I DON’T often feel sorry for the British journalistic class. It’s become a cliché to denounce the partisanship and purchased propaganda of the mainstream media, but every now and then an article comes along that demands a deeper and more melancholy explanation of why they so frequently get everything wrong.
The frenetic few weeks in which the European and British establishments suddenly found themselves deeply invested in the fate of Greenland as President Trump bullishly asserted American intentions has thrown this into sharp relief.
From the Guardian to the Daily Telegraph to the Critic, all cast his actions as a case of Trump dementia, rampant egoism, a crude and dishonourable betrayal of established allies, or the reactionary imperialism of a man gone mad (China’s imperialism conveniently buried the while). The narrative was that Denmark’s honour must be defended against the brutish Trump. Never mind whether the geopolitical case being made by the US might warrant consideration. Damned utterly for his break with conventional manners.
What also singularly failed to occur amid this outraged retaliation was any realistic assessment of the other potential rough actors, China or Russia. Or of Europe’s singular incapacities and hypocrisies as the alleged defenders of Greenland’s virtue. Or how pathetically absurd they must seem to Americans aware that Europe’s virtue as a whole has been shielded for 80 years by a nation paying for the continent’s defence while being treated, from well before Donald Trump’s arrival, with that cool, achingly sophisticated disdain of Europeans convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority over their more powerful protector.
Nor did practical consideration of Europe’s sheer weakness, its military incapacity to provide realistic opposition to the US, or to China or to Russia should any of those seriously entertain the notion of seizing Greenland by invasion, factor into any of these fainting spells. The British journalistic class revealed themselves to be as removed from realities as their European and British leaders.
One Daily Telegraph article headlined ‘Britain must declare independence from America or it will die’, blaming the US for the plight we are in, throws this moral confusion into sharp relief. In a masterclass of truth and delusion, writer Tim Stanley, taking Ireland as an example of the effect of America’s negative influence, stumbles his way to all the wrong conclusions.
First he writes: ‘Ireland, for example, has rightly denounced Trump’s tariff war on the nations that oppose his aggressive takeover of Greenland – yet the country is a model of globalist acquiescence at the cost of sovereignty. It has embraced free markets (low corporate taxes) and free movement (mass migration), with the result that Dublin is outwardly Irish – still beautiful – yet unaffordable and embroiled in a violent identity crisis.’
In short, American capital has made all of us rich, but it has also made us duplicates of the US. But what Stanley is lamenting here are really three separate things.
The first is European and British cultural and political weakness compared to the US. The fact that our nations are no longer of any comparable strength to the US (even collectively) in terms of their ability to dictate how the world is ordered, where money accumulates and where it does not, and who benefits from the decisions of major corporations. All of this is true, as any glance at the number of major companies based in the US compared to the number based in the UK or Europe (and the collective wealth they represent) will ascertain. From McDonald’s on the high street to Amazon online, US companies bestride us all.
And the cultural corollary of relative influence pertains too. The fact remains for us and for Europeans that American movies, American fashion, American celebrities and American ideologies all dominate those of Europe and Britain. We wear jeans and eat burgers, our kids obsess about Taylor Swift. And yes, US academia is very much to blame for many of the utterly disastrous political (culture wars) concepts formulated there, like identity politics, Critical Race Theory or like the BLM movement and its gestures. They all originated in the US and spread to us.
The second strand of Stanley’s complaint references real phenomena – the impact of global capital and the twin policies of pursuing global investment and open borders (which facilitate trade, but harm existing populations within nation states).
Again, what Stanley is saying is true to the extent that he recognises these things exist and recognises these things are damaging – that global capital runs contrary to nationalism and harms civilian populations in Western nations via social breakdown, the loss of a cohesive identity and competition for jobs via both outsourcing abroad and importing foreign workers, consequently suppressing wages and living standards for native workers. What Stanley says about Ireland is correct. It demonstrates indeed the cost of open borders and of following flawed short term economic solutions to deeper problems.
But here we see one of the curious blind spots that is so telling and so endemic to the British journalistic class.
Stanley bemoans this as the fault of America amid of a virulent and snobbish condemnation of Trump while failing to notice that the European leaders he agrees with on Greenland are far more enthusiastic about globalist policies and their outcomes than the American president. Nor does he seem to notice that much of the European disdain of Trump derives directly from his defiance of the global capital model of open borders and cultural and national self-erasure as a requisite for economic success.
In his description of these terrible things that have indeed ruined European nations and are continuing to do so, Stanley manages to ignore that these same damaging policies were enacted in the US – exactly those Trump condemned. The very reason why Trump was voted into power was his commitment to opposing that which Stanley cites as destroying Ireland – the idea that you can simultaneously attract inward investment and protect borders and the rights and prosperity of the people of your country. Trump has severed that false link for the sake of America. It is a link Stanley himself despises, and yet Stanley still blames Trump for these policies, and not the prior US administrations nor existing European and British ones which are absolutely culpable too.
It doesn’t seem to register with Stanley that the Trump administration is offering to Europe a very clear example of what all Western nations should do if they really sought to protect their own citizens, retain their national identities and defy the globalist policies which demand their destruction.
Stanley’s third lament is that US influence has left us with no sense of our own identity, which is ironic given that the US administration under the ‘Anglophile’ Trump has been openly begging Europe and Britain to rediscover their heritage and to reclaim their national identities they are lose culturally by virtue of their own decisions on mass immigration.
In other words, Stanley frets about American influence at precisely at the moment when an American president offers support for our traditional identity and a defence of our traditional freedoms, together with an economic and geopolitical model of sane progress beyond a failed and corrupt globalism.
He expresses horror at the notion of following the American example. What does he support or favour instead? The old embrace of European elites still wedded to the policies by which Europe is being assimilated into and destroyed by foreign cultures? Not by Trumpian policy or US hegemony but by the imported fundamentalism of third world immigration and by increasingly autocratic institutions like the EU who have decided that such identity is ‘racist’.
Ultimately Stanley’s struggling piece is one which shows how unfitted to new realities the pundits of Fleet Street seem to be. Those who aren’t merely repeating propaganda appear riddled with snobberies and blind spots based on their own class niceties. Their whole framing of Trump never gets beyond this all because Trump offends them – speaking and acts with less refinement but a lot more honesty that shatters the so convenient European diplomatic norm.
For all that it is pretty remarkable that anti-American resentment and European-aligned snobbery can get those lamenting the impacts of globalism to the position of hating the strongest opponent globalism has. It is equally bizarre that a writer in the supposedly right-leaning Daily Telegraph endorses the truly comical figure of leftist ineptitude that is Bernie Sanders. Sadly that is where Stanley sits by seriously advocating that the UK should divorce from Trump just at the time when his administration is offering us a realistic template of national renewal which we should enthusiastically copy.
