Welcome to the Age of Disruption: Time for a New Radicalism
Sunday National, 23 February 2025
Gerry Hassan
The world is living through unparalleled times. The post-war international order created by and for the USA is being unilaterally ripped up and trashed by the USA. In so doing it is establishing a new world order which looks less like the 1930s and the spectre of fascism and more like pre-1914 and the age of rival great power rivalries and competing imperialisms.
The failure of the mainstream
Across Europe, North and South America, Israel and elsewhere the march of right-wing populists strikes fear in the mainstream. Yet it is the conspicuous failure of that mainstream – across the centre-left and centre-right – which has contributed so much to, and is responsible for, the vacuum at the heart of established politics that is leading to the populist revolt.
The likes of ex-Tory Rory Stewart and ex-Blair spin doctor Alastair Campbell may be the new doyens of centrist dads and mums, but they represent the failed establishment politics of twenty years of which the present situation and sense of rage and cynicism are outcomes. Similarly, so too is the former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon who ran the SNP with an “ask me no questions” stance and ran out of steam in government and on independence. Mainstream politics are filled with such people who are culpable for a particular state of affairs and yet show no insight or contrition for their role and failings.
Speaking out against the West’s permanent war machine
One of the most prominent voices in the UK explaining the populist “revolt on the right” has been Matt Goodwin. He began as a detached observer studying UKIP, Farage and Brexit, and spilled over into a fully unapologetic advocate for Faragism, right-wing populism, and “the war on woke”.
Goodwin is an important figure on the right, lending an air of respectability to views once unpalatable. He is also on a strange personal journey: having fallen out of academia and his Professorial post at the University of Kent last year he is now occupying a berth on right-wing channel GB News.
The crisis of mainstream politics is echoed by a malaise in mainstream media and how it reports the world and right-wing populism. The BBC for one is absolutely frit to call the likes of Trump out for what they really are. This leads to news items and commentary which are anaemic and normalise such politics.
One rare example of something very different from this on the BBC was provided by the previous week’s Question Time and the exchanges between Matt Goodwin and The Guardian columnist and environmental campaigner George Monbiot which amounted to a battle of contested ideas about the state of the world.
Goodwin made the case unapologetically for Trump, calling him “a strong leader” and indicating that he welcomed his victory and thought that “the world was a safer place” due to his election. From this he laid out the predictable thesis that Trump was doing what needed to be done namely waging war on “the woke”, liberal elites and conceits and addressing concerns like border security and illegal immigration but on the international front what he said was contentious and challenging.
Talking about Trump’s rapport with Trump and stance on the Russia-Ukraine war – prior to the US-Russia summit in Riyadh – Goodwin railed against the dominant Western orthodoxies of foreign policy which have underpinned the endless Western military interventions of the past two decades: ‘We are seeing the breakdown of the international liberal world order which saw 20-30 years of one foreign policy disaster after another.”
Goodwin stated on Ukraine and Trump: “A lot of people who like to start wars are suddenly very angry with one guy who wants to stop this war. And there are people who have taken us into one disaster after another – war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya” who say we should support an open-ended commitment to the Ukraine war.
This brought forth a response from George Monbiot who challenged Goodwin in relation to Trump, Putin and Ukraine. Monbiot observed that there was a contradiction in Goodwin’s comments often found among those on the populist right. “These people who go on and on about sovereignty, say they’re the defenders of sovereignty, when it actually comes to the crunch they will sell anyone down the river.”
Monbiot said directly to Goodwin that what he was proposing was “direct appeasement of an aggressor” and “straight out of Putin’s playbook” and that the West including the UK had to stand full square in support of Ukraine and against Russian aggression.
What was revealing was what Monbiot didn’t say, which was to address Goodwin’s point about the West’s permanent wars and the questionable assumptions behind it. Nowhere did Monbiot take on Goodwin’s critique of the West’s endless wars and his belief that it had the right to impose its interests and be the world’s policeman even when the results have been disastrous.
Major consequences flow from this revealing exchange which made explicit assumptions which are often unstated or only hinted at. Leaving unchallenged the anti-war terrain and argument to the forces of the populist right is a historic and massive mis-call.
It leaves the forces of the mainstream left and centre-left clinging to the logic of the West’s failed wars and to the misguided belief in liberal imperialism which informed the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. It reduces the left, centre-left and centre-right, to being seen for what they are – part of the failed political establishment and order which has contributed to the bankrupt, broken politics domestically voters are rebelling against and the shifting international order which the US is now tearing up.
Trump International
This brings us to Trump and his impact internationally. He has in the past decade stood with near consistency against American foreign intervention. It is inherent in the logic of “America First” which makes no bones about putting less priority on the foreign commitments and alliances which the US has been defined by across the post-war era.
Second term Trump is emboldened compared to the political naivety of his first term. The above sentiment now sits uneasily with a constant advocacy of the language of imperialism and power politics reduced to seeing nation-states and territories as nothing but real estate to be bought and sold. Hence, the fixation on buying Greenland, taking over the Panama Canal, and seeing the human carnage and tragedy of Gaza as an opportunity for a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
This myopic political anti-vision of seeing everything through the prism of deals, business opportunities and buying territory with or without consent is grotesque. But it is not only the world of Donald Trump but also one of the foundational stories in the making of the USA: about taking territory by force in its expansion across the continent.
It does mean that Trump may not only misplay one of the examples he has cited such as the Panama Canal, but that he may with such a perspective completely misread what Ukraine is about and play into Putin’s hands. According to Alex Younger, ex-head of MI6, Trump thinks that “Ukraine is just about territory and that a deal can be done on this basis”; he believes this is a complete misreading of why Putin went to war and Ukraine resisted which is about “sovereignty and the right of an independent, sovereign Ukraine to exist which Putin wants to eliminate.”
Yet underlying the limited nature of Trump’s worldview, and how he is playing to Putin’s agenda and being played by Putin, is a strong popular strand to Trump’s wish to disentangle and disengage the US from its many international military commitments and dial back on the expansive largesse which is Pentagon defence spending. This week he demanded 8% cuts each year to its budget over five years – a move welcomed by left-wing Senator Bernie Saunders who noted that “Every once in a while, I DO agree with Trump … We should cut military spending.”
Too many mainstream politicians across the world react to Trump’s international interventions not only with horror, but by clinging to the global status quo and existing world order – as if that is a state of affairs any progressive, enlightened political perspective should seek to defend, rather than challenge and critique.
Ex-Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen (removed by Starmer as a candidate at the onset of the 2024 election campaign) this week said “the international world order is not something which should be defended. It does not work for the Global South.” She went on that any politics of opposing Trumpism should not end up defending “the existing world order and ignoring the voices which have marginalised and denigrated.”
Trump has brought the limits of the global international order into the open in saying bluntly what was previously unsaid. The US was never going to commit to European security for ever. There was already pre-Trump under Obama a pivot of the US towards the Far East and the rise of China economically and militarily. Is this really as The Economist claimed on its front cover this week “Europe’s worst nightmare” or something which has been long coming and while not a moment Europe welcomes, is it one with unintended consequences and even positive opportunities?
Who speaks in the age of rage?
One dimension of Trump’s stance is the nature of his pro-Putin stance. Is this merely an admiration for a strongman and how he has dominated politics? Or is it a conscious attempt to undermine the US political establishment and its view of the world by aligning with what used to be America’s biggest foe?
Another dimension is Trump’s embrace of authoritarianism, his lack of respect for the rule of law and democracy, and desire for a state and society where he and his cronies can do what they like. Trump has made no secret of his admiration for the mafia state of Russia and the likes of Hungary where checks on state have been eroded, independent institutions trashed, and government and public bodies looted and assets extracted. This is a brazen class politics of billionaires and oligarchs which dares to cloak itself in the language of rebellion and the interests of the people against the elite.
Such an environment feeds on anger, rage and cynicism encapsulated by one audience member on the previous week’s BBC Question Time who declared “all politicians are the same. They are all in it for themselves.” Such predictable sentiments never bring any kickback from politicians who meekly take their punishment but do not make their case or dare to challenge. Nowhere on such occasions is an argument “in defence of politics” in the words of academic Bernard Crick made – to the ultimate cost of all of us.
The language of politics is fundamental and the charge that all left-wingers and liberals are part of a censorious, intolerant “woke” has gained traction and carried weight as a critique from the right. In an important essay in The Atlantic in the past week the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams laid out the hypocrisies of the Trumpian right with their own thought police and censorship of books and words, calling it “the woke right.”
Williams quotes Kevin De Young, pastor and professor, who has argued that the woke right places grievance and identity politics centrestage and this “redefines the nature of oppression as psychological oppression” telling white and male right-wing Americans that they are the country’s real victims; “the world is out to get you, and people out there hate you,” DeYoung warns, “is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed.”
Labour and Trump
All the above has produced convulsions across the centre-left in the Global North – and the UK and Scotland are no exception. The Labour government elected in July 2024 has not found so far a coherent agenda or project it wishes to champion, instead being reduced to at best damage limitation about the state of affairs left by 14 years of the Tories and beyond that offering little clue to the future direction in which it wants to take the UK.
Into this void has stepped Maurice Glasman, Labour peer and architect of “Blue Labour” which has stressed that for too often the party and elements of the left have disrespected working class communities, communitarianism and their values, patronising them and seeing them as unreconstructed. Glasman has the ear of Starmer and proposes that Labour should go hard on immigration and stand for a new era of Labour authoritarianism.
Glasman has no time for Rachel Reeves who he thinks has become “a drone for the Treasury”, but he goes much further saying not only should Labour understand Trumpism but embrace elements of it. Glasman attended Trump’s inauguration in January and at a conference at the end of last year described his coalition as “a working class coalition against progressives” and railed against Kamala Harris’s candidature. In a discussion this year with Steve Bannon he went further, expressing his admiration for “MAGA” as “a strategy of coalition building in which workers can again have a voice” after decades of being denigrated by progressives and the left.
This brought a rejoinder from the publication: Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy who took exception to Glasman’s comments when he said that “the only place to build a house now is on the left side of the MAGA square.” They retorted that this made Glasman part of the right and that they needed to assert the core values that the centre-left stood for, affirming that “we will stay to guard the old house.”
Yet this begs many questions. Glasman has completely lost any semblance of being centre-left by identifying with the Trump project yet that does not mean the centre-left should somehow huddle for shelter in what they call “the old house” meaning the conventional traditions and practices of the mainstream centre-left. The very same forces which have been hollowed out and trashed by the likes of Clinton, Blair and Schroeder and which require some kind of reassessment and reflection before any left worthy of the name can challenge reaction and the right.
Who stole the future and how do we take it back?
The politics of populism flaunt their disregard of conventional norms and celebrate disruption. But they also have done something more: they have appropriated the idea of the future. In this they have gone beyond Farage’s yearning for a “better yesterday” and Britain of the past which never really existed. Instead, the newly emboldened forces of populism believe they can trash established ways of doing things, tear down numerous institutions and remake the world in their image. This is a conceit and arrogance not just shared by Elon Musk, but a host of tech bros and oligarchs.
Jonathan White in his book, In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea, lays out the serious nature of this noting that across the West the centre-left have abandoned “the vision thing”, the power of story and having any sense of a future to aspire to. Instead, they have become bogged down in administrative and managerial politics, defending existing institutions and processes, and hence left the populist right to seize the future.
This fundamental underpins much of the political discourse across the West, namely that the parties of the left and centre-left – whether Labour, US Democrats, German SPD and Greens, French and Italian lefts, and in Scotland, SNP, Greens and Scottish Labour – have no compass or vision of the future and have been displaced by the forces of the populist right. Such centre-left forces have long become part of the establishment and disorientated by the populist right’s claiming of the future and politics of disruption.
In such a fast-changing world and one of inequality, insecurity and powerlessness, clinging to the existing order puts yourself on the wrong side of the equation. That is what centre-left parties have done, gifting the terrain of far-reaching change, transformation and disruption to the right who will then turn things upside down in the interests of the rich and powerful while claiming it is in the name of “the people.”
What could a politics of radical disruption anchored in equality, liberty and solidarity look like? And is it possible? First, it would have a critical understanding of power in all its manifestations and powerlessness felt by millions across the West. Second, it would be about “seeing people” and people knowing they are being “seen”; it would know who its friends and enemies were. Third, it would talk everyday language: not that of the insider classes or PC or “woke” semantics. Fourth, beyond this it would dare to challenge conventional wisdom on the centre-left and the groupthink of identity politics and address the rigged economic and social system which discriminates against the vast majority of people.
Fifth, it wouldn’t represent the interests of the political and corporate establishments; nor cling to defending the status quo. Sixth, such a politics would be rooted in the real-world people live – not the world of corporate and public affairs – but organisations and platforms which are public facing and owned. Finally, such a politics would not be policy focused, incremental and managerial, but about painting a vision of the future fundamentally different from the present.
Nowhere in the West is such a politics evident in opposition to the forces of the populist right. Not in the UK, not in Scotland, not anywhere. This comes at huge cost. The politics of disruption have been claimed by the populist right, as has the idea of the future. This raises big questions about whether a new radical politics of disruption can emerge taking over existing parties (the Trump approach), or whether it needs new forces (Farage) which break open the existing order?
This needs discussion because the existing approach of accommodation and retreat in the face of populism has had dire consequences. There has to be a challenge to populism which breaks with broken economics and politics and permanent war, otherwise the forces of the uber-right will be our future in a world which will be more unequal, harsh and dark than even the present.
