E P Thompson on Trump & Brexit
Obviously E P Thompson who died in 1993 has opined on neither Brexit or Donald Trump. However as an article in the US radical magazine Mother Jones notes, his analysis of the work of William Morris does suggest some parallels
Aditya Chakrabortty has a typically thoughtful piece on Brexit in the Guardian:
I entirely agree that Brexit has remodelled the Tory Party in the likeness of Cummings and Farage and to that extent the Brexit that engaged working class voters was fake. It never had any intention of dealing with the issues they have. That doesn’t mean however that those issues weren’t both real and complex. Ranging from the impact of austerity to public services, housing and jobs these issues remain both live and unresolved.
There is some link with working class support for Trump. Of course Trump never planned to help the working poor, but he focused on many of the issues that they had and still have. One wonders if the mild social democratic politics of Biden (to be kind to his project) will address them from 2021?
E P Thompson identifies in William Morris’s work an understanding of the complexity of how class identity and forces are made and re-made. A battle not just of the economy but also in the moral and cultural sphere too
Just as “capitalist society was founded upon forms of exploitation which are simultaneously economic, moral and cultural”—that’s E.P. Thompson, drawing on the 19th century socialist and textile designer William Morris—so are the politics of living in such a society being worked out along multiple axes at once, at different tempos. This is something people understand on an intuitive level, then seem to forget somewhere between the street and the CNN studio. Maybe you have a shitty job and a shitty wage, but in the roiling mix out of which you make your politics there are also all the rationalizations for the shittiness, the privileges you earn for accepting them, the larger sense that your freedoms, however meager, gain strength in contrast to the unfreedoms of others, and so on.
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