How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

by James O'Brien

The true liberal is cursed with a desire, even a duty, to understand other points of view. It’s a world view that admits disagreement and dissent but seeks to establish objective parameters by which the fundamental truth of things can be judged. The best way to achieve this is to ask the holders of those differing views to explain the reasoning that has led them to their conclusions.

hardly anyone is asked to explain their opinions these days; to outline not just what they believe, but why.

The sort of language and ideas once confined to my most ignorant and bigoted callers have found their way into the White House, and the world seems split into people who find this immensely gratifying and people who find it all as puzzling as it is terrifying.

Anti-semitism, weapons-grade misogyny, white supremacism, homophobia and quite horrible attempts to frame all Muslim people as complicit in the actions of any Muslim terrorist or criminal have moved squarely into the mainstream media. I believe that this has happened precisely because divisive sloganeering and rancid rhetoric have gone unchecked. In short, people are not being challenged to justify their views, or to explain why they think what they do.

When people like him, and there are plenty who employ altogether more sophisticated language and sophistry to make similar points, demand that their right to free speech be respected, what they are really demanding is that their speech be free from scrutiny.

And dominant elements of the media stoke those fears because it has always been easier and more lucrative to sell tickets for the ghost train than for the speak-your-weight machine.

The more fractured and divided a society becomes, the more fertile the ground is for terrorists to plant their views and ideologies.

I remember in about 2010, long before the age of viral clips and online ‘dismantlings’ saw such exchanges reach far beyond the radio, a Ukip MEP rang in to put me straight where callers were once again struggling. There were, he insisted, ‘loads’ of laws that left us unjustifiably enslaved to the EU. Indeed, there were ‘too many to list’. Pushed to name just one, specifically and repeatedly, he left the field after spluttering, prevaricating, patronising and, finally, explaining that EU food refrigeration regulations could compromise the freedom of the Women’s Institute to hold cake sales.

people have been telling me for years that the EU restricted their freedoms and imposed undesirable laws. And, for years, they have proved to be uniformly incapable of naming one.

Theresa May took this aversion to thinking to its apotheosis when she declared that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ shortly after becoming prime minister in July 2016. Even by the standards of modern British politics, this is a slogan of such sweeping vacuity that it beggars belief that she could utter the words with a straight face. Ask yourself now what it actually means. Consider the events of the following months and years and ask yourself whether she could have been doing anything other than using it to discourage thinking, to avoid facts and to postpone reality. You don’t need to be William of Ockham to conclude that this is the only – never mind the simplest – explanation for her choice of words.

I wrote in the TLS shortly after the result that Remainers had turned up to a knife fight with battered boxing gloves and a borrowed copy of the Queensberry Rules (if nothing else, Brexit has at least allowed fans of tortuous analogies something of a field day).

Charged with defending an obviously flawed organisation against claims that leaving it would deliver utopia, they had nothing in their arsenal save a status quo that many found profoundly unsatisfactory. If the debate stays simplistic and devoid of detail then it is surprisingly difficult to challenge someone who is offering an alternative to the status quo. You don’t like the way things are? Well, vote for me and I promise I’ll change things in ways no one else has ever promised. The louder the promise, the harder it is for voices pointing out its implausibility to be heard. Close to conclusive proof of this particular pudding resides, at the time of writing, in the White House.

The trick, as always, is to listen closely to what people say and then frame your next question to them accordingly. This might sound obvious, but you would be astonished to discover how many well-known journalists approach interviews with pre-prepared questions that they stick to regardless of the responses they receive.

And on we could have gone until, presumably, Judgment Day. If we hadn’t already been very late for the travel news.

The fear, which doesn’t seem dissimilar to the one expressed by my brigade of ‘lifestyle choice’ callers, is clearly that portraying homosexuality as normal might somehow persuade previously heterosexual people to jump into bed with the nearest willing member of the same sex. As this, for reasons that are never properly explained, would be a matter of unutterable calamity.

Despite the title of this book, it is refreshing, in an age of increasingly reductionist and binary debate, to recognise the importance of sometimes saying the three most undervalued words in the English language: I don’t know.

To our twenty-first-century Western sensibilities, it beggars belief that anybody could seriously argue that women should, regardless of their own feelings, be required to alleviate the sexual frustration of men. But, if we’ve learned anything over the last few years, it’s that progress we once naively believed to be permanent can be easily undone.

I used to think it was very clever to point out to women that they drew this line according to whether or not they were attracted to the man doing the ‘complimenting’, the whistling or even the ‘inappropriate touching’. I see now that this involves me putting the responsibility for my behaviour onto them,

But as I get older and recognise that I’ve spent most of my life utterly oblivious to the offences and abuses that women endure on a daily basis, I realise that men won’t change until society changes and, right now, forces seem to be trying to pull society backwards as well as forwards.

The inchoate anger some men feel at not only having to check their objectification but also to accept that only a woman gets to decide when a woman has sex, is one of the ugliest phenomena at loose in the world today.

In the long term, of course, the happier, healthier and wealthier a population is, the less strain it will place on the public purse. But the long-term welfare of the entire population is traditionally of little interest to the parts of it keenest to see taxes cut and shareholder dividends soar.

The philosopher John Rawls’ famous ‘veil of ignorance’ posits the idea that a just system can only be constructed by people completely ignorant of their position within it. In other words, you’re not going to endorse a system of law (or, by extension, of tax or government) that unfairly discriminates against a section of society you could conceivably be in yourself.

An essential prerequisite of fascism, the idea that a person’s ‘quality’ is somehow defined by their birth, gets employed here to attempt moral justification of epic inequality. If you can’t afford to go to university then you are obviously not university material and a university education would be wasted on you. The idea that superior I should not somehow see my taxes subsidising inferior you is thus easy to sustain. I suspect it’s also why so many right-wing inheritors of wealth and status cling so desperately to the notion that they have somehow ‘earned’ or ‘deserved’ their privilege, rather than arrived at it through dumb luck. Americans sum it up best when they talk of people who ‘were born on third base but go through life thinking they hit a triple’.

The choice of whether to buy something or not cannot be really ‘free’ if on one side a multinational conglomerate is spending millions upon millions of pounds persuading parents to pour it down their children’s throats, while on the other, if we’re lucky, a tiny not-for-profit campaign group is trying to be heard. And, of course, it’s not just the money spent on conventional advertising. The commercial clout these companies exert stretches into almost every corner of modern life, from product placement in popular TV shows to the sponsorship of major sporting events.

The ‘nanny state’ is a phrase now used exclusively to describe mostly good and important attempts to prioritise citizen welfare over corporate greed; and ‘classical liberal’ now has nothing to do with Thomas Hobbes or Adam Smith. It’s just a fancy phrase that kids who grew up without ever learning how to share use to describe themselves.

To fully understand Trump and his supporters you need, I think, to actually feel that your whole life is somehow somebody else’s fault, that the status and respect you consider your due have somehow been denied you by gay people or black people or Mexicans or feminists.

Trump understands implicitly. Treat people as stupid, hate-filled, gullible and mean while simultaneously helping them to blame all their problems on ‘others’ and they will love you for it. So much so, that you could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote.

Truth has been completely and deliberately debased by the most powerful man on the planet, a man whose entire life has been spent persuading poorer people to enrich him further by acting against their own interests. But Trump, for me, is more symptom than disease. His political success was made possible by creating an environment of fear and loathing into which he could insert himself as saviour and protector.

The Washington Post’s valiant attempt to record every demonstrable lie Trump tells in office stood at 4,229 after 558 days in office. The people who ignore or pretend not to believe this do so because they enjoy being frightened and thrive on anger. It is, in many cases, all they have. In almost all cases, it is the only thing that can rescue them from the realisation that their unhappiness and grievances probably owe more to their political heroes, their own past votes and actions than the existence of a Muslim mayor, a Polish plasterer or a Mexican housemaid.

One of the other central themes of this book, the reintroduction of inflammatory racism into the mainstream, makes contemplating what will happen next a profoundly unsettling experience. How confident can we really be that, if the sunny Brexit uplands of Boris Johnson’s imagination turn out not to exist, his admirers will lay the blame at his blundering feet?

If the media does not pull its socks up sharpish, the blame for a disastrous Brexit will be directed at everyone who warned that Brexit was likely to be disastrous.

Already, a clamour is growing around the idea that arrogant inadequates like Liam Fox and David Davis could somehow have performed much more effectively, if only ‘Remainers’ had stopped pointing out how little they seemed to know or understand about the tasks they had set themselves.

many Conservative ‘Brexiters’ voted both for and against it. Few managed to do so quite as shamelessly as Jacob Rees-Mogg, chair of the so-called European Research Group of Brexit hardliners, who explained on the 27 March: ‘I won’t abandon the DUP because I think they are the guardians of the union of the United Kingdom’. Two whole days later, he abandoned the DUP and voted for the Withdrawal Agreement he had previously described as ‘slavery’.

The EU insisted throughout that there was no prospect of accepting such flimsy proposals but Brexiters persisted in promoting them, apparently believing that if they said the same thing, only louder, then the foreigners would finally acquiesce.

The division inflicted upon our population by the lies and exaggerations of the Leave campaign had become so entrenched that most Leave voters remained loyal to the men who had so egregiously misled them. In a development that took even my battered sensibilities by surprise, callers to my radio show started claiming that they knew that things were going to go so badly because the Remain campaign had told them so.

So it was that while much of ‘Project Fear’ was quietly rebranded as ‘Project Fact’, many Leave voters were reduced to claiming that they had, in fact, known all along that they were voting for national self-harm and economic damage. This heart-breaking scenario provides perhaps the best illustration of how Brexit support had become faith-based and almost entirely divorced from the facts.

It seems unlikely that unity and reconciliation will be advanced by the insistence of men like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage that it is not their fault that the Brexits they promised have failed to materialise. Sadly, recent history suggests that their attempts to blame anyone but themselves will find a willing audience among voters now insisting that they never believed in any of the promised Brexits anyway. Similarly, we advocates of a Second Referendum – or a so-called People’s Vote – struggle to convey our sincere concern for misled Leave voters without sounding patronising or condescending. After all, however we dice it, we are also calling them gullible. Throw in the fact that diehard Leavers are now, with some success, attempting to frame any criticism of the Brexit promises they made as a denigration of the people who fell for them, and you are left with the unsettling suspicion that things are going to get worse before they get better.