Waiting for the Etonians: Review of Nick Cohen’s Latest Book.

 

Eton Spats.

 

REVIEW: WAITING FOR THE ETONIANS. NICK COHEN. Fourth Estate. 2009.

 

Nick Cohen is dismayed. Professionally. He rants, but is terribly reasonable. He finds little reasonableness in the world he looks on. There lie the ruins of popular capitalism. This gives Cohen but small pleasure. He had pointed to the complacency of the Labour governments of Blair and Brown, which inflated the housing and financial bubble. Its policies funded by a deal with Capital, or bluntly, by “prostituting itself” to the City. Cohen had seen that “The spivery of the City afflicted the political left as severely as its blind optimism.”(P 26) He had uncovered subsidised tax breaks for private equity barons, foreign billionaires and British companies with boltholes in tax havens. (P 345) In short, had we read his columns, we would have learnt the truth. This collection of articles bears witness. Not to praise folly, but to condemn it.

 

Nobody listened. Now he listens himself. It’s time to admit the free-market reformist wing’s merits: Labour’s public investments and the consumer boom together fostered a degree of modest personal happiness. Yet (see above) these conditions are evaporating, as the sources in expanding finance dry out. What has the Cabinet, the Third Way, or whatever they call it now (other than save your own skin), to offer? Cohen has more to say. Brown manages some ‘social democratic’ measures – taking the helm of the banking system. Will he go further? Where to? Cohen can only note that the left, from Government to the wilder shores of Trotskyism, has nothing to offer. Nothing whatsoever.

 

The author of What’s Left? (2007) is something of a cult figure on the British left. Admired for his capacity to roar, bellow indeed, though some, who do not measure up to his standards of decency, do not always relish his assertions about the left’s history and ideology. Sample, no doubt weighed on a heavily broken scale, “Because there is no coherent left-wing political programme, anyone can affect a leftist posture, just as anyone can walk into a shop.”(P 188) Ouch!

 

Cohen’s collection of journalism shows him generally in fine fettle. Sharp digs at once fashionable ideas from the ‘therapy culture’, and personal growth (though done better by the late Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism 1979), go down well amongst bitter and twisted leftists. So does attacking the culture industries’ treatment of “underprivileged whites” with “suspicion and condescension” living in a “parasites paradise, scrounging of the cozened middle classes” continues unabated. We lack, he rightly says, someone with the moral depth of Dickens to stir opinion about the poverty of millions. Or, I add, a Balzac to rip into the speculators and financiers.

 

The long-term trend, partly imported from America, for the liberal left to prioritise ‘equality of opportunity’ through promoting people’s identities, is rightly lambasted. Diversity often means flattering diverse prejudices, “..it has become racist to oppose sexists, homophobes and fascist from other cultures.”(P 191) There is an “intolerance of the intolerable inculcated by postmodernism, and the doubts about democracy in the liberal mainstream.”(P 192) Real equality, and better living conditions, are not achieved through a race with plenty of losers, endless ‘monitoring’, and promoting ‘diversity; while failing to improve the lot of all. Again, Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint (1993) has been there before. But there’s nothing wrong is rattling out the good old tunes.

 

Nick Cohen is famously opposed to appeasement of religious reaction, above all Islamism. He writes that, “When society decides that people’s religion, rather than their class or gender, is the cultural fact that matters, power inevitably passes to religious fanatics who believe religion justifies any crime.”(P 144) He appears to think that, when “confronted with ultra-reactionary movements and dictatorial regimes, liberals recommended surrender.”(P 31) Recent cases include Iraqi Baathism, and, above all, Islamist movements and regimes. All partly right. There is a kind of appeasement, exemplified in George Galloway that deserves Cohen’s loathing. Self-righteous followers on this path, can scream all they like about Cohen’s ‘apologies for liberal murder’ (he doesn’t make any): they are wrong.

 

Yet the basic analysis demands a challenge. Such surrenders are not principally due, as he elsewhere asserts, to ‘post-modernist relativism’. Galloway and those of that kidney have transferred their loyalty to the Revolution to ‘anti-imperialist’ Islamism, as in poor old Tariq Ali who thinks the Taliban are a national liberation movement, or those who consider the ultra-right-wing Hamas ‘anti-imperialist’ (for being against Israel). Livingstone is largely trawling for City Boss lieutenants.  But with others, who seek to ‘understand’ Islamism, the motives are more mixed.  Cohen’s definition of liberal tends to be an American not British one. That is a mixture of faith in social improvement, wishful thinking, transcendentalist optimism (the living experience of the Soul), and (in modern times) the betterment of a kaleidoscope of worthy oppressed groups. It is this kind of ‘trying to be fair to everyone’ liberal tolerance (deeper rooted that the transient fashion of postmodernism) which is at fault here.

 

 

It would be better to state that by definition no believer in liberty would indulge in excuses or (in the case of Respect and Ken Livingstone) alliances with reactionary religious-political groups. Nor would they, for example, praise, as Cohen’s friend Bernard Henry Lévy did, for the Afghan warlord and (non-Taliban) Islamist, Commander Massoud (here, here). What is a liberal anyway?  Mill’s definition of liberty included the freedom to think and write as one wants, freedom to tastes and pursuits, regardless of ‘moral’ rules (provided they are ‘self-regarding’ and cause no harm to others), and the freedom of assembly. Exit the Sharia and any Autocracy. For Marxists and socialists the choice is simpler: Islamicism and the dictatorships Cohen cites are vehicles of oppression. The former of the pious Moslem bourgeoisie; the latter of various hybrids of state kleptocracy and robber capitalism. 

 

 

Now that a “battered public seemed willing to embrace its old ruling class with something approaching relief.”(P 32) – the Etonians (aka David Cameron’s crew) – is there really no left in the offing? Brown’s Cabinet barely keeps its head above water. The anti-globalisation movement had little concrete to say, and its Social Forum wing has become (in the UK) the haunt of harmless cranks. The Green Party has plans to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.  Respect and the SWP are, well Respect and the SWP.

 

But there is a left that it emerging. It is one the spans the distance between radical social democracy, Compass, the unions, the small independent socialist publications, such as Labour Left Briefing, Chartist, and many others on the democratic socialist left, a gamut of groups, feminist, gay, anti-racist, green, and which extends to many on the ‘far left’ who are fiercely democratic. Ideas are now being developed, on welfare, public ownership and working conditions, that connect with the legacy of the socialist and labour movement. A left that never had any time for tyrants and dictatorships of whatever ilk, Stalinist, Nationalist, or Religious.  Or so I think – because I come from this movement. As do many. It’s a shame that other than offering some warmed over diatribes, and a few real insights on class and culture, wrapped in well-written prose, that Nick Cohen doesn’t seriously engage with us. Perhaps the East Wind has frozen his frowning face.