Trump, Brexit and the bottom-feeding malignancy of nationalism

Donald Trump needs an enemy. During his presidential campaign, he was fortunate to have an opponent who he might have handpicked if he needed material.

For a time after his election victory, he floundered without Hillary Clinton which is why he never went without her for too long.

Even as the investigation into his links with Russia builds to become the force that will destroy him, he will try to throw Hillary into the mix when he can, just to get the juices flowing.

Trump may well be a fascist, a racist and a danger to us all, but first of all he is a nationalist. Well, first of all, he is an asshole, but that innate assholeness is informed and sustained by nationalism.

Nationalism is a worldview which disproportionately tends to attract assholes, buffoons and eejits, requiring as it does a loss of perspective, an absence of that necessary ingredient of humanity we might call self-awareness. And in Trump, the assholes, buffoons and eejits have found their sun king.  

Trump is often described as an opportunist who doesn’t really believe in anything and that might be true. But his need for approval, his shrill and childish sensitivity, his sense of superiority which masks deep issues of inferiority, are all useful characteristics for a nationalist.

On Wednesday, Trump retweeted Britain First, a racist organisation which, when Sadiq Khan was elected mayor of London, described elected politicians who happened to be Muslims as “occupiers” who would be subject to “militant direct action” where they “live, work and pray”. Among others mentioned was Sajid Javid, a Tory minister, who described Trump’s action on Thursday as endorsing “a vile hate-filled organisation that hates me and people like me”.

This provided a rare moment of unity in British politics, with nearly everyone aware that Trump needed to be condemned for his actions.

Britain, of course, is in the grip of its own version of the disease and as it spreads, as the front pages move from crushing the saboteurs to searching for mutineers, it is reaching its own foaming-at-the-mouth stage.

George Orwell said the goose step would never catch on in England because the people on the street would laugh, but times may well have changed.

The bottom-feeding malignancy of nationalism needs an enemy. It’s never more alive than when its demonising someone else. It may be making America Great Again or Taking Back Control but it usually does so by making others feel small and powerless.

It is a cruel disease - one of the identifying symptoms when you present with nationalism is that it tells you the version you have  is benign compared to the more virulent strains spreading elsewhere.

On Thursday, it was announced that net migration to the UK had fallen over the past 12 months by the largest amount since records began.

One of the unintended consequences of Brexit was to make many EU citizens in the UK question whether they still belong there.

Suddenly this country which had been welcoming and tolerant was perceived as something else.

Most people in the UK didn’t view the French or the Germans or the Irish in the UK any differently after Brexit but those French, German or Irish people felt differently.

If this place had felt like their home, it suddenly didn’t feel like exactly like home.

If they had been debating whether to stay or to leave suddenly there was another compelling entry in the leave column. 

But there was no need to panic, those who had triumphed said. EU citizens' rights would be clarified as part of the negotiations.  But those who were there didn’t feel there was any need for clarification because they thought this place where they lived, worked, married and had children was home. They were wrong, they no longer quite belonged, they were no longer quite home.

Nationalism’s reductive view diminishes the thing it is supposed to love. Trump makes America a more hateful place; Brexit takes the country back by making it a country fewer people want to live in.

I lived in Britain for 20 years. I married an Englishwoman and my son was born in London. He’s lived in Ireland since he was two. Is he English or Irish? I don’t really care.

My father-in-law had come from Abbottabad to make a life in the UK. He married an Englishwoman too and they have lived happily in an English town all their adult lives. 

This a humdrum story, not one of those Weekend magazine articles on the "new Irish" in London which they’ve been running in the Irish Times for 30 years and which they should probably discontinue.

Now thanks to the disease of nationalism, these stories have become something to think about.  Europe stimulates British nationalists in was that demonstrates they are in the grip of the full-blown disease. Their obsession has been relentless. It is tempting to see it as some sort of kink, an S&M fetish, although given that the people who will be doing the suffering after Brexit will not be the people driving it, it may be more accurate to describe it as an 'S' fetish. For the grandees, there will be no suffering, there will be no 'M'.

They hadn’t thought much about the border during Brexit. Now that they’ve had to think about it, there is resentment that they've been dragged into a mess of their own making, like a man complaining about a fire brigade waking him up after they've rescued him from a blaze which started when he fell asleep with a cigarette in his mouth.

The tensions about the border caused by Brexit have been filled by the unbearable on all sides because Irish nationalism is no more benign than any other version of the disease.

And the more absurd Brexit becomes from Northern Ireland's point of view, the more it seems to feed a unionist fantasy of a life lived happily ever after with the rest of the UK. But where else can they go? Ireland reassures the Unionist community that they will be happy and free in any agreed Ireland by reacting to any statement from a Unionist politician as if it was the most preposterously bigoted remark ever made, but don't worry, you'll be made welcome in our utopia.

There has been justifiable rage from many in Ireland about the handling of the border issue by ignorant UK politicians and its media. This was followed by predictable outrage about a few people on a vox pop not knowing where the border was.

The humdrum, boringly normal relationship that existed between people on these islands is now portrayed as an illusion. I feel I have been duped by spending twenty years in England and feeling relaxed and content when it turns out I should have been primed for a betrayal.

So maybe I should laugh - the way I tell my friends from Derry they should laugh when someone makes a joke about ‘Londonderry’  - when people on Twitter are making jokes about how terrible the English are, but the punchlines make me uneasy.

Brexit was an act of criminal self-destruction, but it could destroy others as well.

The sensible option, the one most people secretly want, is that there will be no Brexit or there will be a Brexit that mimics the world there would have been if there hadn’t been a Brexit.

They may find a solution in regulatory convergence and find a lot of money to overcome the difficulties. Freedom of movement may not be a problem now that people have decided they don’t want to live in the UK anyway. It may turn out that all the worrying about the border was misplaced.

But there will always be unintended consequences. The disease has plagued this island. It has become antibiotic resistant, a robust and contagious infection growing stronger through exposure to other, local variations. It can only be treated, never cured, while doing what it does while the symptoms go untreated. It will drive people to righteousness and fury. It will create a troubling and uneasy feeling in those who believed they were home, but who worry now that they can never conform as the disease demands they should.