The playbook of rightwing nationalists
George Monbiot rightly draws our attention to the insidious rise of political authoritarianism in the UK (Trump and Johnson aren’t replaying the 1930s – but it’s just as frightening, 2 July). This is a trend that has been growing in the US and now appears to have taken root in our own democracy. It is characterised by mendacity and narcissism, traits that both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson share to varying degrees.
Narcissists are unable to decentre from their solipsistic cognitions and emotions in a way that might enable them to see and feel others’ points of view, and instead attempt to impose their own distorted realities upon others. Both Trump and Johnson use the same techniques: deny any reality that does not fit their self-centred distortions, and attempt to create an alternative reality through words that evoke emotions in the listener that chime in with their own prejudices.
Covid-19 has shown us that an insentient organism is impervious to weasel words, and that denial or wishful thinking are unable to prevail upon it. At some point, reality will confront our deluded leaders. Now that we have a Labour leader who, by profession, is a champion of the truth, the likes of Johnson will be seen to be the charlatans they always were, and they will vanish along with the post-truth era they helped create.
Dr Allan Dodds
Bramcote, Nottingham
• Following on from Monbiot’s argument, whatever the trappings of the new order, it represents a new form of the state, moving from what Michael Gove calls “the Attlee settlement” of the postwar welfare state to the direct democracy Gove presented as “the agenda for a new model party” in 2005. In this pamphlet, Gove, Carswell, Hunt and others proposed that in the national enthusiasm generated by leaving the EU, the state could be “unbundled” in the way Thatcherism opened the old mixed economy to “pluralism of provision”.
This will consolidate the dominance of finance capital to create a corporate state in which transnational corporations provide cradle-to-grave health, education, social care and local environmental services. For “enthusiasm” read the chaos compounded by the no-deal Brexit that Boris Johnson espouses. The referendum coup engineered by Dominic Cummings is thus ongoing and no one seems able to stop it.
Patrick Ainley
London
