I've noticed this with both Republicans and Democrats. For some odd reason, they both seem keen to say that past Presidents of the other party would either A) Be a member of the other party B) Be disgusted with the state of their own party. The worst example is probably JFK, who often gets painted by conservatives as a proto-Reagan, despite the fact that most of the Great Society (which they say keeps people poor via welfare) was merely stalled JFK initiatives.
AHC: PM Hitchens
- Thread starter Hubert Humphrey Fan 1968
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Probably a few things going on there. First off, Americans have a tendency toward canonization of presidents, so after a certain point, you can't say "That damned JFK was just a scum-sucking liberal commie-lover." Since most of the electorate has a fond opinion of Kennedy, you have to make it sound like he was a good guy, but who'd be on your side if he was still alive.
Mind you, that doesn't always apply. I don't think I've ever heard a Republican say that LBJ would be in their party were he still alive, nor a Democrat say that Nixon would be in theirs. Of course, those two gents are of rather tainted historical memory.
20th Century American presidents I'm pretty sure I've heard claimed by the other party...
Teddy Roosevelt(can't quite recall, but I'd be surpised if no Democrat ever claimed him, especially on environmental and economic issues)
FDR("We'll just forget he had Alger Hiss as an adviser; can't beat a four-time winner.")
Truman(actually kind of surprising, given that he didn't even stand for re-election, but I guess the folksiness and plain-speaking charm is hard to resist)
Eisenhower(refusal to endorse the Suez invasion and Military-Industrial Complex speech have some liberals and even leftists making him out to the spiritual godfather of Abbie Hoffman)
Kennedy(handsome, died young, beloved by all)
Reagan(though, in my experience, this tends to be less from Democrats per se, than from genuine Republicans sincerely ticked off about the direction of the party, but with an overly romanticized memory of the gipper)
It's always amusing whenever people who bring up the 1953 coup in any discussion about Modern Iran turn around and praise one of the engineers of said coup.
thatsbunkers
Banned
I wouldn’t say its that Peter doesn’t care about economics, I think he is an economic leftist. He only abandoned the left for religious reasons, he definitely still kept a lot of his left wing beliefs
I never said he didn't - I said he wants the economics that will enable his preferred society. Much easier to control society in a more controlled economy.
G.K. Chesterton, of course, would be the par excellente example of this viewpoint in the UK.
This is interesting to speculate on - it is indeed the great irony of Brexit (article touching on this in the Guardian this week and pointing out the strong Remain views of some of those who have stuck with the Tories despite the long-term Thatcher legacy in places like the Cotswolds) that, while initially supported largely by the Tory right and seen in the Blair years as a rural or shire position, it was facilitated above all by the votes of former heavy-industrial areas, admittedly partially because Labour were led by someone steeped in the Foot/Benn Eurosceptic tradition who wasn't inclined to go to those places and campaign hard for Remain as all other leaders from Kinnock (in the later part of his leadership at least) to Miliband would have been - but I wonder whether the heavily rural, pre-industrial orientation within PH's view of England/Britain might have worked against him had he become an MP in, say, Barnsley, however pro-Leave such an area was?
Peter's claimed concern for the former heavy-industrial areas and their social and economic decline always seems rather forced to me, as if he's having to convince himself of it (the same argument he always made for why Christopher had to write whole books making the atheist case, which he said his brother wouldn't need to write if he were confident about it). He wrote a column quite recently where he inadvertently gave this away - when making the case for more funding for what little remains of British industry and manufacturing, he said "the government clearly regard the industrial parts of Britain as a foreign country. Fine." Admittedly he meant this as a hook into saying (I think) that money given to foreign aid should be redirected to restore the economies of these places, but I felt he was giving something away about himself - that for all his boasted respect for socialist nobility and calls for economic independence and self-sufficiency, and belief that we should have kept the mines open &c, he still has a whiff of the Telegraph's "three Ws" about him (Worsthorne/Wharton/Waugh) which may have been opposed to the hucksterism of Thatcher, the boastful anti-intellectualism of Essex man, Sky TV &c, but which was simultaneously almost *pre-capitalist* to such an extent that it could never fully embrace the claims of heavy-industrial areas to be truly English or even British, and indeed had seen the power of such areas as a profound thread to British stability in the immediate pre-Thatcher period.
I'm not saying PH wouldn't have campaigned hard for the retention of an industrial base had he become an MP for a socially conservative, insular and backward-looking Northern seat (though he could never, ever have been an MP in Manchester or Liverpool, with their Remain votes and much greater antipathy towards Eng-nat flagwaving driven largely by their Irish influence and cosmopolitanism) but I do wonder whether the voters of such an area might have seen through him and the culture gap might have caused problems after a while, whether there might almost have been a sort of Jarvis Cocker "Common People" situation. Whether his claimed support and identification might have seemed forced, and he'd have been seen as a public school outsider "trying too hard". Ultimately I'd be inclined to speculate that in a parallel world without Thatcher (and obviously only then), where restricting the impact of capitalism on the shires was not completely pushed out of the mainstream of British Right-wing thought, he'd have fitted better as a rural Tory MP than as a Northern Labour MP in any timeline, real or imaginary. I'd be open to being persuaded otherwise, though, and certainly I can understand the argument that he could have led a "left-wing nationalist" movement from the backbenches and maybe even been an outside chance for an "insurgent" leadership bid which, as we all know, actually did happen and then was far more electorally successful than anyone imagined. So maybe. But I think that rural, feudal aspect of his outlook would have required some adjustments - there is of course the argument that much of Old Labour has more in common with Shire Toryism than it does with the metropolitan, trendy version, but its exponents have always been quite reluctant to recognise that similarity, so it would have been best had he never rediscovered that aspect of his childhood. I know that he says the "working class as vanguard" element was shot out of him by having to work with The Real Working Class, as Mailites (however unconventional he is within that description) always do, but he'd have needed to retain more of his original ideas to fit, with his manner and delivery, in an environment where working-class pride is essential.
re. the above, I also think that had Peter Hitchens become an MP in one of the areas of the UK where Soviet sympathies were once quite strong, he'd be very frustrated now by people thinking that he takes his pro-Russian stance because he sees modern Russia as the descendant of the Soviet Union, rather than because he admires its reversion to *pre-Soviet* politics. So again, he might be taken wrongly - as a Soviet nostalgist - in the areas which voted most heavily for a sort of Old Labour Brexit, and resent that. He has written about the way some railway staff he knows like his pro-Russian writings for the wrong reasons, as he sees it.
I must say, I was expecting more talk about Christoper then Peter, given that Christopher was a much better speaker (but TBF, the points raised here about Peter are very true, so maybe I should have expected differently).
Robin:
Interesting, but somewhat complicated, post on Peter Hitchens' political contradictions.
I didn't follow his career as closely as I did that if his brother, but I am familiar with the somewhat awkward positionings of what in Canada we call Red Tories(and here I am using the original sense of the term ie. economically interventionist, socially conservative, as opposed to the newer meaning, which is basically the reverse, ie. a slash-and-burn neo-liberal who shows up for the Pride Parade). One of the few things I've read by Peter was a denunciation of the Iraq War(at the time the war was just starting), in which he somehow linked it to rock music, calling it "the Rock And Roll War". Presumably, the warmongering had the same sort of bombastic narcissism that he associated with rock music. Or something along those lines.
I'm not an expert on UK politics, but I'd imagine that there isn't a huge market these days for politicians who are a) supportive of left-wing economics, and b) still scandalized by Mick Jagger shaking his bum on Top Of The Pops. I think the two positions pretty much cancel each other out, electorally speaking.
There's a lot more to think about in your post, but I'm pressed for time. Maybe later.
Yes, I think PH very strongly associated Tony Blair's love of rock music with a desire to follow messianic American schemes for "re-ordering the world" - he saw the war as rooted in a desire to destroy traditional, rooted nations which he linked to the impact of rock. This *has* caused a slight resurgence of the Richard Hoggart sort of Leftism in the UK, but it remains a highly contentious and divisive issue - generally speaking, it is boomer liberals who resent the notion that things they don't like politically are influenced by rock, and younger Leftists who have partially rehabilitated aspects of Hoggartism. PH's views on this respect are representative more of people both older (now virtually all gone) *and* younger than him than his own generation, as he will repeatedly say. His MoS column yesterday was largely an attack on those who see Brexit merely as a trojan horse for increasing the hegemony of American pop culture over the UK still further; all I can say to that is that I told him so, I warned him that this is how it would be and that Leave voters know far less about the older British culture than Remain voters do.
I think there *has* been a comparative resurgence of the position you describe in the UK, but only on an intellectual fringe, and the resurgence has to be put in context because it had more or less ceased to exist at all, once the boomers finally reached critical mass in my own adolescence during the 1990s. It certainly isn't a mass market position, and the success of Corbyn has been conditional on the fact that he has learnt the lessons of things like the Marine Offences Act (virtually all British people of his age knew people when young who were initially inspired by Wilson's modernity rhetoric but ended up voting for Heath because of that) and party policy is really no closer to the Arts Council/Third Programme aspect of the Attlee inheritance than Blair was: if Labour *had* been of that ilk in 2017, you'd almost certainly have been looking at the Tory landslide that everyone expected.
I think there *has* been a comparative resurgence of the position you describe in the UK, but only on an intellectual fringe, and the resurgence has to be put in context because it had more or less ceased to exist at all, once the boomers finally reached critical mass in my own adolescence during the 1990s. It certainly isn't a mass market position, and the success of Corbyn has been conditional on the fact that he has learnt the lessons of things like the Marine Offences Act (virtually all British people of his age knew people when young who were initially inspired by Wilson's modernity rhetoric but ended up voting for Heath because of that) and party policy is really no closer to the Arts Council/Third Programme aspect of the Attlee inheritance than Blair was: if Labour *had* been of that ilk in 2017, you'd almost certainly have been looking at the Tory landslide that everyone expected.
I would regard Jason Cowley (New Statesman editor) and Adrian Tempany (author of a critical book on the Premier League) as exemplars of Britain's "New Old Left" which has emerged post-Blair, where Mick Jagger is seen as quite an important figure laying the groundwork for Thatcherism. Seumas Milne (a former senior Guardian journalist who is now a prominent figure within Corbyn's team) also put forward such views on Jagger while posting on Twitter, before he had his current job. But Labour won back places like Slough & Ipswich *despite* the partial association with such views, not because of them.
You may be familiar with the movie The Boat That Rocked. While as far as I can recall, it does not outright lie and say that the relevant laws were put in by Conservatives, viewers would very much come away with the impression that those were the types of people who shut down pirate radio. (The movie also implied that the Queen shared this antipathy to rock, which would be a little odd, since it's set AFTER the Beatles got their OBEs).
I swear on a stack of BCPs that I was not aware of this anti-Jaggerism on the British left when I wrote that bit about his bum on TOTP! I actually got that image from a highly negative review of Allan Bloom's Closing Of The American Mind, where the writer(likely a boomer, given when and where it was published) jokingly accused Bloom of secretly getting off on watching Jagger's ass on TV. Where I'm going with all this is that, while Bloom and his fellow neo-cons seemed to share the "New Old Left" contempt for sexually-charged, narcissistic pop culture, they went in very different directions when it came to foreign policy. (In fact, those were some of the people Christopher Hitchens aligned with in his later days, as he quite openly admitted.)
Slough and Ipswich in this context represent sort of artistic, bohemian milieus? Yeah, I'd have to assume that sounding like a member of the Tory Housewives Cleanup Campaign is not gonna win the hearts and minds out there, even if you're synthesizing it with egalitarian economics.
But I'm curious about one thing...
Among these younger leftists who have embraced Hoggartism and what I assume is its hostility to rock, what sort of music WOULD they like? I guess it's just such a given for me that anyone born after the late 1940s has a positive attitude toward rock and its derivative or allied forms(eg. folk, hip hop), I can't imagine a young person being actively against it, without coming off as highly eccentric.
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Oh, and one more thing...
Do you mean that some Remainers opposed Leave on the grounds that it would increase the influence of American culture, but that the Leaver Hitchens thinks that this won't happen?
And by "I told him so", you mean you agree that Leave would mean more American influence?
To a large degree, I think "American culture" is very much a Rorschach test, and people see what they want, and judge what they see as they want, depending on whatever agenda they're pushing. My mother(French Canadian Catholic, partly rural, born in the mid-1930s), told me in the late 1970s that "With more American influence, Canada will get more magazines like Playboy and Mad." Those being her idea of subversive publications.
Nowadays, of course, Canadians congratulate themselves on being so much hipper and edgier than 'Mericans who would think something like Mad is cutting-edge satire.
Do you mean that some Remainers opposed Leave on the grounds that it would increase the influence of American culture, but that the Leaver Hitchens thinks that this won't happen?
And by "I told him so", you mean you agree that Leave would mean more American influence?
To a large degree, I think "American culture" is very much a Rorschach test, and people see what they want, and judge what they see as they want, depending on whatever agenda they're pushing. My mother(French Canadian Catholic, partly rural, born in the mid-1930s), told me in the late 1970s that "With more American influence, Canada will get more magazines like Playboy and Mad." Those being her idea of subversive publications.
Nowadays, of course, Canadians congratulate themselves on being so much hipper and edgier than 'Mericans who would think something like Mad is cutting-edge satire.
No, he isn't using that as a metaphor. He's genuinely stuck in a fifties culturewar against everything that's happened since, well, I was going to say since Glenn Miller's plane went down, but he wouldn't approve of big band music either. He actually thinks that the decline of trilbies and double-breasted suits is an American/Marxist plot. You think I'm shitting you, right? Nope, read the Abolition of Britain. He genuinely is the sort of person who would denounce, let's say, comics. And it's most likely Roy Jenkins that was 'behind' them.
You're right in identifying George Grant/David Orchard-style wariness of America and its influence is something Peter would share with them, but man, putting them and Peter in the same breath is pretty unfair on that much more respectable Cannuck tendency.
He's bonkers, and I don't mean knowingly ridiculous or an American-style demagogue winking at the left, I mean he's a genuine paid-up believer in the conspiracy theory interpretation of history.
His gradual return to far-left economics and becoming a Corbyn supporter is, as VM noted, because he views destruction of the free market as a core part of a return to cutting off the social progress since the forties he utterly despises and can never believe was an organic process.
He firmly believes himself to be a Conservative and the rest of the world which goes under that flag to be In Error, which on top of what I mentioned earlier in reference to the purpose of this thread, should add questions about his basic knowledge of Big People Stuff. In fact Peter is recognisably, wholly undeveloped since I was young twenty years ago. Which I suppose is fitting. I suspect Peter believes that too much knowledge has spoiled many a man.
Peter genuinely thinks there are Bolsheviks in control of the BBC. Be wary of throwing around the depth of analysis of him some posters in this thread have.
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Yeah, I knew he wasn't using it as a metaphor, in the sense of Two Things Actually Unrelated But Being Compared For The Sake Of Easy Understanding(eg. "Las Vegas is the Mecca of gambling"). It was clear to me from what I read that he hates rock music, and regards it's ethos as connected to that of the Iraq War.
And were you under the impression that I was disagreeing with, or minimizing, Robin's, or for that matter, your, presentation of PH's views? I wasn't trying to do that at all. I have no reason to doubt anything that's been written about him here.
And were you under the impression that I was disagreeing with, or minimizing, Robin's, or for that matter, your, presentation of PH's views? I wasn't trying to do that at all. I have no reason to doubt anything that's been written about him here.
Err.... yes of course he was using it as a metaphor! The entire ethos of the Iraq War as projected by Bush and Blair was a bombastic, gung ho atmosphere entirely like the pumped up audience at any good rock gig. Or certainly that's what Blair wanted in tge UK. He didnt get it, of course; happily most Brits had more sense, but not our MPs.
And whilst PH has some views which are not "pc" and are unfashionable, he is far from bonkers; he usually wins arguments he enters on rationality, but certainly not by the emotional support of the audience.
His support for Corbyn seems based on support for a man who has the integrity to stick to his guns, rather than the views themselves.
But no, he could never become an MP, let alone PM; he cannot fake convincingly.
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Oh no, I just think the discussion as a whole was in danger of elevating its treatment of him to the level of a public intellectual, or even on the polemicist level of his brother. He's not on either of those levels. He's much more Ann Coulter-on-the-new-York-Times-bestseller-list.
To provide some context for readers, Peter calls the current Prime Minister, unironically, 'Chairman May'. The PM in question, it might be pointed out, is someone who is compatible with Peter's long, deep obsession with grammar schools, and several other issues.
Rational? Do me a favour.
my guess is that it'd hinge on something occurring in Kurdistan--either we have a British/EU venture that goes better than a hundred Sierra Leones, a pro-Western liberation radiation (or so the news tells us), against both Baathists and Islamists (boosting Chris) or we have a mountain-bound disaster that makes Iraq '03 look like Grenada '83 (Peter); on top of that, even making Chris an MP would require Labour to shiver to bits beforehand (and Peter the Tories)