Fighting the Fantasists

Lord Tebbit was right about Tony Blair: "I don't think he's a liar, just a fantasist. He says whatever he likes, and then he believes it." I think that captures it alright; not so much a fraud, someone who deliberately wants to sell you a fraudulent bill of goods, as a fantasist, someone who has tricked himself into believing it will be good for us. And the ones who trick themselves, the ones who are fooled by their own sheer eagerness and ambition, are the ones who so effortlessly end up fooling us. It would be tempting to dismiss the telegenic ease with which David Cameron goes about pitching his lines as nothing more than the experienced fakery of a professional adsman, were it not for the fact that he so clearly believes in what he's saying. How can we accuse him of inauthenticity, when he says it so convincingly? It might all be a total political con job to the clear eyed straight guy, but it's a con job in which the con man himself has been conned.



My fear is that Blair and Cameron are not atypical here, but are becoming increasingly the norm as a democratic response to the growing rootlessness of society. The consequence of progressive urbanisation is that more and more people are becoming disconnected from their cultural identity. The multicultural cosmopolitans see themselves not as a people with a tradition, but as postmodern Europeans or world citizens. They have cast their loyalties so far and wide, they have no loyalties at all. They have become utterly disconnected.

Take the young Johann Hari, for example, columnist for The Independent, who has described the British Empire as a "psychopathic and murderous form of totalitarianism", and anyone who supports it as "an apologist for mass death". In light of this scholarly assertion and remarkable piece of manly restraint, we can see why the writer primarily identifies himself as an "European social democrat", and not British (his citizenship) or Scot (his place of birth) or Anglo (his English-speaking culture). Better to express yourself geographically and ideologically, than have to associate yourself with your genocidal past. But the point here is that it is not natural to suppress the cultural instincts of the community you were born into, the history and habits of your own country.

The writer is free to rail against God and the monarchy and other British institutions, against the Lords and against snobbery, but what does it say about your own snobbery when you don't have the time of day to identify with your own English-speaking readers. You can call the Empire evil, mock the good works of the Commonwealth, embrace your fetish for big continental government, but it may not be a professionally wise move to ignore the reality of the Anglosphere. There is a social revolution going on that is rapidly turning the Internet into a single online community of English-speaking peoples. The folks reading your columns are in London, New York, Toronto and Sydney, not the Parisians, Berliners and Milanos, who don't pay your salary and are not interested in what you have to say. Johann Hari is no more a European social democrat as I am a Chinese Communist. It is the stuff of pure fantasy.

"European solidarity", "World citizen" and other vapidly transnational utopian schemes are not natural. What any "citizen" should instinctively want is the survival and enhancement of the particular institutionalized cultural expressions (Samuel Francis) he was born into, also summarised as the maintenance of the nation's social ecology (Roger Scruton), which requires a little manly loyalty and dedication to carry it through - what the fantasists, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, are foolishly trying to tear down. We may be trained to think in terms of the political Left and Right, of grouping ourselves into opposing gangs and dividing criticism along an ideological spectrum; while this may still have its uses, it may be more important these days to root out the fantasists, wherever they politically reside, and cast them aside with all the prejudice and conviction we can muster.