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I was taught at school to be suspicious of the Whig interpretation of history: the approach that dominated British scholarship in the mid- to late-nineteenth century when the modern historical profession was being built in the United Kingdom.

My teachers explained to me that the Whig historians’ great sin was “teleology”… a word that is justifiably obscure to the general public but is designed to send shivers down the spines of undergraduates. Teleology, the belief that history is directed toward some inevitable end recognisable in the present, was considered one of the most grievous intellectual failures that a historian could make. It encouraged analysis that lacked sensitivity toward contingency, irony, accident, nuance, that ignored backward steps, and failed to recognise the role of chance, unplanned progress.

By seeing the past only through the lens of the present, Herbert Butterfield argued in his assault upon the Whigs in 1931, the historian “is bound to lead to an over-simplification of the relations between events and a complete misapprehension of the relations between past and present… In other words it represents a fallacy and an unexamined habit of mind into which we fall when we treat of history on the broad scale.”

A problematic historical method, then, was the reason the founders of British history lost credibility among their successors in the twentieth century. On occasion, it was noted that this interpretative flaw was compounded by a nationalistic bias that saw the direction of history as moving towards a state that not coincidentally resembled British constitutionalism. What noticeably did not appear among their sins, however, was their commitment to white supremacy.

Yet this was a more consistent part of their worldview than the Whiggery caricatured by Butterfield. If you browse the pages of ‘The Expansion of England’ (1883), the canonical lectures given by Cambridge’s ninth Regius Professor of History, John Robert Seeley, for instance, we find him arguing that the crucial historical trajectory of England was not the spread of democracy and liberty, which he described as but fortunate possessions of the nation, but rather the historical extension of “the English name into other countries of the globe” — in other words, empire.

This “mighty phenomenon”, he suggested, represented at core “the diffusion of our race” across the world. The white colonies in Africa, Asia and America represented, therefore, something markedly different from other empires, whose weakness lay in the fact that they were “a mere mechanical forced union of alien nationalities.” It also distinguished them from the British government in India, whose people were “of alien race and religion” rather than “of our own blood,” and were thus simply recipients of good British government rather than a true part of a Greater Britain. The Native Australians, meanwhile, were “so low on the ethnological scale” that “they could never give the least trouble.”

Seeley’s lectures on whiteness and empire played a key part in earning him a knighthood. Two years after his death in 1895, Cambridge renamed its history library in his honour. Rebuilt in the 1960s, the library retains his name to the present.

Edward Augustus Freeman took up the Regius Professorship at Oxford in 1884, a year after Seeley’s empire lectures. He offered a response in a lecture in Edinburgh entitled ‘Greater Greece and Greater Britain’ (1886).

Though the two disagreed on the role of federalism within the empire, both shared similar views on the affinity between Britain and its white colonies. The paths of assimilation through which barbarians had become Greek citizens in the ancient world were never duplicated in the British case, he argued. “The nearest approach to these elements to be found in any English colony,” he said, “must be looked for in the grotesque imitation of English ways where real assimilation is impossible” by “another race of barbarians whom they afterward imported for their own ends [i.e., Africans].” In other words, the descendants of enslaved Africans could never hope to truly acquire British liberty, they could only hope to imitate the outward forms of British behaviour.

Surely Lord Acton — perhaps the most archetypical historian of liberty, who replaced Seeley at Cambridge upon the latter’s death and is most famous for his epigram linking power and corruption — cannot have had the same ethnocentric proclivities? Well, in one piece of writing he condemned Mexico as a polity degraded by “a half-barbarous population” of “millions of a strange and inferior race which … [the Spanish could] neither assimilate nor absorb.” So there’s that.

In fact, this supposed apostle of liberty had been an ardent supporter of the Confederacy during the American Civil War and early in the conflict had argued against the moral necessity of immediate abolition. Writing to General Robert E. Lee after the South’s defeat, Acton declared that he had seen the South’s secession “not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy… I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization: and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”

Even if the Civil War was about slavery, rather than states’ rights — a point that Acton, like modern white supremacists, fulsomely rejected — then, he argued, it should still be seen “that by one part of the nation it was wickedly defended, and by the other as wickedly removed”:

The Union which was founded and sustained by the attachment of the people has been restored by force, and the Constitution which was the idol of Americans is obeyed by millions of humbled and indignant men, whose families it has decimated, whose property it has ravaged, and whose prospects it has ruined forever.

A substantial portion of that “ravaged” property, of course, were humans who had been held as chattel and were freed by a combination of the Union army and their own determined efforts.

It is worth emphasising a key point here. Racist thinking was near universal and largely unquestioned in nineteenth century Europe, but this was not just a matter of leading historians who happened to be independently committed to ideas that today we find offensive. Even when it wasn’t spoken about explicitly, racial supremacist thinking was bound up intimately with their vision of historical change itself.

Indeed, in an act of jaw-dropping sophistry, Acton even suggested that slavery had served a positive role in the history of liberty’s expansion. He accepted that in its robust and vocal defence of slavery the South had become a society that accepted “inequality, not as the natural product of property, descent and merit, but as its very foundation.” But, he suggested, in an abstruse passage of writing that reflected the slipperiness of his reasoning, these commitments also caused southerners to resist the tyrannical power of the majority that had come to dominate in the North. “Therefore the very defect of the social system preserved them from those political errors which were transforming the original characters of the Northern Republics. The decomposition of Democracy was arrested in the South by the indirect influence of slavery.”

Typically, the connection between white supremacy and the Whig view of English liberty was quite explicit. Englishness, whiteness and empire were inextricably bound together; white supremacy was the logical extension of their arguments about the genius of the English constitution.

This can be seen quite clearly in the writing and political activities of two other late-nineteenth-century Oxbridge professors: Charles Kingsley and James Anthony Froude.

Kingsley had been Regius Professor of History at Cambridge between 1860 and 1869, occupying the position immediately before Seeley took it up. His reputation as an intellectual had been built through a series of popular novels and historical works, including Westward Ho!, which offered a heroic account of the British conquest of the West Indies, though today he is best known for his 1863 novel, The Water-Babies.

Kingsley had felt a romantic attachment to the British Caribbean since childhood, having being raised on adventure stories of Raleigh and Drake (both of whom had connections to the slave trade). In 1866, he accepted a position as a member of the committee set up by Thomas Carlyle to defend Edward Eyre. Eyre, the Governor of Jamaica, had brutally repressed the Morant Bay Rebellion a year earlier, resulting in the deaths of over four hundred Jamaicans and the brutalisation of many hundreds more. Outrage over the violence of his response had encouraged John Stuart Mill and other reformers to set up the Jamaica Committee to call for Eyre’s prosecution. Carlyle, Kingsley, and others, however, argued that Eyre’s actions had preserved order and good government on the island.

Three years later Kingsley visited the Caribbean, spending seven weeks there, primarily on Trinidad. Without British control over the island, he insisted, it would either have persisted with slavery as Cuba had done under Spanish rule, or would have fallen into the hands of Venezuela, a nation that was “combining every vice of civilisation with every vice of savagery.”

White Britons not only deserved praise for advancing liberty through the promotion of abolition, he argued, but also for controlling the “savage” instincts of non-white peoples after emancipation took place. Kingsley argued that the government of Trinidad should establish a system of public education that would train the locals in “loyalty and order”, since the population was “either degraded or still savage” and therefore unready for anything more expansive.

Where Cambridge goes, so Oxford follows. Sir James Anthony Froude, a disciple (and latterly literary executor) of Thomas Carlyle and relation by marriage of Kingsley, was in 1892 appointed Regius Professor of History at Oxford. By that time he had become something approaching a “national landmark” and was one of the nation’s best-selling historians. Before taking up that position, he also travelled across the empire. He was well known for his contempt of the Irish. While in South Africa he attracted controversy by calling for the use of the Xhosa people as forced labour. In the West Indies, he echoed Kingsley’s calls for a revitalisation of the British imperial influence, which he believed had been in decay since slavery had come to an end.

For these historians, the progressive development of the English constitution never stood alone as a singular, linear pathway through history in the sense that is often assumed today when we talk of these nineteenth-century historians; it was counter-posed against negative possibilities of historical degeneration in which race typically played a central role.

In the West Indies, this alternative path was represented by Haiti, whose history since winning independence from the French had been blighted by endemic poverty, foreign exploitation, and political crisis. By the end of the century, Haiti had become a watchword among white supremacists of what would happen to the rest of the Caribbean if people of colour were allowed a role in governing society. Froude declared that the British West Indies therefore had not one but two possible futures: “either an English administration pure and simple like the East Indian, or a falling eventually into a state like that of Hayti, where they eat the babies, and no white man can own a yard of land.” (Froude’s blue plaque can be found outside his Chelsea residence, if you’re interested.)

Historians have been actively involved in the public conversation around Black Lives Matter in Britain, uncovering the historical legacy of slavery and empire, and have weighed in in debates over how we might engage with statues of public figures associated with these historical crimes against humanity. We have much still to offer, I hope.

However, we should also spend some time revisiting the individuals who originated our own professional discipline and ask questions about how our profession’s roots lie with a cohort of men as deeply committed to white rule as “English liberty.” Perhaps we even might ask whether they have left legacies in our institutions that we still need to address to this day.

The Emperor, believing that this would be a great tool to use to uncover who among his officials are incompetent and need firing, commissions the swindlers to do their work. Over long days the swindlers pretend to be making the clothes and various officials are sent to inspect their work. Each, seeing nothing but terrified that they will be shown to be unfit for office, return to the Emperor telling him that they are incredibly beautiful garments. Captured by the same belief, the Emperor also pretends he can see the garments, puts them on, so to speak, and goes out into the town naked. The townsfolk all praise the garments, not wishing to seem stupid. Only a small child blurts out the truth, after which every can see that the Emperor has no clothes.

(Not everyone remembers how the story ends, though. But more of that later.)

Although it’s generally understood as such, Andersen’s story is not just a warning about the dangers of following the herd, and praising the virtue of going one’s own way. It is also a tale of anxieties about the modern state. It is a fable about officeholders have no good reason to merit their jobs, who know deep down that they are only their through good fortune and will participate in absurd lies if they think it will allow them to maintain their privileges and prestige.

It is also a story condemning the idiocy of a mass public that continues to defer to authority even when it has shown to be incompetent. It poses a question about how we draw the line between an office in which power resides, and the person occupying that office, much as Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory asks questions about the relationship between the sacrament and the far-less-than-holy priests who administer it. If the occupant of the White House has shown himself to be appallingly unfit for it, any continuing respect for the institution of the presidency will inevitably start to look like the foolishness of the townsfolk or the cravenness of the Emperor’s officials.

Foucault points to a key shift in governance through the Enlightenment that speaks to Andersen’s fable… which I will now briefly butcher. In the pre-modern world the sovereign was seen as unique and transcendent, standing above the polity, ordained by God, literally ruling over people. Therefore, their goal at all times to defend their position from challengers who would seek to usurp them. The Machiavellian vision of rulership is about this goal, about developing strategies to preserve one’s power, without which nothing else a sovereign wishes to achieve may happen.

According to Foucault, what begins to emerge after this is a model of sovereignty that replaces this old vision with an alternative one that sees the King not as unique or transcendent but just one example of a host of power relations that bind society together, such as between a Lord and a peasant, a factory boss and their worker, or, critically, between a father and a household.

No longer unique, the goal of the sovereign becomes not to preserve their sovereignty from attack, but to govern efficiently. From this shift in thinking we see the emergence of the modern systems of censuses, measurement, planning and everything we typically think of as the activity of “the state”, whose function is to quantify, manage and dispose of resources in the most “economical” way.

One side-effect of this transformation is that the sovereign — in this case, the Emperor — becomes a human being comparable to others. Perhaps his power is greater or the attention given him is more substantial, but the nature of his relationship to his subjects is no longer fundamentally different to the power relations that we exert and are subject to. No longer is he a divine being.

This disenchantment of the office also connects to a loss of intergenerational faith. The king is like the lord, is like the father — all temporal relations rather than divinely-appointed ones — and when faith in government fails, faith in families are also seen as illegitimate.

It’s interesting that Andersen’s decision to put the voice of truth into the mouth of a babe supposedly resulted from an experience of his own as a child. Standing next to his mother as a child in a crowd to see King Frederick VI, he shouted out, “Oh, he’s nothing more than a human being!”

His mother, ashamed of his utterance, tried to silence him. Either mother still cleaved to the idea of the King as a transcendent being, as fundamentally different from the rest of us, or she was one of the townsfolk who saw he was wearing no clothes but believed it was crucial to go along with the collective fiction. Either way, she thought the young Andersen was guilty of a cardinal sin: lese-majeste. In being chided for speaking the truth, Andersen felt a break between him and his mother that, once it happened, could never be mended.

The parents are culpable in the Emperor’s sin. They are also a part of the interacting systems of power of which the Emperor is but the highest form. The child, the only figure that has no role in the system, according to the fable, becomes the voice of truth.

This is what people mean when they say that someone like Donald Trump corrupts everyone he comes into contact with. By demeaning the office he also demeans all those who seek to respect the system of office-holding, making them look like careerists or fools.

Interestingly, in the original story that Andersen cribbed from, found in the fourteenth century El Conde Lucanor, the great fear of the Emperor, his officials and the townsfolk is not that they will be shown to be fools and unfit for office, but that they were illegitimate children of their fathers. This, the story explains, is because “among the Moors [where the story is set] only legitimate children inherit their father’s property.” In this early version of the story, the truth is spoken by a black African man who doesn’t care about defending his legitimacy because he had nothing to lose. (Andersen, like many Europeans of the nineteenth century, seems comfortable interchanging people of colour and children in his stories, though that’s probably a theme for another day.) For speaking the truth, the man risks a beating, but is ultimately vindicated.

Andersen transforms the fear of biological illegitimacy into a fable about the loss of enchantment with the modern system of government, yet the anxiety over the caesura between parent and child returns anyway … with the moment at the end when truth is spoken and the child is marked out from the rest of the townsfolk for lacking their corruption. When one form of power fails, they all fail.

It feels in this sense very much like a sixties fairy tale, both intergenerational and political at the same time, though ironically now one that is being redirected against the sixties generation, who have become the old folk playing along with the lunacy of the swindlers. If Donald Trump is the Emperor, parading around in front of us all unaware that he is naked, then the boomer generation are, to millennials, the corrupt townspeople putting up with the sick farce.

You’ve been very patient. So here’s how Andersen’s story ends.

“The Emperor shivered, for he suspected that they were right. But he thought, ‘This procession has got to go on.’ So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.”

This, it seems to me, poses the really interesting question that emerges from the disillusionment generated by the transformation of rulership from something magical into something humdrum. What next? We have come to a position collectively where we are comfortable fully inhabiting the role of the child, the person with no stake in the system. We enjoy the feeling of virtue of that comes with pointing out other people’s hypocrisies and consider ourselves liberated in doing so. But all we say is “the Emperor has no clothes,” repeating it over and over again. We have nothing more to add, and because of that the Emperor continues his procession, the officials continue to hold up his invisible train, and the townsfolk continue to watch.

The child’s role is to pull down, not to build up. It is an important role. But it is the beginning not the end.

The child, with nothing vested, can speak some of the truth. But the child cannot shoe a horse or build a house or raise cattle. The child depend on the foolish and hated townsfolk to be raised. And the danger is that they come to hate their parents for their foolishness in a way that is amplified by their dependency on them.

We are the child in the story, but we are also the townsfolk. Some of us are even officials. What do we do once the Emperor has been shown to have no clothes, and yet the procession continues marching on?

To get a sense of quite how far the United States’ myths of itself varies from the reality, consider the example of the Civil Rights Movement, perhaps the quintessential moment of protest in the history of the twentieth century United States, and — alongside the Second World War — the historical process pointed to most often as a demonstration of the superior virtue of the nation.

When telling this story, traditional historians and historians of the national mythos often contrast two distinct traditions within the movement: the non-violent, integrationist, Christian tradition associated with the Reverend Martin Luther King; and the violent, segregationist, anti-Christian tradition associated with Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and other apostles of radical revolutionary resistance to white supremacy.

The authorised history suggests that the great progress that happened as a result of the civil rights struggle came because of the tactical and moral superiority of the King tradition and that the civil rights movement came undone in the later 1960s when it fragmented and more radical and violent strands of protest came to the front. The King tradition was essentially “American”, so it worked; the Malcolm X approach was an alien, “un-American” tradition, and so it was a destructive force in the nation’s life.

Even though it remains the dominant popular narrative, few professional historians today would accept this version of events, not least because this stark binary distinction represents the attitudes of very few of the participants in the struggle. Leaders from either side of this divide often accorded each other a grudging respect and recognised their commitment to black uplift; many figures moved from one camp to another; and black and white activists in the ranks of the struggle often looked to figures from both sides for inspiration. It was perfectly possible to admire both King and X, and many people did so. People even noticed that the progress of the King movement owed a lot to the fact that Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were lurking threats on the margins.

Moreover, even if we wish to defend the non-violent approach as superior both morally and tactically, does this really mean that its success came from being somehow more American? Or that the Nation of Islam was an un-American phenomenon, something alien to the nation’s history? Celebrating Martin Luther King day as a key moment in the year, something that is reserved only for other members of the national pantheon like presidents, would seem to suggest so.

Anyone growing up in the United States today would be perfectly forgiven for reading the messages around them and concluding that King’s tradition was born purely in the bosom of the Southern Christian church, and that Malcolm X and the teachings of the honourable Elijah Muhammad were imported from Saudi Arabia.

In fact, the truth is not far from being completely the other way round. King’s thinking on non-violence was a direct inheritor of the tactics developed by Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa and India as part of his struggle to decolonise the British imperial world, themselves emerging from the Hindu and Islamic teachings that Gandhi explored in his so-called “experiments with truth”. Black Americans had been closely following the struggle for independence in India since the 1920s, if not earlier, and Gandhian ideas slowly migrated to the United States, fusing with the domestic protest tradition.

By contrast, the Nation of Islam was born in Detroit in the 1930s. Even a cursory glance at its animating ideas will show it has surprisingly little to do with the global religion of Islam as it has developed in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Perhaps the best example of this is the founding myth of the races that the Nation of Islam taught its members by its mysterious founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad, and his successor Elijah Muhammad. The Nation’s leadership claimed that there had originally been only one race, the black race, which was a noble race of kings and queens that lived in peace and prosperity in Africa. However, a malevolent scientist named Yakub began experiments 6,600 years ago on the Greek island of Patmos. Here he began selectively breeding children so that dark-skinned babies were killed and lighter-skinned children were raised and supported, so that over time a new race of “whites” emerged.

Unlike the noble black race, this group of recessive white people were dishonest, lazy and unreliable, and gradually over time they began sowing the seeds of mistrust and hatred among the rest of the population of the world. They turned out to be a race of “devils”.

Eventually, over time the white race used its malevolent skills to gain control of the planet, and from that position of power set about rewriting the true history of the world, giving themselves the position of heroes and demeaning and enslaving black people. It was therefore necessary for black people to rediscover their true, noble history in order to regain their position of leadership in the world.

Just look at this story for a moment. Is anything familiar about it? A claim that differences rooted in biology produce different characteristics among the races? An argument that one race is noble and born for leadership, while another is dishonest and treacherous?

This is nothing but an inversion of the pseudo-scientific claims made by white people since the nineteenth century about their supposed differences from blacks. It is a foundational American tradition, just turned upside down. It’s as American as apple pie.

So, too, for the Black Panthers rejection of non-violence and the insistence on armed self-defence. The shocking part of images of Black Panthers standing on courtroom steps brandishing automatic weapons is that they are black; we see many such protests, on almost a daily basis, from white Americans defending the Second Amendment. What could be more patriotic than defending the right to bear arms? This is truly a muscular American tradition, not like that Gandhian nonsense being promoted by Reverend King.

I am over-egging the point, of course. There’s no such thing as a perfectly isolated national culture — we are all always borrowing from each other. But the case does show quite how absurd the ideas of “Americanism” and “un-Americanism” can be, to the point that they almost end up the opposite of the truth.

The bet that the Labour leadership has put everything on is the product of a very specific vision of our dislocated times. It is contextualised by a long historical narrative, built by many writers and thinkers over the last decade or two, in which the axes of conflict are capitalism and socialism, and where history moves decisively in one direction or the other at key moments, or “conjunctures”, as verbose theorists are wont to call them. This body of literature on the history of neoliberalism, of Naomi Kleins and The Road to Mont Pelerins, tells a story about the shifts in Western politics since the 1970s and 1980s toward the current era and places great stress on the role of a key group of thinkers and their political allies in government. In just the right place and with just the right ideas, such people were, like Archimedes, able to move the world. Exploiting critical points of political crisis, whether Chile in 1973, Anglo-America in 1979–1980, or the Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, individuals seized power then deliberately provoked confrontations with their enemies in order to weaken and divide them before building a new political order founded, above all, on the power of the state. This power was used ruthlessly, even though the foundational rhetoric was that the state should get itself out of the way.

This is a story that not only accounts for the origins of our time, the “age of neoliberalism”, but becomes a kind of model in reverse for the politics of “disaster socialism” (not their phrase) that could be enacted in the wake of the 2008 crisis. This critical moment — the one happening right now — is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a genuinely socialist political movement to seize the reins of government and then, from that vantage point, provoke confrontations with key enemies and transform the nature of the modern state back toward the socialist side of the axis. There’s no point in worrying about half measures, trying to gain power by triangulation, since to do so would make genuine transformation impossible. The only option is to take power pure, and to then use the machinery of state to enact the transformative vision that is required.

There are many ways in which this narrative looks plausible, but the clear and visible rise of socialist politics is at the heart of it. The support enjoyed by Corbyn’s Labour project in the last election is a proof, it is suggested, that the old idea of socialism’s unviability is no longer true, that the long-standing fears of the Cold War are irrelevant to an era in which many voters have no recollection of that world at all. All that is needed is one last heave to get the keys to Number 10 and then a genuinely radical future can begin to be built. One cannot be distracted: anything that serves to weaken the leadership or divide the movement must be dealt with quickly or pushed to one side. There is no second choice; if this project is side-tracked the moment will be lost for good. The stakes are far too high to engage with concerns about the leadership or other matters. If one thinks from this perspective, the idea, suggested by Labour moderates, that Corbyn could be shifted to one side to improve the chances for Labour’s electoral viability, is utterly absurd. More than that, it would be wilful suicide.

The implications of this view of current politics are many, but the key aspect of the gamble is in the implication it has on Labour’s position on Brexit. Many people talk about the leaderships’ instinctive Euroskepticism, and this may well be true, but to stress that point undermines the degree to which there is a coherent and deeply held strategic view that informs the leader’s office’s policy choices as well. After all, if this narrative is true, the most important and critical goal is to hold the coalition together long enough for Brexit to wreck the Tory party. This requires making no hostage to fortune that will split the party, and avoiding as far as possible any clear position. A bit of leakage here or there is ok, as long as the core of the Party holds. It doesn’t really matter whether this policy is good for Brexit or Remain were it to be enacted. This is entirely a second order priority to obtaining power. It can, if necessary, be addressed once one is in government, but worrying about it now is just foolishness. Opposition is for opposing, not legislating. The Euro elections, disastrous as they’ve been for both main parties, have clearly not unseated this calculation any more than previous insurgencies within the Labour coalition did, not least because the stakes of this poker game have already been added to the pot: the leadership has gone far too far to change its strategy now. But this is not just a matter of sunk cost fallacies: the gamble may still be right. If it comes to a General Election where the alternative is a Tory Party committed to a Hard Brexit, then Remain voters may do what they did in the last election: hold their noses and vote for the Labour Party’s muddled position as the only way of stopping a dangerous cliff-edge. If this is enough to hold the Party about where it is now, while Lib Dems steal dozens of seats from Remain-minded Tory constituencies, then you quickly have a situation with no overall majority and the possibility of building a grand (Labour-SNP-LibDem) progressive coalition in which Corbyn will be the leading element, and the SNP trades their support for a socialist agenda in the rUK for a new referendum on independence. And, from Labour’s perspective, once you’re in Number Ten, you can start to use the power of the state to build your new constituency and break your enemies, and everything starts to look different…

The problem with this bet is that there is a second narrative, one that also sees 2008 as a profound break with the past, a “conjuncture” leading to a profoundly distinctive political era, but one that doesn’t orient around a socialist-capitalist axis but one that might be called liberal-conservative (in the classical sense of the terms) or, as others have suggested, open-closed. This is a model which suggests the key distinction in the emerging era is not really about one’s commitment to state versus private ownership (which both sides may have mixed views on), but a commitment to cosmopolitanism versus insularity. The big dividing lines in this model are between those with university educations and those without, those who benefit from a mobile labour market among unskilled workers and those who suffer from greater competition by working within it, those who are comfortable moving among many nations versus those that are rooted in place, those with long futures ahead, and therefore for whom global warming and other threats will dramatically impact them, versus those without too many decades to worry about. In this model, the surge in support for Labour in the last election was not a product of any new-found enthusiasm for socialist politics per se, but the “open” voters’ material interests in defending the EU single market, attacking tuition fees (which directly target them as a class), and calling for action on housing shortages (ditto).

Ironically, this could be said to be a more materialist reading of the current situation than the alternative, since it suggests the new support for Labour is based on the specific interests of the young, the upwardly-mobile and the university-educated.

This alternative narrative posits no especial loyalty to Corbyn, and would perhaps seem to be vindicated by the persistent low overall polling numbers for him as well as the terrible performance of the Party in the Euros. If this model is actually the truth, then Corbyn’s bet looks like it was a terrible one. His campaigning was credited with a triumph in 2017 that was actually a product of sociological processes that pushed people toward a Labour Party as the only vehicle for the expression of their class interests, and which could just as easily push them elsewhere if the Party is no longer seen to be so. Indeed, if this is true, then the battle may already be lost. There is basically nothing that Corbyn and his team could do to stop the inevitable fragmentation of the historic alliance between working classes and reform middle classes that sat at the heart of the Labour Party, with the insular working classes and rich rural voters turning to brands of Trumpian nationalism of the Right and leaving a hardened “Remain” core who are furious with Labour’s refusal to fight tooth-and-nail against Brexit. Labour’s future would then be a repeat of events that have taken place in Scotland over the last decade, when an insurgent party managed to successfully generate a blend of progressive politics that was liberal and cosmopolitan toward the EU, selectively interventionist and statist on some domestic matters, but fundamentally and profoundly hostile to the Labour Party.

There is only one way of finding out who is right in this great gamble, which is to wait and see. But there can be no doubt how big the bet is for the future of Labour — and our country.

To understand the place of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel thinking in the matrix of Left politics it’s not very helpful to go back to Stalinist “Doctor’s Plot”-style anti-Semitism, as some commentators have recently done. This is not where it comes from. Rather, the anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist politics of the Corbyn and some of the people around him needs to be understood in the context of the history of the New Left, especially its foundation, during which JC’s worldview was formed.

Arguably two of the most important phases for the emergence of the New Left came around 1956 — the year of the Hungarian Revolution, the Suez Crisis, and the Khrushchev secret speech — and the late 1960s, the time of Paris, the Vietnam protests, the collapse of SDS, and the rise of Black Power.

The first moment is critical because it provided a point of breakage for young radicals from the promises of the old revolutionary forces associated with Stalin. From this time on, radicals would not see global politics in terms of a choice between West (the United States, capitalism) and East (the Soviet Union, Stalinism), but as a choice between two, stale political systems and a dynamic, revolutionary Third World that sought to challenge their authority. The new icons of this liberationist world were Mao, Che, Castro, Nkrumah, Lumumba, and so on. History has shown things to be more complex, and the path of democracy in the “Third World” has been far from straightforward, but for individuals who came of political age in the wake of this event, the strong moral attachment has always been to a hazily-unified idea of a revolutionary global South.

1956 also exposed the weakness and dependency of the supposedly independent European powers, the British and French, who sought to conspire to regain control of the Suez Canal, but were shown to be essentially under the thumb of the United States. This was particularly problematic in France, where the socialists were at the heart of the conspiracy, producing a key point of alienation among the young Left in that nation. Of course, this was also a critical moment in the history of the Middle East, since Israel colluded with the European imperial powers in fomenting the crisis. As New Leftist politics began to take shape, then, Israel was witnessed as very visibly taking the side of the old empires against the Arab world, while the Palestinian cause was integrated as one of the first instances of the Third World struggle for national liberation. Ironically, the power of the US over Western Europe at this moment had been revealed when Washington acted to restrain the British/French/Israeli plot; nevertheless the intellectual legacy of that year on the left was a set of vague, foundational views of Israel and the Western European states as stooges and puppets of Washington.

The late 1960s saw this embryonic New Left politics come to fruition, merging around a constellation of political ideologies that in their broadest sense shared a conception of anti-imperialism that conflated the problems of consumer capitalism in the Western world with the struggles for national liberation in places like Cuba and Vietnam. In the midst of this birthing process came the Six-Day War, the first point at which Israel unequivocally appeared to be the most powerful state in the Middle East. Until this point, support for Israel on the Left, especially in Germany (for obvious reasons), had been quite strong. But this was a critical moment in shifting opinion, reinforcing the idea born from the Suez Crisis that Israel functioned as a key component of the global capitalist-imperialist system.

As a result, New Left anti-imperialist analysis has baked into it from the outset a belief that Israeli politics and global imperialism are effectively indistinguishable, as well as a belief that imperialism and capitalism are always and everywhere two faces of the same coin. If one accepts these core assumptions without critical interrogation, it stands to reason that Israeli foreign policy and the actions of Jewish “bankers” and “media” in the West can be presented as connected projects. It therefore also stands to reason that whenever someone complains about anti-Semitism in the UK, for instance, they must really be a stooge of Netanyahu. This reflects a certain kind of “system thinking” that tends toward the reductive, and is quite inflexible once its core propositions are established, since any criticism is definitionally seen as coming from the previously-identified enemy. Moreover, it is fuelled by a spirit of self-righteousness. As Jeremy Varon insightfully comments about the anti-Semitic comments of the German New Left in the late 1960s, they were enabled by a belief that “they, as the post-Nazi generation, were utterly free of anti-Semitism and therefore had license to condemn Israel without qualification or apology.”

If this hypothesis is true — that these presumptions connecting imperialism, capitalism, Jews and Israel are foundational to the New Left generation’s worldview — then it seems very difficult to see how old (i.e. New) Leftists would be able to accept the criticisms being leveraged against them today without revisiting their most fundamental operating beliefs about justice and anti-imperialism that have animated them for half a century. That’s quite an ask.

But it also perhaps helps to explain why Momentum, a venue where the influence of old line New Leftists is mixed in with a whole constellation of younger radicals whose views of global politics do not emerge from these key experiences in the New Left historical project, seem to be more willing to interrogate their assumptions about Jews and Israel, and revisit prejudicial thinking even when it emerges on the Left.

An optimistic hope taken is that this younger generation will gradually supplant the old, and the reductive equations that have swirled around Jews since the Six-Day War, will gradually dissipate as the white-hairs settle down in their comfortable armchairs for good. The fear, of course, is that, instead, these complaints will be interpolated as purely and simply a covert and cynical strategy to undermine Corbynite Leftism, and that through this conspiratorialist thesis a new generation may be encouraged to accept the faulty premises of the old.

Ok. Right. That’s the theory. Now you can all tell me why I’m wrong and evil. (Politely if possible, please.)

Given the issue is now firmly back in play, it’s perhaps not surprising that much digesting of the election result has focused on Brexit, and Corbyn’s apparent success in straddling the Leave and Remain factions of the Labour coalition. Other analysis has focused on the rejection of austerity, and on Corbyn’s personal role in shaping the positive Labour campaign. But given the election process was interrupted not once but twice by horrific attacks of terrorism, perhaps it’s also worth taking a bit of time to consider the dog that didn’t bark: Corbyn’s apparent weakness on terror and security issues that turned out not to be much of a weakness at all.

This was something that featured heavily in the Tory attack dossier and was clearly central to the aggressive headlines in the Tory press, especially in the last few days. But it wasn’t the right wing alone that expected this to be his great vulnerability; across the political spectrum people suggested that this would be an Achilles Heel . Indeed, on the far fringes of his support there was even speculation that the terror attacks were ‘false flag’ operations from the Tories designed to pull the nation behind the Conservative government. It certainly didn’t work out that way.

Why was Corbyn less vulnerable on this issue than many people — certainly including me — thought? There’s a number of reasons, I think.

Corbyn the Appeaser?

Firstly, there’s the question of the relative lack of purchase of the IRA/Hamas/Hezbollah attacks. I think there’s a couple of reasons why this didn’t translate into a visible impact in the campaign polling. Partly, it’s because these views were baked in already. After two years of politics in which Corbyn and his internal struggles were regularly making the headlines, the vast bulk of the politically-interested elements of society had already formed their opinion about whether Corbyn was reliable or not on these matters, whether he was a danger to the British position in the world, or, contrarily, that these were unjustified smears. I can’t imagine that all that many people suddenly discovered eight weeks ago that Corbyn was closely aligned with Stop the War. And most of the younger support for him saw the IRA stuff in particular as ancient history. A bit like the question of race and Obama, there were certainly people who’d never vote for Corbyn due to his foreign policy positions. But I’m not sure these were people who’d have voted for him anyway. Meanwhile, there was another bunch of self-assigned rapid rebutters on the ground who supported him precisely because of his positions on these matters. So, something of a score draw.

The other part of the relative weakness of Corbyn’s historical reputation is that one can easily look at the questions of terrorism and security as a singular, homogenous whole; and I’m not sure it’s true that this is the way voters always think about it, especially when you’re dealing with “home-grown” terrorist attacks of the sort we’ve seen recently.* Of course, Corbyn’s argument is that the roots of these attacks lie in our foreign policy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, for most people, this was essentially a domestic issue, and Corbyn’s points about the Middle East were neither here nor there.

Elections are very rarely foreign policy driven in any pure sense, and this one seemed to be especially absent any substantive debate. In fact, Corbyn’s speech after Manchester was virtually the only moment I can recall politicians from either side talking, even in the most general terms, about our foreign policy beyond Brexit. I’m also far from sure that people think about the politics of the Troubles as being related with Islamist violence. If so, then is it obvious that what Corbyn was doing in the 1980s has much to do with explaining what he’d do as a PM in 2017? But this is all speculation, of course…

The Iron Maybot?

The second element of the equation was the failure of terrorism to strengthen support for the government. The main reason for this is fairly obvious: it’s hard to argue for the need to ramp up security and to transform the government’s approach to defending our cities and towns when you’ve been in government for seven years setting policy — and when one Mrs. May was in the Home Office for much of them, directly responsible for security matters. Any failure to act that May pointed to, then, ultimately could be focused on failures that happened on her watch.

The Labour Party was able to capitalise on this problem very effectively, focusing on the reduction in police numbers due to austerity. The argument that declining numbers of police officers directly correlates with preventing terrorist attacks is debatable, but it certainly cut through, especially given the police themselves were more than happy to point out the pressures that May had been putting them under in order to make their case for increased spending in the future.

This is nothing more than another gut feeling, but I’m also not sure that the public at large saw the attacks particularly in terms of weaknesses and failures in policy at all, certainly not as evidence of the need to create new laws. Armed police officers were able to get to London Bridge and kill assailants in eight minutes; I think plenty of people saw that as a sign of an incredibly well-prepared and capable operation, not one that was failing.

Besides, how would longer prison sentences have stopped these attacks, anyway?

And end-to-end encryption? Really?! Pointing to end-to-end encryption is just a nonsense if your own party colleagues are busy using WhatApp to moan to journalists about your terrible campaigning.

I can totally understand why May opted to stand herself in front of Number Ten twice and try and present herself as an Iron Lady, but it didn’t work, given her place in the history of the past seven years of Tory government.

Corby the Blairite?

The third part of the equation was Corbyn’s own surprising media fluency on this issue. Having watched him go through an exceptionally steep learning curve, this was perhaps the bit that was perhaps most surprising. Nevertheless, the fact is that Corbyn, and whichever people were advising him, developed a series of lines of attack, and a form of words in his keynote speech on the topic, that managed to balance his long term beliefs with the wider concerns that these attacks raised among the general public. This meant that he was able to act like a politician without looking like one. He quietly junked his earlier attacks on the security state and policing more generally, using the attacks as a vehicle to promote his anti-austerity politics; but he stood firm on his opposition to mainstream UK foreign policy, not least since changing his line on that would demonstrated a lack of principle that even Corbyn’s biggest critics would struggle to credit him with.

The rhetoric of his speech after Manchester was an impressive rhetorical balancing act … and a rare occasion where Corbyn was (mostly) able to resist using the dreaded “but” word that normally precedes his awkward efforts to straddle difficult positions and keep to his perennial obsessions. Keep the country safe at home and avoid making it unsafe abroad: this was a theme that many people could get on board with, and the balance between his expressions of solidarity and hostility to Islamism came in a much more appropriate ratio to his more muted points about foreign policy later in the speech, which occupied only a few sentences toward the end of the speech.

Alex Goodall on Twitter

Strikingly, Corbyn's speech can be summarised as "Tough on terror, tough on the causes of terror." The Blairite.

The Blitz Spirit?

“Protecting this country requires us to be both strong against terrorism and strong against the causes of terrorism.” I was very far from alone in noting the positively Blairite dimensions of his message. The phrasing could hardly have been accidental. Still, you can go too far in ascribing the relative success Corbyn had in neutralising this issue to triangulation. Rhetoric is important, but finding the right form of words is hardly the whole story.

Indeed, looking back on the campaign, I think the reason why Corbyn proved relatively resilient on the politics of terror was not really down to media strategy, or the failures of the government — but that Corbyn’s core instincts simply better fit the public mood of the United Kingdom in 2017 than May’s. This is something of a surprise to me, even though I was a participant in this mood as much as the rest of us. Every conventional instinct would suggest a turn to security politics after these attacks would reap political rewards for the Right. But this wasn’t how the public responded, and they refused to follow the expected line.

A lot of guff gets written about the Blitz spirit, and historians far more knowledgeable than I have done a lot of work distinguishing the myth from the reality. But even as a myth, the Blitz has never been about state security. It orients toward themes of the resilience of ordinary people, carrying on with their lives under extraordinary conditions, and saying “‘screw you” to people telling them what to do: the Luftwaffe, sure, but the government as well. The dominant theme of the response to the attacks, if there was such a one, was solidarity, not fear. The keynotes were the extraordinary scenes of a tiny singer, Ariana Grande, serenading thousands of children who refused to be cowed and returned to Manchester to sing and celebrate and share their hopes and fears. The stories we heard after London Bridge and Borough Market were of people from all communities acting together to fight back the knife attackers. The suggestion from May in her speech, that “too many people” were tolerating Islamism in our midst, were defied by the fact that so many Muslims, from leaders to citizens, had contacted the police and security services to raise warnings about dangerous individuals they’d seen causing trouble in their communities. Meanwhile, a thousand voices on social media came together in offering a great “fuck you” to the US media and Donald Trump who, through laziness and malevolence respectively, sought to suggest that there was a climate of fear abroad in the country. “Screw you,” the public said. “We won’t be afraid.”

I don’t think Corbyn has suddenly become a political pro, even if it’s pretty clear that he’s getting better and better at the media stuff after several gruelling years of fairly non-stop assault. I don’t think that he’s changed his views all that markedly, and I don’t really buy the argument that is circulating among cognoscenti that his success in this election was down to a new spirit of compromise. I still suspect that Corbyn is something of a stopped clock. (Though I should qualify that by saying I’m increasingly coming to believe that most of us are.) But it didn’t really matter. On this issue, right now, for reasons of luck or planning, Corbyn was telling the right time. The smart money was that the Tory playbook would work to help them capture the moment, that Corbyn would be immensely vulnerable on this, given his history; the smart money was wrong. I doubt that terror politics won Labour votes, but it definitely failed to weaken Corbyn in the way most people thought it might. If there’s a political lesson from this, it’s that running lazy plays from old playbooks is always the choice of complacency. If there’s a social lesson, it’s that if you’re a politician in the UK you should be careful any time it looks like you’re telling people what to do. They might well show the mythic Agincourt spirit, and stick two fingers up at yer.

* Actually, at least in the case of the London Bridge attack it’s turned out to be more complex than the term ‘home-grown’ terminology would suggest. Nevertheless, this is certainly how they were presented in their immediate aftermath.

You don’t need to travel very far in today’s politics to hear versions of these arguments developed with much greater eloquence and subtlety than I’m capable of giving them. The hard form of anti-Semitism, where Jews are attacked and hated explicitly for being Jews, is pretty rare on the ground, at least in public debate (though undoubtedly more common today than it was only a few years back). Even in those parts of the world where the most virulent anti-Semitic language can be found, many people argue that they don’t hate Jews because they are Jews, but because of what they’ve done: controlling the media, invading Muslim lands, controlling the world’s financial organisations, controlling Congress, you take your pick.

“I’m not a racist, but the crimes black men commit are disgusting, and we need the police to robustly defend our homes”, “Some of my best friends are gay and I’ve got no problem with them, but the traditional family is the bedrock of society and needs defending.” We’ve all heard these arguments before. They should be easily dismissed, but the claim that one’s views are legitimate because they focus on matters political not personal is one of the most persistent defences of prejudice and one of the trickiest to disentangle.

Indeed, the suggestion that political groups are using allegations of anti-Semitism to shut down legitimate criticism of Jewish politics is certainly nothing new. In the 1930s, arguably the most influential anti-Semite in the United States was the radical Catholic priest and radio talk show celebrity, Father Charles Edward Coughlin. Coughlin rode to fame during the early depression years by attacking the international plutocratic class for driving the United States into the ground, fostering inequality, and ignoring the needs of the American people. He was also a passionate anti-Communist. He argued that the international elites and the professional revolutionary radicals shared a set of atheistic and modernist political values unmoored from any real commitment to timeless religious truths or the community. At his peak, his radio hour, syndicated across the US by CBS, reached tens of millions of people. Stories were told of referees stopping Sunday football matches to allow schoolboys to listen to his sermons. It was said in his home town of Detroit that you could walk along some streets and listen to the sermon uninterrupted as it came through the windows of each of the houses, one after the other.

Coughlin was involved in a populist effort to challenge FDR for the presidency in 1936, a third party campaign that, like most, went disastrously wrong. As his reputation and influence began to decline in the late 1930s, he became increasingly radical and conspiratorial. Complaints about exploitative banks increasingly turned into attacks on Jewish bankers. He began to praise, and even quote, leading Nazis. He attacked the US democratic system, which seemed to him hopelessly corrupted, and began to speak in favour of corporatist models of government. By 1940, the FBI was investigating allegations that he had been involved with the organisation of militant Christian Front groups that had been attacking Jewish shopfronts in American cities. Eventually, during the war years, the Church placed a ban on him giving public political statements in order to pre-empt his federal investigation, and he lived out his last years in relative obscurity.

Often people conflate Coughlin’s influence at its peak, in the early 1930s, with his radical and proto-fascist agitation in the late 1930s to suggest that support for fascism in America at this time was larger than actually it was. In fact, as Coughlin’s politics grew more extreme, support for him declined and opposition grew exponentially. Jewish groups, liberals, radicals, conservatives and even other populists criticised his attacks on Jews as dangerous, divisive and even “un-American.”

As pressure on Coughlin grew, he responded to attacks by defending his position as legitimate on the grounds that his complaints were essentially political. He had no problem with “good Jews”, as he put it, only those Jews who engaged in dangerous political activities. In one radio sermon, entitled “Not anti-Semitism but Anticommunism,” he argued that those people accusing him of anti-Semitism were actually trying to silence him because he was a leading critic of Communism’s influence in America. “Would not a dispassionate judge be inclined, then, to conclude that the effort on the part of my critics to assail my person and scoff at my presentation of facts — would he not conclude that this is related to their desire to protect Communism?,” he asked. “There is no Jewish question in America,” he argued. “Please God, may there never be one. However, there is a question of Communism in America. … Please God, we will solve it. If Jews persist in supporting Communism directly or indirectly, that will be regrettable.”

With hindsight, the manipulation seems obvious, but at the time fears of Communism were rising and the manoeuvre helped to confuse many Americans who were worried about Coughlin’s increasingly aggressive statements but naturally reluctant to do anything that might be seen to shut down legitimate political debate.

It was a canny move. But what we might call the “political defence” was not unique to Coughlin. George Sylvester Viereck, a leading pro-German propagandist operating in the United States during the interwar years, travelled to Germany in 1933 and, according to his account of the visit, met with Hitler to discuss American politics and how best to influence it. Viereck told the Führer that Germany’s reputation would be significantly strengthened if their propaganda in the US was directed at “internationalists” and Communists — what Viereck termed “bad” Jews — rather than the Jewish people as a whole. Indeed, this is what much of the pre-war pro-Nazi propaganda in the West looked like: efforts to explicitly attack Jews as Jews were watered down while efforts to present attacks upon Jews as essentially political criticisms were played up. This is why there was such a strong (and enduring) effort to associate Jews with Bolshevism, among other things.

You can see the “political defence” in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which after all is essentially a “political” attack upon Jews for supposedly leading a global conspiracy to set up a world government. You can even read it into the Blood Libel, the ancient smear that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian children in order to use their blood on religious events, or in the “Jews killed Christ” canards. The idea that anti-Semitism is not anti-Semitism because it is political, because it is about what Jews do not who they are, is a lie as old as anti-Semitism itself.

Does this mean that any attempt to criticise Jewish groups politically is anti-Semitic? Does this mean that you’re not allowed to say anything negative about Israel? Of course it doesn’t. There wouldn’t be such controversy on this question if there was a clear line between what’s acceptable and unacceptable in public debate. All I’m suggesting here is that the line between anti-Semitism and acceptable criticism of Israel, or of attacks on “Zionists,” is not one that can be drawn on the basis of whether the complaint involves “politics” or not.

Politics is always involved in these matters. The real question is prejudice.

If your criticism is so sweeping that it obscures all complexity; if your rendering of the situation means that one side in a conflict has no redeeming features; if your criticism places close to 100% of the blame on one side or group and ignores the way events unfold in a messy and tragic world; if your criticism serves to demonise and dehumanise the people you disagree with; then that’s the problem. That’s prejudice, whether it’s directed at an individual’s skin colour, religious beliefs, or politics. Prejudice, not politics, is the issue at stake. And nuance, doubt, complexity, discussion, and a willingness to accept the humanity of the people with whom you disagree are the only things that point the way to the solution.

A note on sources: I write in more detail about the connections between anti-Semitism and anticommunism in the United States in the interwar years in my book, Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War I to the McCarthy Era (Illinois, 2013), especially part III. A fuller bibliography of the subject can also be found there.

It’s a perfectly reasonable response, especially when so many humanities scholars seem not to prize clarity very highly. You only need to look at the many news articles that do the rounds each year about awful academic prose to realise the risks such writing can pose to the messages that these individuals are trying to promote. Not only does it undermine the specific content of the piece, it discredits the entire practice of scholarship. Most famously, of course, there’s the Sokal hoax — in 1996 a physics professor, Alan Sokal, managed to get a several-thousand-word article of absolute nonsense published in an American academic journal that published on postmodern theory. The editors apparently failed to spot the difference between technical precision and utter garbage. But there are many more examples to be found. It seems commonsensical to many outside the academy that there are people in it who are spinning out their well-paid careers generating pages and pages of verbal compost — so why should we be obliged to read them?

There is a response to this. Often, the reason people are writing in a difficult manner is because they want to get the reader to think twice about a subject they think they already know well. The act of presenting a message in difficult language, or in a convoluted way, can oblige a reader to slow down and respond to the intended meaning of the words as if they were approaching the concept anew. Call a thing by a name you’ve been using for years, and there’s a chance you won’t even think twice; describe it in an unusual or difficult way and maybe you’ll look again. Maybe you’ll see it differently as a result. This notion, of defamiliarisation, can take many forms but is central to a huge amount of difficult twentieth-century writing, poetry and critical theory. I think it has a lot going for it, but when you’re in the middle of some mind-bendingly weird and difficult French obscurantism, it’s still a pain in the rear end.

Moreover, built into this strategy is the hope, even the expectation, that the reader will do the work necessary to fully engage with the text as intended. It is an approach to writing that’s the very opposite of the lemon-sorbet New Yorker prose style, a way of writing that’s designed almost to be invisible as it slips down the mental gullet. And while giving tough prose the effort it requires can reap dividends, it can also discourage a whole pile of others who never get to the end or ever really feel they understand the messages being imparted. Defeated readers walk away feeling excluded or, worse, stupid. Those who do conquer the text — and often it does come to resemble a kind of struggle for conquest — assume a sense of intellectual superiority, a belief that their ability to cope with the demands of the mental assault course marks them out from others. Their triumph is not rewarded with a greater understanding of and connection to the world, but by becoming a member of a particular, self-regarding elite, distanced from everyone else by their certainty of being smarter than the average reader.

In short, the strategy of defamiliarisation, while a crucial tool for questioning things that appear straightforward, comes with risks: the risk of losing many of the people that you’re trying to bring along with you, and the risk of separating you off into a self-styled elective group who believe you are, unlike others, uniquely able to see the reality behind the Matrix.

Because this approach to communication is concerned with looking twice at the way things are in life and trying to think differently about how they could be, it is a strategy that has been more appealing to people on the political left than on the right, and it is the left that most fully bears the risks that are attendant upon it. If you are encouraged to think about communication in these terms, you can start to fall into the kind of belief that it’s the responsibility of other people to understand where you’re coming from rather than your responsibility to persuade them. If other people don’t get what you’re saying, it must be their fault.

I can’t help but think that the increasingly insistent demands that we contextualise the political choices taken by the British left, that others are obliged to work to understand the environment that Corbyn and his allies are operating in, that outsiders must recognise and acknowledge the ways in which his poor performance is conditioned by a hostile press , by a PLP that won’t go along with him, the perpetual refrain that he’s not been given a fair shot, is all a reflection of this same underlying orientation — the belief and approach that suggests that others need to do the work to “get” what’s really going on among the community of critical radicals, rather than that the radicals need to do the work to persuade people to come along with them. Go too far down this road and you end up with a politics dominated by self-justification and self-pity, blaming everyone else for being too dumb, too immoral, or too trapped within a media-driven false consciousness to recognise the truth that only you and your allies can see.

If the danger of this attitude is insularity, the threat posed by the opposite approach — focusing entirely on talking to people in the language they understand and are comfortable and familiar with — is pandering. If you believe that your only purpose in political debate is to tell people what they already think, to speak in terms they already understand and accept, then you end up seeming unprincipled — or, worse still, pointless. And that’s certainly something that could be levelled against some members of the moderate wing of the Labour Party: to eager to say whatever’s necessary to get votes, whether they believe it or not.

The art of politics lies in navigating between these two poles: standing for something, speaking up for your beliefs, but not speaking only to only the small group who are willing to work to see the world in exactly the same way as you do and not expecting everyone else to go on a long march simply because you fancy taking a trip. Between naval-gazing and pandering lies an alternative approach to political communication: one that defines democracy in terms that respect other citizens as people of equal potential and equal capacity for reason, but without confusing that respect with the assumption that the mass of people are always right. A belief that people are open to and capable of persuasion, but that it’s the advocate’s job to persuade. Not hector, persuade. Democratic politics at its best is about using the language we share to build new alliances, not parroting things that voters already think, or speaking in ways that shut them out and telling yourself you were never given a proper chance. But there’s no doubt that it’s a bloody difficult thing to get right.

What depresses me is lack of curiosity about why people support Corbyn. From people who wrote at length about why people support UKIP/BNP.

I saw this tweet this morning. In response, here’s a bit of possibly ill-thought-through material that’s part of an effort to take the people I disagree with seriously…

Here are the things you’ll hear when you listen to Labour opponents of Corbyn. Corbynistas won’t listen because they are a “post-truth” community, immune to reason and rational thought, they’ll say. Corbyn’s fans are tied into an emotional, visceral movement of virtue-signalling and this leaves them incapable of rational thinking. These people, you’ll hear, don’t care about winning. They’d rather be moral than actually make a difference. They’re well-off middle class voters who won’t actually stand to lose anything if Labour stays out of power for a decade. They completely fail to recognise the achievements of New Labour and the vast gulf between the policies of those years and the Tory government of today. They’re a cult.

Look, you can argue about these points as much as you like. An effective political movement undoubtedly has to be about both principles and the strategy to put principles into practice, and you can certainly construct a plausible case for saying that the Corbyn agenda is too focused on Labour’s internal struggles to ever deliver wider electoral success. It happens to be a view I agree with. But whether you agree with it or not, I think it’s only fair to admit there’s a counter-argument that can, and is, being made by the Corbynistas. Things that anti-Corbynistas point to as proving Corbyn’s failure — the loss of support of MPs in parliament, the poor polling data — can be explained away as either sporadic data points or as a product of conservative resistance to change. And, as Tony Blair showed with his disastrous intervention in last year’s Labour election, arguing that one needs to think strategically about political viability can easily be presented as arguing that you have to give up on what you believe in. To be fair, that’s not actually what Blair said. Still, Corbynistas are right when they say there’s no point seeking power if in doing so you abandon your principles.

More important, though, these arguments are all ones that work better for preaching to the converted than understanding the loyalists. They’re the same category of arguments that Remain supporters levelled against Leavers in the election, and which in part contributed to their defeat. They’re the kinds of arguments that were thrown at Scottish Nationalists during the IndyRef: an election that was won, but an argument that was lost. In terms of thinking about how the world looks from Corbynopolis, they’re not only unenlightening, they’re probably quite unhelpful. We can find things profoundly silly and self-indulgent about the “social movement” discourse that surrounds the Corbyn movement and it’s very tempting to mock — I’m undoubtedly guilty of this — but let’s not delude ourselves that the disparagement of those we disagree with makes the slightest difference to a convinced Corbyn supporter.

For someone who supported Corbyn to stop supporting him, none of these arguments matter. For someone who supported Corbyn to change their mind, things are much more simple. To give up on Jeremy, two and only two things must be true:

• Jeremy must be failing
• Another candidate must offer a greater chance of putting their ideals into action

Let’s be clear: both of these must be true. If your guy is failing but there’s no better alternative, then they, like most of us, will just go down fighting.

It may be that some supporters from last year have concluded that Jeremy is failing. People who observe parliamentary politics closely, who believe that leadership is about bringing together a diverse coalition behind a shared political agenda and about communicating this message effectively, these people may have lost faith with Corbyn over the past nine months. There’s some evidence to suggest that the people out door-knocking are aware of how unpopular Corbyn is with the wider electorate, and how his messages are failing to get through. But the vast majority of Corbyn supporters do not believe Jeremy is failing, on these terms or any others. The period in which Corbyn has been in power has seen a series of moments when Tory policies were rolled back, and elections in which the Labour party has either won or not done disastrously when its critics were warning much worse would happen. There was a major defeat on Europe, but most supporters of Jeremy would refuse to accept this had anything to do with him; indeed, they would argue that his half-hearted attitude to Europe better represented the British public’s view than the attitudes of the official Remain campaign. Again, there are all sorts of points that could be offered to challenge the logic of these arguments. Still, it’s clear there’s insufficient concrete evidence of failure right now to justify turning the heads of people who are signed up to the project.

And whatever problems there may be with the Corbyn project, for most people who voted for him last year there’s definitely not evidence enough to justify jumping ship when the only other ship around seems leaky.

And here’s the rub. Why should someone who supported Jeremy last year, perhaps someone who even joined the Labour Party because of him, support someone like Owen Smith, whose pitch seems to be that he’s just like Jeremy but gives better TV interviews? Why should someone in that situation believe the people who have, for a year, been attacking them as idiots and fools and post-truth activists, when they promise that Smith will deliver the priorities they want?

This is why running against Corbyn in the Labour selectorate right now is such a sticky wicket. What can Smith point to that would justify a leap in the dark? Either you say that you disagree with Jeremy on key issues, and risk alienating those people who supported him (i.e. the bulk of the party and of the registered supporters), or you say that you basically agree with Jeremy on everything and in so doing make the idea of replacing him seem pointless. All you’re left with is a relatively small group of people who would be willing to abandon their political community and sign up to a new and untried leader because of issues like “understanding the policy-making process”, “management of the parliamentary party”, and “message discipline.” Don’t get me wrong, I think these things are vitally important, but I hope I have enough self-awareness to recognise that they hardly add up to an inspiring program of hope and change.

Anyone with a long track record to point to is likely to have had to compromise politically (see Eagle), and that will be held against them. Anyone new enough to not have a track record of decisions capable of parsing (Smith) will for that very reason also have very little to commend them.

In short, right now, I can see no convincing reason why Corbynistas would change their minds, at least not in sufficient numbers to deliver defeat in the election. And the only evidence likely to reach that threshold — crushing defeat in a general election — could end up potentially also delivering a fatal blow to the Labour Party’s hopes of being a party of government at any time in the next decade, perhaps even of being a viable political party at all.