22nd August 2025
In his 1992 memoir Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby describes his experience of a crush in a stadium at a 1980 match (before the tragedies later on that decade):
“…there was a forty-thousand-plus crowd.
“Something went wrong – they hadn’t opened enough turnstiles, or the police had made a pig’s ear of controlling the crowd flow, whatever – and there was a huge crush […]
“I could pick both my legs up and remain pinioned and, at one stage, I had to put my arms in the air to give myself just that little bit more room and to stop my fists digging into my chest and stomach. […]
“But the thing was, I trusted the system: I knew that I could not be squashed to death, because that never happened at football matches. The Ibrox thing, well that was different, a freak combination of events; and in any case that was in Scotland during an Old Firm game, and everyone knows that these are especially problematic. No, you see, in England somebody, somewhere, knew what they were doing, and there was this system, which nobody ever explained to us, that prevented accidents of this kind.
“It might seem as though the authorities, the club and the police were pushing their luck on occasions, but that was because we didn’t understand properly how they were organising things. […]
“But I thought about that evening nine years later, on the afternoon of the Hillsborough disaster, and I thought about a lot of other afternoons and evenings too, when it seemed as though there were too many people in the ground, or the crowd had been unevenly distributed. It occurred to me that I could have died that night, and that on a few other occasions I have been much closer to death than I care to think about.
“There was no plan after all; they really had been riding their luck all that time.”
*
You may think:
“….somebody, somewhere, knew what they were doing, and there was this system, which nobody ever explained to us, that prevented accidents of this kind.”
But:
“There was no plan after all; they really had been riding their luck all that time.”
*
At the end of the 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, Ralph is running and frightened, and he falls, and then:
“He staggered to his feet, tensed for more terrors, and looked up at a huge peaked cap. It was a white-topped cap, and above the green shade of the peak was a crown, an anchor, gold foliage. He saw white drill, epaulettes, a revolver, a row of gilt buttons down the front of a uniform.
“A naval officer stood on the sand, looking down at Ralph in wary astonishment.”
Everything is going to be alright.
*
There is a tendency to assume that unpleasant situations will resolve themselves, that problems will have solutions.
This tendency can be associated with certain modes of thought: that a court process will come to an end; that a constitution will regulate political conflict; that a thesis and antithesis will become a new synthesis; that a market will clear and come to an equilibrium.
In an image: the notion of the scales:
Things will balance, eventually.
A naval officer will turn up on the beach.
The police and the stadium authorities will know what they are doing.
Everything will be alright.
*
There is another, related tendency, of those who have not experienced things resolving themselves.
This is the complacent tendency of exceptionalism.
As Hornby avers in the quote above: what could happen at Ibrox would never happen at an English stadium.
“The Ibrox thing, well that was different, a freak combination of events; and in any case that was in Scotland during an Old Firm game, and everyone knows that these are especially problematic.”
A similar sentiment is that what happened in Germany in the mid twentieth century would not happen anywhere else.
“The Nazi thing, well that was different, a freak combination of events; and in any case that was in Germany during the 1930s, and everyone knows that was especially problematic.”
*
*
So one can be tempted to think what is happening in the United States is eventually going to be alright.
That the constitution will resolve the issues, and the mid-terms are on their way.
And in terms of narrative, soon those “on the wrong side of history” will realise they are actually being the baddies and see the error of their ways.
Thesis and and antithesis will become a new synthesis.
There will again be an equilibrium.
Everything will be fine again.
*
The problem is that some conflicts never resolve, at least not without an absolute victory for one side and an absolute defeat for the other(s).
The current culture wars and cruel partisanship may not settle down to an agreed narrative, where one side admits they got it wrong.
The nastiness may continue, without there ever being a naval officer on the beach.
That the police and the stadium authorities really had been riding their luck all this time.
*
Trumpism is not going to go away, at least not easily.
An entire generation of people, many far younger than Trump, now know what it is like to exercise power without political, legal, or normative limits.
They see how the courts and the legislature can be made to cower.
They see that a codified constitution is impotent at setting limits, and in providing for checks and balances, without a sense of constitutionalism.
And in this situation, the political gatekeepers are not more useful than the old turnstile operators, adding more people to the crush.
*
Trump and Trumpism provide the most fundamental of challenges to constitutionalism.
And having tasted real, raw power, the Trumpists are not going to go away of their own accord: they like it here.
Unless and until Trump and Trumpism are defeated, there is no reason to believe constitutionalism will survive in the United States – or elsewhere with similar politics.
Brace, brace.
***
Comments Policy
This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.
Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated and comments will not be published if irksome, or if they risk derailing the discussion.
More on the comments policy is here.
Help!!!
Thanks for this warning. I have been thinking that ‘this too will pass’ – and it will but not necessarily in my lifetime or before a great many worse things have happened.
Sitting in the UK I can only wring my hands and hope – with less and less conviction – that the counter-vailing forces which are supposed to supply stability will operate before too much damage is done. But those forces seem to have melted when confronted with the will, or whim, of Trump. Democrats? Senate? Supreme Court?
I can imagine a new secession movement but led by California rather than Texas, but even that seems less likely than the long, slow, decline into authoritarianism.
P.S. I too have been in a Hornby-like crowd, pre-Hillsborough, and I too assumed that ‘they’ knew what they were doing. I’m older now and I’ve been near enough to ‘they’ to know that they know no more than we do.
You may not be able to do much about the US, but sitting in the UK you can and should try to defend our own (unwritten) constitution and democracy, which are also under attack. This too may not pass. Remember: the longer people delay, the harder it is to resist. Fighting while the court system still works is easier than fighting after it has been corrupted. Preventing a bad law from being enacted is easier than trying to get it off the books.
In the UK specifically, free speech and freedom to protest are under attack. These freedoms are utterly crucial because without them we cannot defend our other freedoms. So start with the assumption that, at best, the government does not know what it’s doing and, at worst, is actively malicious in eroding human rights. What can you do about it?
– Join groups and contribute funds. Pick one that chimes with your own concerns, maybe the Free Speech Union or Big Brother Watch or Liberty, and give it what you can.
– Use whatever power you have to do good. If you are a civil servant or a local councillor then do not abuse your power to oppress inconvenient speech or protests, however distasteful you find them, and oppose any colleagues who do the same.
– Understand what laws exist and what rights still remain. Seek remedies if anyone commits an injustice against you, and encourage friends and acquaintances to do the same. For example, if the police record a non-crime hate incident against you for wrongthink, take action to get it off your record and try to get a court injunction to stop them doing it again. This may be time-consuming, inconvenient and expensive. Fighting oppression generally is. Do it anyway.
Slightly – but only slightly – at a tangent, I was totally horrified to read this story in the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/nyregion/january-6-capitol-riot-prosecutors.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Any comments?
Brilliant – it-can’t-happen-here – piece. remember Joan Baez: ‘There but for fortune’. It can happen; and then things just get worse
Welcome, sadly, to this end of the sofa.
We know it stings when ‘the lessons of history have failed to be learned’. That’s what all Enquiry reports and bureaucrats say, isn’t it? “We need to learn the lessons from this.” But at least some people have learned them and have suggestions about how to install them into better systems afterwards.
The sad part is we now have to wait until ‘afterwards’. As the great philosopher Jim Jeffries said; “Society can only walk as fast as the slowest member to keep it all moving.’ I’m increasingly sorry that this appears to be the case.
Well said
Isn’t it the same sentiment in all big organisations ? The shop floor and office workers have the impression that the big bosses really do know what they’re doing and have a plan and a strategy to help progress the business. Although the workers with all their experience, skills and fundamental understanding, suspect that sometimes the bosses might not quite have got it right.
As anyone in middle management knows, who finally gets the opportunity to move up to the top floor and is confronted by the frightened realisation that it was all bluff and bluster all along.
Or, as often turns out to be the case, the team at the top, safely wearing golden handcuffs and parachutes, are actively destroying the country, sorry, company, so they can sell their shares (abandoning the company, in essence) before it all crashes down due to their short-term actions.
Well said. The threat grows from those now watching with relish Trump’s progress through the ruins of the US constitution.
Watching, that is, from either side of the pond.
I’m not sure how we brace for this.
I remember some time ago reading from a trusted source that, the people of Northern Ireland have brought the troubles on their own heads by continuely voting for the then current parties.
I thought that statement was harsh, but, having lived through the past umpteen years in the UK I now know that it’s true.
None of us can see far into the future and most of us are so poorly informed that it seems easy to be lead by the charlatans who seek power.
Indeed we have somehow created the conditions for public office where only charlatans can survive.
Unfortunately public safety was in the hands of civil servants, those people have been systematically removed under the austerity and “red tape” removal campaigns. The neoliberalism idealogues who preach small state and personal responsibility vanguarding this are still all powerful. Until there is a fundamental change in ethos, then I am afraid the cowboys of politics will always win.
This is an outstandingly lucid and sobering piece even by your own very high standards. I wonder if you might develop the analogy of the turnstile operators further in a future piece in that as I read it the essential problem you have identified is the arbitrariness of the political gatekeepers.
Just as Hillsborough in 1989 revealed how the the crowd being ‘unevenly distributed’ by the arbitrariness of the turnstile operators’ admission criteria at the match NH attended in 1980 was a disaster waiting to happen all along, the arbitrariness of western political leaders’ admission of what constitutes an infraction of the law in general and of international humanitarian law in particular are creating a situation that will render — perhaps already has rendered — the concept of international humanitarian law void within a decade.
The belief that western leaders know what they are doing or that they are acting in good faith at all times is fraying badly if indeed it has not already snapped altogether.
In any case, thank you for this extremely compelling piece.
Thanks for this blog👏🏻
A republic. If you can keep it.
So far so good, but approaching 250 years after the US declaration of independence, it remains far from certain for how much longer.
It seems relatively unusual for a country with a long history of democracy to slide into authoritarianism – Turkey perhaps another recent example, and lets see what happens in Israel – but there are many more countries in the world at the authoritarian or “managed democracy” end of the spectrum than democracies like Norway or Japan, or even France or Argentina or South Africa. Some going through the motions of an acclamatory election from time to time without any real political choice on offer, and the “leader” remaining in power for decades.
It is a shame when hard-won lessons are ignored or forgotten, but I can’t help thinking that things are going to get worse before they get better. If they get better.
What would have happened to Germany if the Nazi’s hadn’t wanted to expand territory. If they were happy just to be authoritarian butchers at home. To “Make Germany Great Again”.
I have only had that football crowd experience once, but it sticks in the memory decades after it happened. I did not know enough to have Nick Hornby’s sang froid.
I know enough to be very, very worried about Trump and Trumpism.
What worries me about Trump and Trumpism, is that it is easy to attribute its prevalence and success to the man and his acolytes, and the narrow focus of some progressive causes.
In fact, Trump and Trumpists’ successes ought properly to be attributed to those who voted for him, yes, but also those who are willing to go along with the malicious, the venal and the criminal because they think it won’t harm them. It will. Eventually. Somehow.
Getting those who go along with things to wake up is going to be painful, take a long time and probably be a bloody affair.
“In fact, Trump and Trumpists’ successes ought properly to be attributed to those who voted for him, yes, but also those who are willing to go along with the malicious, the venal and the criminal because they think it won’t harm them. It will. Eventually. Somehow.”
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.
Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.
Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.
Als sie die Juden einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Jude.
Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte
I know you are using the phrase with skepticism here, but it’s worth elaborating by that “the wrong side of history” is a terrible phrase that well-meaning people have used as a substitute for proper political debate with their ideological opponents.
See also “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Both phrases present a sort of teleological view of human events that inspires the kind of attitude you describe in the OP.
The antidote is, perhaps, another Motivational Poster-grade political quote: “Be the change you wish to see in the world” — Arleene Lorrance, maybe channelling M.K. Gandhi.
So true. But it is not only that everyone else thinks it will be all right. *They* (esp. the orthodox catholics) also think that it will be all right no matter what they do… Decades ago, Carl Sagan reflected on it in this exchange (https://youtu.be/FqXRhqf7bvY?si=Mv8x599km0S23GPH – at ~2:25). We – as the human race – have preconditioned ourselves to think this way. We just generally do not believe/want to believe that things may go wrong… To a large extent, this is why Brexit and many other seemingly improbable votes went the way they did.
Sadly good sense. While one side seeks to act within a constitution the other ignores, there is no scope for compromise. Time for Canada to offer membership to states fleeing Trumpism. A ridiculous fantasy now, but …
I am increasingly entertaining the view, especially in my bleaker moments, that 300 years from now, mildly baffled historians will look back and say “yes, there was an odd period, a blip if you will, from around 1945 to 2020 when open liberal democracies were actually seen as the way to build and maintain a society and establish a peaceful world order. Of course, we now see that these seventy years or so were an aberration from the obvious strength and stability of the clearly defined ethno-nation state and a complex web of self-interested alliances. See you at the next lecture. England prevails!”
Regarding “It can’t happen here”, it’s worth noting that the UK constitution boils down to “A Prime Minister with a majority of sufficiently tame MPs is an absolute tyrant.” Johnson pushed at the constitutional walls and found them to be made of cardboard; he was only stopped from tearing them up by his own ineptness and lack of foresight. Someone able to plan more than three moves ahead would be able to legally dismantle the safeguards piece by piece, much as Putin did. Frame it correctly and those who object become the “Enemies of the People”. You wouldn’t even have to follow the Trump route of flouting the law, with a bit of patience you simply change the law, one piece at a time, to enable your plans.
Agreed.
I’d be happy to hear from constitutional experts of how this scenario has been thwarted since the BoJo era so Martin and I need be worried no longer. As it is I think the ‘test to destruction’ of our own situation may be closer than anyone looking at the US wants to see.
Indeed. One might cite the “shelter in place” policy at Grenfell as another example of “they knew what they were doing”.
It does strike me that, for all our faults in the UK, the “men in the grey suits” play an important (if not entirely successful) constitutional role. So much for the “checks and balances” we all learn about in the codified US constitution.
Somewhat counterintuitively, constitutional monarchy, with a customary but not written constitution, and with an independent judiciary. seems to have some protection against political instability.
Traditionally, even political parties in the British context sought to govern more or less for all the people, but there seems to be a more divisive spirit in the twenty-first century.
It is to be hoped that Trump-style attitudes don’t cross the North Atlantic!
They have. I spend far too much time catching up with U.S. politics on Youtube, starting with “Belle of the Ranch” who took over the channel from her husband “Beau of the Fifth Column”. Previously the algorithm fed me clickbait consisting almost entirely of serious, fact-finding journalism which inevitably had the effect of confirming the obvious virtues of Western liberal democracy.
It also tried (and tries) to distract me from all that heavy stuff with astonishing discoveries in astrophysics and archaeology which overturn everything we thought we knew — a bit like MAGA.
Now, when pursuing other persons’ viewpoints on a given theme, I am plagued, not so much with Fox “News”, but with rants from obscure, individual, attention-seeking posters pushing English white supremacy, Farageism and Yaxley-Lennonism and screaming that Britain is broken.
I have already learnt to check whether an intriguing headline emanates from “GB News”, Talk TV, or Sky News Australia (with its recurring “Lefties Losing It” feature ), or from right-wing British newspapers; and not to contribute my click-pennies to their bloated coffers. But it’s a minefield.
When Jacob Rees-Mogg can get on “Any Questions?” and say that Donald Trump and his ICE bandits “have the right idea”, how long before we see the anti-immigrant demonstrators not slouching but briskly marching in our streets?
“They see that a codified constitution is impotent at setting limits, and in providing for checks and balances, without a sense of constitutionalism.”
At least with a codified constitution the plebs can pick it up and read it, and have a stab at figuring out if they’ve been conned. Without that they either get fobbed off with platitudes from experts, or suss out that parliament is a thinly veiled tyrant, responding accordingly. At least an accessible codified constitution gives them a chance to exercise their constitutionalism by reading it.
Yeah, that seems to be working.
“Yeah, that seems to be working.”
There is a pretty live debate going on in the USA regarding their current state of affairs, and the constitutional implications. That is in stark contrast to the UK where access to a constitutional understanding is filtered by Brahmins, and as a consequence few in the UK even consider that there might be a constitutional basis for the debate.
So yes, there is a reason to think that it is to an extent working as designed.
My feeling is that the midterms will be an acid test for the future of the United States. If they function lawfully and fairly – and if the Democrats retake control of the House – there is a fighting chance. If not … I suspect it won’t be long before the military has to choose sides.