Summary: A Very British Coup

I suppose it comes from watching too much Dangermouse and James Bond as a kid: I came to expect the evil to be geniuses.

Watching Boris Johnson and his even less impressive minions like Nigel Farage, Priti Patel, Mark Francois, Andrew Bridgen, Sally Ann Hart and their ilk on television these days and I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt’s observations on the banality of evil. 

These are people who have not gotten into power because they are positive human exemplars of looks, brains or personality. They simply hate, and they share hatreds with enough others to have an electoral base in what passes for democracy in the gerrymandered U.K.

More than any other European democracy, the UK is an elective dictatorship. Those checks and balances on the excesses of the executive as exist post-Brexit, such as the national courts and remaining international law, the British government is now openly talking about dismantling. So the only constraint on their power grab will be the speed of bureaucratic processes.

Basically, the health of English democracy will be determined by how much and how quickly the government can undermine it in the next four years. So, the only saving grace of Boris Johnson, like Donald Trump, is that he is inordinately lazy. So he might, on his own, not get around to many things.

Even in the most notorious of dictatorships, authoritarianism can creep slowly. Mugabe’s power grab in Zimbabwe was a protracted but relentless affair, done in concert with the scapegoating of portions of the population, starting with the Ndebele, and, later, with the settler farmers.

Boris Johnson has based his political career on scapegoating too: first the European Union, now impoverished migrants trying to cross the English Channel. “Look”, he says, probably astonished that so much of the English population remains gullible enough to swallow his charlatanism whole, “these are the ones who are the causes of your problems, not me! Not the policies me and my pals have advocated and implemented for decades, not the incompetence I have shown in the face of a public health crisis.”

It is in moments like this that journalism’s role in defending democracy becomes most critical. But by fetishizing a notion of “balance” it is possible for even well-meaning media professionals to become cogs in a process aimed at obscuring the true causes of contemporary poverty and conflict. If, like the newspaper editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the press chooses in the name of “balance” to print the politicians’ legends while knowing they are untrue, then they become mere henchmen to government, not journalists.

Without sufficient critical appraisal of the Johnson circus’ shenanigans, people can become distracted by the performances. Then they may more easily overlook the growing stench of corruption and cronyism coming from the Prime Minister’s circle as lucrative contracts are awarded to school pals, and foreign intelligence agencies are tolerated in their murder and injury of British citizens because they donate to the Conservative party.

In 1944, the then US vice president Henry Wallace argued that in America fascism could come to power under the auspices of “Americanism.” In England authoritarianism is likely to come to power under the auspices of a form of “patriotism” in which intolerance is practiced in the name of toleration, and the wholesale destruction of human and civil rights accomplished in the name of “British values.”

Those who bring their country to this nadir will, of course, be too stupid to appreciate the irony.