The rise of the right

Defying the rise of the wrong

“Love him or hate him, we all owe Snowden our thanks for forcing upon the nation an important debate. But the debate shouldn’t be about him. It should be about the gnawing questions his actions raised from the shadows.” Bernie Sanders, US Senator for the state of Vermont, on whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Edward Snowden, by AI

Edward Snowden is a criminal. He’s been tried by American courts and found guilty under various statutes of engaging in criminal behaviour. But he’s not going to prison any time soon, not so far as I’m aware. He lives in Moscow, holds dual citizenship of both the US and Russia and revealed a lot of state secrets about the American intelligence behemoth, which has earned him the aforementioned rap sheet together with the adulation of some parts of the world, as well as provoking awkward silences from others.

To sum up the Snowden revelations in a nutshell: he was very wrong to do what he did, but doing what he did made plain to all the world that the US government are shysters and that you couldn’t trust them to post a letter. To which the US government essentially responded by saying that anyone who has problems with spying by the bucketload on the US’s own population or the population of a partner country, all they need to do is escalate the matter to senior intelligence service managers, who will then sort the matter out. In response to which, the US’s federal courts have said the intelligence managers are duplicitous liars, and their data-collection scheme was, and likely still is, probably unconstitutional.

I know that that’s a pretty big nutshell, but it was a pretty big revelation. If Mr Snowden’s audacity was not in and of itself enough to take your breath away, and if the facts revealed in his disclosures to the world’s press did not take away what little breath surely remained from the shock of his audacity, then the responses by the American judicial system and its intelligence bosses certainly took the cookie.

President Obama called Snowden a “29-year-old hacker,” which revealed the president’s fundamental misunderstanding of Mr Snowden and his own intelligence services, because Snowden didn’t obtain the stuff he disclosed by hacking; he obtained it by copying what the National Security Agency (NSA) themselves had already hacked.

Essentially the intelligence services and the US courts went from denying that they ever spy on anyone (other than bad people), to saying they spy on their “partners” (like Mrs Merkel in Germany—for which she and their other friends should be grateful), to saying it’s not unconstitutional for them to do that, to saying that it might be unconstitutional, to changing the relevant provisions (of the ex-Patriot Act, now USA Freedom Act (if there’s freedom in the title, it must be about freedom, but I’m not sure whether it’s about guaranteeing it or limited it)) so that mass-collection of ordinary folks’ data is restricted.

The prime complaint against Mr Snowden appears to have been that he broke the law by revealing that the NSA was breaching the constitution and thereby breaking the law, and if he’d only tipped the wink to his line manager, the whole thing could have been sorted out without him having to get stuck in Russia and terrorists learning how America hacks and tracks them.

Senator Sanders is regarded by Edward Snowden as probably the most decent politician in America. I think so, too. But the most balanced view of all about Mr Snowden, albeit coming from the pen of Mr Sanders, promises nothing: a debate? A debate. It is in a way the fact that nothing will change in terms of the kinds of information the NSA collects that proves how nefarious the NSA’s collection of that data is. The impermeability of the intelligence services, by which nothing gets in and nothing, certainly, gets out (aside from Snowden, how many other NSA whistleblowers have you heard of?) gives good cause to regard its every denial as an admission and its every admission as a cover for a worse admission.

An acquaintance of mine of yore once opined on Facebook that she had no qualms about her data being collected by she-knew-not-who. Whether she’ll ever live to rue her lack of concern, no one will know but she. Surveillance is now so omnipresent that it’s a great temptation to throw up one’s hands and accept it all, as just the way things are. If Edward Snowden’s revelations could do nothing more than create a debate, then we can all sigh a sigh of resignation: there is nothing we can do about it. But doing something about it is not the point, not here it isn’t.

I read an article on the website of the Electoral Reform Society by one of the society’s officers, Jessica Garland, entitled What is the role of the House of Lords and could it do more? In it, Ms Garland says:

While the House of Lords is often in the press, it’s often due to the things its members should not be doing, rather than the work it does do. The chamber though has an important role to play in our democracy.

My eyes halted at the last word. The ethos of the Electoral Reform Society is as follows:

Our vision is of a democracy fit for the 21st century, where every voice is heard, every vote is valued equally, and every citizen is empowered to take part. We make the case for lasting political reforms, we seek to embed democracy into the heart of public debate, and we foster the democratic spaces which encourage active citizenship.

What Ms Garland calls our democracy is not, for all her position as its director of policy, what the ERS calls a democracy fit for the 21st century. What I’d like to ask Ms Garland is whether a democracy in which the intelligence services collect massive amounts of data about ordinary citizens’ use of telephony, Internet, transport providers, credit cards, water consumption, electricity usage, and all the other things that it is possible to do surveillance on in our modern world is democracy fit for the 21st century. Because, if it isn’t, I suggest she should stop calling it our democracy and start calling it something else.

The problem is that democracy is a philosophy—despised by Plato no less—and it’s a label—applied to how we vote, as it is also to our actual system of government: one that relies heavily on trust and cooperation and is at the same time eminently susceptible to abuse and corruption. The reputation of reliance and trust is so robust that it becomes palpably easy for the malevolent to breach the trust and either not raise so much as a suspicion that they’ve done so or to vehemently deny, with some vestige of credibility, that no such breach of trust has occurred, and thereafter to carry on regardless. From the NSA’s viewpoint, what is irksome about Edward Snowden is that his revelations were backed up by facts, which made it arduous to engage in a dialogue of his word against theirs. In many other cases, that’s a dialogue that’s so much easier to lie your way through.

What is reassuring to the NSA’s viewpoint is the fact that Snowden’s bombshell left so much that was wrong with the NSA untouched. It was a scud missile that, in many respects, once the smoke cleared, could as well have been a dud. That surely emboldened the NSA moving forward, since it was a text-book application of strong-arm tactics on partner countries actually working, for all to see and gasp at: partner countries displaying canine-like obedience when it comes to rolling over and playing dead.

When Mr Snowden filed his 21 asylum applications, I don’t think it was necessarily to find out where he might end up living, but rather to find out where he ought, above all, to avoid living: who are the US’s lap-dogs? Is it not odd that Snowden’s biggest assurance of safety lay not in the great democratic nations of the west, but in autocratic Russia? Well, Russia is no lap-dog to the USA—I don’t think so, anyway—and it’s unlikely to be one in the foreseeable future, so that is where Mr Snowden has made his home: the guarantees offered to him by Russia transpired to be far more believable than those offered to him by the land of his birth, the cradle of democratic tradition.

So, where does that leave the rest of us, who have not blabbed copious quantities of state secrets on the Internet, who drag ourselves out of bed each morning and roll into work on the 8:50, clock off at 5 o’clock and return home to our Volvo estate and 2.4 children? For the most of us, it has for a long time been sufficient if the 8:50 is actually running, if the Volvo starts on a frosty morning, if the kids get decent grades in arithmetic, and the little missus has put a braised rabbit on the table for dinner. More we do not want from life, and if the NSA finds it interesting to monitor our WhatsApp birthday congratulations, well, good luck to ’em.

Until the full shock of Snowden’s revelations came to be felt, and as long as respected politicians were talking about earnest debate, the little people cherished a hope, a confidence that the misdeeds of the past would remain in the past and that a fresh start could be made on making democracy fit for the 21st century.

But now the little people fear the rise of the right: the Alternative für Deutschland, the American Trumpists, Marie Le Pen’s National Rally, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, and they fear the right without all too often asking themselves how come the right is rising? Well, to answer that, you’d need to ask the right.

You’d perhaps get answers such as that vast sums of money have disappeared from public coffers with nothing to show for it, the enormous bale-outs of big business that those little people all had to shoulder, the equality legislation that gets flouted by local authorities, who engage high-powered counsel to defend cases raised by greedy workers instead of admitting their own failings (as ably illustrated by the Post Office Horizon scandal and the Glasgow and Birmingham care workers’ pay cases).

In short, how often does democracy need to shoot itself in the foot for it to eventually be found limping? Time after time, new faith is mustered to invest in democratic institutions, because, of course, we live in a democracy (just nip outside and check that’s what the brass plate on the door says), which, time and again, prove their disregard for the system on which they are founded, the same brass plate on the door. They hack away at the very structure of the public confidence that is essential to their existence and, when they chip a chip too far, they walk away with financial benefit and preserved reputations, leaving disaster in their wake, to move on to democratic pastures new.

That is how the right rises: it is the direction that people turn to when all else has failed them. They believe the rhetoric because the rhetoric of democracy rings all too hollow. They place faith in the right, because their faith is at a low ebb in any case: what have they to lose? A vote? An appointed second chamber packed with ex-prime ministers’ cronies? A pretend democracy? Regardless of any illusions about the right, many are asking: if this is what we have to thank democracy for, why would we want to preserve it?

They say that turning to the right is an act of suicide. It is, yes: an act of desperation.