The day after the mid-term results

It is November 1932 and there has been a general election in Germany. Christopher Isherwood was to write:

“On November 7th the election results were out. The Nazis had lost two million votes. The communists had gained eleven seats. They had a majority of over 100,000 in Berlin.

“‘You see,’ I told Frl. Schroeder, ‘it’s all your doing.’ We had persuaded her to go down to the beer-shop at the corner and vote, for the first time in her life. And now she was as delighted as if she’d backed a winner […]”

~ Mr Norris Changes Trains, 1935

There was a general sense of relief at this fall in Nazi support, but we know now it was temporary.

Isherwood himself was to leave Berlin the the following March:

“‘I’m sure I don’t know what makes you want to leave Berlin all of a sudden, like this,’ Frl. Thurau told Christopher sadly, with perfect sincerity.

“She, who had voted Communist—because of Christopher’s urging—in the November 1932 elections, now called Hitler ‘Der Fuehrer’ when she talked to the porter’s wife.

“After all, like millions of others, she had to go on living in Germany and making the best of it, no matter who was in power.”

~ Christopher and His Kind, 1976

*

Any setback or defeat for the illiberals is only ever temporary.

As Adam Serwer correctly says, for Trump and his supporters the cruelty is the point.

And they cannot be effectively cruel without power, and now they have had power they will want it again

*

But.

The illiberals can be defeated. The trick is not to think that they are ever defeated once-and-for-all-time.

Politics – especially democratic politics – is like eternally trapped in the third-quarter of a thriller, where the heroes rejoicing at defeating an enemy find that the movie has not quite finished yet.

And loop.

*

The most significant sound from yesterday’s mid-term election results in the United States was a silence.

There was a great deal of welcome noise about the results, but there was no aftershock of Trump and his supporters dismissing the results as a fraud.

As the eminent US political pundit Sherlock Holmes would put it, that was the key incident.

The results were too big to be dismissed with even the biggest lies.

The results had to be accepted.

Trump instead pivoted to blaming others for the results – which is fine, as the necessary implication of such blame-mongering is that he accepted the results.

*

Another happy point about the results is that there were many wins for unapologetic, positive liberalism. There was no need for successful candidates to triangulate and negotiate with cruelty, no need to denigrate the “others”.

There was no advantage for seeking to out-illiberal the illiberals, with their supposed “legitimate concerns”.

A similar lesson perhaps can be learned over here in England, where there can be no advantage in seeking to out-Reform the Reform party and similar parties.

*

Making a positive case for liberal, progressive politics and policies is the best way to deal with illiberals.

And here there must a warning.

It will be very tempting for those Democrats now in office and now with power to focus on righting the wrongs of the administration’s last two years: impeachments, investigations, hearings, subpoenas.

And by gods, the illiberals deserve to have some accountability.

But this needs to be balanced by using offices and powers to also make a positive case at the next elections. The illiberals are not going to go away, but come back in a new form and with new leaders and they need to be defeated all over again.

*

In the United Kingdom and the United States we have been lucky with incompetence of illiberal leaders. Trump is a figurehead with little obvious sense of what is going on, and here we had Bad King Boris and Mad Queen Liz, both of whom lost power rather abruptly.

But we cannot assume each illiberal leader will be foolish.

Wise illiberals realise that power is precarious and needs to be retained.

Foolish illiberals think they will have power forever, and so show no restraint in their daft and dangerous antics.

The next illiberal leader may not have the manifest weaknesses of a Trump.

And, indeed, had it not been for Trump’s follies and misadventures with Iran, yesterday’s results could have been a lot closer.

*

And so yes, we should clap and cheer at yesterday’s United States results – like we did with the results from Serbia and Brazil.

Hurrah!

But for every November 1932, there is a March 1933.

So we still need to be braced for the next round.

We are still three-quarters through this film.

And we always shall be.