Political Observer on Mount’s contining attempts to self-emacipate from his Thatcherism, by means of political prestidigitation wedded to a selective re-telling of American History!

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May 26, 2025

Headline: Conservatives Have Lost Their Grip on the World — and Themselves

September 26, 2024

Editor: in a mere 3151 word essay this Thatcherite continue to self-present as a ‘voice of reason’ in the Age of Trump! The opening paragraphs of his political monster are instructive, in fact act as a diagnosis of a kind?

The British Conservative Party has long boasted of being the most successful political party on the planet. The unimaginable scale of its defeat on July 4, when it won the fewest seats in its history, looks like the downfall of moderate conservatism. It appears to be the final straw for the center-right parties offering pragmatism, prosperity and opportunity that have dominated Western politics since World War II. Almost everywhere conservatism’s brash rival, nationalist populism, is on the march: already in power with its colorful leaders in Hungary, Italy and Argentina; on the brink of it in the United States and France; and eroding the old-style conservatives in Germany, the Netherlands and now Britain. The rivalry on the right is in danger of becoming a rout, with the senior, steadier force swallowed by its insurgent challenger.

These shocks to our established ways of thinking are so violent that we immediately assume that this must be a unique apocalypse, the product of unprecedented social and economic forces. This, I think, is a temptation to be resisted. The reality is that something similar has often happened or nearly happened before, at different times and in different places. Nationalist populism, my umbrella term for the smorgasbord of hard-right forces, always sings the same song. The circumstances that gain it a sympathetic hearing are usually much the same, too: decline of old industries and loss of well-paid jobs for men, undercutting by rising nations and, of course, fresh waves of immigrants from new places. It’s when mainstream conservatism visibly flounders in dealing with the challenge — as it has so clearly done in recent years — that such movements can hope to surge.

The upshot is both concerning and consoling. Conservatism has been here before — and it can get through it again.

Editor: As interesting as the attempt at explication , Trump and Trumpism is the child of the Ameican Tea Party that devored itself in internacine political warfare that Trump exploited! Yet note that Mr. Mount’s ‘The New Few’ was a wan attempt to self-emancipate from his Thatcherite past, and note that on page 154 and 155 Mount uses the epithet ‘Loony Left’ twice and the final chapter on ‘The Riots and after’ of August 6 and 10 of 2011: Recall that the collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, 2007-2008 that Mount acted as a co-conspipertor, advocate, even a True Believer took time to manifest itself in the lives of ordinary people. And the fact that The Neo-Liberal apologists like Mount re-wrote a History Made to Measure. And that he had the brass to lecture Americans, about their own History: Oxbrider Brass is Eternal !

Editor: Nothing quite prepares The Reader for these 509 words of History that seeks to enlighten The American Reader?

Nationalist populism is not a weird deviation from the natural flow of history. Since the dawn of the nation-state, it has been an ever-present threat, sometimes lurking in the shadows, sometimes derided as a throwback, but never quite disappearing from view. The possibilities for its success are often visible well in advance to keen observers, at times when most people are thinking about something else. In 1922, when the rest of Europe was convulsed by the threat of Bolshevism and Adolf Hitler was still a nonentity, the German chancellor declared “There is no doubt about it: The enemy is on the right.” In 1994, when all of Europe was still celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of history, Edward Luttwak foresaw a “space that remains wide open for a product-improved fascist party.”

It’s in the United States where the most stunning example of something like that has taken place. But the Trump phenomenon did not come out of a calm blue sky. Donald Trump’s discarded guru Steve Bannon saw in his master echoes of earlier populist orators, such as William Jennings Bryan, who could rage against bankers to rural audiences for hours on end. Mr. Bannon prepped Mr. Trump for his inauguration by telling him tales of his predecessor Andrew Jackson, whose inauguration had drawn to Washington thousands of obstreperous supporters who drank the capital dry and outstayed their welcome — echoing what was to come four years later, on a more violent and terrifying scale.

Mr. Trump’s critics, and his fans too, preferred to think of him as a unique irruption into American history. But Mr. Bannon was right in thinking that most of his instincts and his policies have roots going way back. Before the aviator Charles Lindbergh helped lead the America First Committee to keep the United States out of World War II, Woodrow Wilson had used the slogan “America First” in his doomed 1916 pledge to keep America out of World War I. The press baron William Randolph Hearst used it in his campaigns almost as often as he played up the threat of Chinese immigration. (Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,” based on Mr. Hearst, is Mr. Trump’s favorite film.) In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan took up the slogan, and as recently as 2016, David Duke, a former leader of the Klan, ran for a Louisiana Senate seat as an “America First” candidate.

For Mr. Trump, “America First” meant withdrawing from pretty much every international organization. At one time or another as president, he demanded that the United States withdraw from NATO, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Health Organization, the Paris climate accords and the World Trade Organization. He was equally hostile to bilateral agreements, with nations such as South Korea and Iran. This isolationism also has plenty of precedents, going back to the failure of the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and join the League of Nations the year after, under the influence of such implacable America-aloners as Senator William Borah of Idaho.

Editor: Reader only 2333 more words ….

Political Observer

Reader how could I had forgotten Francis Mulhern ‘A Tory Tribune?’ from 105•May/June 2017 of The New Left Review?

A review of Ferdinand Mount’s ‘English Voices: Lives, Landscapes, Laments’ Simon and Schuster: London 2016

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii105/articles/francis-mulhern-a-tory-tribune

Reader note that I do not share in Francis Mulhern’s generosity of spirit! I offer this revelatory excerpt:

…

The great politico-ideological contests of the twentieth century ranged Mount on the side of the bold Western David, of course. The closing words of his appreciation of Hugh Trevor-Roper, from 2005, recall a once-mighty ideological adversary:

The causes for which he battled with such ferocious glee have come out on top, in the Cold War no less than in the English Civil War. In politics as in historiography, the Marxists and the marxisants have been routed. It is easy to forget how their premises and arguments were once taken for granted and how quirky and perverse seemed those who spoke out against them.

And indeed such moments are a reminder of the voices that go unheard in Mount’s whispering gallery. With just a few idiosyncratic exceptions (Greer, Alan Bennett, Le Carré, Arthur Ransome, author of the children’s classic Swallows and Amazons, and the philo-Soviet ecclesiastic Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury), here is a spectrum without a Left. Of course, what is not published cannot be reviewed. But even a very short list of eligible-but-absent voices—salient authors or subjects of the kinds of book Mount chooses to write about—is telling for what it says about the national imaginary as mediated by him: Richard Hoggart, Jack Jones, Eric Hobsbawm, C. L. R. James, Dorothy Thompson, Angela Carter, Tony Benn.

Mount’s local party loyalties are more ambiguously framed. No great admirer of politicians in general, Conservatives included, he is damning in his judgements of Harold Macmillan, whose premiership he thinks was an anachronism and a historic mistake, and Edward Heath, the technocrat; the mock-heroic Lord Hailsham he dismisses as an exhibitionist. Among his contemporaries, two of his three touchstones are legends of the Labour right, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins (the other, as always, is Margaret Thatcher); and the plainest statement of political inspiration in the whole collection comes aslant, in a sub-section nominally devoted to religion, in a portrait of a Liberal leader, Gladstone. For an uncomplicated Tory loyalist, Mount’s intellectual presence must be about as reassuring as Matthew Arnold’s higher journalism was for party Liberals in his own time. But Arnold’s free play of mind had a brake, which he applied in a motto from the French conservative thinker Joubert: ‘Force till right is ready.’ Mount’s equivalent statement of limits deserves the same notoriety. ‘There are times’, he wrote in Cold Cream, defending the domestic programme of the Thatcher governments—including the premeditated fight to the finish against the miners—‘when what is needed is not a beacon but a blowtorch.’

Mount did his bit to fuel the blowtorch, and would have done more had not the bearings of the Thatcher government shifted during her second term, now giving priority to the formulation of a new Östpolitik for the last days of the Cold War. As it was, he returned to full-time journalism and writing. If, more prosaically, the ratios of intellectual engagement in public affairs—the exercise of shadow authority—can be calculated from a scale ranging between the extremes of prophecy, or moral leadership, and policy, the formulation of practical goals for duly equipped institutions, Mount’s readings show a continuing pull towards the latter end. This practical bent, in the centre-right zone marked out by Thatcher and Blair, has been most obviously displayed in the book-length works he has written over the past twenty-five years: The British Constitution Now (1992), Mind the Gap (2004) and, most recently, The New Few (2012), an attack on the spread of oligarchy in British political and economic life. But it is present too even when, as often in English Voices, the occasion is not primarily political. Mount’s Gladstone is a working fusion of the two modes, a seer and an effective reforming politician in one. He is, moreover, a figure who defies the reductive polarizing terms of the given ‘political creeds’ and party shibboleths. He is ‘reverent’ among utilitarians, a communitarian in his own day, but tolerant—eventually—in the face of narrow confessional demands, and liberal in his sensitivity to popular conditions of life. There is something in him of Berlin’s philosophy and also Michael Oakeshott’s, two figures whose mutual hostility was unrelenting.

…

Political Observer.

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