The Polyamorous State - A Final Analysis

This is almost certainly the last time that I will write on monogamy and polyamory and associated sexual matters. The subject has fascinated partly for personal reasons but equally because it is central to how we view future social development in the liberal West as it comes under pressure from external communitarian pressures such as the emergence of Islam and a growing internal authoritarianism.

This internalised authoritarianism is chipping away at the margins of difference and freedom in order to create a new 'normality' that its proponents think might restore the order on which States and institutions thrive. But this is not a political paper. I am not interested here in that chipping away of freedom by a weakened authority or the challenge of organised political communitarianism. 

I am interested here in the liberation of that limited proportion of humanity capable of the emotional intelligence required to live beyond restrictive historical community constraints on sexual and emotional expression and how they can be protected from both the community-State and from a culture of anxiety where freedom's greatest enemy comes not from the Right but from the enemy within - the frightened neo-authoritarianism of the liberal left, the snowflakes intent on turning us into ice. 

Basically, how can these people be protected from the majority. There is no answer to that here, just a statement of that which must be protected. Having resolved and understood one aspect of freedom, I propose to move on over time to explore the broader framework necessary to preserve liberty.

A polyamorous orientation is just a state of being for an individual. Polyamory is the living out of that state of being in society. Contemporary Western society is definitely not accepting of polyamory. The polyamorous individual is forced into secrecy and stigma with his or her opportunities for self expression severely limited by the refusal of others to recognise that polyamory is a free and non-harmful individual choice which they have no right to condemn if it is between consenting adults (though they also certainly have the right not to accommodate automatically the polyamorous person within their own relationship situation). 

The internet has had the dramatic effect of 'sub-normalising' (that is, creating a different normality that works for a sub-set of those otherwise regarded as normal) minority sexualities of all types, bringing people with those orientations together and enabling discussion that reassures and encourages people who are questioning their own 'normality'. It is one of the reasons why the internet is so loathed by authoritarian personality types of both Left and Right. The new media landscape has enabled people starting out on their own journeys of self development to consider forms of behaviour and organisation that suit their true natures rather than simply accept pre-packaged models delivered by the past and by the community.

The current state of polyamory is defined by the social assumption that just one partner be recognised in law and social situations. This inhibits a secondary (or tertiary) partner so this has to change at some stage. Similarly, variation in polyamory needs to be more widely recognised - it is not a case of simple replacing a couple with a 'thruple', thereby merely expanding conventional forms. It is really about finding consensual arrangements that suit individuals, with very different psychologies, in their dealings with emotional need, sexual desire, economic relations and property holding and responsibility for child rearing and other dependents.

Far more common than the thruple is the 'vee', one person with a relationship to two people who are not involved with each other. And the 'vee' may have the two others become or be sustainable friends without any emotional or sexual content. Economic and social realities will tend to make one partner 'primary' in terms of household and property but this does not mean an incompatibility with equality in sexual or emotional terms or with equality in terms of intent to equality all things being equal, especially if the alleged 'secondary' actually has their own effective household or property arrangements with their 'primary' who may have nothing to do with anyone in the first 'vee' ... or may have everything to do with them - in theory, a chain of 'vees' could theoretically extend forever. Yes, it can be complicated.

The polyamorous personality may be fully (say) heterosexual but they strongly tend to tolerance of queerness and fluidity. They may participate in alternative sexualities at different times of their lives. The central aspect of polyamory here is its resistance to definition and to fixed identity, working against the prevailing identity politics of our time, a reason why it is clearly resented by the authoritarian Left. One reason that there is only a minimal polyamorous identity group presence is because polyamorists generally (except as psychological support) see little point in defining themselves as other sexual identity groups have done, precisely because it works against the instinct for fluidity and adaptability.

Polyamorous people tend to adopt the same fluidity towards friendship (avoiding closed groups and cults), business (avoiding corporate restrictions), politics (being wary of authoritarianism of both the Left and the Right and tending to left and right-libertarianism), culture (being open-minded, following a more tolerant, appropriative, hybridising and hedonist approach to art and popular culture) and religion (being either more atheist than average or, at least, more vaguely 'spiritual' without seeking fixed external moral frameworks). There will, of course, be exceptions to all these claims because difference and fluidity means being different from even the norm of the non-normal.

It is certainly no accident that the leading edges of polyamory were non-heterosexual and often pagan in orientation because 'normality' binds the heterosexual and the communitarian first before it binds anyone else. We are in a free society nominally and, in a free society, regulation does not bind our emotions and the vast majority of our sexual desires. What binds us are our own fears and circumstances. Our society is expressly designed to be constructed around a core of monogamy between heterosexuals sanctified if not always in a religious ceremony then by the State. The polyamorist is rarely a revolutionary as such but Church and State are not generally his friends.

Once the barrier to personal acceptance of polyamory is broken down, the tendency within the polyamorous personality is to see a breaking down of many other barriers and the creation of new boundaries that are personally-directed and not socially-directed. People are seen as relating to each other as complex and different so that it is recognised that it is rare and probably undesirable that one person should aim to meet all the needs of another person or that exclusivity necessarily be reciprocated.

Instead, the polyamorous personality sees the central aspects of his or her life as all potentially separate but equal, interdependent but each unique to its own needs. Economic security, cultural or sporting interests, intimacy, sexual expression and so forth are all separable and potentially identifiable with different people. 'Normality' recognises this to some degree with the bifurcation into life partners and friends but then limits friends considerably to friends of the same gender (for example) or limits the nature of the friendship if members of the opposite gender (in heterosexual relationships) enter into the 'household' or community circle.

'Polyamory' changes these boundaries so that perhaps fewer but deeper relationships are designated by the needs of the polyamorous person, under conditions where more than one person might even serve the same need - so one might see shared households (economic), group engagement in culture or interests (friendships), shared child-rearing or shared intimate and sexual bonding with more than one person consensually and transparently.

It is central at all times to polyamory that the participants who actually participate are aware of the relationships that exist even if (perhaps) one participant might have a partner in turn 'who does not want to know' but has released the person to be free to do what they want or need or the participant has claimed that right in general regardless of their own #primary' and stated their nature yet the partner on that side does not want to participate or engage. The model presupposes the freedom of the individual so long as they are prepared to be honest about their true nature.

Polyamorous people tend to have quite strong moral codes about transparency but also to vest the 'right of resistance' in the individual not to be bound by the codes of 'normals'. This can require immense courage on the part of the polyamorous person as well as some potential for misery. One partner may, for example, insist that they themselves cannot lie and that their partner cannot lie to others although, once the right to polyamory is asserted, there is no obligation to 'tell'. Truth-telling becomes bound into the group of those who tell the truth to each other and who tell no lies to others (but need not go around telling the truth to others outside their circle).

Above all, polyamorous relationships are coded to be unique. There is no standard format. 'Normality' can often result in compromises that mean the standardisation of social relationships into the necessary 'norms'. Some monogamies can be indistinguishable from other monogamies as all aspects of the individual's personality are shoe-horned into a pre-existing framework in order to meet essentially communitarian ends dictated by history, family and social convention. The polyamorist can have relations that are primarily directed at one aspect of themselves with one person and another aspect with another. Part of the early stress and pleasure of a polyamorous relationship is creating these private boundaries - emotional, sexual and practical.

One of the counter-intuitive (to 'normals') results of all this (as far as mature and experienced polyamorous set-ups are concerned) is that the addition of persons actually tends to relieve psychological pressure on the primaries (and there is generally a starting primary) because they are also no longer trapped in the need to be all things to one person and see their own personality limited and distorted.

Many polyamorous people coming to this late in life are faced with the potential for massive disruption if their primary has no understanding or liking for the change. This deters some who live, in effect, in private misery, unable to move forward, not only because they cannot afford at many levels to alienate a primary who 'holds all the cards' but also because a sexual and emotional life outside monogamy under conditions of secrecy is not tolerable to such people. They are not swingers and do not seek the frisson of illicit affairs. Indeed, the stress of illicit affairs is so great and sex without emotional commitment so miserable that polyamorists tend to prefer the private misery of the closed relationship. But eventually such people either snap and divorce at great cost or simply decline into a deathly acceptance of their fate.

However, for those primaries who are not themselves polyamorous but are open-minded and comprehend the truth-telling and trust aspects of the case - and make the effort to understand the situation - then the evidence indicates significant benefits after a period of adjustment and disruption. Certainly, the polyamorous person's commitment to a primary is usually strengthened and not weakened by the emergence of a secondary, possibly because he or she can concentrate on those aspects of the relationship that work instead of trying to make the aspects that do not work fit into some socially pre-set model.

It turns out that the pre-set model can often not work in terms of exclusivity because of circumstances or personality differences.  Secondary relationships can strengthen 'marriages' or at least whatever primary structure existed at the beginning of the process of creating a polyamorous situation or even household. Polyamorists, if they have a fault, tend to a certain neediness that places pressure on single partners so that relieving that pressure by 'spreading the love' enables a more direct dialogue on what really matters between the two primaries.

Under 5% of Americans are consciously polyamorous and seeking that lifestyle. The numbers are likely to be less, for cultural reasons, across the rest of the West. This far-flung community is not likely ever to overwhelm the wider instinct and cultural prejudice for monogamy if only because polyamory is stressful even if that stress might be regarded as 'good stress', creative and life-affirming. It is open-ended and fluid with no sense of absolute certainty for the future and so it appeals only to a certain personality type and this type is not going to be a majority in any society. Apart from anything else, most polyamorists are inveterate communicators and many people prefer silence in relationships.

What polyamorists want is just 'permission' from society to develop alternative lifestyles that offer no threat to 'normality'. Above all, the polyamorous person probably needs not to be locked in too early in life to a socially determined structure that will be next to impossible to climb out of without massive pain and disruption not only to himself or herself but others.

He or she just wants to associate with others like himself or herself and go with the flow of being as it changes with the coming and going of children, the acquisition and loss of property and the different needs of a personality at different life stages. At its best, it is a programme of self development and life management where command and control is in the hands of an individual negotiating directly with other individuals. It is fundamentally libertarian, unsuited to the authoritarian personality and probably with identity politics.

Research also shows that polyamorists tend to be far better educated than the general population. This may simply mean that education enables a person to engage in critical thinking about normality and abstracts them from communitarian contexts. Education may also be correlated with emotional intelligence which is definitely required to maintain a successful polyamorous relationship - without EQ things generally fall apart. Communitarian models are probably better for many people simply because people without adequate EQ may need external frameworks to ensure some degree of stability and decency in their lives. This need for adequate EQ alone probably dictates that, given the nature of our species, fully-functioning polyamory will never be the norm for more than 15% of the population at any given time.

This EQ aspect can be tiresome - polyamorists have a tendency to over-communicate and some even to over-think and privilege every passing feeling and anxiety although things eventually settle down. Psychologists who have studied polyamorous behaviour have, however, suggested that normally monogamous people might learn a great deal from this capacity to communicate and question given boundaries. The instinct of the polyamorous person, when faced by a troublesome emotion like jealousy or anger, is to go inward and question why they may be feeling that emotion before discussing it with a partner. Once having carefully considered the roots of the emotion, they then feel free to explore what was going on and come to a resolution through dialogue.

As for jealousy, it might not be the love or sex act that causes jealousy but something deeper, like a perceived 'being taken for granted' or failure to respect the aggrieved person. A few easy to manage and sensitive behavioural changes, usually with some sincere reassurance, can resolve the issue and adjust boundaries.

Commonly, many marriages that are monogamous are enhanced if one partner takes risks and expresses frustrations and feelings for resolution. Some marriages of course cannot be resolved and decline into negativity. A monogamous relationship often bottles up feeling in a model of mutual possession that ends up exploding in anger and recrimination, quarrels and eventually, after much misery, divorce.

The entire framework of honesty, transparency and respect is also more likely to encourage safe sex, according to University of Michigan research (2012). This is possibly because sexual activity is less likely to involve spur of the moment drink or drug-fuelled activity. It is 'timed' according to 'rules' which may be a bit of a passion killer for the impulsive but can work well for people who are not.

Polyamorists are not generally wealthier than average which is equally interesting because polyamory does incur expense in time as well as funds. Time is often essential to 'wealth creation'. Polyamorists tend to have priorities other than financial ones, yet need sufficient resources to be able to maintain their lifestyle. It could be argued that some of the time and financial costs arise out of the secrecy required by the dominant communitarian culture.

If there was sufficient cultural change to make polyamory more acceptable this problem might disappear as it has disappeared for the gay community. Polyamorists tend, however, to have an experiential rather than an acquisitive or materialist orientation - they may not necessarily be 'spiritual' but they do have a greater orientation towards the mind than the body in general or at least towards a balancing of emotion with reason.

There is also a misunderstanding about 'permission' because permission is not a matter of asking Mummy or Daddy if the polyamorist can go out to play but a more generalised 'permission' that really means just acceptance of the working out of difference within a framework of rules. Again, there is the potential for misunderstanding about rules - some relationships seem to require detailed rules because that is who the personalities are but others simply require an understanding of what could 'hurt' one of the parties through another being crass or negligent or lacking in basic respect for the individuality of another.

This latter form of rule-making is the more intelligent version (we can liken it to the preference for principles-based regulation in British culture over rules-based regulation in other cultures) because it abandons any attempt to command and control someone else instead of oneself. Self control is central to responsible polyamory as is adjustment to changed conditions and knowing precisely when someone is 'taking the mickey' or pushing a boundary too far. Such informal framework acceptance also permits improved communication, including communication about jealousy which may not at all be sexual or even emotional but simply of too much time spent in one place rather than another.

In other words, polyamory is the art of calibrating the needs, desires and circumstances of three or more individuals and their dependents so that all achieve the maximum reasonable state of happiness and self development that is possible under the available material conditions. In this form, polyamory is here to stay for a significant minority of the population alongside standard monogamous options with people phasing in and out of each as circumstances change. This fluidity, if well handled by mature people in consensual contexts, can only be beneficial to those people capable of dealing with its inherent stresses and negotiations and so to society.

The Left and Intangibles

The Left often has a difficulty with intangibles. Often the notion that what is intangible is important is rejected altogether because of an over-insistence on materialism. Acceptance of the importance of intangibles does not reject materialism as the basis for being and so of society and politics. It simply sees the emergence of 'things from things', from matter, as constructions of minds that are material but have evolved into a consciousness that is creative in using language, concepts, the creation of new formations of matter through science and manipulation and new relationships as tools and weapons in the struggle for power, resources and status.

On the other hand, the Left often collapses this analysis into a po-faced Frankfurt School vision of intangibles which is riddled with inappropriate moral judgments that derive ultimately from Judaeo-Christian habits – hence the often trotted out garbage about commodification and objectification as if the concepts meant much more in their hands than the sort of moral disapproval that Jeremiah would have warmed to. The correct approach to intangibles is one that is detached and neutral about the fact of intangibles and concentrates on their actual use in ‘really existing’ human relationships as instruments of power – in effect as weapons and tools.

For example, it may well be (I think it is) true that so-called 'commodification' and 'objectification' are potentially progressive insofar as they are expressions of actual human being. It is the interpretation and use to which they are put by power that is problematic and not their use in themselves. Even consensual pornography, let alone free trade with full information, can be highly progressive if undertaken between equals freely choosing their position. The issue is thus not the fact of intangibles or even their analysis but the ownership of the use of them and the right to choices about use value. The Left has certainly not come to terms with late liberal capitalism’s ability to create and control economic and power relationships based on these intangible weapons and tools rather than on the use of iron, steel and rail.

The current political case study is the violent struggle in America going on at the moment between liberals trying to define their own fake news as truth and conservatives discovering that they can create their own truth with impunity as fake news. The struggle sometimes seems trivial but it is a war as important as the mid-twentieth century ones conducted with bullets and bombs because ultimately it is about control of the levers of informational power and so economic choices affecting the material lives of millions. Both sides are basically lying liars who have got into the habit of lying but this complex eco-system of lies is a good example of the power of intangibles and of the Left's failure to rise above the lying to create the opportunities for the mass of the population in order to derive their own functional truths from full information and a solid grounding in critical thinking.

As we write, the US stock market rises and employment levels are increasing and yet an entirely different vision of reality is presented as truth because it is necessary for some people to believe it is true – the same applies to the persistant apocalypticism about the British economy under Brexit. These are examples of political intangibility distracting us from reality that are as absurd as our uncritical acceptance of brands and the claims of corporate social responsibility going on within capitalism. As invented reality spins away from really existing material reality, so the chances for cataclysm do increase - hence our social progress as a continual two steps forward, one step back amongst mountains of gore and lost dreams. The educational problem is one of lack of critical thinking under complex social conditions and the equally important lack of some sense of the self as more than simply the creature of social conditions - this last lie is the fatal pessimistic crime of the modern intellectual liberal left towards the people.

There is thus a total system of intangibility overlaying materiality with many layers within it, all derived from a materiality for which there is no serious Left critique that is not mired in a priori theory. The dead weight of all forms of essentialism - especially the cant of Kant - gives power to an intellectual class denuded of intellect. Our new critique should encompass our acceptance of the value lying in intangibles in economics, in culture, in social relations and in politics but then explore how to vest the value in the people in general rather than in self-interested classes – including an intellectual class which is highly manipulative of intangibles in its own class interest. In short, the Left has no serious philosophy of the human condition that is not already moribund and it is time to call the universities out on their failures.

Narrating The Current Crisis - What Trump May Mean

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States is a fact on the ground. Even if Jill Stein somehow succeeded in overturning the result through recounts, it is to be doubted that the populist movement would accept the revision. A Hillary Clinton Presidency would be a wounded beast, facing an angry Republican Congress and probable civil strife and under vicious and continuous internet attack. The world beyond the United States, having congratulated Trump once, will be embarrassed to have to become partisan by subsequently congratulating Clinton. The deeper truth is that Trump has won even if he loses a recount. He has destabilised liberal America and mobilised populist America. That clock cannot be turned back. Nor is Trump's victory is an isolated event. A number of similar political events across the West suggest that a radical change affecting international relations is under way and that the process has not yet concluded. Let us provide a new narrative of contemporary history and see where it leads us.

We can start by saying that the neo-liberal model and its ameliorative liberal internationalist and post-Cold War international socialist variants have improved conditions for many millions outside the West but they have arguably also enriched up to half of domestic Western populations at the expense of the condition, security and identity of the other half as well as created oligarchical minorities elsewhere. Neo-liberalism and its variants have also not brought peace. On the contrary, a forward expansion of liberal values by force has destabilised many countries, leading to mass movement of peoples (which brings free movement of peoples into disrepute amongst those who have not benefited from globalisation), has created new security threats, has forced non-Western sovereign states into defensive militaristic postures and has even recreated the conditions for superpower competition and confrontation only a quarter of a century after the ending of the Cold War.

There have been benefits from quasi-socialist and liberal ameliorative strategies operating at a global level, especially in terms of the mobilisation of progressive forces outside the West and the engagement of young activists in progressive politics within it but regulatory regimes have tended to pay only lip service to democracy and to have preferred corporatist structures in which activist minorities collaborate with corporate CSR departments and government agencies to impose legal and regulatory solutions to global problems without consultation with or the political education of those in the West left behind. They also tend to treat emerging country populations as ‘subjects’ of action rather than as independent actors engaged in their own liberatory struggle.

The role of the United States has been ambiguous. The promotion of a progressive liberal agenda has often operated alongside a militaristic and expansionist agenda. This has created a class of international NGO activists ‘who mean well’ but it has also created alliances with faith-based obscurantists who feign democracy and, in turn, also created its own obscurantist and reactionary oppositionism prepared to engage in armed struggle to defend identity against what they see as cultural imperialism. National liberation has moved from the progressive Left to the reactionary Right, the United Nations has been diminished and, at its worst, the reaction to Western ideological expansionism has created cause for new threats of asymmetric warfare operated by terrorists allied with organised crime.

Globalisation, in collapsing borders, has also permitted massive capital accumulation by organised crime, free riding the increase in international trade, in facilitating illegal economic migration (often willing but sometimes enslaved), piracy, online fraud and the trade in narcotics and banned substances as well as in armaments and illicit untaxed funds. The liberal internationalist regulatory strategy has scarcely made a dent in this expansion of non-state activity which may be classed as criminal by state moralists but, in some areas, represents the developing world’s own rational exploitation of globalisation.

The negative response to this situation was originally restricted to two distinct movements. The first was the rise of a domestic Western anti-war movement which split progressive forces into those who supported liberal values expansion and those who saw it as imperialistic. The second saw the co-emergence of neo-nationalist resistance to the claims of the West. Both appeared in the wake of Western intervention in Central Asia and the Middle East. During this period, the Liberal Establishment of the West was in a strong enough position to ignore the anti-war movements and to place continued pressure on non-Western nations, not excluding attempts at regime change by stealth, often indirect through 'Foundations'. The prospect of a global hegemony for the West, based on market economics, oligarchical democracy and rights ideology, was considered real by the liberal’ hawks’. At this time, right wing national populist forces in the West were largely marginal.

In 2008, a major economic crisis transformed the situation. The capitalist system teetered briefly on the edge but proved resilient. However, its resilience was purchased at the price of a strategy of domestic austerity which continues to this day. This coincided with growing acceptance that liberal interventionism using force had been a disaster that had not achieved its ends although the full fruits of that disaster would still not be seen for some time (exemplified by the Syrian tragedy). Confidence in the elite was shaken but the solution of the voters was, at this stage, to grumble but change the captains of the fleet, not the direction of the navy.

The Coalition Government of 2010 in the UK and the Obama Administration which came to office as the recession of 2008’s effects were unfolding continued governance much as before but a series of developments shook confidence in the elite: above all, the economic crisis itself and the associated fact that, though economies were stabilised, growth did not return. The self-identifying middle classes (actually the middling and lower middle classes and upper working class) were disproportionately hit by the consequences. The rich appeared to get richer. Austerity measures were increasingly judged to be applied unfairly to keep elected officials in power by appealing to the half of the population fearful of taxation. Elected officials were increasingly seen as self-interested and even corrupt or certainly beholden to the economic interests who had caused the crash. In foreign affairs, incapable of winning wars, democratic states proved perfectly capable of war crimes and out of touch with public distaste for foreign adventurism. Since progressive governments had either presided over the conditions that led to the crash or were presiding over the failure to deal with the consequence of the crash, public discontent tended to move to the right rather than the left (although populist movements appeared of both types). This was compounded by a new factor - the pressure of mass migration as 'free movement of peoples' turned from a dream into a nightmare that liberal ideologues failed to recognise as such.

The failure of the Arab Spring and other democracy movements saw a hardening of state power across the emerging world and in the communist and former communist states. These latter states also took a more neo-nationalist stance, fully aware of the role of Western elites in attempted regime destabilisation. Noting Russia’s successful incursion into Georgia, they began the process of resisting liberal Western incursion and then turning back the tide of Western expansion, a process in which Russia took the lead with its acquisition of Crimea and its own intervention in defence of the existing order in Syria. If the liberal internationalists continued to pursue their strategy either directly or indirectly through ‘philanthropic’ foundations, these not only made little headway but created further instabilities which neo-nationalists could exploit. A huge class, an 'industry', of otherwise unemployable graduates created a special interest bloc in the West of 'activists' and 'campaigners', appealing to that part of the electorate with a deontological view of international affairs where the exclamation of a 'should' would be sufficient to demand an action that would then become an 'is' - life is rarely so simple! This was faith-based and not evidence-based politics. While the Left began to split into its liberal left and socialist components with increasingly bitter recriminations between the two over austerity, identity politics, liberal economics and foreign policy, the real beneficiary of this break down in the liberal Western paradigm was the neo-nationalist and populist Right which now began to grow rapidly within the West.

The negative populist reaction to liberal elite failure was both a Left and a Right phenomenon but it was the Right that was enabled to remain united in its opposition. Most of the establishment Left were implicated in the failures and errors of the current regime. This has been symbolised well in the last week by the unprecedented decision of an incumbent French Socialist President of France not to put himself forward as the candidate of his Party in next year's Presidential Election. Liberal elements on the Left had refused to compromise with public anger because of liberal ideology and so saw their side split into factions and their acceptability diminish except among special interest groups who had nowhere else to go (such as public sector white collar employees and NGO workers). Meanwhile the populist Right, taking overt inspiration from the effective opposition to liberal hegemony of Putin (Russia), created an alliance of the lower middle class with national trading and financial interests and discontented working class people whose economic interests had been ignored and whose culture had been disrespected by urban liberals. These latter created a network of interconnected national populist movements that claimed democracy and freedom (not without reason in some cases), seizing power quite quickly in Hungary and Poland but increasingly setting the terms of debate elsewhere and posing material threats to the established order in countries as different as the UK, France and Italy.

The first major breakthrough for populism against the elite was not on the Right but on the Left with the surprise election of a marginal figure (Jeremy Corbyn) to the Leadership of the Labour Party, Instead of accepting the result, the liberal wing of the party undertook a war of attrition against their new Leader. This halted any chance of Labour becoming the voice for British populism instead of UKIP. By the time he was established firmly as Leader (even then clearly being undermined despite that), the initiative had long since passed to UKIP and thence to the Leave Campaign for Brexit. This same opportunity was lost more recently in the US when the DNC conspired to halt the rise to power of the avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, confident that their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton would have the confidence of the American people. This split on the Left and widespread economic discontent presents us with weak versions of Lenin’s famous three pre-conditions for revolution. All that were missing were the cadres to seize power. These were provided by ruthless well-funded populist machines, wholly dedicated to achieving power, in successively the Brexit Vote and the 2016 Presidential Election and strong enough to push aside even the mainstream media which had been arbiter of politics for the bulk of post-industrial history.

The victory of these forces is truly revolutionary for the following reasons:-

1. They have forced conservative forces to accommodate the key populist demands of the neo-nationalists – we see this in the strategic commitment of the May Government to Brexit and the degree to which previously negative conservative Republicans have offered their full support to the incoming President
2. They have given encouragement strategically and tactically to national populists elsewhere, most notably in Europe where there are real fears amongst liberals that their last major stronghold (the European Union) may fall to neo-nationalism or implode under pressure from neo-nationalism
3. They have not merely out-manoeuvred the progressive Left but have forced it into a crisis with the two factions (the socialists and the liberal) now engaged in a bitter existential struggle for dominance as the primary opposition force – a process that may take many months or even years to result in victory for one side. It is just as likely that these forces will split into separate ‘parties’, dividing the Left for a generation.
4. Moreover, they have managed to ‘detourne’ the liberal left so that it appears to be increasingly anti-democratic and irrational as well as arrogant and narcissistic, the historical attributes of the Right. This latter may be the populists’ greatest achievement in the long run.
5. They have introduced other apparently left-wing strategic policies – including variants of Keynesianism and anti-imperialism/peace – into populist discourse leaving the liberal (rather than the democratic socialist) Left as justificatory spokespeople for austerity, corporatism and even war (which in itself fuels the civil war within the Left).
6. They have adopted a paradoxical inter-nationalism in which strong nation states collaborate as they compete, concentrating on trade relations and deal-making rather than war – again, this is a ’detournement’ of traditional Left positions which have abandoned inter-nationalism and national liberation for supra-nationalism and trans-nationalism.
7. Above all, they have appealed over the heads of the Left beyond their traditional lower middle class base to the non-public sector working class (at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries), adopting their values, respecting their culture and (at least superficially) supporting their economic interests. This has split the working class from the Left in a decisive historical shift that saw a third of working class votes go for Brexit despite Labour backing for Remain and the Democrat’s white working class support dramatically hollowing out on November 8th.

The importance of the Trump phenomenon is that whoever commands the United States of America commands the general thrust of international relations policy. It is now clear that a national populist agenda is in charge of that thrust, directly or indirectly (in the event of a disputed result) for at least four and probably eight years and maybe twelve years That is sufficient time (as Reagan showed) to transform the condition of the world for good or ill. It is likely that a more moderate but allied Conservative Government will be in office in the UK for at least four years and possibly nearly a decade and that the European Union will see a major transfer of power to the national populist right in several major nations and possibly the implosion of the liberal model for the Union as a whole.

This is as strategically important as the arrival of communism and fascism in the 1920s. Even if states were not communist or fascist by the 1930s, they often adapted their politics not merely to challenge these forces but to appropriate aspects of them in order better to challenge them. National populism in a number of variants, including liberal and Left variants, are likely to become the hegemonic form of international relations discourse for at least the next decade and probably much longer This does not mean the Left does not represent a challenge to the new Right. Neither of national populism’s great victories (the US Election and Brexit) were overwhelming – the Democrats still (barely) won a majority of the popular vote and we have noted the theoretical possibility of the result being overturned by recounts. Similarly, Brexit is accepted by both major parties but the debate over whether the UK is to have a 'soft' or 'hard' Brexit permits Remainers to believe they can overturn the mandate through stealth or attrition. But the Left now has a major problem of credibility – it is associated with arrogance, incompetence, corruption and hypocrisy and, increasingly, with a rather dubious attitude to democracy.

Another problem the Left has is one of division – there are now two major competing visions for defeating neo-nationalism, the liberal and the socialist, which are fundamentally incompatible. The former will not adapt, compromise and let go of power while the latter sees the former as equally if not more problematic than the populists (who inconveniently will not go all the way to being fascists or official racists or xenophobes despite intense attempts by liberal propagandists to make these connections). Moreover, many socialists have more in common with Trump on key aspects of foreign and economic policy than they do with their own liberal ‘allies’ while many liberals are clearly highly emotional about single and identity issues that socialists see as part of the problem and not part of the solution. Given that Jill Stein only got 1% of the vote and 40% of women voted for Trump, the environmentalist and feminist commitments that lead Left thinking are also probable barriers to recapturing working class support.

To all intents and purposes, November 8th was a devastating blow to the liberal internationalist project. Funding will continue from European (at least until 2018) and from Liberal Foundation sources but US and UK Government sources are likely to dry up quite rapidly in the coming months. More to the point, the US and UK Governments are no longer going to be available to promote many liberal causes with emerging world Governments even if the British Government appears to remain committed to some important international rights-related treaties. UK Government action will be redirected at trade deals forcing European countries to follow suit. Major international agencies will have their role questioned with expectations that policy be in accordance with national populist values. The Business & Human Rights Treaty is unlikely to make progress until the current cycle is over - unless it is made more business-friendly.  The balance of power has shifted.

Corporate reactions fall into various special interest categories with many welcoming the new populism, others (with large urban liberal customer bases) nervous of boycotts and politicisation and others concerned about the collapse of the existing liberal internationalist order. One likely result is that all but the bravest corporation will start to withdraw funding from social liberal projects that might be classed as political where once they were simply classed as CSR (corporate social responsibility). Public affairs departments are reeling under the shock because they tend to be staffed by ‘urban liberals and liberal conservatives’, people who have had a stake in the preceding order and a career path that might include political office. Now, they have to consider their options as business splits into camps according to their relationship to various factions in the culture wars. However we look at it, independent funding is likely to decrease or shift into obviously charitable projects where those charities are not engaged in political lobbying. Radical capitalists like Soros and Branson are swimming against the tide. They are also not getting any younger.

Culturally, the liberal internationalists are faced with the problem that they are no longer ‘hegemonic’ within the West. Half the population rejects their hegemony. A significant part of the leadership of the 'hegemonic half' is questioning the strategy of arrogance towards the working and lower middle classes. Globalisation is in question intellectually. Liberal internationalists no longer hold all the commanding heights of power (and may not recover ground until 2020 or even 2024 or 2028) and, if they do recapture them, it will be a much weakened position - Weimar or Leon Blum's Popular Front to all intents and purposes. Their funding is about to fall except from highly politicised Foundations who are now in a confrontational relationship with the sources of power that can deliver what liberal NGOs want. Soros, for example, has openly declared war on the Trump Administration which places the Trump Administration alongside every 'regime' that Soros wants to overturn - their enemies' enemy is Trump. Every attempt to assert radical liberal values now has a countervailing, often cogent and aggressively positioned, alt-right argument. As liberal social media platforms try to cut out the alt-right, new platforms appear to serve it.

Two cultural opponents within the West are now evenly matched for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union and this has happened in under a year. As in all such struggles in the past, it will be hard for anyone to stay out of the fight and stay in public life. The old Right/Left conflict is changing into a conflict between democratic nationalism and inter-nationalism on the one side and supra-nationalism and liberal internationalism on the other. A third of the Left, mostly working class, will find itself moving into what will be positioned as the New Right and a third of the Right, mostly managerial business and white collar professionals, will find themselves moving into the Liberal Left. The former have the old media, the universities, the 'intellectuals' and the scribblers. The latter may have the most innovative parts of the new media, the public meetings, the bulk of social media sharers and the people who discuss public affairs in the pubs rather tham the wine bars. And we are only at the beginning ...

Critiquing Steve Bannon

A great deal of attention is being paid to Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's new head of strategy. I suspect there is some misunderstanding about the amount of power that an ideologue like Bannon can have in Trump's administration and an exaggeration of the link that can be made between the past views of Bannon and the opinions of the President-Elect, let alone the views of those to be found expressed on Bannon's vehicle, Breitbart.

The liberal cultural wing of the 'American oligarchy' are having a bit of a hissy-fit at the moment and any straw is being grasped at to demonstrate that Trump is a 'fascist' or worse. Eventually cooler heads will prevail. In the meantime here are three things to note before we look at what Bannon may actually think.

Bannon as Employee and Populist

The first is that his job as chief strategist is a 'corporate' one - he no longer speaks for himself and now loans his talents to the President. He has been bought. If he fails to deliver or blunders, he will be disposed of. His job is now to support the President not because he believes in him but because he is paid to perform a function and that function is political. He has to think about practical outcomes - increasing the President's rating sufficiently to get him re-elected in 2020, assisting in building a coalition that will get the President's programme through Congress and maintaining the momentum of the movement that put Trump into power.

Instead of shouting agit-prop aimed at the slightly over half the population required to get into White House, he is now dealing with the structures of power and with a struggle for control of information flow and interpretation against a mainstream media ['MSM'] that must, out of class interest, aim to destroy him. His ownership of Breitbart represents a direct challenge to MSM authority and revenues, especially if Breitbart becomes the main means by which the Trump administration communicates to the mass of the population.

The second is that he comes into office not as part of the closed competing network of networks that makes up late liberal democratic representative democracy but because he controls a means of communicating with and maintaining contact with a populist movement. This is his strength but also his weakness. The strength is obvious - he can reach millions of Americans with a policy line faster than any political rival and he can help form their opinion and actions in a way that may be unprecedented.

Perhaps only Father Coughlan's radio broadcasts in the 1930s come close to this but Breitbart is providing data in real time and continuously. Of course, Bannon will be delegating control of this medium but it would be naive not to see this as part of his armoury even if indirectly. He has a reserve power that, if he is dismissed, lies in the possibility that this machinery may become a thorn in the side of the President that it has helped to elect.

The Paradox of Bannon's Populism

The third thing to note is that the claims of 'fascism' miss some very central non-fascist aspects of American populism. The confusion of populism and fascism is sending liberal critics down a blind alley, stopping them from developing an appropriate critique and strategy for countering it. By propagandistically using inappropriate terms, liberals are creating the very culture of resentment that partly led to their defeat in the first place, opening up territory for Bannon's Alt Right to conquer. One key difference from fascism, a difference also to be found in European right-wing populisms, is the approach to democracy and free speech.

Both are viewed as positive and dynamic forces whereas liberals are being caught out being anti-democratic (questioning the 'deplorables', intellectuals questioning democracy itself and, in the UK, maintaining a resistance against the majority vote in the Brexit vote) and opposed to free speech (promoting increasingly onerous anti-hate laws, limiting freedoms on the campus and often downright bullying of non-liberal dissidents). This is a complete detournement of conventional thinking about what it means to be right and left. It is central to the drift of many social libertarians from one side to the other despite the conservatism underpinning Alt Right culture.

Bannon's robust and aggressive populism might be framed as 'hate speech' amongst liberals but it is framed as 'free speech' amongst conservatives with some plausibility. The liberal MSM has tried to counter with the framing device of 'fake news' (extended from genuine abuses to cover political opponents who are often merely  providing information that would be pre-censored as inappropriate or inconvenient by the MSM). The MSM's somewhat sinister interest in trying to place rival social platforms under pressure is obvious. Twitter has taken the bait (aware of the sympathy for liberalism of large consumer-driven corporations with products aimed at urban liberals and minorities) by removing 'hate' accounts although many of these accounts equally class themselves as 'free speech' opportunities.

In the pre-Trump world, the control of the total system under a liberal hegemony would have instantly marginalised the critics of liberalism but Bannon has contributed to the creation of an entire alternative information and communications political ecology whose success can be seen in the election of a President despite the massive post-nomination assault on his candidacy by every element within the hegemonic system. The cultural power of this parallel system has thrown the dominant structure into something close to panic. Almost every idea emanating from it stands against the assumptions and values of oligarchical liberalism.

What Liberals Might Like To Do

This is where it gets interesting. In any other period of history or under any other hegemonic system, the solution would be simple - authoritarian repression. When faced with an existential threat, the system forgets any 'rules of war' and suppresses free speech, jails opponents, if necessary tortures and kills. But the West no longer has these tools at its command - not only because of its own claimed values (though we wonder if this would be restraint enough) but because the rule of law cannot be deployed in this way (certainly not after January 20th and as Woodrow wilson deployed it) and because the infrastructure of the State cannot be relied upon to comply with such orders.

Trump is faced with his own problem in that it is clear state level law enforcement in some key states may resist some of his policy measures. Any push to survival by the hegemonic regime through repression would probably mean civil war and certainly extensive political violence. In other words, the liberal hegemony of the US has fallen into the same position as the communist hegemony did in the Soviet Union in 1991 without even the tools at the disposal of the reactionaries. Anti-liberal forces have seized control of the State using liberal methods and are now in command of Presidential power for at least four years and possibly eight or twelve.

Bannon, who has cited Lenin, appears to understand his position and that of Trump. Through sheer energy and exploitation of the undoubted failures of liberalism (which are not the subject of this posting), they have surged forward in under nine months from nowhere to capture control of supreme executive power with reluctant and nervous allies controlling the legislature and a real opportunity to set a conservative tone within the judiciary. This cannot be called a political revolution because the forms and substance of the American 'regime' remain the same. There are also many points of resistance from centres of power still controlled by the liberals (in the very broadest sense) which can slow down the Presidency and destroy his credibility with the centre-ground.

However what Bannon, Trump and others have achieved is the possibility of a cultural revolution in which they set the tone for American politics and society on terms to which liberals have to adjust to survive. It cannot be Leninist - in other words, it cannot be the imposition of one ideology on the rest of society by a minority - but it can be significant if it forces conservatives to take on the concerns of the population at large and if it forces the liberals to begin a self-critical appraisal of how they lost power (which they currently seem reluctant to do) and if they transform themselves to include the concerns of the voters who switched sides out of frustration with their neglect. How liberalism might transform itself post-Trump is for another time.

So, with these caveats and comments, that Bannon is not the President but the servant of the President, that he is only part of a movement which he guides but to which he does not dictate terms and that his room for manouevre is limited in any path to replacing liberal hegemony, what is it that Bannon believes? We don't have timer for an exhaustive analysis of his views or trying to work out what what views on Breitbart are his and what are those of his contributors. 

We will take an analysis of his opinions to just one audience (a conservative religious group) in the summer of 2014 and see what it reveals. Of course, being a politician, Bannon is tailoring his opinions to the audience - the Human Dignity Institute at the Vatican - and that has to be taken into account. Yet we can see what values underlie his views and so what beliefs are going to be influential in advising the President (whose views may be different) and in squaring various political circles - appointments, deals with Congress, speeches and policies.

The Problem of Capitalism

Bannon's world view is fundamentally communitarian. This creates the space for a critique of capitalism that is not socialist but belongs to a parallel right-wing tradition. This originated with petit-bourgeois anarchism but became central to the corporatism of fascism and national socialism as ideologies. But it is also an ideological position held widely within the Catholic Church as a critique of the dehumanising aspects of treating persons as not souls but mere units of production within large-scale combines that are disruptive of social bonds, duties and obligations. It is this critique that matters to Bannon in his Vatican talk. This critique is not interested in liberal capitalism's undoubted achievements in driving progress and innovation because progress and innovation are not seen as good things in themselves - as they tend to be seen by most liberals (though not increasingly by the eco-conservatives within the ranks of liberalism).

Where capitalism is criticised from the Left (as it used to be until the 1990s), it is as an anti-progressive force that fails to make best use of human talents and is wasteful. Innovation is seen as something just as easily and better done by the collective. Marx had his own critique of the de-humanisation involved in capitalism but, unlike Heidegger whose critique is of technology, science and so technology are positive factors which socialists will be better able to understand and make use of. If Bannon quotes Marx it is to point up the dehumanising aspects (in his view) of capitalism and not to share his socialism. No more than the Vatican and the Proudhonists, Bannon is not remotely a national socialist, a very different hybrid of socialism and communitarianism presented as anti-Marxism, nor a fascist, a corporatism without a moral base.

Naturally, I do not share this view of Bannon's since I see all human development as being broadly enhanced by scientific understanding and technology. I would go further and say that the objectification and allegedly dehumanising aspects of capitalism are positive rather than negative precisely because they break apart social binds that are repressive (indeed oppressive) and permit new social forms to emerge in their place, forms that are more suited to individual freedom and to human progress as technology develops.

The criticism I would have late capitalist liberalism is that it has compromised far too much with conservative forces - historically-based identity politics, regressive environmentalism (rather than sustainability as strategy) and faith-based approaches to values - and that, while communism as a political system became sclerotic and inefficient as well as cruel, some form of scientific materialism is central to the forward-looking Left Project. In other words, the rise of the Alt Right has been partly predicated on liberalism's compromises with conservative forces because ground had already been conceded by Clinton and Blair for short term electoral reasons in favour of identity, sentiment and faith.

Cronyism & Fairness

Many Leftists will share Bannon's views on 'crony capitalism', the capitalism of the few creating wealth and value for themselves and not for the people. This is classic populism but it not only represents an ideal shared with the Left but liberals are now on the defensive because, whether under Blair or Clinton, they have bought into the spurious global trickle-down theory of development and have allied themselves with corporations and oligarchs on terms that seem to enrich leading liberal politicians more than those who elect them.

This is where Bannon, appealing to the moralism of faith-based communities, has probably scored his greatest political victories in the last year - in the comparison of the insecurity and anxieties of struggling families with the wealth and comfort of a liberal elite who seemed to care more about people in faraway places than their 'ain folk'. Framed as 'racism' or 'white nationalism', it was nothing of the kind. It was merely filling the yawning chasm left by liberal abandonment of the respectable working classes and lower middle classes who had failed to fall into a pre-set liberal identity category and who did not give a stuff about liberalism's cultural politics.

There is a 'fairness' in Bannon's critique both that is it is a fair criticism but also that fairness (a very ordinary sentiment) is a value. He sees liberals as being at the apex of an unfair system and this clearly makes him angry. In another age and time perhaps he would have been a socialist. Perhaps not. American liberals have not made generalised fairness an existential value but have particularised it within identity politics. Perhaps this is why they are now licking their wounds.

Fairness is important as a social value. It is something imbued in children during their own battle to be recognised when power lies elsewhere. They do not object to power so long as it is fairly applied. The child-like resentment at unfairness may be at the very heart of the Trump 'revolution' - it is not resentment at people with darker skins or who like the same sex but resentment at the unfair privileging of other people at their expense. And, yes, this is what liberals have done, often without realising they have been doing it.  They have been 'unfair' at multiple levels towards many Americans in the political home and the political playground. Some of Bannon's anger is justified.

Securitisation & Moral Value

Bannon's attack on securitisation is perhaps the most interesting aspect of his critique of liberal capitalism. Let us take the ideological base in Judaeo-Christianity for granted (more of that in a moment). His analysis is questionable - almost sub-Tawney - but let it stand. When he complains about securitisation, he is doing two things. The first is to give us a theory of commoditisation that could have come straight out of the late Marxist Frankfurt School - another of many detournements of left-wing thinking to meet right-wing objectives.

But it is the moral underpinning of the critique that matters. The Frankfort School (though their arguments were often specious) were claiming to describe reality and moral responses only emerged out of the hysteria of the liberal Academy - you might call this a displaced morality or valuation in which belief uses intellect cover up its own sentiment. Bannon will have none of that. He goes straight to valuation. He observes what he thinks is a fact on the ground and then sees it through the prism of morality from the very beginning.

Jump back to the causes of 2008 and you see securitisation at the very heart of the crisis. Bannon takes something that is intrinsically immoral from his perspective - the commodification of humans, their deepest needs and attributes - and shows, in a religious morality tale, to people who can put two and two together that the collapsing nature of capitalism is essentially a problem of moral failure. It means that if we change our morals (or rather imbue a certain morality in the State and economic system), prosperity and order will return.

This is a classically populist argument. It is, of course, nonsense but it sentimentally works for many working and middle class Americans who have no alternative 'scientific' narrative, who are accustomed to framing difficult questions in terms of good and evil and who desperately want change. This attack on Wall Street is definitely not a progressive or socialist one but, since progressives are ineffective and socialists marginalised, the liberal acceptance of Wall Street and liberal lack of interest in commodification in economics (oh, the irony! - the interest seems only to be in persecuting sex workers and getting better jobs for urban middle class women), it is the most effective one, the last interpretation left standing for relatively poorly educated people under real pressure who liberals refuse to accept or help.

'The World Burns' & Freedom

Bannon adopts one aspect of fascism that is really no more than an emotional stance - the desire to tear things down and destroy the Establishment. I have some sympathy with this since this so-called Establishment (a system of interconnecting networks with its own shared ideology) has failed to solve so many real world problems, indeed compounded them. Such an emotional stance can be a productive one in creating the motivation for change under conditions of sclerosis. But do we take this seriously? I don't take seriously my own emotional impulses in this direction which I express more as approval for 'shocks to the system'. Only 'shocks' seem to capable of forcing liberals to change their ways and they may remove the older generation of failed liberals and put in a new generation with a better understanding of the situation. In Bannon's case, yes, I think we must take him seriously.

Whereas for a Leftist like me, the liberal project simply took a wrong turning just as the Russian Revolution was a wrong turning, things are not black and white. Our failed liberalism has still produced a more tolerant and open society which the best efforts of Bannon and the Alt Right cannot reverse, just as Sovietism provided some genuine advances for the Russian people and offered a valuable experiment in the achievements and limitations of socialism. In other words, I can attack late liberal capitalist democracy on its failures because I see it as blocking the forward advance of humanity but I would want to reform and control it rather than want to destroy it completely. It irritates the hell out of me but it is still part of the human condition that has to be accommodated. Bannon on the other hand wants, like Lenin, to replace one system entirely with another - he wants to reverse progress and re-stabilise humanity on conservative-communitarian lines.

And will he achieve this? Of course he will not. It is rhetoric. The resilience of the American Constitution, the resistance of 50% of the American population, the fact that there is no means for enforcing a 'gleichshaltung' on the many different centres of power within modern liberal democracies and the reality that most people actually want more freedom rather than less work against his revolutionary romanticism. Furthermore, he may have to come to terms with the fact that his President is an instinctive social libertarian and he is only a part of a mass movement whose key word is Freedom just as that of the liberals is Justice (when perhaps it should be Peace, Justice & Freedom).

For the leading edge of European populism and, we believe, for Trump, Freedom means economic freedom as conservatives view it but only more so. It is not just that - 'freedom populists'  have determinative concepts of national or state freedom and individual freedom presented as private rights over public claims. This is not the ideology of Judaeo-Christian communitarianism which we will see is central to Bannon's position. We have here internal contradictions within populism - between communitarianism and libertarianism where the former is actually on the defensive. The unhappiness of Christian Evangelical conservatives at Trump's lack of enthusiasm for some of their views as he gets closer to the Oval Office is an expression that this is not a Christian conservative regime.

Bannon & Communitarianism

Bannon regards libertarianism (in the US this is nearly always seen in economic terms) as an ally within populism but contrasts it with his brand of Judaeo-Christian 'enlightened capitalism', creating the core of that primary internal contradiction within American populism between Freedom and Fairness. It is an internal contradiction that creates a point of potential conflict with Trump himself who is clearly not a man of faith and who equally clearly rather gets on very well with a typical European proponent of the Freedom agenda like Nigel Farage. Although we might suspect Bannon playing up to his audience at this point since he clearly likes and admires Farage, I think Bannon is serious and not playing to the crowd here. His belief in Fairness draws him to a particular view of economic relations that is not scientific but comes from Biblical revelation (ultimately).

This does not require some deep-seated faith in God but only a belief that the code of values created in Judaea in the Iron Age and adapted by Christianity provides a template for an economic and social order that sees integrity in a community as something to be preserved. For the West, Judaeo-Christian ideology is what Confucianism is for the East (though he does not mention China) - a text-based wisdom ideology that is fair but tough-minded, constraining human desire and ensuring the weak are protected by moral leadership. He is far from alone in this - there is an extensive network of Judaeo-Christian (and, interestingly, Islamic) conservative critiques of liberal capitalism that seek to preserve the market but on terms that permit the community to dictate the conditions under which it operates in the community interest.

Needless to say, as an atheist existentialist, the idea that some Iron Age text, let alone some Eighteenth Century constitutionalist text, is an adequate guide to the maintenance of justice, freedom and security in an age of rapid technological change, strikes me as absurd. The reality is that such texts simply become, and have done so since Constantine in the public sphere, cover for the political hegemony of whatever class happens to hold the levers of power at any one time. However, he is right that contemporary neo-liberalism, whose ideology of unfair and untrammelled power relies ultimately on economic libertarianism, does not protect the weak and vulnerable.

Neo-liberalism does destabilise societies. American liberals seem to have been unable to develop strategies adequate to the task of creating a strong society in which the weak and vulnerable are protected and in which the ordinary man or woman is not threatened with insecurity and anxiety. Naturally my answer is different from his - the radical democrat control of capitalism through reason and science - but I can understand why, having been failed by the Left and with historical cultures that emphasise the Bible, millions of anxious and insecure people have looked backwards to the past rather than forward to the future. If there is a failure in American liberalism, it is its constant living in its own present, denying the identities of those clinging to past forms but also unable to offer any grand vision of the future.

Racism?

The idea that Bannon is a racist or white nationalist is convenient for liberal critics but not merely is it unproven, it is clear that Bannon has no interest in such ideologies. This would fit with his mainstream Judaeo-Christian ideology. What he is accepting is the fellow-travelling of such ideologies within the broad populist movement. Liberals can neither understand not forgive this. But the response implicit from Bannon is two-fold - everyone has a right to a voice ('Freedom') and these people don't really matter in the long run.

Both are actually cogent positions. The first points up the authoritarian instincts of liberals who like to ban things they do not like under the banner of 'Right Conduct, Right Speech, Right Thought'. There is yet another irony in this. The Left has adopted Iron Age Judaeo-Christian attitudes and it is Bannon who is offering Voltairean freedom. This really is beyond the mental capacity of many liberals to comprehend.

Whether these extremists matter is another story. We tend to agree with Bannon. Their existence boxes him in a bit and allows liberals some easy propaganda wins in the less sophisticated centreground but it could equally be argued that free speech is a value and that the minorities have now sufficient political force to defend themselves. The weeping hysteria over the rise of fascism has been over done.

Nevertheless, the fact that Trump has such fellow travellers (though there is no evidence of racism on his part) is as potentially damaging to him as having Communists as fellow travellers were to candidates of the Centre-Left in earlier periods. On the other hand, the cultural war on the Confederate flag was probably, in retrospect, a major blunder by liberals, mobilising a legitimate and not necessarily racist 'white identity' that had scarcely existed before. The rise of Trump can be told as a succession of own goals by arrogant and presumptuous liberals.

Islamic Fascism

All this perhaps helps to explain one of the more absurd psychological turns of the New Right, its obsession with Islam. To the 'real' Leftist, Radical Islam is easily explained. I think rightly so. It is the partial creation of a long period of self-serving Western imperialism and is, in itself, obscurantist and has become dangerous: however, it is powerful in our lives only because we have panicked and made it powerful through our continuous interventions and the ease with which its atrocities trigger our own insecurity and anxiety.

Liberals have both indulged it by trying to accommodate faith-based views into their own political strategy and been panicked into illiberal measures by fear and special interests. The Alt Right fear and distaste for Islam, meanwhile, operates at many levels - in Europe, a xenophobia which has its roots in the reality of growing ghettos of poor people with a completely alien culture, amongst European intellectuals as a feared threat to free speech and the accommodation with that threat of liberals and, more in the US, an exaggerated fear of political violence (admittedly in an always potentially violent country where gun ownership is normal) from an enemy within.

These are all simplistic responses that reify Islam and often fail to pinpoint the real policy failures - in the handling of colonialism (by France in particular), the absurd early adoption for ideological reasons of free movement of peoples in Europe and the interventionism of liberal internationalists in the Middle East (although many liberals have become vociferous in their own right against this last) - but Bannon is going deeper, seeing Islam in almost medieval terms as a cultural rival to Judaeo-Christianity instead of (as we would see it) the third arm of three equally obscurantist but mostly benign Abrahamanic religions.

The Manichean view of religion can only take place if the critic takes religion seriously. Now, self-evidently, Bannon is speaking to an audience in the Vatican and so he may just talking his book to a particular audience but I do not think so. Everything I have written before this point hangs together to give us the picture of a man who may or may not believe in God but does believe in Judaeo-Christian communitarianism whether his boss does or not. In fact, it might be argued that the internal contradiction outlined above in populism is partially resolved by having a libertarian President with a communitarian ideologue in his ear whispering truths about half his country base and guiding his language to hold the movement together.

Apocalypticism

We are painting a picture of a highly intelligent man, who in the tradition of de Maistre, is not interested in creating a reasoned political philosophy but in expressing a more or less coherent and very flexible philosophy of political sentiments. In this regard he is a throw-back to the right-wing response to the French Revolution yet one where the radical has now adopted the central tenets of the Revolution - democracy and free speech - to overturn its values which (I think rightly) he sees as having, in any case, degenerated and given him his opportunity for his politics of sentiment. However, each sentiment is not just simple brute emotion.

Each relates to the other and each, on closer investigation, has 'just cause' - the anger and resentment are based on justifiable concerns about household and personal security and at the overweening sense of entitlement of the liberal elite. But part of the personality type involved - a testosterone and energetic male type of a certain age - requires an habitual gloomy apocalypticism, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. It isn't, of course, (the Cold War was scarier and so were the 1930s) but it feels as if it is because lots of men of a certain age have seen no progress since 2008 and feel insecure. This means they get to feel apocalyptic. Once a word for women trapped into certain behaviours by their condition, hysteria now transfers easily to early and late middle aged men in the West as well as liberal snowflakes in the universities who send each other into paroxyms at the drop of a Tweet.

Bannon's apocalypticism (which he seems to enjoy) centres on two beliefs - that capitalism is in crisis and that we are at the beginning of a global war against Political Islam (which he calls Islamic fascism as most neo-cons and Israelis do). The first is partly true although it is not capitalism in crisis but the prevailing neo-liberal form of it: all that is happening is a challenge by national capitalisms to globalised regulatory capitalism on one side and a challenge to liberal accommodation with neo-liberalism (by both Right and Left) on the other. Looked at more closely, even a Trotsky-inspired radical like Shadow Chancellor McDonnell in the UK is not reviving any form of state socialism but doing little more than offering us his own brand of National Keynesianism that will probably have more in common with Trump's programme (insofar as we know it) than either neo-liberalism or state socialism.

The war with Islamic fascism is, however, pure hysteria since Political Islam presents serious threats to Europe in terms of incidents but little more than that - crush IS and you have no place where it holds sufficient state power to threaten any other State existentially. Any State it did seize control of (and Saudi Arabia is not an example of it) would be surrounded and pummelled if it did prove a serious threat. Only Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal is a country to be truly scared of in this context and a war on Political Islam in Islamabad is as likely to create the problem for us as resolve it. What it is about really is Israel but not quite in the way we may think. We have to go back to the ideology of Judaeo-Christian communitarianism to see why Israel is so important to Bannon. His Jews are not the cosmopolitan intellectuals so distrusted by Stalin or the combination of those and poor refugees and shtetl dwellers hated as the enemy within by Hitler but Judaic communitarian heroes of the Book who built a land of settled immigrants (ironically). Protecting Israel is protecting a strong global communitarian ally and so the communitarian transformation of the West.

The Putin Problem

The internal contradiction we have identified within populism represented by Trump's libertarianism and Bannon's communitarianism is exemplified by the different attitudes to Putin. I suspect Trump really does not care over much about Israel and only looks at it through the lens of political expedience. But Trump sees Putin as a deal-maker would see a rival businessman with whom he can co-operate on a major development.

Trump rationally sees that IS is the real threat to America insofar as Islamic radicals have already declared war on the country and that the only people fighting IS in Syria (as opposed to Iraq) are the Syrians and the Russians. He has a 'sphere of influence' view of international relations and, like any good businessman, weighs up the profit and loss of whether to be in one theatre or another. He probably sees the American Empire as over-extended and that it is time to dump some loss-making subsidiaries. That does not make him weak. It makes him pragmatic, rational and non-ideological.

Bannon however is idealistic, sentimental and ideological. He acknowledges Putin as a social conservative and traditionalist who appeals to many populist communitarians but he resists his charms (this evidence, of course, comes from the period before the current phase of the Syrian crisis and well before Trump announced his nomination). He sees Russia as expansionary (probably falsely since Russia is really only protecting a sphere of influence that is existentially threatened by Western expansion) and as an example of the crony capitalism that he excoriates at the centre of his ideology. He probably has limited understanding of Russia and fails to see that the 'kleptocracy' is a creation in part of the way Yeltsin responded to events, backed by the West.

After all, an American executive said in my hearing in 1992 in Moscow that the right strategy for Russia was to drive it into a robber baron phase in order to ensure capitalist development - Putin has been cleaning up stage by stage ever since. Nevertheless, from an absolutist point of view, Russia epitomises the sort of crony capitalism Bannon sees as a global problem that is destroying the basis for a legitimate or 'enlightened' capitalism that would be beholden to Judaeo-Christian moral values. The point is not whether he is 'for' or 'against' Putin at any one point in history but why he is critical - and it comes down to a less informed but wholly consistent critique that derives from his observation of American conditions. In the talk, Bannon admits his lack of knowledge of foreign affairs and it is to be doubted whether he has had time to become more sophisticated since then.

Where We Are

Bannon is important but he is probably not quite as important as liberals fear. Having said that, what he has done is bring Judaeo-Christian communitarian thinking into the inner counsels of the most powerful military and economic leader on the planet and we should take this seriously. Although his President undoubtedly has different values, that President is a pragmatist and the maintenance of his movement requires respect for Bannon's ideology even as he is challenged, in turn, by alternative visions from radical nationalists, economic libertarians and social conservatives of a more elite type.

Bannon's ideology is emotional, sentimental and ignorant in key areas (especially foreign affairs) but coherent and based on some political realities - that American liberalism has become corrupted, that capitalism is failing and in the hands of unaccountable elites and that the deep anxieties and insecurities of perhaps half the American population have been ignored at best and treated with contempt at worst.

As for responses to him, calling him a fascist is just plain ignorant and counter-productive. He sits within a Western right-wing tradition that may be said to include fascism but he is better described as the radical democratisation of traditional right-wing authoritarianism. It is that radical democratisation in substance and in method that has knocked liberals sideways.

Only weeks after the vote, most liberals still do not know what they are dealing with - that identity politics can be turned against them, that conservative religious interpretations of the decline of capitalism have force because Left critiques of capitalism were fully marginalised in the 1990s and that the new populism has proved more adept than liberals, not at campaigning per se (Clinton still got the majority of the popular vote) but at creating a sustainable movement during a technological revolution in the means of communication. Campaigns come and go but movements tend to stick.

But perhaps most interesting is that at the end of the Q&A in his talk to the Human Dignity Institute, he positioned his struggle as primarily (in 2014) one against the 'crony capitalist' conservatives in the Republican Party. If one was looking at the response of the Left in 2017, it would have to echo that of Bannon - the struggle is primarily against the 'crony neoliberals' in the Labour and Democrat Parties. If Bannon could do what he did for the Right, democratic socialists could do the same for the Left by the next round of critical elections in both the UK and US (2018-2020).

Some Friendly Advice to Hysterical 'Liberals'

What is really fascinating about the last day or so has been the lesson that 'liberals', both London-based and American, appear not to like democracy very much, especially when it comes up with a decision of which they do not approve.

The current Remain response is to try to overturn a democratic decision by fair means or foul - by a replay ('best of three' or keep going until they win?) based on claims of lies from people who lied, by Parliamentary coup d'etat or by Lords blocking. What next? Calls for the Army to step in or for the Bundeswehr to be 'invited in' to liberate us.

60% of Scotland does not want to be part of the United Kingdom anyway and the Northern Irish nationalists, well, we know what they want, so the democratic vote in England and Wales was not 52% but much more than that.

It was a decision made not by racist Morlocks looking to munch on the effete Eloi in the universities but autonomous working class and middle class individuals, debating the issues, ignoring fear and slander, and coming to a view on what was in their and their country's best interest.

I really do wonder at the mind-set of these people. The European Project is truly proven here to be more important than national democracy. Or is this propaganda just coming from people nicely immersed in the gravy train and terrified of the plundering coming to an end. They really do seem to want a manipulative dictatorship of the intelligentsia. They really are anti-democrats.

Our side's reaction has (up to this point) been emolliative and magnanimous in victory. We have remained relatively silent. We have urged not only calm but unity in the national interest. We are seeking a negotiated withdrawal that is amicable and retains as much of 'European values' as possible. We have only asked that the final say on policy be ours because we have a democratic mandate.

And what do we get in return? Hysteria. Aggression. Slander. Attempts to mount a coup (not just in the nation but in the Labour Party). I have seen what amounts to a racist (or rather classist) cartoon apparently labelling 17m or so people as skinheads in, of all places, an Israeli newspaper - you would think they would know better, wouldn't you?

What should our reaction be? How long should we put up with this before ending our current demobilisation and pulling our troops off the reserve list to undertake a second campaign in which lessons will have been learned and no quarter can be given.

You see, our attitude to a war of aggression on us is to say - bring it on but only if you must! We don't want it but if you insist on it, we will respond. A majority of the English and Welsh people are neither racists nor fools.

They will be angered at the patronising attitudes of urban intellectuals who have been lining their pockets at their expense for far too long. I mean, how many cultural studies experts exactly do we need to export goods and services? They will be even more angered by a metropolitan political class that has failed and now purports to tell them how to think.

We who fight alongside them act as a restraint. We want peace, harmony, the opportunity to build a better and fairer and more prosperous Britain in collaboration with all the reasonable elements in the political class. But if you declare war on the people, you declare war on us, their intellectual allies.

A war of workers and intellectuals against a supine and weak, and failed, liberal political establishment can end in only one result - if not now, then in five years, ten years, twenty years - because we believe there is no value greater than national democratic sovereignty as a precondition of individual freedom and long term prosperity.

Please do not underestimate the sheer force, the cold determination, the rationality of our position - or that we will not harden over time.

So, a piece of advice. Lay off the patronising attitudes. Lay off the aggression. Work with us to build a pluralistic, tolerant, independent Britain that is fundamentally democratic and is ready to work with and not against the European nations to build a better world. But if you want to push us all into a cultural civil war, that will be your decision and not ours and you must take the consequences.

Livingstone, Zionism and the Nazis

The National Socialist regime of the 1930s has always fascinated me, ever since, around the age of 12, I came across an article on medical experimentation in the concentration camps and was almost physically sick. Since then, I have accumulated a large library of books from every perspective. The story has nagged at me because the conventional narratives never seemed quite right.

First, there was the historical-epistemological problem that the victors of any struggle always write the narrative. It takes time for a detached and independent analysis of the facts to emerge just as the facts themselves ossify into highly selective documentation with the deaths of the participants.

Second, the truly horrific fate of the Jews and the barbarism and totalitarianism of a rough-hewn populist movement was always presented as a sort of grim morality tale around a demonic figure (Hitler), as a folk tale of inevitability where virtue was finally rewarded after many trials and tribulations.

What such a narrative failed to do was deal with the inconvenient facts that the participants were working in real time with limited knowledge, that all parties involved were human beings and neither angels nor demons and that few could see how acts in one place at one time could possibly result in effects in another place and at another time. There was, I suspected, more chaos in the history than hindsight reconstruction had permitted.

Third, I felt uncomfortable at the way post-war commentators insisted on speaking for the victims of circumstance and criminality. The story was equally skewed by the enforced silence, guilt and shame of the losing side (partly out of fear of vengeance or legal penalty).

This, as well as the competition between various parties that subsequently ensued over their victim status, struck me as precisely the wrong method of getting at the truth of the matter - certainly of precisely why and how things had happened.

It has been pointed out [by Cesarani - see below] that amongst the Jewish victims of the Nazis, the survivors were disproportionately young and mobile and that this has given us a narrative that takes little account of the perspective of those settled, older and with families.

In contemporary events, we see similar issues arise. Narratives are written by those with the resources to gather information and manage the media. These narratives are then imposed on us and we are given limited access to alternative stories. Very few active participants in the drama ever get to tell their story directly.

Victims are often mediated through NGOs with an eye to policy change and fund-raising. Perpetrators are wholly demonised and unable to explain what process led to their emotions and actions. Sides are taken, attitudes are not adjusted to reality and actions are consequently undertaken that worsen the situation.

A politics of outrage can emerge without the resources or will being to hand that will achieve any major change to a situation until it has reached cataclysmic proportions and become an existential clash of grand narratives with only one possible winner amidst the expenditure of much blood and gold.

The current migration crisis is like a re-run of the 'Jewish problem' of the 1930s with the same lack of analysis, the same populist hysteria, the same desperation, the same impossibility of a liberal solution and the same threat of it turning cataclysmic because no one is listening to anyone else or questioning the ideological assertions of those with access to the media.

Mountains of print and documentary footage seem to skirt profound questions of what our species is like when faced with humiliation and poverty perhaps because the conclusions were often too shocking for most liberal minds to contemplate. Observing our species in its raw rather than cooked state is left to the servants. It is evaded as we evade our own deaths.

There have been honourable exceptions. Laurence Reese's Their Darkest Hour (2007) managed to escape the good versus evil trap to show how evil was to be found in the chaos of all sides of the Second World War. You certainly need a strong stomach to read his text to the end.

Similarly, the idea that actors involved in the drama were in full control of events always struck me as absurd, a point brought out in the diplomatic arena by Zachary Shore's What Hitler Knew (2002).

Hitler was an emotional chancer of not inconsiderable natural intelligence but, like all of us, he was not a person whose views did not change over time. Finding what precisely drove him affects every judgement we subsequently make about his regime.

Was he driven by antisemitism or by something else? Cesarani certainly makes the plausible case that, in fact, although anti-semitic, he was more driven by his nationalism and an imperialist analysis of the state of Germany.

Reese and Shore helped bring me to the conclusion that, just like a lot of corporate and administrative life today, most activity takes place in a state of muddle in which sociopaths are constrained more or less by the degree to which the muddle is regulated.

The recent child abuse scandals across the world indicate that sociopathic predation is not deterred even by the existence of any ostensible cultural regulation.

Using Cesarani to Try & Understand What Happened

Coincidentally to the Livingstone 'scandal', I recently picked up what strikes me as the most definitive and most mature account of the war on the Jews I have yet read (I have not completed the book but the issue of Livingstone and the Labour Party is urgent: my comments below take us only to 1938).

This book is the late David Cesarani's distillation of a lifetime of Holocaust studies published this year, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949. On the reading so far (and I will review it when I have completed it), it is a competent and humane account of the tragedy.

Cesarani does not offer us another folk tale but rather a sound explanation of events rooted in what people actually knew of their situation and in the context of their own interpretation of that situation.

The issue in our intellectually trivial mass media was whether Livingstone was or was not an antisemite because he had made an off-the-cuff remark that was interpreted as saying that Hitler was a Zionist - much to the glee of excitable BBC reporters.

Cesarani's narrative, fact-based, is highly instructive in assessing Livingstone's claims. I use those facts here while making it clear that the interpretation is mine. And why do I allow myself to comment when I have only got to 1939 in the book? Because Livingstone was referring primarily to the early period of Nazi rule, the era of the so-called Haavara Agreement.

His comments should be judged on an understanding of what the Nazi regime was thinking in that period when it was in effective coalition with German Conservatism and not from the perspective of the exterminatory 1940s.

The fact that people change their mind over time has to be accepted and the error not made of believing what happened at point B was part of the understanding of the people at point A.

As the 'enemy within' (of which more later), the preferred strategy of the Nazis in the 1930s came to be expulsion (much as the Moriscos were expelled in Spain in the 1490s) but a series of unfortunate facts on the ground conspired to drive the regime into encouraging emigration through terror and expropriation at a time when the Jews had nowhere to go and the only ones with a plan under such circumstances were the Zionists.

As we shall see, the soup of terror, theft and murder emerged out of many ingredients -  the reluctance of ordinary Jews to be expelled, the vicious anti-semitism of the dim-witted ordinary activist in the populist movements that underpinned the regime, the perception of Hitler that the Jews were getting in the way of his war plans, the emergence of ambitious Nazi radicals in the security apparat, the inability (rather than failure) of the West to provide a refuge for the expelled or send in troops on humanitarian grounds (we have seen how that has ended up in recent history), German desperation to build up economic resources for imperial ambitions and the diplomatic problems that suddenly emerged when the radicals tried to dump the problem on the British Empire.

In this context, the Zionist strategy in Germany assisted the process of apartheid without actually enabling much migration while the Zionist strategy in America, almost certainly from ignorance rather than intent, began to 'prove' to National Socialists (and indeed Italian Fascists) that Jewry was international and was engaged in a project to limit and control the aspirations of European nation-states that had lost out on the plundering of the world by the Western Empires.

From apartheid to expropriation and expulsion, the road to extermination emerged as the final act in a drama in which an 'enemy within', constructed in part by the way that the West criticised the regime, came to look like a fifth column using up vital resources in a struggle of existential import to the Nazis.

The poor Jewish people across Europe found itself positioned as something it never was, an active trans-national plot against Germany and, without intent, Zionism accidentally helped in the construction of that meaning by its own determination to be an international actor.

The Zionists and the Nazis - The Alliance of the Incommensurable

Cesarani makes it clear that the National Socialists actively encouraged Zionist-like solutions to the 'Jewish Problem' between 1933 until the borders closed with war in 1939.

The 'alliance' of convenience between Nazis and Zionists began originally as a shared interest in diminishing the sincerely felt belief of most conservative German Jews that they had a place in Germany and were not simply (in the Nazi formulation) Jews in Germany.

By analogy we can see the difference in tone that the term 'British Muslims' has from 'Muslims in Britain'. The first is inclusive and the second positions Muslims as the 'other' and potentially, in a crisis, the 'enemy within'.

The right-wing Zionists were complicit in this, initially willingly and latterly certainly not so, although for complicated reasons. One of those reasons was they wanted assimilationist conservative Jews to feel that they had no place in Germany because they wanted these Germans, many wealthy and cultured, to emigrate to an ethnically pure Jewish homeland, preferably in Palestine.

Zionists were engaged in their own cultural, political and ideological struggle within Western Judaism. They were temporarily blinded (in Europe) by that internal struggle to the threat to Jews of being seen as 'internationalists' in an age of nationalism where, paradoxically, a Jewish version of the prevailing nationalism would be seen as an internationalist plot against specific nationalisms.

Both Zionists and National Socialists were creatures of the late nineteenth century with a similar pseudo-scientific essentialism about their own identity, an essentialism you might then have found across the so-called civilised world, in late British imperialism as much as in the Japanese Empire.

However, we can never go so far as to say that Hitler 'was a Zionist' (that claim does not stand up) but only that an identity of interest emerged in these years which fell apart only when the Nazis realised that the British were themselves considering creating a Jewish State in Palestine, one which would have given Jews a recognised diplomatic status from which to criticise the National Socialist regime.

At that point, Nazi policy remained the expulsion of the Jews by forcing them to emigrate but the Zionist model of a Palestinian homeland ceased to be of any intrinsic interest to the Nazis smewhere between 1936 and 1938.

The Nazis just wanted the Western powers or neighbouring states to take them off their hands and, to jump ahead beyond our 1938 cut-off date, the Nazis were still obsessed with strategies of expulsion rather than extermination well into their war on Poland in 1939.

The diplomatic status of the Jewish people in this context was relevant in its potential for mobilising further the most Nazi-critical force of consequence in international relations, the American Democrats who were in power under FDR and, as we shall see, Jewish activism in the US had a disturbing kick-back effect on German attitudes.

We like to date American hegemony from the middle of the Second World War when it took over from an exhausted British Empire and sealed the deal in the Suez Crisis but, in fact, American economic power, even under conditions of Depression, and its associated diplomatic influence were already central to the deliberations of weaker European powers in the 1930s.

The diplomatic status concern emerged because Jews overseas had emerged as a force to be reckoned with in defending their kindred in Germany.

We might say that we had here an emergent conflict of Zionisms - one in the West seeking to bring the West into play against Germany on behalf of German Jews in general and one in Germany seeking to collaborate with the National Socialists against the German-Jewish community that was not Zionist.

This fact alone belies the claim of a co-ordinated International Jewry. Yet Jews were speaking to each other on political matters and sufficiently so to create the perception of 'International Jewry' amongst those minded to see it.

Conservative German Jews themselves tended (until a certain point of no return) to want to quieten down Western protest precisely because of the provocative effects on German national feeling and the way it raised doubts about their own loyalty just as they initially competed with Zionists in an effort to halt the apartheid process within Germany. The Zionists and the religiously orthodox Jews had less of a problem with the 'apartheid' model.

By 1936-1937, the situation had become so critical for Jews in Germany that the representatives of German Jewry (who had had a very different vision of the future of the Jews in Europe than the Zionists) and the Zionists started to co-operate.

Nazi attitudes also changed after an abortive attempt (stopped by the British) of a small Nazi delegation to visit Palestine and meet with right-wing Zionists. The diplomatic issue (see above) had also intruded at this point and the Nazis were starting to radicalise their own emigration strategy which they saw as existential because of the coming (as Hitler saw it) inevitable war of survival.

From the Anschluss (March 1938) onwards, Zionists remaining in Austria and then in Germany were trapped into becoming little more than a tool of a strategy that might have accorded with their ends but which definitely did not accord with their vision of the means.

Zionists can certainly not be held responsible for any 'complicity' after this period, perhaps for quite some time before, for the simple reason that they had no choice in the matter. So, the situation is complicated, as complicated as, say, the decision to immolate a hundred thousand people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Far far more complicated than Livingstone implied but there was still more substance to his claims (taken as a brief period of history when the full extent of Nazi Party determination to impoverish German Jews and chase them out of Germany was unclear) than critics like John Mann can admit. The obviousness of the radical strategy of total expropriation emerged only with Kristallnacht (1938).

It is certainly not anti-semitic to point out uncomfortable truths about the three years of early Nazi-conservative rule in Germany but it should equally be said that the alliance of interest between right-wing Zionists (who showed, at times, proven disregard for the fate of Jews who wanted to remain Europeans) was based on the assessment which many shared at the time that Nazi policy was merely going to be a matter of 'apartheid'.

What no one, not even the Nazis, were seriously envisaging was that 'apartheid' was just the first stage of a process that would later lead to extermination both by deliberation and under the exigencies of war within a decade. Extermination emerged out of repeated alternative policy failures under conditions where the Nazis had truly boxed themselves into a corner from which there was no escape.

The Radicalisation of the Nazis

The problem was that the emigration solution proved difficult because most Jews understandably would not follow their own Zionist ideologues and give up their lives and livelihoods as German Jews easily. Most German Jews were, bluntly, not Zionists in the 1930s.

The emigration strategies of Nazis and Zionists alike were equally stymied by the politically understandable reluctance of the Western Powers to offer hundreds of thousands of Jews a new home during domestic economic crises and, in the case of Palestine, with the threat of destabilising further an unstable part of the British Empire.

German frustration was driven by the brute fact that whatever they did, there was nowhere for the Jews to go - just as the small town and rural Nazis were becoming increasingly vicious in their frustration that the Jews were not being 'emigrated' as promised.

The oil between these two wheels - Nazi populism below the level of the leadership and Western inability to offer help to the Jews (and it was a political inability since some politicians seem to have been keen to do more but were constrained by democracy itself) - was provided by one particular Nazi faction, its Jesuits in the SS, who applied moderate intellect and relative efficiency to an ignorant and chaotic ideology.

It was the SS, specifically Eichmann, who opportunistically grabbed the power being provided by populist street action to seize administrative control of the Jewish Problem and make active use of Zionist networks to try and drive the emigration strategy just as Goring and other Nazi bosses were driving the matter for entirely different reasons (war preparedness) through overt expropriation.

If 'extermination' was not a confirmed policy of the Nazis in the 1930s, expulsion was - even ghettoisation tended to be accidental rather than deliberate until after war was declared. Extermination only emerged later as an option (although radical Nazis never shied from the policy conceptually) when large numbers of Jews were trapped inside German territory as borders closed.

The economics of the situation in the mid-1930s had already implied that from being producers (the basis of early relative 'tolerance' under the influence of Schacht) the Jews (thanks, of course, to the very policies of marginalisation and expropriation) had become drains on the resource required for the future war effort.

This attached itself to a sort of existential panic amongst the Nazi elite that, combined with their absurd theories and ideology, would eventually sentence both Jews and leading Nazis to death. Cesarani brings out a number of other pressures working towards tragedy in this context.

One is the pressure on Hitler and the elite from their own radical (mostly rural and small town North German) party activists. It seems that the racist Nuremburg Laws were actually welcomed by many German Jews as giving (in theory) some protective legal basis for what was in danger of turning into a lawless pogrom.

More than once, the leadership was driven by the lawlessness of the Party, especially during the period of joint rule with conservatives.

The brown shirt elements may not have been a threat to the military after the Night of the Long Knives but they and the Gauleiters could still act as a populist rabble that claimed to speak for the ideals in Mein Kampf (even where their Fuhrer appeared to have moved on somewhat).

There is evidence of frequent attempts to try and manage the rabble from above in these early years rather than to egg them on. Racist radicalisation emerges as a force emanating from state enterprises only with Himmler's acquisition of security functions and the failure of conservative policies to achieve the nationalist and imperialist (not antisemitic) ends of Hitler.

Hitler might be characterised by the mid-1930s as an 'old man in a hurry', watching the clock tick and seeing time working against his life's work.The frustration of Hitler with the Jews as threat to his war aims and the populist instinct for the pogrom only merged with the horrors of Kristallnacht, an operation actually engineered by Goebbels much to the irritation and frustration of other Nazi barons.

With the monstrous Kristallnacht and the impetus it gave to a radical intensification of the expropriation to force emigration strategy under Goring aided by Heydrich and the Ministries, the Nazi regime entered a new and fateful phase and Zionism becomes virtually irrelevant to the story except as non-consensual creatures of the SS' emigration strategy. 

The balance of interest in 1933-1935, however, was towards an 'apartheid' (much as we rightly deplore this today) that initially permitted Jews to have their own economic and cultural identity as Jews in Germany rather than as German Jews, a status preferable (it seemed to many Jews) to being attacked by brown shirted thugs or having to abandon their assets and lifestyles for an untested future in Palestine, a French slum or Madagascar.

Bear in mind that the Western Governments tolerated, even if they disapproved morally, South African apartheid for many decades after the Second World War. And we have to say that there are some apartheid elements, 'justified' by security considerations, even today in aspects of right-wing Israeli policy directed at the Arabs.

As we shall see, the effects of Western boycotts on national economic viability while Hitler was planning his war for 'lebensraum' turned the Jews from being a cultural problem that could be solved through apartheid or expulsion ('medievalism') into an existential modern problem perceived to be decisive to any potential failure in prosecuting an eventual war effort.

The malign ideology and bad science of the Nazis conspired accidentally with the self-righteousness of external activism to reinforce the conspiracy theory and worsen the position of the Jews at a time when the struggle for Germany appeared to be becoming increasingly existential to men like Hitler.

How Right Was Livingstone?

Cesarani plausibly argues that, though Hitler was deeply antisemitic, his antisemitism was second order (in comparison to many of his followers) to his prior interest in making Germany great again through successful war-mongering.

The Jews were not the main object of his policy but were incidental to his main object - the conduct of war (although, of course, he saw the war as one not only for respect and empire but against 'International Jewry' so it would be foolish to say that the Jews were not a consideration here).

The tragedy unfolds in the 1930s in part as overseas Jewish responses confirmed the conspiracy theory and the Nazi radicals in charge of the security apparat (notably Himmler and Heydrich) were enabled by these attacks on German aspirations (as they saw them) to promote their position as agents within the Nazi State.

German Jews were squeezed between the policy priorities of the senior Nazi elite, the ideological obsessions of the Party whose radicals had captured the state security apparat and the radical activism of Zionism.

Zionism denied any solution to the problem that positioned Jews as good Germans, a positioning which German conservatives (who shared power with the Nazis until around 1936) and Catholics (who acted as a restraining influence in Bavaria and the South) could conceivably countenance.

The Zionists can definitely not be said to have not had the Jewish interest at heart (that would be absurd) but their commitment to cultural separateness found itself in a call-and-response relationship to National Socialism because their ideologies were surprisingly similar in many ways during the early 1930s.

On the evidence of Cesarani, for the period to 1936 at least and in muted form possibly beyond, there was a relationship of sorts between ideological National Socialism and ideological right-wing Central European Zionism - enemies fundamentally but both complicit in separating out the Jewish people from their European heritage and creating a unique identity, either to be contained and made self-sufficient or expelled from Europe.

If Livingstone was saying that Hitler and his advisers on Judenpolitik were Zionist, he is wrong. If he was saying that Hitler accommodated Zionism as the lesser evil, that his advisers and executives were favourable to Zionism over and against other forms of Jewish political expression and that Nazis and Zionists willingly collaborated for a period to resolve the 'Jewish problem' through exclusion and expulsion/migration, then he appears to be right.

But he is right only for this very early stage of National Socialist rule (1933-1936) when Conservatives and Zionists both retained some power and when economic considerations restricted the ability of the regime to damage Jewish domestic economic power or alienate the US in particular.

As we will see, it was the US which alienated Germany as much as Germany alienated the US - their world views were incommensurate. The Jewish situation worsened when their asset value as restraint on the West (especially America) shifted from one based on attempted economic extortion to a brute and obvious positioning as hostages on good behaviour (meaning non-interference with German imperial expansion).

Once Germany appeared to have got past the propaganda coup of the 1936 Olympics, won some foreign policy victories that created domestic enthusiasm for the regime and Hitler had shifted from a conservative economic policy to a radical Four Year Plan directed at a war in the East (late 1936), the conspiracy theorist in Hitler saw the actual recent conduct of American Jews as 'proof' of the danger of International Jewry to his war ambitions.

Interestingly, Mussolini interpreted matters in a very similar way and flip-flopped in his previously tolerant approach to Italian Jews after the activist criticism of his Abyssinian adventure which he also put down to Jewish agitation.

Hitler seems not only to have become enraged at the Jews but to have given the space for Himmler and Heydrich (using the security apparat) to overwhelm the rule of law and actively invent an intensified and more brutal anti-semitism (but still directed at emigration) even where it did not exist before. This rage is what permitted the authorisation for Kristallnacht.

The question begged by Livingstone's intervention, though, is whether right-wing Zionism worsened the situation for German Jewry or not.

My own view (looked at from 1938 but not later) is that it did but only marginally when compared to the inherent malignancy of Nazi ideology, the understandable but damaging blockage placed upon migration by worried neighbours and the logic of Hitler's policy of war.

War was always going to be economically unsustainable for Germany and would inevitably leave behind the lines hundreds of thousands of people alienated from national socialism by national socialism itself.

The tragic logic of the situation was (after marginalisation) towards Jewish containment (a trajectory of policy that was initially and ironically regarded by many as preferable to disordered pogroms - a malign 'tribute' to the value of German order, an order that eventually murdered millions in an apparently orderly way), deprivation of resources and, eventually, systematic extermination

Perhaps the worst that could be said of right-wing Zionism was that it was not helpful to the situation in 1931-1935 and that its model of Jewish separation became a self-fulfiling prophecy that helped drive that trajectory of death.

Its American version also helped to turn a national German prejudice about Jews into a more existential matter in which the will to extermination could eventually flourish, weakening conservative restraint on national socialism by feeding into the fantasies about the power of International Jewry.

But the logic of national socialism (war) and the nature of its ideology placed the Jews in a situation of potential destruction from day one. Perhaps the dabbling and equally inappropriate ideology of right-wing Zionism merely brought the crisis forward a bit, weakened the Conservatives of course and made things a little easier for the Nazi extremists.

But we cannot make the right-wing Zionists in any way responsible for the crimes of National Socialism. If Livingstone's point is that right-wing Zionism is problematic and problematically linked to national socialist attitudes to politics, then he has that point but no more than that point.

We cannot go so far as to assume that 'Hitler was a Zionist' rather than that the Nazis supported Zionism as an option in a critical period. The right-wing Zionists proved to be right about the need for Jews to escape Europe at that time even if they contributed to the conditions that created the reason to escape.

It is as if they were complicit in forcing the issue and were sometimes half-aware of what they were doing but without being responsible for the unforeseeable tragic consequences. We are dealing with a tragedy beyond anyone's control other than the Nazis (and even their control of events has been exaggerated). They too were hurtling to their own destruction on the basis of their own fantasies.

The Austrian Tipping Point

There is more to add because the collaboration with Zionism was to continue but under very different circumstances in Austria after the Anschluss in 1938. Cesarani continues to make the point that Hitler's Judenpolitik was virtually in abeyance by this time. The Fuhrer's primary concern was the impending war effort so that appropriating Austria was merely appropriating a potential war asset. 

On the other side, Austrian Nazi activists were little more than a thieving and vengeful rabble who made their German counterparts look civilised. The German military was even forced to restore order (not the first time) under Nazi orders against the thuggery of Nazi activists in Vienna. There was to be similar confusion and ambiguity in the wake of Kristallnacht.

Neither Hitler nor the Party activists were interested in Zionism per se by this time - Hitler (with Goring as lead economic organiser) saw the Jews only as either an asset or a liability in the cause of war while the party activists just wanted humiliation and dispossession without any considered strategy. Looting and humiliation of a hated enemy was the imaginative limit of many activists.

The policy gap was eventually  to be filled by Eichmann, deputed to Vienna in March 1938 or thereabouts, who promptly introduced a policy of encouraging emigration by arranging the release of Jews from detention to recreate the 'Zionist' infrastructure.

Eichmann even made financial arrangements to help restore some economic cohesion to the Jewish community while they were being plundered by the local Austrian Party and 'legally' by Goring from Berlin. 

What Eichmann 'achieved' in Vienna was so successful locally that the same methodology was re-imported to Germany. A new strategy of expropriation (rather than just marginalisation, civil restrictions and punitive taxation) was employed that was designed to increase the asset base of the State but also, again, drive Jews to emigrate.

We cannot say that Hitler or the Nazi Party was at all 'Zionist' at this point but we can say that the Nazi security apparat was still collaborating with Zionism in 1938 although under conditions where the Zionists were no longer equal partners (as it might be argued they were in 1933) but simply tools with little choice in helping to drive the emigration policy of mid-level Nazi technocrats. 

What happened in Austria confirmed that any pretence of 'co-operation' was now over and that Zionists were simply being forced to collaborate in finding a way out for the Jewish community which, by now, to anyone with any judgment, was passing the point of no return. 

To get out if you had the money was the only possible and reasonable solution but only for middle class Jews who had some resources. The idea of being an assimilated European Jew was now a nonsense wherever the National Socialist writ or influence might run. The Zionists had won an Pyrthic intellectual victory over the assimilated German Jews.

How Zionism and Nazi Ideology Could Be Alike

It is staggering in retrospect that this shift from a 'civilised' apartheid based on identity politics (there is an irony here in that modern British identity politics owes a great deal to Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London) to full pogroms (Vienna and Kristallnacht in 1938) and the total plundering of Jewish wealth for other purposes took barely five years.

There is no reason why any European Jew at the beginning of the process could have predicted the state of affairs at the end. This lets Zionism off the hook somewhat as 'prescient' perhaps about the need to emigrate but also, in one interpretation. in collaborating for a solution that was (on paper) against the interests of liberal European Judaism.

Zionists were working with like-minded identity politicians on the other side but not realising that their temporary collaborators were infinitely more ruthless and chaotic. Nazi rationality (and it was rational from false assumptions like all activist ideologies) was based not (also ironically) on identity alone but on a preparedness to use violence and war as the means of preserving the identity.

Livingstone (if he intended this) makes a good point that right-wing Zionism was 'like' National Socialism in certain key respects (as an ideological ethno-nationalism that had limited interest in those of its own kind who did not subscribe to the ideology) but he was wrong in another.

Zionism lacked the power to be an equal of a rival ideology with full access to the resources of a major European State and it faced a philosophy of utter hatred towards its own base, the Jewish people. So, Zionists in 1933 were as deluded as to the future as virtually everyone else in that year. 

Collaboration was logical with the Nazis within their own ideological model because they were deluded. Livingstone has misinterpreted what happened by reading back from the present his own concerns about the conduct of Israel in a very different situation while rightly positioning German Interwar Zionism as on the European Political Right (whatever may have happened to it later).

However, to call his interpretation anti-semitic is wholly wrong - even disgraceful - since many assimilationist and other liberal Jews would have shared a negative assessment of Zionism and deplored the acceptance of their own removal from Europe as ethnic cleansing avant la lettre. 

They would equally have deplored early Zionist collaboration with Eichmann and other Nazi technocrats. They cannot have known that the Zionists would be proved right by history (indeed, the Zionists had no prescience of the extermination themselves). 

The fact that only emigrant Central European Jews were likely to survive the following decade or so was no more understood by Zionists than anyone else in 1933 - even Hitler. 

It might have been better therefore if Mann had not behaved as a bit of verbal thug himself in the street but had contested Livingstone's interpretation on what facts were available. He would certainly not have won the argument that Livingstone was anti-semitic but he would have won the argument that 'Hitler was not a Zionist'. 

Mann would, had he behaved in a measured way, have increased understanding in the general population of the nature of interwar antisemitism and why Israel has the collective mentality it often has. 

He would perhaps have reduced the instinct for antisemitism after Gaza and redirected the questioning to the specific conduct of the Israeli Government rather than the existence or general ideology of the country. 

Israel today is not the same creature as the one imagined by right-wing Central European interwar Zionists. But Mann threw away the game on irrationality and emotion, showing up a political party (in its subsequent actions which disciplined the victim of the verbal assault and not the perpetrator) that now looked no longer fit for office intellectually.

The Bolshevik 'Threat'

A key factor in all this is that the German view of the Jews was not entirely without basis historically but that the basis for Nazi claims was not adequately questioned because the average German right wing political activist, let alone 'citizen', was as intellectually lazy as our average contemporary British Labour MP. The anti-semitic history was inadequately questionedby all parties.

We have to understand the average German reaction to the disproportionate role of Jewish intellectuals in the Bolshevik-driven chaos of 1918-19 and to the role of radical Zionism and the Jewish community mobilising the American Democrats and the Left in Western Europe against Germany in 1933-1934.

Both were interpreted as being engaged in a war on German aspirations. Both were seen as actual conspiracies in operation against the German national interest. Ideological rigidity was as much on the Bolshevik and American Democrat side as on that of the National Socialists.

The Jewish community anywhere is mostly very ordinary and just like the rest of us who are not Jewish. The myth of Jewish genius is like all national-ethnic myths, harmful to the right of ordinary folk to live ordinary lives without being defined from outside, a right specifically denied by the National Socialists. 

The problem of incommensurate world views tends to lies in the activism and propaganda of a very small minority of activists and their influence on the mass. Most Germans too were basically decent, if morally lazy, just like us and most Jews.Ordinary people may not have loved the Jews but most were shocked and unhappy at the excesses of Kristallnacht ... they were not liberal but also not cruel.

Many excesses against Jews can be put down to a demographic - very young people, indoctrinated over the cohorts that received their education between 1933 and 1938, and slightly older cohorts who had suffered humilation and loss of opportunities between 1929 and 1933. These were the ones who be militarised between 18 and 21 and have received the most intensive anti-semitic indoctrination.

But returning to the Bolshevik problem, the mythologies of the War on the Jews have allowed us to evade the implications of what actually happened.  For example, the Bolshevik risings in Central Europe did look co-ordinated to Germans and were partly co-ordinated in fact. 

These risings seriously frightened the solid base of national conservatism. They were opportunistic but they looked like a 'stab in the back' especially as the Bolsheviks had deliberately stabbed the Russian war effort in the back in 1917-1918. The indoctrinated activists in their twenties and teens received a mythic history of struggle that covered the period of their childhood.

Hitler added to this mix a radical evolutionary analysis that, offensively, saw German survival as based on the same sort of imperial expansion as the British had undertaken. Germany could, however, only build an empire in one direction, eastwards. There, it faced not only a new rising Soviet empire which was perceived to be partly Jewish-led but a large number of Jews who were 'in the way'.

This imperialist war-mongering, an intensification of British and other Western imperialist attitudes but with rassenpolitik added, also involved a perceived defensive element. 

Only the Communists on the one side and Western liberals, including many American Democrats, had a critique of imperialism. Both were to prove very weak in their convictions when the opportunity for different forms of empire came their way after the defeat of the Nazis. 

Imperialism was normal in this era and the question for Germans was only how they, as a significant economic power in potential, shared in the loot. But a failure to act (in the perception of many Germans) would place Germany in the position of being a victim and not predator on economic fundamentals within a few years. 

The economy had to be put on a sound footing not for its own sake but in order to re-enter the struggle for survival that Social Darwinism (and not just in Germany) considered the normal condition of humanity. 

Whether true or not is not the point. This vision helped to create a perception of 'Jewish' Bolshevism as being not only a proven past threat but a probable future threat with a only brief window offered (in Hitler's eyes), by exercising an act of national will, to change the tide of history. 

One of the differences between Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism was that the former saw history progressively in terms of particular inevitabilities whereas National Socialism saw nothing inevitable except through weakness, lack of engagement in history and lack of will. 

Although the philosophers cannot be held responsible for the political expressions of their world view, Hegel and Nietzsche were combatting here over the nature of existence through half-educated and ignorant ideological proxies. 

The Jewish role in 1918-1919 thus became part of the 'proven' and probable threat (noting that Stalin's purges did not get under way until 1935-1936 and so the 'old Bolsheviks' had not been clearly eliminated) just as Hitler put together his war strategy in those same years. 

I often wonder whether Stalin's purges had an element of trying to lance the boil of Nazi perceptions but I have seen no evidence of this. If he did have that purpose, it would have been futile - the matter was existential for Hitler. However, it was not only the Soviets whose world view was incommensurate with National Socialism.

How American Capitalism Was Understood
  
The US situation was entirely different. It might be regarded as offering a problem of democratic politics shared with Germany insofar as, unlike the Soviet Union, National Socialism represented a form of quasi-populist pseudo-democracy in which the actions of party workers and public opinion had real political meaning. 

George Orwell has almost certainly not done us a favour in helping the liberal mind take totalitarianism as meaning far more totality of control than there was in both the Soviet and National Socialist cases. 

In both cases, the State had full control in crushing any obvious dissent against the ideology through terror but it was proportionately driven to radical positions, ones that could be inconvenient to policymakers, by activist and popular readings of the ideologies themselves. 

Liberal ideological hegemony in the West today operates in a similar way but with 'terror' replaced with manufactured shame and guilt.  

In the period 1934-1936, there was thus an American-German clash of cultures derived from the working of two domestic political forces on their respective leaderships and pulling them apart. In the US, the New York Jewish community was engaged in its own political struggle to establish itself as a voice in the American Democrat Party. 

It was divided between conservative and radical Jews, either Zionist or Leftist or both. The latter mobilised through an assertive Zionist and internationalist commitment to World Jewry whereas the former adopted a more conservative 'fraternal relations' approach with Jews overseas, listening to them rather than claiming to speak for them. 

As we have noted, conservative German Jews begged American Jews to go easy on the Nazi regime because radical activism angered the nationalistic pride of Germans (which many German Jews shared at that time).

Activism fuelled both the idea that German Jews were not loyal Germans (which would have horrified German Jews) and that there was some sort of plot against Germany in which Jews were participants.

Part of the problem was that National Socialism had two enemies in its own mind that were enemies of each other (Liberal Capitalism and Bolshevism). They could only be presented as one enemy by introducing a spurious all-encompassing Jewish influence. 

Bolshevism we have covered above but capitalism was the other threat and there is some evidence here that Zionist activism may have made things worse only because it did not understand or perhaps care what was driving German sentiment. 

The point to remember is that millions of Germans had lost their jobs and were thrust into penury in 1929 (only five years or so years after an earlier inflationary economic shock that had destroyed middle class savings) because American 'capitalists' under pressure at home had simply withdrawn their funds and left Germany in the lurch. 

Perhaps we can now understand this anger better after 2008 given the language of Occupy and their attack on banksters although the pain after our recent crash was nothing compared to the pain of Germans (and indeed most other developed nations) after 1929. 

Why the American capitalists did this was not clear to many people who had not been raised in a pure free market culture. The simple fact of the capital flight and its consequences created a gap of understanding into which conspiracy theory, anger and resentment could enter. 

However, the positions of Hitler and the Nazi leadership on the one hand and that of the mass of the Party were different, at least initially. Hitler metaphorically cut off the heads of the SA in the Night of the Long Knives but he left the Party in existence, inchoate and the basis of his power. Hitler led it but he was also led by it - and it could prove an embarrassment at times in the early years. 

The Party's version of the iniquity of American capitalism - initially subsumed under the national socialism of the Strasser Brothers - lost its alternative racial-socialist interpretation at the top with the purge of 1934 so that anger turned even more fiercely towards the anti-semitic analysis as the basis for an explanation for what was inexplicable. 

The anti-capitalist interpretation of events were only to return later (from 1936), with the anti-semitic elements even further intensified, because an attempt to accommodate capitalism under conservative leadership failed to deliver the goods in the eyes of the Nazi elite. Events in the US seemed to suggest that the failure was down to active Jewish interference in weakening the German economy.

This part of the tragedy begins because the National Socialists initially were concerned solely with strengthening the economy through traditional capitalist means but with added corporatism. Hitler not only brought the military under his wing but also the national capitalists by promising to maintain order and property. Big business offered in return to make Germany strong.

This first phase had the economy run not by Nazis but by a Conservative Hjalmar Schacht who protected Jewish economic interests to a degree, not because he liked Jews but because the Jews were major contributors to German economic strength. The assumption was that, here, that 'international Jewry' could still be made to work for Germany.

The aim was to encourage inward investment but within apartheid lines - which shows some seriously sloppy thinking and arrogance on the part of the Nazis. 

But the Nazi Party's demands for a 'Judenpolitik' (ironically moderated to some extent in the Nuremburg Laws) created a tension with the American Jewish interest in defending their 'own people' - as a people first without regard for the national German context. 

The Zionists and liberals in New York were, of course, 'morally' right but their protests led to boycotts, diplomatic problems for Germany and restraints on investment. Schacht's policies directed at controlling and taxing Jewish wealth unfairly then compounded the anger on the American side which reached to the level of the Presidency. 

By the time of the 1936 Olympics, Germany had lost a PR battle it was never going to win but it had rebuilt its economy (admittedly on sand) despite the boycotts and attacks. 

But if a German war machine could not be built against the Soviet Union with the support of the West, then Germany (around late 1935/1936), once the Olympics were out of the way, would do it on its own. But the three years of boycotts and diplomatic pressures had by now been interpreted as Jewish disloyalty and subversion. 

The picture had developed in Nazi Leader's minds that the Jews were not potentially neutral Conservative Germans to be fleeced within their economically viable social 'ghettos' but were a potential Fifth Column and a source of assets that might be used by Germans themselves. There was no incentive, as conservative policies failed, even to allow the category of German Jews to exist.

The Plundering Years

For Goring, Schacht's successor as master of Germany's economic destiny, as 1936 became 1937 and then 1938, Jewish wealth was of more use (in his opinion) to the Reich expropriated than operating within a corporatised free market system, 

We can now see where this was heading. The Anschluss (seizure of power in Austria, 1938) brought all this to a head. The Nazi Leadership had simply given up on Western approval and understanding.  Kristallnacht was just a giant 'get stuffed' gesture to the West. Germany now adopted a position of full-on nationalist defiance. 

American boycotts had, in fact, proved potentially disastrous to Germany and had caused immense worry to the Nazi Leadership whose own survival depended on delivering the economic goods after the disaster of 1929 in order to prosecute the policy of 'German greatness'. At the same time, the global economy was not exactly driving forward as 1937 turned into 1938. 

The Nazi solution was not to act 'rationally' along the lines assumed to be 'rational' by Americans (who perhaps never learn about the counter-productive nature of sanctions to existentially threatened regimes) but, on the contrary, they drove ever harder towards autarkic solutions involving expropriation. There were calculations about balance of payments that made this inevitable.

It is hard, however, to see what else American Jews could have done except protest and boycott since no action at all would have involved complicity with an apartheid regime that would have exported its ideology at Jewish expense across the world. 

Indeed, the background in the mid-1930s was a sharp rise in deliberate state antisemitism - in Romania, Poland and Italy in particular and antisemitic feeling was rising in the United Kingdom and France (and elsewhere) - in response to the German example.

The perceived lack of Western understanding of German nationalism in the 1933-1935 period was not just a Nazi sentiment either. Conservatives were clearly getting as fed up as Nazis with Western cultural intransigeance by 1935 and the sentiment was shared by many ordinary Germans.

Add to the pot the German sense of grievance over recent history, the complicated relationship between German Jews and German Nationalism and the fact that the language used by American activists (not always Jewish but also including many liberals) looked anti-German and we can see that the sense of Germany being up against the wall and on borrowed time could be widespread. 

Even German Jews found the American stance problematic. Both diplomatic networks, German and American, were now being driven by populist pressures but were also ideologically attuned to distrust the other. 

American diplomats were frustrated by the vicious crimes of the Nazi Party in the country and perhaps by the insouciance of the British. German diplomats made no headway because there was no headway to make. 

While the Nazi Leadership tended to choose effective conservatives over incompetent Nazis (as they did in relation to the Wehrmacht in its squabble with the SA and in economic policy while they were working within a capitalist rather than a pseudo-state socialist system), they would always choose Nazi policies over conservative policies when conservatism failed. 

And there were certainly many Nazi radicals ready to fill the void left by conservative failure.
  
Economic stalling and balance of payments problems, even though Schacht solved the immediate problems for Germany derived from the Crash, arose in part because of boycotts and lack of investment because of bad PR. 

Germany was not being integrated into the global economic system on its terms. It felt that it received nothing but often futile attempted obstruction in its drive to restore its economic base.  This meant that the regime could only concede to the American 'capitalists' or find an alternative expropriatory and autarkic strategy. There was no middle way.

The first required kow-towing to the West. The second meant defiance. Kow-towing would mean political suicide for the regime. Hitler himself would be unlikely to survive for long as Chancellor.

Under no circumstances could the Party in the country and so Hitler permit concessions to the degree necessary to reintegrate Germany into the world system. Such concessions would ahalt Hitler's real project - empire. Hence the firing of Schacht.

Hence also, the shift of attitude towards the Jews from being regarded as an economic asset to being regarded as a liability, and, hence, the move towards expropriation and then extermination when 'all other means had failed' (the notorious 'Final Solution'). In other words, pure evil arose in part from a clash of world views when what we had had before was just qualified evil.

Judging Hitler and the Zionists

Nothing I write should be interpreted as a 'justification' of Hitlerism - far from it. But the point here is that Hitlerism is not the creature of one demonic mythic figure but a much more complex phenomenon.

His story is an example of what happens when a) conditions become intolerable for too many people and b) a politics of response is based either on false facts (such as racism or conspiracy) and/or on false interpretations of history (Hitler was right-ish about the methods of the British Empire but was wrong about their applicability to Central European conditions). 

One might say that evil arises not from some sort of satanic malice or occult philosophy but from ignorance, disorganisation, intellectual laziness and stupidity. The poor Jews were truly in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

It could certainly happen again to some other bunch of poor sods quite as easily when all the pre-conditions are in place. What happened in Cambodia and Rwanda has at least served to shake us out of our torpor in this respect and stopped us believing that the genocidal mania of the 1940s was quite as unique as some would like to think.

To summarise where we have got to, we can say that while it is wholly ridiculous to call the Nazis Zionist, it is not ridiculous to say that Nazis and right-wing German Zionists were mutually simpatico for a brief period when the former were looking to emigration as the solution to a 'problem' created out of their respective ideologies. 

The Nazi solution was, for a period, precisely the same solution as that of the Zionists but they were solutions to different problems. And yet the solutions were similar enough that the two ideologies could cohere for a few years in a particular place. 

The right-wing Zionists were trying to out-compete conservative rivals for the affection of German Jews and this period of mutual Nazi-Zionist sympathy certainly existed from around 1932 to around 1936 but it equally certainly died with the Anschluss if not two years before with Hitler's public commitment to a war strategy in 1936. 

By 1938, any Zionists within reach of the now all-powerful Nazi machine simply became the bullied tool of the radical emigration strategy of that year, a strategy which was then stymied by the inability of the Western powers to respond by opening their doors because of internal political pressures ... this strategy was then further radicalised by war.

It is important to face up to this historical misjudgement of a small part of the Jewish community and to the fact that the original impulse of Zionism in relation to the Arabs is little different to that of the Nazis to the Jews and the Slavs (and the Imperial Anglo-Saxons to their subject peoples) in one respect - settler imperialism. 

Right-wing Americans in particular have fetishised settler imperialism because of their own history of expansion on their continent (the British now just pretend it never happened) but National Socialism was, at heart, a settler-imperialist project first and an anti-semitic project second. 

For Jews to deny this aspect of their own impulse (which pre-existed the persecution in Zionism) is part of the denial of this brief period of 'simpatico'.  The history of 1932-1938 is thus one of miscalculations by everyone - Western Powers, Jews of all persuasions and Nazis. 

The situation was unprecedented. Each party was dealing with what were to it existential problems: survival in the mind-set of the two main participants (we should not under-estimate the degree to which many Germans saw themselves as potential victims of attack and colonisation from the East) and the political and cultural risks of mass immigration in the case of the third. 

We all know the Nazis got it profoundly wrong but there is a persistent refusal to understand what circumstances created the tragedy and why, once certain wheels were set in motion, things had to turn out the way they did. 

Above all, the Nazis had a false model of imperialism (they should have listened to Lenin on the subject) while conservative Jews had a false model of the German State. The West was constrained by its own liberal democratic forms. 

The Social Darwinism of the era was one of those nut cults that science periodically produces - a bit like climate change obsessionalism today - but it was far more generally acceptable across the West at the time than many of us realise.

All that Hitler did was to follow the theory through to its logical conclusions much as modern deep greens equally dangerously follow through some eco-political ideology to its logical end as nihilism about humanity. 

But nothing is inevitable intrinsically. There would be merit in the National Socialist concept of the will in politics if only those willing things actually understood what they were willing in a rational way. 

Things start to become inevitable only if the players in the game insist on not being aware of their own magical thinking. We see exactly the same thing playing out today in the belt of idiocy from Tallinn to Kiev, an idiocy that may yet turn millions of us into flaked ash in the convenience of our own homes.

Some Contemporary Political Conclusions

So what of the Labour Party and Ken Livingstone and what of the political lessons to be learned today, at least those that go beyond trite statements like 'never again' from people who refuse to look what happened dead in the eye? Of Livingstone, we can say this. He interpreted facts without empathy and with a weak understanding of conditions at the time.

Having said this, Livingstone was at least trying to work with the facts and he was doing what we badly need to have done in our political culture - show a willingness to bring difficult data out into the open and debate their meaning transparently and accountably in order to guide future policy. 

He was, somewhat hamfistedly, engaged in a primitive attempt at political education, spoiled somewhat by his own ideological prejudices. But there is no evidence of antisemitism here, merely evidence of a lack of deeper thought that might have been made deeper with a civilised debate. 

As for the Labour Party (we should really pass over John Mann's conduct in silence), to suspend Livingstone was an act of panic by ignorant and frightened people under weak leadership who demonstrated, in this one act, that it was worse than intellectually flaccid, it was the creature of the ignorant, the lazy and the ideological. 

That it compounded its error by not disciplining an MP (or at least being fair in not suspending Livingstone) who made unsubstantiated accusations about the motivation of a colleague beggars belief unless you accept that the Party itself has become ignorant, intellectually lazy and driven by ideological conflict. 

Such a party, wherever it exists, does not deserve to rule, precisely because it reproduces the very qualities of National Socialism - ignorance, intellectual laziness and ideology - that drove it to disaster. Malice does not come into the matter. 

The Labour Party is not alone in this. As the Brexit Debate has shown on all sides, liberal democratic politics has become more than a little degenerate when it comes to political education and civilised debate. 

At its worst, it has become little more than a matter of professional half-wits posturing for advantage, an advantage dictated by their own emotionalism and posturing, designed to appeal to a population too busy with life to do more than treat politics as theatre.

But there are other lessons that are difficult from this dreadful period in human history. The first is that, yes, well, things are complicated and that it is important to be clear about one's values, to critique them in depth oneself and to consider the implications of placing those values too far ahead of the consequences of holding to them.

Part of the critique has to be a realisation that all our values are highly contingent on circumstance and are not quite the eternal verities each of us likes to think they are. An analysis of consequences cannot take place until we understand how the 'other' has come to have the values they have.

For whatever reasons, the West seemed to be both too pushy and too half-baked and indecisive in its reaction to National Socialism and, indeed, Bolshevism, not setting enforceable boundaries to behaviour early enough.

However, it also failed to find ways to relieve the pressure on events where the values of the other may not be ones we like but which might have to be recognised as sincerely held, then working to correct false perceptions and untruths and organising in advance in order to be able to police the limited but important value boundaries that had been set.

The mistakes made over Germany in 1919-1923 and then subsequently are being repeated today in the treatment of Russia with, one hopes, not such dire effects. Of course, hindsight is a beautiful thing and one cannot see how, in fact, things could have turned out easily in any other way.

The avoidance of Auschwitz and Nagasaki was probably beyond the capacities of everyone involved because everyone involved was working with limited data in real time and found their decision-making increasingly existential as each year passed.

What would have been required would have been beyond the period's capability and is beyond ours today - a rejection of imperialism in a determination to support national sovereign aspirations where they were in alignment with the popular will.

We might also refer to the need to detach the State as ordering mechanism from ethnicity and identity and a total economic system that concentrated on avoiding failed states rather than relying on the free market to decide whether ordinary people would go hungry or not.

Similarly the value boundaries are either not there, too rigid  or too extensive today as then - asserted but not policed because activists demand too much of state powers that have neither the resources nor will to do anything but exhort and, through exhortation, create further resistance, defensiveness, resentment and an understandable reversion to identity.

Activist pressure in the interwar case could have been more subtle but it needed a stronger lead from states both in setting boundaries of acceptable behaviour (involving hard decisions) but also to be put in its box when it threatened to have worse consequences on the situation of those it purported to help.

The correct balance between righteous indignation and the safe exercise of power remains a problem today. Both Zionism and National Socialism were flawed ideologies with activist issues. They were both 'essentialist' about identity, placing race and ethnicity ahead of humanity.

Communism and American Liberalism have made similar errors in placing a universalised humanity ahead of really existing humans in all their complexity and difference. German and Austrian Conservative Jews were not much better with their deluded Wilhelmine or Austro-Hungarian Nationalism.

The unravelling of ideological formulations in favour of the questioning of all grand projects is one way forward - whether it be of Europeanism or British Identity - to be replaced with the politics of rational 'sufficient' (that is sufficiently organic and sized) nation-states that are secular, limited, administratively efficient, welfarist and defensive in international affairs.

Such states should be tolerant of difference and democratic but committed to neutral political education about the hard choices that arise from shared values. But, of course, that would take political courage in an ignorant population driven by infotainment values.

The ultimate lesson of the Livingstone controversy is that we have not progressed as far from the situation in the 1930s as we might have believed. All the participants have failed to be clear about their core values, engaged in sound-bites and simplifications.

They have also failed to engage in political education (which can be done simply through a cheap web site) and engaged in a populist politics in which decisions are being made in the light of how something will appear rather than whether it is true or not.

In this respect, in terms of style, Livingstone has the edge over his critics because he has tried to avoid becoming involved in a fruitless sound bite war until his case is fully prepared and it may be that he will adjust his view as he goes back to the facts in question.

Perhaps the low point lately has not been the Livingstone Debate but the Brexit Debate. We do not need to go too deep into it but the 'flip-flop' on Europe from Corbyn, McDonnell, Momentum and the intellectuals who service this Group on the Left springs to mind.

It is still unclear, given their profound and sustained criticism of the European Project which has extended in some cases for decades, how, within a space of a few months, like a herd of wildebeest frightened by some predator, they have turned into Remainers. Either they have been talking nonsense for decades or they are talking nonsense now. One suspects a bit of both.

What seems to have happened is that their position on the most significant, indeed existential, decision made by the British population in many decades has not developed out of a considered position on values but has emerged out of the need to manage a particular political power structure in contingent circumstances.

This is precisely the sort of short term event-responding decision that sets humanity on its paths of inevitability to disaster. And, lest you think I am only having a go at the Left, we see the same daft trajectories of inevitability taking place in NATO's dealings with Russia.

There we have rigid ideological thinking on Western expansion, disregard for Russian security and the self-determination of peoples, pandering to the ethnic nationalist instincts of small powers, failure to have a strategy of viable defence and a refusal to understand the cultural roots of Russian nationalism or the effects of activist interference in the region.

These have all combined to create the possibility of a trajectory towards conflict no different from that in the 1930s. At one level, we cannot learn from history - no past event ever repeats itself exactly as before. History is not a science. At another level, we learn from history by understanding not what was done but how things were done.

This means understanding and critiquing the trajectories and the common reactions of our species to our own ignorance and the repetitions of certain ways of dealing with circumstances, the construction of ideology, the demonisation of the other, the inability to critique value, the refusal to face facts, the allowance given to activist hysterics, the weakness in asserting our own considered values where it matters and our blind acceptance of the inevitability of things.

The Livingstone debate over the relationship between Zionism and National Socialism is a marker event, showing us how we misuse history in contemporary liberal politics and how, in doing so, we are likely to follow trajectories that lead us towards disaster in the future.