Friday 12 May 2023

Book review: Pain, exile and progress

This week’s post is the latest of the series of book reviews I began in March and intend to continue as, no doubt, more and more books about Brexit are published. Generally, I’m doing them as additional posts to the normal weekly discussion of Brexit news but, this week, there’s not much of this that’s worth discussing.

One development has been the confirmation of what I discussed last week, namely that the government will only axe 600 pieces of retained EU law by the end of the year (not even the 800 floated). A sensible move, to the outrage of the Brexit Ultras, though there remains the important question about what exactly these laws are.

There were also the Local Election results which, amongst other things, gave rise to questions about what salience Brexit now has to voting patterns and about what the implications for Brexit policy would be if the results foreshadow a hung parliament. The latter question is discussed by Nick Tyrone in his latest Week in Brexitland, and I largely agree with his analysis.

Book review

Behr, Rafael (2023) Politics: A Survivor’s Guide. How to stay engaged without getting enraged. London: Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-83895-504-5 (Hardback). 404 pages. £20.

This isn’t, strictly speaking, a book about Brexit, but Brexit runs through it as a theme and a context, and because of the focus of this blog it is mainly this aspect I will discuss. I bought it because its author, Rafael Behr, is, to my mind, one of the best political columnists in the country, and not just in relation to Brexit although he has written a great deal about that. Almost all his columns are excellent, especially because he so often finds a distinctive angle or a fresh insight on whatever it is that he is discussing. Moreover, he has a superb writing style, at once elegant and punchy, acute and amusing.

I mention this because I’m not sure that I would have been drawn to it by its title, or more especially the sub-title, which, almost literally, makes it sound like a ‘self-help’ book. Thankfully, it isn’t really that and, towards the end, Behr makes it clear that there will be no “list of practical tips for a less infuriating democracy” (p.371).

Balance and perspective

Saying that I was drawn to it because of regard for Behr’s writings opens a difficult question which is partly what the book is about. Might the reason I think his writing so excellent be because I generally agree with it? Isn’t it a symptom of the enragement of politics that Behr’s book discusses that we all become partisans, seeing unquestionable virtue in our heroes and irredeemable iniquity in our foes?

Spending, as I do, much time trawling through the writings of Brexiters, I am struck by how often they will point people towards an ‘excellent’ article by one of their fellows which, when I read the recommended piece, I find to be vapid, disingenuous or worse. But, no doubt, they would think the same of writings that I admire about Brexit, or indeed of my own writing about it.

It may be simply impossible for any of us to know for sure whether we are open-minded, and perhaps that is most true for those who are open-minded enough to even consider the question. Anyway, as Behr says, “it is consoling to discover my perceptions of things reflected in another mind; not just reflected, but clarified, analyzed and organized. That is how I know I am not alone and not going mad” (p.371). Confirmation bias is always a possibility, but it would be absurd to dismiss all confirmations as being the result of it.

Agonizing and ambivalence is both a theme and a characteristic of Behr’s analysis, so that even ambivalence is subjected to agonizing questions about “the threshold where equivocation [becomes] complicity” (p.349). He records how, on the occasions he has been pre-interviewed for possible appearances on the BBC’s Question Time, his responses are measured, discursive and qualified: “On and on it goes like that, on the one hand, on the other, everything depends, until consensus is reached that I should not appear on Question Time.” (p.169)

It’s only an anecdote, but it gives a flavour of Behr’s intellectual curiosity and innately liberal sensibility, as well as his wry and often self-deprecating humour. It also illustrates the fact that “a recurrent theme of this book [is] the need for balance and perspective, which involves the more subtle art of keeping balance itself in perspective.” (p. 368)

At all events, I approached the book with at least enough open-mindedness to be prepared for disappointment, in that it is one thing to write fine columns but another to write fine books. They are very different forms and disciplines, and few can master both. I wasn’t disappointed, for it turns out that Behr is one of those who can.

The pain of politics and the politics of pain

This is a book by a political journalist about politics, but of a most unusual kind. It weaves together personal experiences, family stories, political theory, and particular political events within an over-arching narrative of some key aspects of modern history (especially in the UK and Russia, but also Lithuania, Europe generally, the US, Israel and South Africa). It’s not the kind of book most journalists (or academics) would or could write, precisely because it operates in so many different registers, and is all the better for that.

Much of it is a meditation on the nature of democracy and threats to it, the polarisation and toxicity of contemporary political discourse, the rise of the alt-right and, to an extent, the alt-left, cynicism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Anyone who has followed politics in recent years will find these familiar topics, but Behr brings a freshness to the discussion that is engaging and readable. But I think it is the interweaving of the personal and the political which is most arresting and, for me and I suspect others, most ‘relatable’. It is very much a book about the pain of politics, a pain that feels personal. By the same token, this review is to a degree about my personal responses to the book, rather than simply being a rehearsal and appraisal of its contents.

I used the word ‘arresting’ deliberately, because it was a massive cardiac arrest, with which the book starts and ends, which both stopped Behr in his tracks and then motivated him to write the book. That doesn’t make it self-indulgent: on the contrary, it is an analytical book which seeks to explore not simply the personal pain of politics but the political significance of that personal pain.

The pain of exile

Whilst Behr is careful not to ascribe his heart attack to politics or to Brexit (he explains it mainly in terms of genetic pre-disposition and lifestyle), he does connect it to the way that he and others he knows experienced the “furious mess of British politics” (p. 12) following the Brexit referendum. The pain of that wasn’t simply that of an observer: the political mess wasn’t experienced by people as something external to them but as something that, so to speak, messed them up, creating what Behr describes as a “state of emotional and psychological exile.” (p. 118)

The notion of ‘exile’ is, in various forms, a central motif of the book, along with the related idea of political disengagement being “internal emigration.” (p.344) Thus, the overall puzzle of the book is the political, psychological and emotional challenge of “treading the line between complacency and despair” (loc. cit.) or, in other words, between the temptations of internal emigration and the pain of exile.

It is the motif of exile which I am going to focus on in this review. Indeed, one reason why I find the book relatable is because the first thing I wrote after the referendum finished with these words:

“As for me, I feel distraught and physically sick. As the Brexiters crow of having ‘got their country back’, I feel that I have lost my home and now live in exile.”

That was on another blog, but the feeling was the impetus for this blog, and all that I have written about Brexit which, in its own way, has been an attempt to bring an analytical perspective to bear upon what was, and to an extent still is, a visceral sense of pain; to engage as a way to make enragement productive or perhaps to assuage or displace enragement.

For Behr, that sense of exile is refracted through the lens of his family’s migration from Lithuania to South Africa to Britain, and freighted by his Jewishness, which gives particular weight not just to the experience of Brexit but of the anti-Semitic strain within Corbyn’s Labour. Thus, he writes:

“Even in twenty-first-century Britain, safe by any historical measure, the hearts of the survivors’ grandchildren beat with a trace of inherited dread. It is the cautionary tale about the worst-case scenario that was handed down: it is the emotional baggage and the passport kept ready for sudden flight. It is the inescapable suspicion that no matter how rooted Jews feel in a country and its culture, one day there will come a mob armed with the rusty old prejudice to let us know that we don’t belong.” (p.72)

I’ve quoted this at some length, because it captures powerfully and eloquently something which is immediately intelligible, even to those of us who are not Jewish. I’ve heard or read similar sentiments, but rarely, if ever, expressed with such clarity.

I also know, not from first-hand experience but from family members, the somewhat adjacent and sometimes overlapping fear of being found not to have one’s paperwork in order, and to be passport-less, a fear that also gets transmitted down generations. It was a fear suddenly experienced, after the referendum, by those millions of EU-27 nationals in the UK and, often, the British people with whom their lives were deeply intertwined. It was no comfort – in fact, a source of intense anger and upset – when leave-voting friends and neighbours, explaining that immigration had got ‘out of control’, told them, rather as Behr was told by his anti-Semitic landlady in Russia (p.215), that ‘we don’t mean you, of course’.

And then, somewhat adjacent to and sometimes overlapping with this, there is that experience that I, and many others, felt on the morning after the referendum of having becomes exiles in our own country, newly revealed as alien to us and alienated by us. That wouldn’t have been felt by all remain voters, of course, but the volume and visceral nature of the response of many, and the way that it has endured over the years since, shows how widespread and profound it was. Equally, though more quietly, alongside that enragement I’ve witnessed the gradual disengagement of many erstwhile remainers who, rather than shout impotently at the news, have retreated into the “internal emigration” of the personal and the local or even a literal, external emigration to other countries.

A lost past and a lost country

Behr’s other point of reference for the feeling of exile engendered by Brexit and post-Brexit politics is the comparison with the apparent stability and prosperity of the ‘Great Moderation’ of the 1990s, and especially the second half of that decade, when he was in his early twenties: “What I have more recently found intolerable about British politics can only be properly diagnosed with reference to that glorious fin de siècle. To know the present feeling of exile means revisiting the country as it was when I felt most at home in it.” (p.74)

I don’t doubt the authenticity of the sentiment, but I think it is slightly off-target analytically. I am ten years older than Behr, and have a similar feeling about my ‘salad days’ a decade earlier, at a much less politically auspicious time. But I also recognize the contrast he draws between the late 1990s and the recent period. My point, then, is that the two issues of youthful hope and political hope shouldn’t be conflated just because, for Behr, they happened to coincide.

For certainly, at the time, and still in retrospect, the late 1990s did indeed seem to be a time of hope and possibility in Britain. That is not rose-tinted – even then, and more clearly now, it had some obvious limitations. But the morning after the 1997 election, as I got the train to work having been up all night, and people of, presumably, many different backgrounds, were spontaneously smiling at each other, was unforgettable. It was an experience repeated across the country.  As Behr writes, “it had some of the character of a cultural revolution: a moment, like the Brexit referendum 19 years later, when the democratic process seemed to express a metamorphosis in national identity.” (p.80)

However, whereas in 1997 there were, no doubt, some bitterly upset Tories, that election had a sense of bringing people together that was wholly lacking in 2016, when even the victorious leaders looked shocked and frightened, and whilst some were cheering in the streets, many others were behind closed doors contemplating what seemed like tragedy.

I’m attracted to Behr’s point – which is very much in keeping with his disposition to ‘balance and perspective’ – that “the other side” had also felt a sense of exile of ‘having lost my country’, which drove the nationalist desire to ‘get my country back’: “it is possible, and I think necessary, to acknowledge that symmetry.” (p.118) It’s a wise and charitable observation, as well as having some truth. But the difficulties of acknowledging such a symmetry go beyond being “hard when the losing side sees most of its arguments from the referendum vindicated by subsequent events” (loc. cit.). For I think there is an important asymmetry in the political psychology of these two exiles, and considering it may also reveal some of the limits to where ‘balance and perspective’ can take us.

Asymmetries of exile

The leave sense of exile was a grumble, perhaps much more than that, which had built over many years. The exile of remainers was an instant trauma, an overnight ripping up of the old order, and not just that of EU membership. That was made worse by the fact that, even then, it was known that plenty of leave voters weren’t motivated by their own exiled hurt but by more frivolous motives of ‘wanting a change’ or ‘giving Cameron a kicking’, or simply ‘assumed remain would win anyway’.

Behr anticipates this point in noting that the collapse of the centre (meaning Brexit, but not only that) “felt sudden … because we hadn’t been paying attention to the shifting ground beneath our feet” (p.245), and it’s true that, like many things in life which come as a shock, there now seems a kind of inevitability about Brexit. But if the narrow margin of victory had gone the other way, we would be writing with equal assurance something like ‘when it came to the point, a traditional pragmatism, allied to fear of adding more economic damage to that of the financial crisis, unsurprisingly carried the day’.

The small numerical difference between the outcomes was, of course, epochal in its effects, but an identical electorate, with exactly the same groundswell of discontents and grievances, might on another day have yielded a different result. It’s only because there was, in fact, an earthquake that we now say the tectonic plates beneath our feet had already shifted.

Initial shock aside, the aftershocks of the earthquake were profound for remainers because of the way that Brexit was then prosecuted in a form which was so ‘hard’, and without any attempt to build consensus. Notably, it wasn’t until after that became clear that the People’s Vote campaign got underway and gained ground. At the same time, a kind of ‘Brexit McCarthyism’ emerged in which remainers (whether actual or alleged), especially in the civil service, academia and judiciary were talked of, and even to some extent treated, not just as exiles within their own country but as its internal enemies. Increasingly, that seems to have extended to treating anyone who is educated as part of an alien ‘new elite’ judged against populist loyalty tests that include but are far more extensive than Brexit.

Although he doesn’t mention the McCarthyism comparison, drawing it might be an example of Behr’s highly incisive discussion of “the paradox of vigilance” (the title of chapter 14) and his contradictory “dread at how bad things might get” and “irritation at the casual invocation of worst-case scenarios” (p.349). He means, primarily, Stalinism and Fascism, but McCarthyism could fit as well. Arguably the McCarthyism comparison is a more legitimate one, in that it refers to a scapegoating that happened within a society which was, nevertheless, essentially a democracy, but it is still a form of catastrophising and one which can be too glibly made.

For what it is worth, I don’t think that in that respect things have turned out as badly as I and others feared but there, again, is the paradox: perhaps, with less vigilance, things would have gone worse? At all events, my point is that, to whatever extent the fear was justified, it was a fear felt only by one side (it’s true that the ‘other side’ invokes its mirror image of a ‘woke thought police’ set to ‘cancel’ those who speak out, but such a situation would arise despite rather than because of, or out of, Brexit).

It's also worth pointing out that both the ‘aftershocks’ of how Brexit was done in such a hard way, and with no process of consensus-building, and the incipient McCarthyism (if that’s what it was) of 2017-2019 happened under Theresa May. Behr’s book isn’t, and doesn’t purport to be, a history of Brexit, but the account of Brexit it gives is perhaps surprisingly muted on May’s role, certainly by comparison with the extensive, and extremely acute, analysis of Johnson. Yet May set many of the directions for how Brexit turned out, and in many ways her character and motivations are more difficult to decode than his.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the idea of a symmetry of exile is that, almost from the outset, and certainly now, the most committed Brexiters and many leave voters have insisted that Brexit has been betrayed, and that ‘this wasn’t the Brexit I voted for’. Many of us thought that was inevitable, and it’s the central theme of my own book about Brexit (a revised and updated edition of which will be published in September, by the way). But, inevitable or not, it is the case that Brexit hasn’t restored the homeland of previously-exiled leavers at the expense of newly-exiled remainers; it has aggrieved just about everyone, albeit for different reasons.

Behr is well aware of this, of course, and it surfaces several times, especially in Part 3 of the book (‘Revolution’) which is one of the best analyses of Brexit I’ve read (again, perhaps reflecting the fact that it is one I very much agree with, and have advanced on this blog, including many times referencing Behr’s newspaper columns). For example, he points out that “a revolution that has achieved its defining purpose while meeting none of its higher goals condemns its leaders to a cycle of endless grievance-mining.” (p.294) Just so, and by the same token not just the leaders but the followers were left trapped in grievance. But that is doubly galling for the other ‘tribe’ who, in addition to their own grievances about Brexit having happened must listen to the victors still complaining, perpetually dissatisfied.

Building a new home

I don’t want to give the impression that Behr projects a kind of flabby relativism about Brexit, or anything else. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, whilst he understands the frustrations that drove people to vote leave, “it boiled my blood when the impeccably-credentialled professional politicians who led that revolution excused themselves from belonging to the Establishment so they might claim to be overthrowing it” (p.268), using what he calls the “Brexit ju-jitsu ... that defined the losing side as the authors of their own defeat” (loc. cit.). And notwithstanding his post-cardiac avoidance of enragement there’s plenty of anger on display, and an acceptance that “when politics degrades the country you call home there is a responsibility to stay angry in defiance of those who seek to gain from disengagement.” (p.381) The trick, Behr suggests, is to discharge that responsibility without getting stuck in a cycle of personal anger that leads to nowhere but more anger.

There’s so much in this book that I haven’t touched on, even in what is quite a long review. Much more about Brexit, and much more about much more than Brexit. Almost every page has a fresh insight or a thought-provoking argument, usually accompanied by a compelling story from his family or professional life and always informed by a deep knowledge of modern history and politics. The last book on politics I can recall reading with such attention and pleasure was Tony Judt’s (2011) Ill Fares the Land.

If, at the end, it’s not quite clear how to be engaged without being enraged – and the route that Behr involuntarily took to do so isn’t one anyone would want to have to follow – well, this isn’t, after all, a self-help book. The main tools it advocates are also those of the balance and perspective it deploys, to be applied to oneself, but also to history and politics where it reveals that “the balance sheet, read across a long enough timeline, is net positive for progress.” (p.364). That enables an engagement which can’t reconstruct the home from which we have been exiled, but can build a new home in the new land where we find ourselves. In that sense, it is an optimistic book, and if Behr has become less enraged by politics, he doesn’t seem to have lost a passion for its possibilities.

No comments:

Post a Comment