Has there been a better illustration this decade of the staggering aloofness of the activist class? It will surely have mystified the good people of Epping that their heartfelt pleas for female safety were met with such fury from bourgeois agitators. With guttural cries of fascist, scum, Nazi, bigot. All they wanted was for local girls to be safe, and for that they were branded a demonic threat to the social fabric. It was confirmation that the working classes are not only locked out from the pride and flag-waving that their ‘betters’ gleefully engage in, but also from the ideology of #MeToo. Where women of the professional classes who raised concerns about predatory men were listened to and believed, women of the working classes who do likewise are damned as the spawn of Hitler. Classism bares its teeth.
The irony of the fuming counter-protests against the women in pink is that they came off as infinitely more bigoted. If bigotry, as the Oxford English Dictionary says, is ‘intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself’, then the bigotry at the migrant-hotel clashes came less from the concerned mums than from the privileged activists drowning them out with insane wails of ‘Nazi!’. The depiction of working-class communities as hotbeds of racial hatred is a far more stark expression of imperious bigotry than anything we’ve seen on the hotel protests themselves.
To my mind, it is deeply unfortunate that migration has become such a burning topic in the shifting of the West’s vibes. But whose fault is that? As Frank Furedi has argued, it was our border-eliminating elites who marshalled migrants as human weapons in their culture war against national sovereignty. ‘Migration’, he says, ‘has been turned into an instrument for the realisation of a future cosmopolitan condition’. Mass migration is celebrated because it is ‘seen as a challenge to the sovereign subject’. The ‘refugee’, says Furedi, is cast as ‘the main protagonist in this heady drama’ of weakening borders.
Many bad things have been done by the self-styled ‘eliminators of borders’. But this might be the worst thing – this nodding through of an army of the wretched in order to weaken sovereignty and boost the ‘opportunities’ of well-off Westerners for whom borders are a pain in the neck. This is the poor of the Global South being treated as the footsoldiers of an ideology beloved of the rich of the Global North. To knowingly risk social cohesion by green-lighting mass migration for ideological purposes is unforgivable. It is possibly the cultural establishment’s most lethal and lunatic moral error so far this century.
The great undeniable factor in the vibe shift on migration is class. There are those polls that show working people are fuming on this issue. And there’s the evidence of our own eyes – members of the activist class with credentials and blue hair barking ‘fascist’ in the faces of working-class women who simply desire security and sovereignty. Harvard professor Charles S Maier has argued that the borders question meshes with the class question. ‘Territorial allegiances have become a class-specific property’, he writes. ‘Those who tend to occupy the supervisory positions in politics and the economy… claim to transcend territory.’ They aspire, he says, to make national pressures ‘archaic’ in order to deprive sovereignty of ‘real power over their particular activities’. Meanwhile, people down the pecking order dream of sovereignty. They dream of its tempering impact on the neoliberal wreckers of borders, and the transformative impact it might have on their own atomised lives in the post-national era.
The true theme of the technocratic era has been insulation – the insulation of political decision-making from the pressures and thoughts of the masses. Everything was outsourced. The law-making rights of European states were surrendered to Brussels. The authority of our elected officials was undermined by ‘human rights’ judges whom none of us could pick out in a line-up. Through the ECHR – the European Convention on Human Rights – the decisions of the people we vote for can be overridden by the judicial overlords of ‘rights’. What a flagrant assault on Britain’s 1688 Bill of Rights, which proclaimed loudly that ‘proceedings in parliament ought not to be questioned or impeached in any court or other place’. Even mighty America found its internal democratic authority being whittled and undermined by external writs, like the Paris agreement on climate change. Little wonder Trump has sought to shred such documents.
The revolt against the borderless vibe is fundamentally about burning that insulation between the ‘plebs’ and our rulers. It’s about dragging decision-making back to the territory in which us mere mortals live. It’s about saying there is nothing ‘archaic’ about nationally agreed limits on neoliberal activity or the movement of migrants. On the contrary, it is the fundamental right of a people to say which business and which visitors may operate in their territory. As the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly said: ‘A free nation must have complete control over its own harbours, to open them or close them at will, or shut out any commodity, or allow it to enter in, just as it seemed best to suit the wellbeing of its own people… and entirely free of the interference of any other nation.’ ‘Short of that power, no nation possesses the first essentials of freedom’, he said.
Do we have that power? No. The project of eliminating borders has robbed us of that right that was once seen as the very foundation stone of nationhood and democracy. But the vibe is shifting. Under pressure from pissed-off citizens in Europe and voters in America, national sovereignty is being slowly restored against that gold-collared superclass that fancies itself as the border-crossing fixer of humanity’s problems. Trump’s ‘America First’ initiative, in particular, has compelled the nations of the West to confront the issue of nationhood. You can love or loathe his tariff regime, but it has at the very least compelled the decadent border-haters of the European elites to get real about the national interest as globalism wanes. Indeed, national populist parties keep rising. From Argentina to Czechia, the UK to Japan, parties that promise a restoration of the shattered, enfeebled domestic realm, rather than yet more globalist deal-making, are coming to power or growing in stature. Populism, for all the rumours of its demise, is ‘surging’, writes Henry Olsen, and it isn’t hard to see why – the ‘globalist elites’ flat-out failed to ‘bring the peace, prosperity and cultural harmony’ they promised.
Hannah Arendt spied the dangers in the cult of post-sovereignty. ‘The establishment of one sovereign world state, far from being the prerequisite for world citizenship, would be the end of all citizenship’, she wrote. Many others now sense the very same. They agitate for a shift of the vibe not because they have ‘closed’ minds and fear foreigners, but because they long to repair citizenship after years of its ravaging by border-busting capitalists and ideologues. They recognise that it is only within the realms of a free state that free people can think for themselves, and flourish.
All that flag-raising on the streets of left-behind Britain was a blast not only of national pride, but of common sense, too. The wise, grounded beliefs of ordinary people in open revolt against the wrecking-ball politics of their distant rulers. It was a mutiny of citizens against fashionable follies, noisy proof that the age of revolt is far from over.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
