Brexit & the Madness of the Sovereign Individual
August 26, 2019
Daniel Lazare analyzes the Trump-Bojo attacks on democracy and equality.
Mosaic pavement showing what could be a Vandal cavalryman, excavated near
Carthage.
(British Museum/Wikimedia Commons)
By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News
Its tempting to describe President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Boris
Johnson, and their ilk as the new Vandals. But that would be unfair to the
old Vandals, fifth-century Germanic tribesmen who defeated Rome, established
a trans-Mediterranean empire, stabilized the economy, and, despite the bad
rap theyve gotten over the years, patronized learning and culture.
The new Vandals, on the other hand, seem interested in one thing only:
spreading chaos. With their doughy bodies and similar hairdos, Trump and
Johnson came across as a latter-day Gog and Magog as they praised one
another to the skies at this weekends G-7 conference in Biarritz and
promised all sorts of mutually beneficial trade deals.
While Trump engages in a war of words with everyone from Denmark to Iran,
Johnson is threatening to storm out of the European Union even though the
likely result will be economic havoc and, in Northern Ireland, a return of
the low-grade civil war that killed and wounded some 50,000 people over the
course of three decades. Somewhere, somehow, there must be a method to their
madness. But what can it be?
The answer may lie in the 1997 bestseller The Sovereign Individual:
Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. Written by popular stock
analyst James Dale Davidson and former Financial Times editor William
Rees-Mogg, its basically a primer on how to profit from the coming
politico-economic apocalypse.
What makes it oddly prescient, as publications ranging from the Guardian to
The New European have pointed out, is lineage. William Rees-Moggis the
father of Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of House of Commons and Britains
best-known advocate for a hard Brexit after BoJo himself, as Johnson is
popularly known. Visiting the sins of the father on the son is usually
unfair. But their ideas are so close in this instance it seems appropriate.
The elder Rees-Mogg, who died in 2012, was not just a free-marketeer and an
opponent of the EU, but a Catholic convert of such arch-reactionary views
that he favored the long-banned Latin mass because it is associated with
opposition to such radical upstarts as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
His son, a latter-day Bertie Wooster, the fictional creation of P.G.
Wodehouse known for his double-breasted suits and upper-class drawl, goes
even further. Not only does he champion the Latin mass, but he named one of
his six children afterthe staunchly royalist Earl of Stafford, beheaded by
Puritan revolutionaries in 1641. When a critic dubbed him the member of
parliament for the early twentieth century, he replied that the twentieth
century was too modern for his tastes and that hes rather be known as the
member for the early eighteenth century.
Upper-Class Caricature
In short, an upper-class caricature of the sort that only England can
produce. But where Tories are forever promising to turn back the clock,
they have never actually done so by a single second, as the satirist
Evelyn Waugh once pointed out. So, whats this phony Neo-medievalism really
about? The Sovereign Individual may provide a clue.
Basically, the book is not only an ode to the coming apocalypse but an
extended assault on the 20th-century nation-state, That is something that
people fought and died for but which Davidson and Rees-Mogg père associate
with high taxes, burdensome regulation, and the pain and torture of having
to do what other people tell them to. Hence, its demise is to be welcomed
since it will unleash a revolutionary new force, that of the unchained
individual. The new Sovereign Individual, they write, will operate like
the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject
citizen but in a separate realm politically. Commanding vastly greater
resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign
Individual will redesign government and reconfigure economies in the new
millennium.
With much of the worlds commerce
migrat[ing] into the new realm of
cyberspace, the book goes on, the old nation-state, with all its
pretensions, will starve to death as its tax revenues decline. Democracy,
which flourished as a fraternal twin of Communism precisely because it
facilitated unimpeded control of resources by the state, will likewise
wither away. So will hoary old concepts like equal protection under the
law that rest on power relations that are soon to be obsolete.
Jacob Rees-Mogg debating at the Cambridge Union Society in 2012. (Cantab12,
CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
With income-earning capacity more highly skewed than in the industrial era,
jurisdictions will tend to cater to the needs of those customers whose
business is most valuable and who have the greatest choice of where to
bestow it, Davidson and Rees-Mogg continue. Like Spengler, they add, we
see the impending death of Western civilization, and with it the collapse of
the world order that has predominated these past five centuries, ever since
Columbus sailed west to open contact with the New World. Yet unlike
Spengler we see the birth of a new stage in Western civilization in the
coming millennium.
Not only will democracy and equality go out the window, in other words, they
should go out the window the quicker the better so that a new utopia can
settle in.
Brexit Riding to the Rescue
Rhetoric like this used to be common back in the halcyon 1990s. But once it
became clear that neoliberalism and greed-is-good individualism would lead
to economic polarization, financial instability, and permanent warfare in
the Middle East, the old ideology had lost its shine. But now Brexit is
riding to its rescue by creating the chaos that is its essential
prerequisite.
With its royal family, bewigged judge, and ancient parliament, it appears
increasingly likely that it will not be able to withstand the stresses and
strains of a hard Brexit. The chief culprit is the increasingly explosive
debate over where to place the hard borders that Brexit will inevitably
create.
At bottom the debate is quite simple. BoJo wants to place it in between the
Irish Republic and U.K.-ruled Northern Ireland where a current EU-supervised
frictionless border now exists. Fears that cutting off Northern Ireland in
this way will lead to a rebirth of the Troubles are unfounded, he adds,
because an array of hi-tech monitoring devices will render it no less easily
crossable. If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a
frictionless re-entry to Earths atmosphere in 1969, he argueswith
characteristic blitheness, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade
at the Northern Irish border.
But its a pipedream for the simple reason that, as Hettie OBrien observes
in the New Statesman, monitoring some 110 million crossings per year will
require a degree of British government surveillance that both sides will
find intolerable. Thus hard borders mean just what they suggest, i.e. a
hard reality of border posts and customs checks, not to mention smuggling
and gun running.
But theres another alternative: creating a hard border not on land but
along the Irish Sea, with Ireland the island, that is on one side and
Great Britain on the other. The advantage is that patrolling a few seaports
is a lot easier than policing some 300 miles of lanes and cart tracks, as
Jenkins describes it. The disadvantage, at least as far as London is
concerned, is that locking two Irish jurisdictions in a single customs union
under EU auspices will bring Belfast closer to Dublin and hence to Brussels,
the EU capital, as well. With 56 percent of Northern Irish voting against
Brexit and 60 percent in favor of continuation of the customs status quo,
economic union will eventually give way to a political union, which means
that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will cease to
exist.
Westminster Palace, aka Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben, at night.
(Maurice via Flickr)
Westminster Palace, aka Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben, at night.
(Maurice via Flickr)
A Traumatized England
Irish nationalists, who have advocated such a solution for more than a
century, will rejoice. But what are the implications for Britain? With
Scotland voting to remain in the EU by an even greater margin 68 to 32
it means that it might also throw in its lot with Brussels. If so, a
traumatized England will be reduced to a hard-right rump seething in anger
at Ireland and Scotland for leaving it in the lurch. With leftists in
disarray and extreme nationalists in the saddle, whats left of the welfare
state will disappear as England positions itself as the low-wage alternative
to an over-regulated EU.
Its not hard to imagine the reaction on the other side of the Atlantic.
Trump will rub his hands in glee as a liberal nation-state bites the dust.
Then hell go on the prowl for fresh opportunities abroad.
Perhaps he can persuade Hong Kong to separate from China. Maybe
Hungarian-speakers will break away from Romania under U.S. influence and
throw in their lot with Budapest. Perhaps Greenland will separate from
Denmark and sell itself to the U.S.. With the capital city of Nuuk growing
positively balmy thanks to global warming, Trump will be able to fill it
with glittering high-rises after all.
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is
Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American
politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation
to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related
matters at Daniellazare.com.