Johnson, Churchillism and the Delicious Verdicts of History Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Johnson, Churchillism and the Delicious Verdicts of History

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 3h

I don’t know how this all will play out for the UK, whether they’ll finally leave the EU and on what terms. But there’s something richly satisfying about seeing the first flames erupting out of PM Boris Johnson’s plane as he appears to be crashing and burning only weeks into his ministry.

Let’s  just briefly review what has happened over the last 24 hours. A cross-party coalition appears to have formed to pass a law preventing a no-deal Brexit at the end of October. We’ll know whether that works by this afternoon. If that happens, it short-circuits Johnson’s elaborate game of chicken with the EU. A legal action by the Scottish regional government has surfaced documents which appear to prove Johnson was deceiving the public about his decision to prorogue Parliament. And just a short time ago, an erstwhile member of the Conservative Party defected to the Liberal Democrats, thus depriving Johnson of his parliamentary majority.

Brexit is simply a bad idea. So I oppose it. It’s bad for the people of the United Kingdom and the UK itself as a continuing union. A no deal Brexit is an astoundingly bad idea, reminiscent of debt limit chicken GOP antics in the U.S. during the Obama years. Johnson is also the British, or rather the English, variant of Trumpism. So I oppose it and him for those reasons too.

But there’s another deeper reason I’m enjoying this.

There is a transatlantic, Anglospheric ideology I call Churchillism. You see it in the nonsense controversies about having busts of Churchill in the Oval Office. You see it repeatedly carted out as justifications for various wars, or more often continuing various wars rather than wrapping them up. I come to critiquing Churchillism in a funny way, because I’m a sort of dissident member of the Churchill cult myself. If you’re up for a good read pick up a copy of his “My Early Life,” a book he published in 1930 at the age of 56, when the high points of his public life appeared to be over. It’s his account of his life through age 30.

Churchill was born with a whole set of silver silverware in his mouth. He was the grandson of a Duke. But he was also the son of a politician who he idolized but had no time for him because he thought Winston was an idiot who would never amount to anything. His mother wasn’t much better until she took an interest in him in his late adolescence. He was born with almost every advantage and yet also with some of life’s great disadvantages. And through his own hopeless desire to prove himself to his father and chase away early hints of depression he managed to build his own idiosyncratic life first as a writer, then as a Tory politician, then as a Liberal verging on radical before wrenching back to his more native Tory reactionary politics after World War I. Which is when he comes to writing this book. It’s really good.

The heart of Churchillism is the belief that character — particularly the character of Tory reactionaries like Churchill — is the sheet anchor of politics and international affairs. Only Churchill had the insight to understand who Hitler was and only Churchill had the strength of character to stand him down.

There was a particular, albeit limited truth about this in 1939. And that’s the magic of the history. Because the reality was that Churchill had spent 25 years being wrong about virtually everything. He was wrong about the Dardanelles. He was wrong about the Gold Standard. He was wrong about the Abdication Crisis. He was amazingly wrong about Gandhi. But on this one critical thing he was right. Indeed, his defiant, romantic-bordering-on-fantasist personality was particularly suited to the moment. As he later described the moment when the Prime Ministership finally fell into his hands in his country’s greatest crisis: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial … I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.”

The greatness of this moment was its serendipity, the sheer improbable coming together of events, its uniqueness. The man who was in many ways a man out of time, who had gotten so much wrong, being thrust into power in the crisis over the single issue about which he assuredly had right. Every treacly self-help book tells us we all have that one talent that makes us special. What a gift to collide with history in that one moment when it is truly needed.

The doctrine of Churchillism is that this is a plan of action for all moments: that what you need is defiant and unbending men something like Churchill (less generously: white, imperialist, militarist, reactionary) to be inflexible, certain of their own rectitude and just willing to lay it all on the line, bet everything and stand down whatever mix of bad guys, Euro-weenies and left, softie flotsam who might be standing in their way.

Johnson is of course the ultimate avatar of Churchillism. With his affected eccentricities, his foppish manner and his flitting back and forth from journalism to elected office, he has unquestionably modeled himself on Churchill. Indeed, as Fintan O’Toole aptly put it three years ago, Brexit itself is in fact an English nationalist movement, not altogether aware of itself. Really Brexiteers are heading toward independence from the United Kingdom more than the EU. Brexit is an English revolt against history itself, or at least the century of it. Johnson’s rhetoric, if not quite imagining a rebirth of the Raj, is filled with all manner of fantasies about Britain reclaiming its great power role on the global stage if only it can throw off the shackles of the EU. Churchill himself was a considerably more complex figure, an ardent Europeanist and francophile and with a horror of war as much as a love for it. Johnson’s no Winston Churchill. But he is the ultimate Churchillist.

Because of all this Johnson’s month-plus in power is a model of Churchillism. No negotiation: not within his party, no with the country at large, which is clearly against a no-deal Brexit if not as clearly Brexit itself, and certainly no negotiation with the EU (though he has pretended otherwise). The whole plan has simply been to rev the engine, remove all the guardrails, prevent anyone from hitting the brakes and move forward. Character, British rightness will make it all come together.

And yet it does not appear to be working out.

The EU countries are not folding (and really why should they?). A nontrivial number of Tory MPs are abandoning him. And the hopelessly, even comically divided opposition seems to be uniting just enough to tie Johnson’s hands. And he even seems to have lost his majority itself — though the immediate impact of that single defection isn’t necessarily that great.

The whole effort has been an elaborate game of chicken. Get the Tory leadership and thus the Prime Ministership. Drive headlong into the wall because the wall will decide we’re just crazy enough or just Churchillian enough to plow right into the wall. Seeing that, see stiff upper lip and scowl and all that, the wall will certainly get out of the way and we’ll get what we want.

And yet here we are with Johnson at full speed and the wall showing a marvelous indifference to his approach. It will be delicious to watch this play out.

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