This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
Know the past to understand the present. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), was a formidable Italian Marxist philosopher, writer and politician. In 1926, Mussolini’s fascist government imprisoned him after a fake trial. The prosecutor said: “For 20 years, we must stop his brain from working.” They couldn’t do that. In prison he wrote notebooks full of wisdom and knowledge.
Severely ill, and denied medical care, he died 11 years later aged just 46. Today, Italy’s leader is Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy party, which Mussolini’s granddaughter, Rachelle, considers too right-wing.
Gramsci believed fascism thrives in periods of flux and uncertainties: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Donald Trump is one of those morbid symptoms. He is at the top of his game. But political cycles move. He will come down. America can then cleanse its corrupt body and soul.
I hope I live to see that day. But for now, it’s a political horror show. Trump, super-narcissist and felon, has already pardoned violent white supremacists. What do you think they will do next? He wants to deny the birthright of US-born babies, outlaw equality measures, nail all those who oppose him, intimidate the legal system and state authorities, destabilise the world, grab land, and clear out Mexicans at the border as if they are vermin despoiling “clean” America.
See how billionaires and other powerful Americans, including tech bros, turn petitioning supplicants, bending their knees before him. See how many Christians view him as God’s rep on Earth. See how institutions including Ivy League universities and top schools bow to his will. See how democracy is used as an alibi to praise and defend the grotesque man, whose tax and business affairs remain opaque, who thinks it is Ok to “grab pussies” and who, in 2023, was found by a New York jury to have sexually assaulted writer E Jean Carroll. Other women have accused him of bad sexual behaviour.
Millions of Americans are manifestly dismayed and enraged. They will resist the man and his acolytes. Some of his executive orders are already facing legal challenges; protesters have come out. Michelle Obama was a no-show at the inauguration.
square IAN DUNT Look at Musk's salute in context and you can see the future of the US
Read More
Among the bravest of them is the heroic Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, who led the post-inauguration interfaith prayer service last Tuesday, attended by the President, the VP, and their wives. In a steady voice she asked the President to have mercy on migrants and on gay, lesbian and transgender people. Trump looked menacing. He has since trashed the bishop and branded her “nasty”. For in this democracy which purports to lead the free world, the Leader expects to be revered, always and by all.
Over the next four years Trump will radicalise and fragment America. How does the world deal with the morbid symptom? More pertinently, how do we?
Amoral capitalists
Some, like Ian Cowie, a British investor, advise us in the Sunday Times to make the most of Trump and invest in weapons, space and oil, because, you know, Trump has vowed to “drill, baby, drill”. These amoral capitalists, turned on by Trump, should go live there. Such migrants are always welcome.
Many influential and ordinary people in the UK remain steadfastly pro-Trump. Twice already on TV shows, fellow panellists have told me off for hating Trump. One waxed lyrical about the “special relationship” and the President’s “star quality”. Most Britons, thankfully, are not mindlessly loyal. Yes, Starmer will have to find a way to do business with the President. But we are not, as Trump, and his half-demon, half-sprite bestie Musk seem to believe, a satellite US state.
Thankfully, we have public figures who understand what Trump’s victory could mean for surviving liberal democracies. In The Observer last Sunday, Sadiq Khan highlighted the AfD party in Germany, National Rally in France, Trump in the US and other far-righters who use democracy to get into power: “We should be in no doubt, this is a perilous moment. The spectre of a resurgent fascism haunts the West.”
Right-wingers were, as ever, outraged; Labour’s frontbench urged Khan to tone down his words. They forget that during his last presidency, Trump assailed London’s elected mayor.
In this interregnum, when too many are genuflecting to resurgent fascists, I hope many more stand up for the post-war principles set down by Winston Churchill and others who defeated Hitler (an elected leader). Liberal democracies are often disappointing, sometimes treacherous. But the alternatives will lead the world to hell. Stay on the right side of history.
Moving forwardLabour needs to heal our severed relationship with the EU. A Statista poll last year found that 55 per cent of Britons thought it was wrong to leave the EU. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, at last moving on from hijinx to serious politics, has accused the Government of an “act of economic negligence”, adding: “It is alarming that the Government is happy to negotiate with China but won’t even look at a better trading arrangement with our closest neighbours in Europe.”
What he says is indisputable. Will Starmer heed these words or be cowed by Priti Patel, the Conservative shadow foreign secretary, who is still warbling old Brexit tunes about sovereignty and “our national interests”? Fixated by “Red Wall” voters, I predict he will capitulate to the Tories.
A conversation I had this weekAfter the publication of my column investigating how Muslims of Pakistani heritage feel about the grooming gangs, several individuals and Muslim organisations have contacted me. Most thanked this paper for publishing views that go beyond simple binaries.
Three vowed to subscribe to the paper (YES!). Four of them were unsettled because I condemned the rapists, claiming it would increase discrimination against them. I easily saw off these ploys of disengagement. Young women, some activists I know well, said it was important for people to know “we are not all the same”.
And, finally and most telling, a call from an imam who said: “I thought you with your English husband were one of them. But you are one of us.” Er, no. I am one of me, sir. That’s why I can think and write honestly and freely.
Yasmin’s pick: Ex-Wife (Faber)This book, newly reprinted, was first published in 1929. I am reading it compulsively, addictively. The author, Ursula Parrott, was, in many ways, using writing to heal her pain after her husband left her. (I did that too.)
The middle-class heroine is good at her job, cool, beautiful, fashionable, reckless, desired by many. But she wants him back. Even though he hit her, repeatedly rejects her, was cruelly unmoved by the death of their baby.
All this was accepted as the norm, by women of all classes. Not any more, though it does happen. Sometimes it helps to remember how bad the bad old days were.
This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The fightback against Donald Trump is already beginning )
Also on site :
- Tottenham sack Postecoglou despite Europa League win
- Trump announces new round of US-China trade talks
- Iconic ‘80s Actor, 76, Is Unrecognizable Nearly 35 Years After 'Dallas’