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One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Trump campaign’s denunciation of Labour activists flying over to campaign for Kamala Harris was the language it used about Britain and the British left. In a statement headlined, “The British are coming!” it condemned this “blatant election interference” by the “far left Labour Party”, declaring that “Americans will once again reject the oppression of big government that we rejected in 1776.” Far from being a one-off, this sort of talk fits into an established narrative on the American right which variously sees Britain as a dangerous, dystopian and communistic.
This was vividly on showduring the summer riots. “Nanny-state totalitarians are destroying Great Britain,” warned Senator Ted Cruz. “The Magna Carta is on [fire emoji].” Citizens were being thrown in jail for tweets, it was claimed; the work, Elon Musk averred, of the “Woke Stasi”. Jim Hanson, author of Winning the Second Civil War: Without Firing a Shot, declared, “The UK Thought Police”– a department, perhaps, of the Woke Stasi –“owe Orwell royalties.” Jordan Peterson had previously prophesied that Britain would be “Venezuela for 20 years”. And as Musk infamously concluded:“Civil war is inevitable.”
Since he made that prediction, Britain has not yet been torn in two by internecine conflict. As febrile and disaffected as our political life may be, it’s hard to imagine 27 per cent of British voters telling pollsters that they fear civil war after the next election. Yet that is exactly what emerged from a poll by YouGov for the Times, released this week, when 1,266 Americans were asked this question between 18 and 21 October. And, as we approach the November election, the intensity of this transatlantic projection seems to instead bespeak a deep anxiety in American politics, one in which “Britain” is little more than a blank canvas on which to project long-standing American nightmares.
During the riots, the point those apocalyptic claims obscured, of course, was that people were not simply being thrown in prison for tweets, but, in most cases, for incitement. Managing the intersections between law and order, liberty and violence is a permanent struggle in any democracy. But for many of this paranoid political persuasion, it is the American right to bear arms secured by their Revolution, and Britain’s relinquishing of guns, that has opened the door to this tyranny – hence the redcoat memes that appeared among these tweets, and the Trump campaign’s invocation of 1776.
In the 1990s, this idea underwent a resurgence, as a large-scale militia movement emerged in response to cases of lethally heavy-handed federal law enforcement, as in the siege at Waco in 1993. This began with an assault on the compound of a religious cult by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms which left several dead on each side, and ended in a fire which killed the remaining cult members – on the anniversary of the start of the Revolution. Many came to believe that the United States stood in imminent danger of subjugation by the black helicopters of the One World Government, in collaboration with a treacherous federal state, and that only patriots’ home arsenals could prevent it. With reports of a recent pre-election resurgence in the militia movement, such fears still haunt America today.
Rather surprisingly, you can find some sympathy with this thinking in the work of George Orwell, the British writer to whom the American right are so quick to turn. As the era of the atom bomb dawned, he wrote that “ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism”. But when “the dominant weapon is cheap and simple” – as with the musket in the American Revolution – “the common people have a chance.” Likewise, he was clearly attracted by the freedoms he might have enjoyed, a century earlier, as an American pioneer. In 1942, in a letter to the magazine Time and Tide, Orwell even advocated using the slogan “ARM THE PEOPLE.” But while he may have yearned for the world of the pioneering farmer, alone upon the plains – for whom a gun was a guarantor of freedom – he knew it was long gone. He wanted Brits to be ready for guerrilla war with invading Germans, but he did not advocate arming the people in peacetime.
Today, the claim that the British need AR-15s is not particularly convincing – it seems more likely to bring on dystopia than to ward it off. But by pointing out how odd their logic seems in the United Kingdom, those angry tweeters risk pointing up how strange it seems even in the United States. Why are guns so vital to American freedom, in a way that they were not felt to be in, say, the 1950s? It may well be because, as the Atlantic journalist George Packer wrote in 2020, “for the sinking working class, freedom [has] lost whatever economic meaning it once had”. It has been reduced to “the slogan of a defiant and armed loneliness”. The implications of this are visible in Musk’s suggestion that restrictions on free speech meant civil war was inevitable in Britain. Could the same be implicitly true for America?
The first American Civil War, declared Abraham Lincoln, heralded a “new birth of freedom”. But what if there were a second, fought partly – as some of these tweets imply – for the right to absolute free speech, the abolition of which Britain’s perceived lurch to the far left is just a foretaste? It’s hard to see how such a catastrophe would expand freedom. With the age of the musket far behind him, Orwell fought for freedom instead by writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. The thing from which “all else follows”, as he has Winston Smith insist, is “the freedom to say that two plus two equals four”. Crucially, as the American historian Laura Beers points out in her new book Orwell’s Ghosts, his core belief was not in free speech, but true speech. That is not the freedom to insist that “two plus two equals five” – no matter how many followers you have. And this subtle but profound difference jars against a more fundamentalist American conception of a scared right to free speech, consecrated in the first amendment.
But there’s a deeper reason too: many on the American right fear that free speech is under threat anyway, regardless of their constitutional rights. The clustering of Americans into communities of like mind, charted by the journalist Bill Bishop in The Big Sort, tends to create situations where exercising freedom of speech in real life comes at a forbiddingly high social cost for those whose views don’t match those of their neighbours’. The effect of the United States’ deep-rooted religiosity is visible here, in the tendency to believe that opposing opinions are not just unfortunate or incorrect, but evil. In a forthcoming book, The Shadow Gospel, media culture specialist Whitney Phillips and political scientist Mark Brockway identify an anti-liberal “demonology” whose adherents spy a more-or-less satanic force abroad on the left, bent on destroying American society. And it’s not difficult to find examples of such absolutism at other points on the political spectrum. In a society already struggling to untangle its own paradoxical attitudes to free speech, it is all too easy for some to see Britain as a harbinger of a future they already fear.
Who can tell how the American right’s vision of Britain will affect diplomacy should Trump win the election. But, for now, none of this would matter too much here, were it not for the way that the US right’s vision of British dystopia has started to well up in our politics– in a sort of mirror image of those ties between Brits and Americans on the liberal left. At the London conference of the “National Conservatism” movement in 2023, one of its founders – the Israeli-American intellectual Yoram Harozny – announced, according to the Guardian, that “the UK was plagued with ‘neo-Marxist’ agitators who want to detach Britons from their entire past”. At the same event, the then-Conservative MP Miriam Cates announced that “a cultural Marxism” was “systematically destroying our children’s souls”. “Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory that emerged in the US in 1990s, alleging a long-term plot to undermine traditional American values by branding them as politically incorrect. The plan was supposedly hatched by the (mainly Jewish) Frankfurt School intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany for America in the 1930s. Cates is clearly not among them, but some proponents of this theory couch it in anti-Semitic terms. And while Britain has had its own debates about “political correctness”, the spectres of conspiracy and totalitarianism inherent in talk of “Cultural Marxism” speak to American nightmares, not British realities.
Butby far the most eye-opening manifestation in our politics was the blood-curdling attack ad released by the Susan Hall’s Conservative campaign for the London mayoralty, spinning off stats on drug and knife crime, and the introduction of the Ultra-Low Emissions Zone scheme, to lambast the capital’s Sadiq-tatorship. “In the depths of these narrow passageways,” growled the voice-over, “tread squads of ULEZ enforcers dressed in black, faces covered in masks, terrorising communities at the beck and call of their Labour mayor master, who’s implemented a tax on driving, forcing people to stay inside or go underground.” There were several hints of the video’s likely intellectual origins. First, there was the Hollywood-trailer narration. Then, there was the shot of passengers fleeing a tube station as “in the chaos, people seek a desperate reprieve” – which had to be removed when it turned out to actually be a clip of people seeking a desperate reprieve in Manhattan’s Penn Station. And underpinning the whole thing was the idea that ran through those tweets triggered by the riots: that Britain, with its “narrow passageways”, is sliding into a tyranny defined on American terms.
However, if there are some over the Atlantic who now fear that Britain reveals America’s near future, that is no more than a reversal of a long-running British phobia: that America reveals the terrible fate awaiting us. In recent years, British writers have been at the forefront of conjuring images of America sinking into the political abyss, from Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror to the election of a fascist president at the end of Jesse Armstrong’s Succession. And one of the most famous fictions coloured by this anxiety is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell described wartime London, full of American troops, as “Occupied Territory”; in his novel, the British Empire has been “absorbed” by the United States to form “Oceania”. So it turns out that the novelist to whom the American right turns to denounce Keir Starmer as a latter-day Stalin saw something of the totalitarian in the United States itself. And, at least at the time he was writing, he was being similarly unfair.
[See also: Why Kamala Harris was always destined to lose]