TOO LONG

IN EXILE

JUNE 2021

a Parliament Street paper authored by Patrick Sullivan

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PATRICK SULLIVAN

TOO LONG IN EXILE

A PARLIAMENT STREET PAPER

PUBLISHED BY

PARLIAMENT STREET

JUNE 2021

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CONTENTS

PAGE 4: DEDICATION

PAGE 5: FOREWORD

PAGE 6: INTRODUCTION – PERSONAL STORY

PAGE 8: CHAPTER ONE – THE POLITICAL/ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX

PAGE 12: CHAPTER TWO – MODERN-DAY CYRUS

PAGE 14: CHAPTER THREE – I KNOW WHAT I KNOW

PAGE 17: CHAPTER FOUR – PATHS TO POWER

PAGE 22: CHAPTER FIVE – WHEN VIRTUE SIGNALING BECOMES A VICE

PAGE 25: FINAL THOUGHTS

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TO THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE AND THOSE WHO WILL COME AFTER...

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FOREWORD

As we approach the end of this crisis which has been a challenge for even the most stoic amongst us. Many will find the phrase too long in exile is a sentiment that they share. The last 15 months have been difficult and we are now about to enter, to borrow a phrase, a brave new world. Let us just hope it is not a dystopian one, as exists in the Aldous Huxley book that bears that name. The threat of ending up in a dystopia is a real one yet this author remains hopeful that it is still remains true that we can live in a world that we design. This paper will address the world as it was, as it is and as it might become. Over a millennia ago there was a dream that was Camelot, where virtues of bravery and chivalry reigned supreme. It is was a dream then but we should seek to make those virtues a reality today.

I will not hide the fact that I am afraid for what the future might bring and I emphasise with those readers who are too. If it is of any comfort, we should not wish to be without fear for to be without fear is to be hope. That we fear for the future also means that we still have high hopes for better tomorrow. And, if we are to have to have high hopes, we should also dream big because hopes and dreams are so often intertwined. Our job must now be not to fight the future but to win it. True bravery comes from acknowledging our fears and facing them. In the days, weeks and months ahead it is not our job to be unafraid. Instead, it is to be brave and also to be kind. As Warren Jones Masten put it in his poem My Brother’s Keeper:

Am I my brother’s keeper? Yes and no. Not his to bind, but with him sympathize When footsore his steps flag and head droops low; To lift him up, encourage him to rise.

Many unknown to fame might have been crowned With laurels had the needed aid been given; Many a one whose name is world renowned Attained his goal through words kindly spoken.

These words from the 2010 Conservative Party Manifesto and High School Musical have seldom been truer, “We’re all in this together!”

From the Desk of Patrick Sullivan London, 8th June 2021

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INTRODUCTION PERSONAL STORY

“Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o’er life’s solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again.”

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life (1838)

“Too long in exile Too long not singing my song Too long in exile Too long like a rolling stone Too long in exile” - Van Morrison, Too Long In Exile (1993)

Back in mid-February 2019, I was up in Newcastle for some fancy dinner, when I was hospitalised for what was likely the result of prolonged stress and exhaustion. I had been sent to hospital because there was a concern that I might be suffering from Deep Vein Thrombosis. At the hospital, a junior doctor spoke to me in such a way that I was led to believe that I had less than 24 hours to live. At that point, I heard the voice of David Tennant’s 10th Doctor in my head saying “I don’t want to go”. As I contemplated my imminent demise, I visualised my spirit in some sort of waiting room talking to three spirits sat behind whatever the spirit version of a desk is. I was complaining to them “what was the point in all that?”, meaning my life. I seemed pretty confident that I had lived before and that I would live again. I was not fearful of death; I was just pissed off that to that point my life had not served its purpose. I suppose it’s nice to know that when faced with death I am unafraid – I am afraid of pain, don’t get me wrong but death, not so much. I can get my head around being eternal far easier than the idea of their being an ending, as opposed to a hiatus. Within the space of an hour, I was informed by one of the hospital’s consultants that I was not going to die. I didn’t feel much other than “that’s nice to know.” One of the reasons I had found it difficult to leave by apartment the preceding year was because when I have done so to go to Newcastle I had ended up in dire straits. The outside world now seemed dangerous. At the time I had been living 6

my healthiest life, was losing weight and working the hardest I had ever worked. I was adhering to all the tenants of a virtuous life, according to society in 2019, and as a result, as far as I was concerned, I almost died. To say that this experience required some getting over is an understatement. I found excuses to do the majority of my work from home and whilst my freedom was not self-constrained to the extent it would be government-constrained in lockdown, this period did unwittingly prepare me for what was to come. In an act of spectacular poor timing on my part I marked the first anniversary of Newcastle by resolving to put myself back out there into the world. After a year I believed I was back and able to take on the world again. I told my friends and family as much. Of course, within a month came there came COVID-19 and the first lockdown. We have been in and out of lockdown ever since. My personal exile began slightly earlier than most in February 2019 meaning that by the time of writing it has lasted about 28 months. 2018 had not been free of difficulty, no year ever is, but overall, it had been one in which I had been having significant professional success and whilst much of this continued in 2019, I felt that I was not experiencing the same momentum that I had been before Newcastle.

This period of time did have the silver lining of removing the author from frequent interaction with the Westminster Village ecosystem of which he had previously been a background character for two decades, slightly resembling Andy Millman in the first season of Extras. As the lockdowns began, I decided to make the most of the ability, thrust upon me by circumstance, to take a freshly detached look at our body politic whilst having more than a passing understanding of how it worked. This led me to write my previous paper The Age of (re)Alignment and the paper you are currently reading.

The title of this paper therefore serves a double meaning. It speaks to the author’s personal journey and it also speaks to the impact the coronavirus crisis has had on each individual reader. I imagine that almost everybody reading this paper must find that the phrase “too long in exile” also applies to them. The timing of this publication is such that it hopefully aligns with the exiles return, as we all re-enter the outside world and survey how much has changed and how much has stayed the same. Everyone will have their story to tell and everyone will have changed in some way during this crisis. It is a time of great hope as we begin to live amongst each other once more as the social animals we were designed to be. It is, however, also a time of great uncertainty. Having spent so long apart, it is only human to wonder whether we can still communicate as well as we used to. We will have to be patient with one another as we feel our way back into society. As for society itself, it will have changed too and we are about to discover how and to what extent.

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CHAPTER ONE THE POLITICAL/ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX

“People who change history are rarely aware of it while doing so. Ron and his news team simply thought they were making the news more fun. Little did they know they were changing the course of broadcasting history forever.” - Narrator, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013)

“Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?” - Maximus Decimus Meridius, Gladiator (2000)

In his final address to his nation as President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the American people about a military-industrial complex. Today we find politics in Britain, America and across the world dominated by a political-entertainment complex. It is difficult to understate how interwoven the worlds of popular culture and politics have become. Since the days of Ancient Rome, politics has always had an element of “bread and circuses” attached to it and political success has often come to those with an ability to tap into the cultural zeitgeist of the day. In the TV movie, The Deal, which is about the pact made between and Gordon Brown during the Labour Party leadership contest in 1994, screenwriter Peter Morgan has Tony Blair point out to Gordon Brown, someone who has just come into Granita restaurant where they have been eating:

Blair: On your way out, say hello to that girl. Brown: Who is she? Blair: The new girl in EastEnders. Forget about politicians, that’s real power. She gets 15 million viewers, three times per week. Brown: Bloody Islington.

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What has changed between then and now has been the blurring of the lines between celebrity and politics, and also between politics and celebrity. The political-entertainment complex treats the art of governing as if it were a daily rather than the means by which we resolve differences and seek solutions for real people’s real problems. Rather than focus on the concerns of their constituents there have been a growing number of politicians who have become so taken by the media’s politics-as- entertainment spectacle that they have started to see themselves as celebrities. A rather bizarre example of this is that of Rick Perry, who served as the 47th governor of Texas from December 2000 until January 2015. Having finished a long stint in the Governor’s Mansion, Perry dropped out of the race for the 2016 Republican in September 2015, after his campaign failed to garner any enthusiasm; he re- emerged in late 2016 as a contestant on season 23 of Dancing with the Stars, where he struck an unlikely friendship with 1990s icon and rapper Vanilla Ice. Although Perry was eliminated from the show in the third week and finished in 12th place, he returned to perform a duet of Vanilla Ice’s hit song “Ice, Ice Baby” with his new friend as part of the show’s finale on 22nd November 2016. By this point had been elected president of the United States and was openly considering Perry to be the new US secretary of energy. Three weeks after his unforgettable performance with Vanilla Ice, Rick Perry was nominated for that post in the new administration; making him the fifteenth person in the presidential line of succession, upon his confirmation. The United States Senate confirmed the former Texas governor to his position in President Trump’s cabinet on 2nd March 2017. This means that in the space of exactly 100 days, Rick Perry went from palling around with Vanilla Ice on Dancing with the Stars to heading up the department within the US federal government that is responsible for the building, maintenance, and disposal of all America’s nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the previous American president, the aforementioned Donald Trump, spent over a decade as the star of his own reality TV show. The current British Prime Minister also has a deep appreciation of the importance that popular culture has in making a popular politician. As mayor of London, Boris Johnson popped into The Queen Vic in EastEnders and gave Peggy , played by the late Dame , his card. Two more surreal examples of the intersection between politics and popular culture are about to follow. These examples highlight some of the bemusing ridiculous moments that the fusion of politics and entertainment has brought about. It is in this lived absurdity of reality which we must now contend. The first of our examples is when Michael Bloomberg named Thursday 26th January 2012, Gossip Girl Day in the City of , when he was its mayor, in order to mark the show’s 100th episode. We also learned that the world’s ninth richest man was ostensibly rooting for the Blair Waldorf - Chuck Bass pairing. According to Mayor Bloomberg, “she’s [Blair’s] clearly in love with Chuck. I mean it’s so obvious. I can’t believe everyone doesn’t understand that. Although she and Dan became pretty close when they interned together at that fashion magazine.” I was personally a bigger fan of the Blair/Dan pairing which is one of many differences opinion I have with Michael Bloomberg, 9

who would make a cameo in the show’s final episode later that year to express his shock when Gossip Girl was finally revealed. Our second example came on 26th August 2013, when the incredibly intelligent and establishment revered President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Haass, was asked to weigh in on the previous day’s controversial MTV Video Music Awards. He said of Miley Cyrus’s performance that “it is the coarsening of America”. Hillary Rodham Clinton obviously didn’t share Mr. Haas’ opinion because when she was reading a thank you letter to Ms. Cyrus on The Tonight Show in 2017, she saw fit to quote from We Can’t Stop – one of the two songs that made up the medley in that unforgettable performance. The other song was Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke who also performed. Both songs had been the subject of censure from some quarters and that is certain to have informed some of those who disapproved of that VMA performance. Miley Cyrus was criticised for the references to drug taking in We Can’t Stop, a song released only two years after Cyrus wrapped up her hit Disney Channel show, Hannah Montana. Personally, I like the song. I am just amused at how inept Hillary Clinton’s advance man was in this instance. An alternative take concerning Ms. Cyrus’s VMA performance is that of journalist Ronan Farrow, who interviewed Miley for the March 2014 issue of W. Magazine. The possible son of Rat Pack legend, Frank Sinatra, Mr Farrow declared: “Cyrus laid siege to public consciousness”. Many are of the mistaken belief that Donald Trump had never apologised, outside of reluctantly for his “locker room talk” in the tape on “Billy weekend”. That belief is mistaken because Donald Trump once apologised to Frank Sinatra. In his third book, The Art of the Comeback (1997), the then-Mr. Trump wrote in the introduction (pages xvi and xviii):

“Another one of my biggest regrets about my second book was how harshly I wrote about Frank Sinatra. I didn’t mean it to come out the way it did. It was a strange evening, the night I met him. I reported how Sinatra, over dinner in Monte Carlo with Ivan and me and another couple, blew up at his wife, Barbara, and made some fairly rude comments about women in general. I was shocked at the time, but what I realize now is, hey, the guy has got a hell of a lot of pressure on him. He can’t walk through a lobby without a hundred people asking for his autograph. I didn’t take this into account. Dealing with fame can be a hassle. Believe me, Frank, I realize that now. I shouldn’t have written the things that I did, and I’m sorry.”

The new American President, Joseph R. Biden, is just as cognisant of the political power of popular culture as his celebrity predecessor was. It has become increasingly true that, in the West, the popular culture has been leading the political discussion, particularly in relation to social issues. As

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then Vice-President Joe Biden told Meet the Press in May 2012, when explaining how his position on same-sex marriage had evolved to one of support:

“as I take a look at when things really began to change, is when the social culture changes. I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody's ever done so far. And I think people fear that which is different. Now they're beginning to understand”

For those unfamiliar with Will & Grace, it is a half hour US sitcom about two young professionals who share an apartment in New York City. Will is a lawyer, who happens to be gay, and Grace is an interior designer, who happens to be straight. In the United States it was highest-rated sitcom among adults 18–49 from 2001 to 2005. In 2021, it is impossible to escape politics in entertainment and it is almost exclusively left- leaning. In the case of Star Trek, which is owned by Viacom/CBS, it is downright communist. The official Star Trek website posted an article on 8th April of this year with the headline “The Star Trek Communist Hopes Star Trek Can Inspire A Real Revolution”. The piece is about some random Star Trek cosplayer who also likes his Marx. He seems perfectly harmless, if misguided. What is not harmless is big corporations playing footsie with communism. If they think they can ride that tiger without being eaten they are tragically mistaken. Woke Capital is not only promoting dangerous leftist ideas, it is also denigrating anyone of intellect who dares question the tenants of leftist ideology. The Canadian psychiatrist and philosopher, Dr Jordan Peterson, has come under fire for exactly this reason. I do not agree with all of Dr Peterson’s views but many of them are sound and all of them have been well thought out. Dr Peterson is one of those rare intellectuals who seems to have caught the popular zeitgeist. He is considered conservative today because he challenges many new left shibboleths but this author suspects that Dr Peterson would have considered himself to be on the centre left before the left embraced the culture wars and everything-is-identity politics. So threatened by Dr Peterson was author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who for some reason is now writing Captain America monthly for Marvel Comics, that he decided to turn Captain America’s arch-enemy, the super-powered Nazi, Red Skull, into a parody of Dr Peterson. It is astonishing that Disney who own Marvel Comics would allow this, not least because quite a few conservatives read Captain America. As someone who enjoys both Star Trek and Captain America, it is upsetting that my forms of escapism have become politicised. The political/entertainment complex has fused entertainment and politics together in such a way now that it is becoming increasing difficult to differentiate between the two.

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CHAPTER TWO MODERN-DAY CYRUS

“'Cause Jesus he knows me And he knows I'm right I've been talking to Jesus all my life Oh yes he knows me And he knows I'm right And he's been telling me Everything is alright” - Genesis, Jesus He Knows Me (1992) “As a result of these experiences, my thinking has changed. I’m sharper. I’m warier. I believe in an eye for an eye – like the Old Testament says. Some of the people who forgot to lift a finger when I was down, they need my help now, and I’m screwing them up against the wall. I’m doing a number . . . and I’m having so much fun. People say that’s not nice, but I really believe in getting even.” - Donald J. Trump, The Art of the Comeback (1997) One of the apparent mysteries of modern politics is how a candidate who has lived the life Donald J. Trump has lived could garner the fervent support of America’s evangelical community. Part of the explanation comes from their being a significant evangelical voter base in the United States that believes that President Trump was the later-day equivalent of King Cyrus of Persia. King Cyrus was not what we would consider to be a traditionally godly man but he is seen by many Jews and Christians as being an unlikely agent of God. When King Cyrus conquered Babylon, by force, he not only ordered the end of the Babylonian captivity of the Jewish people, but also declared that they were free to return to Jerusalem, where he had decreed that their Temple was to be rebuilt. Many Evangelical Christians and Jewish leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saw then-President Trump’s December 2017 move to have the United States recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and his ordering that the US Embassy in Israel start planning to move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as being worthy of King Cyrus. The US Embassy officially moved to Jerusalem in the May of the following year. Evangelical Christians are steadfast in their support of Israel for two primary reasons. The first is that they hold as an article of faith that God’s promise of Israel as the Jewish homeland was made in perpetuity. Ergo, they believe that supporting the State of Israel is supporting the will of God. The second reason is that, for Evangelical Christians, the re-establishment and acceptance of Israel’s boundaries as they were in the time of Abraham are necessary and prophesied precursors to the Second 12

Coming. Therefore, President Trump’s policies regarding Israel were seen by many Evangelical Christians to be moving us closer to the Rapture. The recent agreement, facilitated by President Trump, between the United Arab Emirates and Israel to normalise relations further amplifies the image of Trump as a modern Cyrus. As Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour wrote in Canada’s National Post “the finalisation of talks to normalise and tighten relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is an important step towards general Arab acceptance of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.” Taking this into consideration, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to understand how Evangelical Christian voters in the United States could so overwhelming have supported (and still support), in Donald J. Trump, a politician so very different from them. Additionally, the Republican president previous to him, George W. Bush, certainly knew how to talk the Evangelical talk but when it came down to delivering the results, Evangelical voters wanted the forty-third president failed to walk the walk. President Trump might not have been one of them but as far as those voters are concerned, he has delivered for them. When discussing the Evangelical vote in the United States, it is important to understand just how many Evangelicals there are and that Evangelical Christians are quite different from Christians of other denominations. A significant number of those who originally settled in the American colonies in the 17th century were Puritans who weren’t welcome in England. This means that Christianity in America has an altogether different flavour to Christianity in Europe. This is electorally and politically significant because, according to the Pew Research Center, 25.4% of Americans are Evangelical Protestant. In Britain, we do not appreciate this because the Evangelical community, by and large, is not part of the popular culture that America exports to the rest of the world. In the United States, the Evangelical Christian community has its own vibrant sub-culture separate from what we would call the popular culture. This also puts these voters largely out of the reach of the corporate media and the overwhelming majority of them are all in for President Trump. This makes Donald J. Trump a serious contender for the White House in 2024, even with the corporate media and big tech against him.

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CHAPTER THREE I KNOW WHAT I KNOW

“Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” - Leonard Joseph “Chico” Marx, Duck Soup (1933)

Just as industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilisation shaped by surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our humanity. - Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018)

A large proportion of people feel that they can no longer trust the media. They no longer take what they read and watch in the mainstream media on face value. Hard-working journalists should not shoulder the blame for this. The “political-entertainment complex” first came to the attention of popular culture at a time when most of today’s best reporters were still in primary school, or in some cases, not yet born. The 1977 celebrated the success of the prescient film Network which won Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. Poignantly, the sadly then-recently deceased Peter Finch posthumously won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his electrifying portrayal of Howard Beale, the self-styled “mad prophet of the airwaves”. Fast-forward to the present day and most journalists see themselves neither as mad, nor as prophets, of the airwaves or any other kind. Unfortunately for my peers in the Fourth Estate, attention rarely falls upon those working diligently in the corner. I will not say anyone is or isn’t a mad prophet of the airwaves here, partially because it happens to be so subjective. It is a pretty safe bet that each person reading this will be able to think of a handful of very well-known reporters and think that they act as if they were indeed mad prophets of the airwaves because that is what drives ratings. The populist victories of Brexit and Trump thrust mad prophets from all sides further into the spotlight as much of the public seemed to want confirmation bias as opposed to straight reporting. My personal experience during this time was not that straight reporting seized to exist. Indeed, I found many 14

journalists, that I suspected where not sympathetic to either Brexit or Trump, to be genuinely interested in how the political establishment had become so out-of-touch that such large numbers of voters were willing to throw a provable Molotov cocktail into the body politic, on both sides of the Atlantic. However, as the 2020 American presidential election drew ever closer, the most partisan or ideological voices in newsrooms across the world became increasingly vocal. Rather than apportion blame to any side or single out individuals or organisations out for their excesses, it would serve us better to acknowledge the reality that the modern media resembles the partisan press of the nineteenth and early twentieth century than it does the post-WW2 broadcast media. It must be remembered that from 1945 until 1980, there really wasn’t such a thing as cable news. A lack of diversity of views and outlooks in journalism can lead a society to sleepwalk into dangerous groupthink. It must also be remembered that the partisan press of the nineteenth century was fearless, dynamic and on balance did more for the public good than it did harm. The plurality of voices and opinions in the press is important for true democracy to flourish. It is also important that we do not all live-in different universes from each other. So, there must also be a common set of facts on which we can rely. However, it should not be for Big Tech billionaires or corporate media conglomerates to act as arbiters of truth. It must be remembered that ultimately these individuals and organisations are ultimately answerable to only themselves or their shareholders and not the public at large. That is not to say that they are not public spirited; it is simply to acknowledge a fact. In many respects a Pandora’s Box was opened when social media companies were given the legal protection of being considered platforms instead of publishers. It meant that they had too little skin in the game when it came to ensuring their websites were not abused by those wishing to defame others or spread hate. Indeed, allowing their websites to be the World Wide Web Wild West enabled Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter to become two of the richest and most powerful individuals on the planet. Recently, two things have happened. The first is that governments across the globe have come late to the party in the realisation that having a these social media giants acting as a law onto themselves is unacceptable, The second is that these social media giants have consolidated their positions so that now they have decided they do have a responsibility to ensure their websites do act as free-for-alls, those sites they own are the source of so many people’s news; that these oligarchs have such control of the flow of information that they can become virtual arbiters of truth. Despite no one having elected them and that they are accountable to no one. The protections which have allowed Facebook and Twitter to prosper (such as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States and Section 14 of the European Union’s e- Commerce directive) should be revoked and they should be subject to the same liable laws as publishers. It might make them unprofitable in which case they will fade away as quickly as rose to 15

prominence. This is not necessarily such a bad thing, as they should never have been allowed to get so powerful in the first place. Even if Zuckerberg and Dorsey are Boy Scouts it sets a terrible precedent that any individual or group of individuals have that much power over something as important as information. Of course, the technology now exists to make digital molds of people’s faces that it is now possible to create convincing deep fakes of almost anyone. So, situations such as that shown in post-credits scene of the recent Spider-Man: Far From Home in which the DailyBugle.net releases doctored footage to the global media which implies that Spider-Man and not the villain Mysterio was responsible for a killer-drone attack on London. With these deep fakes in our near future and faith in the mainstream media and Big Tech at an all-time low, it will not be long before many people conclude that they can no longer even trust their lying eyes. When that day comes expect the Paul Simon classic, I Know What I Know, to get a sudden resurgence in popularity. Soon we may all find ourselves singing the lyrics:

“I know what I know I’ll sing what I said We come and we go That’s a thing that I keep In the back of my head I know what I know”

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CHAPTER FOUR PATHS TO POWER

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

- Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic (1910)

“I’ve seen quite a few elections I know how to read projections I can recognize a change when it appears The people make the ultimate decision The system says they always get it right So through it seems like half an hour Since I stumbled into power Now it’s time for me to say goodnight.”

- Casey Bennatto, The Light on the Hill from Keating! The Musical (2005)

The problem with most political analysts is that they try to explain trends in a rational way. This would be fine if voters were Vulcans but they are not. Often the lessons we can learn from campaigns of previous electoral cycles are contradictory and yet coexist with each other.

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Another mistake made is that the electorate in one election is also considered as fundamentally different to the electorate in another. There will of course be certain demographic changes but these do not happen at such a rate that there won’t be significant numbers of people who voted for Tony Blair in 2005 that would vote for Boris Johnson fifteen years later. In the United States there are some who voted for Obama in 2008 that voted for Trump in 2016.

The centrist consensus of the Cameron years was reaffirmed by the British electorate in 2015. Those voters didn’t suddenly disappear from the electoral register only to be replaced by completely different voters. The same is true in America. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 didn’t remove from the electorate the voters who delivered Barack Obama a second term in 2012. And although Joe Biden won the most votes of any presidential candidate in history in 2020, it must not be forgotten that Donald J. Trump received the second highest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history during that same election. Biden bested Trump in the 2020 contest but many more Americans affirmatively voted for Trump than ever voted for Clinton, Bush and Obama. Those voters did not vanish the moment Biden was inaugurated.

Those campaign consultants who don’t make the mistake of thinking that there are dramatic changes in the composition of electorates between campaigns often make the opposite mistake and view the electorate as stagnant. Barack Obama was able to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic Primaries because his campaign adopted a strategy of expanding the electorate; getting people who would never normally vote in a Democratic primary to vote. Hillary Clinton’s campaign assumed the electorate would be by and large the same as it had been in 1992 when her husband first went for the presidency. Her campaign had failed to factor in those who were eligible to vote but not considered likely voters. As a result, her campaign was blindsided by the superior strategy of the Obama campaign.

The Obama campaign would continue with its strategy of expanding the electorate into the general election when they saw off the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin. The Obama coalition of younger voters, liberal elites and minorities was similar in composition to the coalition that Democrat George McGovern had ridden to a spectacular defeat in the presidential election of 1972. Enough time had passed between the electoral cycle of 1972 and the 2008 cycle that the constituent parts of the McGovern coalition had ample time to expand.

According to the Pew Research Center, turnout from black eligible voters increased 4.9% from 2004 to 2008. Amongst Hispanic eligible voter there had been a 2.7% increase and there was a 2.4% increase amongst eligible Asian-American voters. Conversely there was a 1.1% drop in turnout among white eligible voters. The racial disparity in the preference of voters in the 2008 presidential election was also stark. Barack Obama won most votes cast by black voters casting their ballots for the first African American president. Most white voters cast their ballots for John McCain, but McCain did not win the white vote in the same way that Obama had won the black vote. 55% of eligible white voters supported McCain whereas 43% were for Obama. Eligible Hispanic voters voted 67% for Obama with 31% voting for John McCain. Among Asian-American eligible voters, 62% were for Obama with only 35% supporting John McCain.

Many Republican political consultants treated the 2008 presidential election as an anomaly due to the historic nature of Barack Obama’s candidacy. The logic was that upon his taking the oath of office, Obama normalised there being an African American president. With his historic achievement achieved they thought that politics as usual would resume. When at the 2010 US Midterms the Republicans gained six seats in the Senate and won back the House of Representatives, it appeared as if that had happened. Obama himself called the results a “shellacking”.

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When it comes to political consultants, candidates often find themselves being given strategies as to how to win the previous election. There was certainly some of this with the Republican approach to the 2012 presidential election. When deriving lessons from the 2010 midterms the consultant class failed to factor in that turnout was always down in the midterms, as opposed to a presidential election year. Furthermore, as a rule of thumb, an “off-year election” would typically be expected to go against the party which held the White House.

When Newt Gingrich led the Republican Revolution at the 1994 US midterms, President Bill Clinton found himself publicly having to make the case for his own relevancy. However, with the help of pollster Dick Morris, who pioneered the politics of triangulation, Clinton was re-elected by a landslide in 1996. Morris, however, would go on to call the 2012 presidential race for Mitt Romney on the Polling Eve episode of The O’Reilly Factor, which was the No. 1 show in cable news at the time. A couple of days later he had to go back on The Factor and eat humble pie. Morris managed to regain his reputation as a political Svengali when he was one of the few analysts who correctly predicted Donald Trump’s sensational 2016 victory. I was another.

In 2012, I was working as research director for a US congressional campaign in Massachusetts. As part of my role, I would liaise with the Romney campaign, which was based down the road in Boston. I know from first-hand experience that they fully expected to win that election. The reason that Dick Morris, Karl Rove and the Romney campaign managed to call the 2012 election so wrong was that their electoral modelling assumed that the ethnic composition of those turning out to vote would follow the traditional breakdown of previous presidential elections, save for that of 2008.

Demographer William H. Frey produced a post-election analysis for the Associated Press (AP) which showed that in 2012 the turnout rate amongst black eligible voters supposed the turnout rate amongst white eligible voters for the first time in a U.S. presidential election. According to contemporary reporting from Public Radio International:

“Frey found that, had black and white voters turned out at the same rates they did in 2004, when the white voter turnout rate was higher than the rate for black voters, Republican Mitt Romney would have won the election.

‘The 2012 turnout is a milestone for blacks and a huge potential turning point,’ Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, told the AP. ‘What it suggests is that there is an “Obama effect” where people were motivated to support Barack Obama. But it also means that Black turnout magnet always be higher, if future races aren’t as salient.’”

The punditocracy would have done well to take heed of Dr Gillespie’s caveat. Instead, there was significant gloating from members of the liberal media who were crowing that demographic changes in the United States were able to render the GOP as a minority Party. Much was made of the fact that the Republicans had only managed to win the popular vote in one presidential election (2004) since George H.W. Bush was elected to the presidency in 1988.

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The then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, brought into the argument that his party was sitting on a demographic timebomb. He certainly didn’t want the national GOP to go the way of the California Republican Party.

Today, California is seen as solidly Democratic but it has not always been that way. Ronald Reagan got his start in politics as Governor of California after all. It is also often forgotten that before he was Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard M. Nixon was one of California’s two United States senators. The current American Vice-President Kamala Harris before taking her present office was custodian of Richard Nixon’s Senate seat. Kamala Harris, however, grew up in a California that was almost considered a Republican state. In addition to politically educating two of the best-known Republican presidents; between 1952 and 1988, the state of California would only vote for the Democratic candidate for President once, in 1964.

Whilst Britain has been traditionally averse to referenda, ballot propositions have been commonplace in Californian politics for decades. These are ballot measures put to a plebiscite either by a vote of the California state legislature or a petition that has been signed by either 5% of the state’s registered voters, in the case of putting a statute up for a vote or 8% of registered voters, or in the case of putting an amendment to the state’s constitution to the electorate.

In 1994, whilst seeking re-election, Republican Governor of California Pete Wilson also championed Ballot Proposition 187 (Prop. 187). This was a controversial measure which sought to deny public services to illegal immigrants. The vote on Prop. 187 was held on the same day as California’s gubernatorial election. Wilson was re-elected and Prop. 187 passed. In hindsight, many California Republicans would come to think that these victories came at too high a price.

In 1997, a federal judge ruled Prop. 187 unconstitutional, and so, the will of the people was subverted by the actions of an activist judiciary. Following the passage of Prop 187, California was never again to vote for a Republican to be either president or a United States senator. California only voted for a Republican Governor again when the candidate was world famous movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think that most people would agree that Arnold is always the exception to the rule.

Today, all of the statewide offices in California that are held by Democrats. California currently has only 7 Republican Congressmen, as opposed to 43 Democrats. Interestingly, the leadership of both political parties in the US House of Representatives is headed up by a Californian. The Democrats all fall in line behind Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. The leader of the House Republican Conference is the Representative for California’s 23rd Congressional District and House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy also served, for a period, as minority leader of the California State Assembly when Arnold Schwarzenegger was Governor.

The passage of Prop. 187 marked an increase in the turnout rate amongst California’s eligible Hispanic voters and in the subsequent years there has been a marked increase in the size of the state’s Hispanic population. As many Hispanics felt that Prop. 187 was unfairly targeted at them, in the state of California, they became reliable Democrats. Many Republicans think that Prop. 187 alienating these voters is in large part responsible for California becoming what they would regard as a one-party state.

Reince Priebus was convinced that the language used around the issue of immigration in the 2012 campaign played a substantial role in alienating minority voters. He thought that if the Republican Party was ever to regain the White House, it would first have to build bridges and reach out to minority communities typically ignored by the GOP. In order to move his party towards positions he felt would be more amenable to minority voters, Priebus commissioned a report into his party’s failure to win the presidency and/or take back

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the US Senate in 2012, to help facilitate him with this endeavor. The report when it came out in late March 2013 was unkindly labelled the “Republican autopsy” by the liberal press.

What Priebus wanted to do in his second term as chairman of the Republican National Committee was similar to what Karl Rove had done as “Bush’s Brain” during the-Texas Governor George W. Bush’s first run for the presidency. In Bush’s 1998 re-election campaign for governor, he made a strong effort to court Texas’ sizeable Hispanic vote. W. was rewarded with a solid showing; winning somewhere in the range of 33-49% of the Hispanic vote depending on which source you choose to believe. In any case, it was an impressive performance, if just for that George W. Bush was willing to venture into territory in which Republican politicians had traditionally feared to tread. It helped Bush that he was bilingual and therefore willing and able to speak to Hispanic voters in Spanish.

When we think about George W. Bush today; we tend to associate him with neo-conservativism, the War on Terror and the War in Iraq. Too often the candidate he was when he was introduced to the American people en masse is forgotten.

When he ran in 2000, George W. Bush sought to position himself as a softer brand of Republican than Newt Gingrich and his Republican Revolutionaries had been. The GOP had actually lost seats in the US House of Representatives in the 1998 US midterms. This was largely considered to have been the result of the public thinking the Republicans were too obsessed with impeaching President Bill Clinton and, as a result, indifferent to their priorities. Newt Gingrich shouldered the blame for the House Republicans losing ground and swiftly resigned as speaker of the House of Representatives.

George W. Bush did not want to be seen as in the Gingrich mold and instead sought to cast himself as what he called a “compassionate conservative”. In doing this he was trying to do for the Republican Party what Bill Clinton had done for the Democratic Party with his New Democrat Presidential campaign in 1992. Bill Clinton had been perceptive enough to realise that the Democratic Party had been pigeonholed as being soft on crime and also at the mercy of the leaders of various groupings within their “rainbow coalition”, to borrow a phrase from the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Before 2016 and the electoral successes of Vote Leave and Republican candidate Donald J. Trump, political parties on both the left and the right held it as an item of faith that elections were won on the centre ground. The reality is more complicated. The political earthquakes of 2016 did not mean that centrism had lost its appeal or that centrism was dead as a political force. It simply meant that just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is more than one way to build an election winning coalition. With the exception of countries that have compulsory voting, it is possible for politicians to confound expectations by expanding the electorate by bringing former non-voters into their coalition. It was previously disengaged blue-collar white voters in the Midwest of the United States who delivered Trump his 2016 victory, despite him running a campaign that was the polar opposite to the one recommended in the Republican autopsy.

Politics still remains a game of addiction; it just so happens that it requires a greater combination of numbers that can be used to reach the number of voters needed to win. I use that phrase deliberately because the British and American systems do not strictly require the head of government to receive a majority of the votes 21

cast nationwide. In 2016, Donald J. Trump received fewer individual votes than Hillary Clinton but won a majority of votes in the Electoral College. In 1951, Labour received more votes than the Conservatives and received a higher percentage of the vote share. The Conservatives, however, won more seats in the House of Commons, so King George VI invited Winston Churchill to serve once more as prime minister.

Politics will always be a numbers game, but now it is understood that there is more than one path to power, politics has certainly become more interesting. There is an ancient Chinese proverb: “May you live in interesting times.” One thing is for certain; we live in are anything but dull.

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CHAPTER FIVE WHEN VIRTUE SIGNALING BECOMES A VICE

When George Floyd was murdered last year there was close to a national consensus in America against what had happened in Minneapolis. President Trump and Sean Hannity were amongst the first to publicly condemn what had happened. The stage was set for real policing reform and progress on race relations.

Then the conversation was hijacked by the organisation Black Lives Matter. It is a given that black lives do matter, but before we continue, it is necessary to separate the sentiment from the organisation. One can agree with the sentiment but disapprove of the organisation. We must reject those who would have it as a rule in the conduct of public discourse, that if someone criticises the organisation Black Lives Matter, it should be taken as meaning that one does not believe black lives matter. Which is utterly absurd. The organisation, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, was established in 2013 by three self-proclaimed Marxists – Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. They want to overthrow the capitalist system and replace it with communism. Foolish multinational corporations that have failed to do due diligence are funding this attempt to destroy them because they feel a need to “virtue signal.” In a page since scrubbed from the Black Lives Matter website What We Believe, they state their desire to disrupt the nuclear family structure:

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

The organisation Black Lives Matter thrived after the murder of George Floyd because multinational corporations and the corporate media wanted to throw slogans at the problem of racial inequality. The situation regarding race in the United States is full of far greater nuance than some in the press would have you believe. The history of race in this country is also complicated, just differently so. To understand the situation, we are in need of a cursory knowledge of these complexities. There have been a number of slogans banded about and there has also been a fair amount of “virtue signalling” also.

Race, gender, sexuality and gender identification are not an issue that can be addressed in 30-second soundbites. There are few easy answers. The world is full of conflict on racial and religious lines. The idea that we can end bigotry and intolerance in the space of a weekend, a decade or even a century is tragically absurd. That is not to say that we, as a society, shouldn’t try as the journey is worthwhile even if we do not end up reaching the destination.

Last summer, the smart approach would’ve been to first focus on areas of broad consensus and then move on from there. It stretches credulity that the primary concern of those experiencing racism was the toppling of statues of long dead persons that modern pedestrians had previously just walked on past with absolutely no interest as to who the statue was actually of. The murder of George Floyd had nothing to do with slavery. There is not actually any evidence that it was a racially motivated murder. A psychopath was given a badge and George Floyd was unfortunate enough to cross his path. That doesn’t mean that racial profiling 23

doesn’t go on, it does, and it doesn’t mean that certain groups haven’t traditionally been victims of police brutality, they have. It just so happens that the Floyd case does not seem to be about race, let alone slavery.

Given the overwhelming majority of my ancestors are Irish and none of my ancestors were involved in anything untoward, I found it galling that some people were laying the blame for historic injustices down at my door because of how I look and how I sound. For reference, not only is my surname Sullivan, my mother’s maiden name is Kelly, my paternal Grandma’s maiden name was McMahon (Irish), my maternal Nan’s maiden name was Turnbull, and my paternal Great-Grandmother’s maiden name was O’Donnell. There are many English people today who if you trace their ancestry back will find that at the time when there was a slave trade their families were not English. There are also many English people today whose families were English but whose ancestors were doing back-breaking labour, to feed their families at the time of the slave trade and who had nothing to do with the damnable thing – most people not being descended from great wealth. It seems a kick in teeth to blame the descendants of those who suffered under the boot of old, inept aristocracy for the crimes of that aristocracy.

And whilst there remain many significant families whose property and wealth came from the involuntary exploitation of others, for the most past, the old elites have gone the way of the dodo, leaving their heirs instead of great wealth, a mountain of bills. The hereditary House of Lords was done away with over 20 years ago and it was hardly a hive of activity back then. Most stately homes belong to the National Trust as the families in whose name they might be could not continue to afford their upkeep.

I have little time for yesterday’s men but it is important we remember that social change did not happen in Britain through use of quotas or by putting people’s heads on chopping blocks. Social change happened not because people were given special treatment but through the creation of a more level playing field which placed merit above all else. People rose to top by being a lot smarter and working a lot harder.

Inherited wealth did help those lucky enough to inherit it, but the capitalist system is unforgiving when it comes to incompetence. There have been those who inherited wealth, made the most of the advantage they have been given, and by being smart and working hard, built upon it. There have been more who inherited wealth, squandered the advantage they had been given and by wresting on their laurels left little or nothing the next generation of their family leading the cycle of aspiration to begin anew.

This is not an entirely fair system, granted. No system devised and administrated by human beings will ever be 100% fair. The best way to make the system fairer is not actually through government action but through a change in the culture. It used to be a popular concept that to whom much is given, much is expected. We must as a society reinforce that mantra and bring it back into vogue. Those who have been the recipients of good fortunate should give back and work to expand opportunity for others.

Those who are suffering or have suffered from prejudice want barriers to opportunity removed and greater equity - good jobs, safe neighbourhoods and a dignified standard of living. President Trump significantly increased his share of the vote amongst African-Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics and 24

LGBTQ+ Americans because, before the pandemic hit, he had created a prosperity in which all Americans were sharing and these groups had their highest levels of employment ever recorded with their real wages significantly increasing for the first time in decades. Real people care about their real lives improving and are less concerned with “virtue signalling.”

One major obstacle to social mobility that exists in Britain today is student debt. Too many young Britons are starting their professional lives straddled with debt so that Marxist sociology and unelectable politics academics can live comfortably writing polemics condemning the very system which has in grave error allowed them to thrive. The time is now to rethink higher education and rid us of these later-day fifth columnists from the public payroll.

FINAL THOUGHTS

At the time of this paper’s publication, a poll just came out revealing that the leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, is now as unpopular as his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. Far from this being good news for Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it is very bad news indeed.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition is not providing much of an opposition, then some new personal, group or force will move in to fill the void. When the Conservative Party was in disarray in the early New Labour years, Tony Blair was not without opposition. The media moved in to fill the void left by the shambolic Tory Party and acted as a check on the then prime minister’s power.

Boris Johnson should be concerned by Starmer’s abysmal approval ratings because they serve to embolden backbench Conservative MPs with reservations about parts of the Prime Minister’s agenda. With Starmer being the political equivalent of a dead parrot, these MPs can now rebel against Mr Johnson without the fear that it might benefit Labour.

As the sun shines on this Tuesday afternoon, things are looking good for the Prime Minister. His is a good position to be in, but part of me wonders whether things are looking too good. Mr Johnson should take great care now not to get sloppy for fear the self-destructive side of his personality might once again surface. I have little doubt that it will but that is for another day. I am now going to enjoy the sunshine for the rest of the afternoon.

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