England's last roar: Pankaj Mishra on nationalism and the election
Nairn predicted a long-term future for
Powellism, which, he wrote in 1970, “actively stirs up conflict instead of
conspiring to stifle or ignore it” and in an existential crisis “can pull the
whole of the official structure of British politics in his direction”
... With Brexiters in the ascendant, politically as well as culturally, the triumph of Powellism is complete. But we may be looking at an instance, to borrow a term from the Bush administration, of “catastrophic success”. For Powellism remains, in its moment of hegemony, a symptom of rather than a cure for the seemingly insoluble crisis that Orwell diagnosed: the dwindling material basis of an ex-imperialist country that is unable to break, in a globalised world, with its antique assumptions of power and self-sufficiency, and whose fundamentally cynical Bagehotian mode of politics, in which the will of the few was passed off as the will of the many, is broken, unable to innovate and deal with change, or defuse the anger of those victimised for so long by social and economic inequity.
Gary Younge - Brexit: The price of dishonesty
... With Brexiters in the ascendant, politically as well as culturally, the triumph of Powellism is complete. But we may be looking at an instance, to borrow a term from the Bush administration, of “catastrophic success”. For Powellism remains, in its moment of hegemony, a symptom of rather than a cure for the seemingly insoluble crisis that Orwell diagnosed: the dwindling material basis of an ex-imperialist country that is unable to break, in a globalised world, with its antique assumptions of power and self-sufficiency, and whose fundamentally cynical Bagehotian mode of politics, in which the will of the few was passed off as the will of the many, is broken, unable to innovate and deal with change, or defuse the anger of those victimised for so long by social and economic inequity.
Gary Younge - Brexit: The price of dishonesty
“The life of nations,”
Powell argued, “no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagina-tion.”
But nations that are too extravagantly imagined eventually pay a steep price
for their system of self-delusions. Postcolonial India turns on itself in fury
and frustration as its dream of power and glory explodes. England’s
post-imperial self-reckoning feels harsher, largely because it has been
postponed for so long, and the memories of power and glory are so ineradicable.
In the meantime, the most important elections of our lifetime approach, and, as
Orwell warned, “a generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a
necklace of corpses”.
