a famous controversial speech made by a learned Tory politician named Enoch Powell.
The current reversal of fortunes of both of the two major political parties in Britain is nothing less than stunning. Less than a year and a half ago the Labour Party won a landslide victory after two decades of Tory rule. At the time the result seemed to counter a conservative trend discernible across the continent of Europe. But that appears to have been a misreading. It is true that today the exhausted Conservatives, having already nearly approached irrelevance, seem on a path to virtual extinction. But Labour, too, is under water and still sinking deeper. Nigel Farage, a seemingly paleolithic conservative English nationalist, momentarily basks in such glow as is cast by what many characterize as the best of bad lights. In May Britons saw the extraordinary volte-face of the Labour Prime Minister declaring unregulated immigration to have been an “unmitigated disaster” for which, actually, the Tories are responsible. The general political consensus is that the first part of that judgment is wholly true and the second part partially so. What is very clear is that the great controversies roiling Britain have to do with the long maturing and suddenly exploding backlash to mass immigration and the widening concentrated communities of unassimilating Muslims from various parts of the defunct British Empire, especially Pakistan and its eastern cousin, Bangladesh. Pakistan itself is a country created amid much violence and what is usually called “sectarian strife” only after the second War in an attempt to separate the majority Hindus and minority Muslims in old British India.
The British press is perhaps yet more partisan, and thus to be taken even more skeptically, than that in our own country; and the dominance of the cultural left even yet more pronounced there than here. But it is clear that there is, especially in England, some kind of a revolt of the masses, as yet inchoate, and that both of the business-as-usual parties are in deepening trouble. Certainly the current Prime Minister, a colorless and lawyerly bureaucrat, is taking his knocks. For the terrifying words racist and racism, on account of their formulaic and repetitive misuse, are clearly losing their once almost talismanic power to intimidate the aggrieved. Patriotism emanates from a love of locality, inherited customs, and a feeling of belonging, of familiarity, of amenable geography. Many ordinary native Britons no longer entirely feel easy access to such unacknowledged spiritual resources. I think—or perhaps only imagine—that we all must share some vague version of their disquiet. Old men forget, yes, but they also remember. And to remember is to call to mind things past. Can any person of mature years claim to do this entirely without regret or at least wistfulness? When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought….What I myself have discovered in old age—as have so many of my contemporaries—is that I am no longer living in a world which I claim fully to understand or with which I am wholly comfortable. Social change can be very swift, and certainly very powerful.
It is quite remarkable that what is in effect a major revolutionary force in British politics seems to have arisen by spontaneous combustion. It is one thing to “forge” or “create” a movement and quite another to find one lost on the sidewalk. For Nigel Farage, an articulate and sometimes clever gadfly, can be said to be the “leader” of the Reform Party mainly by adoption. That is, the movement has adopted him very much faute de mieux. He is no Robespierre or Huey Long. The conservatives still have some able people, but the Conservative Party is so shop-worn and tainted that it seems impossible that any of them could soon, or perhaps ever, regain robust national backing. The greatest of several villains in the eyes of many of the revolutionaries is Boris Johnson, whose lengthy years in office as Mayor of London, Foreign Secretary, and then Prime Minister coincided with the entry into Britain of huge numbers of immigrants.
There are parallels between the political climates in Britain and America, so long as we recognize that some similarity is very different from near identity. Who would doubt that the situation at our southern border has been chaotic? Or that border chaos did not on the whole invite a big win for the Trump forces? Although I have never thought of myself as a documented person, I can still tremble at the thought of being an undocumented one. So I am not much relieved by the assurance that the number of persons illegally resident in the country is probably actually only ten million, not the twelve million or more claimed by alarmists. That is to say, only the population of Michigan as opposed to that of Illinois. Michigan, incidentally, is just about the same size as the British Isles: England, Scotland, and Wales taken together. In area, the United States is about forty-seven times the size of Britain.
