Dominic Cummings: Bismarckian
Dominic Cummings has appeared in the news again, albeit from a very unreliable source. According to the Mail, Cummings is in touch with Musk and is behind his recent Twitter outbursts about various UK related matters. The article claims that Cummings is talking to Musk about the launch of a ‘start up party’ which will break the mould of politics. Cummings has been going on about this for years and nothing at all has happened. It is however very much in line with what is known of Cummings political views.
It may come as a surprise to those who know Dominic Cummings from his Vote Leave and No.10 period but he took a first in history at Oxford, studying under the late Prof. Norman Stone.
Stone was a right-wing historian and fan of Mrs Thatcher and idiosyncratic in his views. Of historical actors in the modern era he favoured Churchill and Bismarck as significant historical figures.
Cummings picked up his interest for Bismarck from Stone and has blogged about the German Chancellor (1815-1898). Bismarck, the ‘Iron Chancellor’ was instrumental in creating a unified German State. His Wiki entry notes that he ‘distrusted democracy and ruled through a strong well-trained bureaucracy’.
Cummings returned to the Bismarck question in answers to questions to subscribers to his social media site in 2021. Not just Stone but Eric Hobsbawm supported the historical significance of Bismarck. Cummings may yet warrant a footnote in the history of post-Brexit Britain.
Studying Bismarck was the best help to understand what politics really is and how it’s possible to radically outperform – but also that you should never ever expect anybody to say ‘oh I was wrong you were right’. In politics you never really know if what you’ve done is a mistake! And even very smart people struggle to escape fashion and gang mentality
And in another answer he said:
If you want to study effective action in politics there is no better case study than Bismarck.
He was playing a completely different game to everybody else and you can trace a lot of how he did it and how he thought in the record.
Guardian report 21st June 2021
Bismarck was not an enthusiast for democratic politics and judging by the views Dominic Cummings relayed to Laura Kuenssberg , neither is he. He talked in 2021 of a plan to oust Johnson as Prime Minister once he had been elected as he was entirely unsuitable for the job. We had to wait a bit longer for that and the ousting was nothing to do with Cummings.
Cummings isn’t a fascist but he is clearly a supporter of a significantly more authoritarian society than Britain currently is. There will be those who argue that this isn’t possible given how dismissive of civil liberties both the last and current Governments are. It is. Look around Europe for examples and indeed to America.
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