The liberal-left has an optimism problem
In a recent publicity junket for the new Guy Ritchie release The Gentlemen, Hugh Grant was asked: “I’m just wondering, how are you feeling now everything’s kind of settled?” Grant’s response? “It’s [Brexit] a catastrophe.”
“The country’s finished,” he added.
Grant’s first instinct, a sixth former’s huff and shrug of the shoulders rather than any genuine attempt to console progressives disappointed by the general election result, illustrates a central problem for the contemporary liberal-left – there is no sense of hope.
There have been very few social democratic “progressivist” politicians who have done optimism genuinely well post-crash – Barack Obama, who worked eloquently with the future-facing grain of American culture, was a genuine “progressive patriot” (Ray Charles’s America the beautiful was, in his view, “the most patriotic piece of music ever performed—because it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”).
Birgitte Nyborg, the fictional Prime Minister of Denmark in the drama Borgen, with her vision of “a new Denmark” was another. Emmanuel Macron initially seemed to favour a kind of robust liberalism but he has moved towards a darker vision of Christendom under threat.
I cannot count the number of times I have found myself in conversation with my contemporaries in which the tone is always, “Oh isn’t it all a mess.” Not quite “the country’s finished,” but pretty close. However unjustified, there is a sense that opportunities are limited by Brexit, that the prevailing mood of politics is anti-progress, pro-nativist and anti-freedom. But whatever the millennial style is, it doesn’t seem to marry itself to an alternative that could assemble a broader electoral coalition.
Playwright Mike Bartlett’s new play Snowflake, which finished its run at the Kiln Theatre in London this weekend, gets to the heart of the optimism/pessimism problem. It’s a sensitive attempt to stage the inter-generational cultural argument between a leave-voting father and his daughter, who had run away three years before just after the Brexit vote.
She is a modern, millennial progressive – anti-Brexit, comfortable in her sexuality (she has a girlfriend) but also fundamentally downcast about her prospects and about the direction of the country. It is her priggish Brexiteer father who appears far more upbeat – we can manage on our own, he seems to say, the future is ours to make.
We may be suffering still from the distortions introduced by the Sixties into our notion of what radical can mean. The great figures of the counter-culture (Lou Reed’s early music is its highest achievement) understood that in wilfully distending the limits of the self, to, as Bob Dylan put it “to dance beneath the diamond sky” and seek what Baudelaire understood as “the new,” you could find yourself radically at odds with how other, less strange-minded types, could realistically live and find meaning. Was it unpleasant? Perhaps, but it was also life lived in the awareness that the poet’s condition is loneliness, that the poet is, for many, an obscenity, a polluted thing, marked by evil.
I do not get any sense now that this project has any appeal to agitprop radicals – the self is, by contrast, something to be protected, made safe from the toughness of the world. Perhaps the most successful of modern Instagram poets is Rupi Kaur. Here’s a poem entitled thank you that goes like this: “Look down at your body / whisper there is no home like you”. Another runs: “and here you are living / despite it all.”
This radical inward turn, mirrored in the history of the novel by the vogue for autofiction, has twisted radicalism back towards solipsism, rather than the sense that the world is open to be constantly reinterpreted and reshaped by those of exceptional insight and talent, as Dylan or Reed might have had it. “The country’s finished” and a shrug of the shoulders are no place to start.