Lurching Towards Autocracy

Leading Conservative thinker and former European MEP Daniel Hannan discusses the erosion of freedoms and rule of law under the pretext of tackling a pandemic. Interview by Nick Cater.

Nick Cater: Well, the issue of freedoms is at the forefront of our minds right now, highlighted by the extraordinary and disturbing, dare I say, developments in Victoria this week. Our freedoms, of course, have a long tradition. They come from the British culture, the British traditions which we inherited as a colony, and I've been struck by how much the interpretation of freedom here is so similar, indeed, perhaps even identical to that in much of the English speaking world. Someone who's written about this extensively is the former British Euro MP, Daniel Hannan. Daniel Hannan published a book in 2013, on the Anglosphere. He was out here to promote it. We debated it furiously, but in the end I couldn't help but agree with him. I'm delighted to welcome from the UK now, Daniel Hannan.

Daniel, you wrote a very thorough and convincing account of the freedom, the particular peculiar kind of freedom that arose in that wet, damp, islands which you now occupy, and spread around the world. Can you just give me a taste of what that freedom is and what makes it so distinctive? And then we might move on and say, "Are we worried about what's happening to it now?"

Daniel Hannan:

Well, I think there is a really extraordinary, unique thing about the individualist cultures that Australians and Brits, and indeed now most people in the Western world, have become used to. It's quite exceptional by historical standards. We're a species which evolved in kin groups, in tribes. We have, if you like, collectivist genes, and for most of the last 10,000 years since there's been agriculture, we've lived in various states of tyranny and slavery. That's been the normal condition for most members of our species, for most of the time since there has been anything that you could call a civilisation. And I wonder sometimes whether we, in open liberal democracies, democracies that have elevated the individual above the collective, that have elevated the rules above the rulers, have got something that you can call the rule of law, aren't living through a kind of weird blip.

It feels almost as though we're in the interglacial and the frozen ice age is on either side of us, and that that is the more normal, natural condition of humankind. And one of the things, listening to your introduction, is that this whole gustily response to the epidemic has reminded us of is how easily people surrender their freedoms, and then how reluctant they are to take them back again. As long as you have an argument of necessity, of emergency, people will put up with the most extraordinary abuses of what used to be regarded as their most basic civil rights.

Nick Cater: You wrote in your book, I was struck at the time when I read, that Australia is the philosophy of John Stuart Mill made flesh. Do you have any cause to revisit that in light of the events in Victoria, where the Premier is using basically undemocratic extra-parliamentary mechanisms on the pretext of solving this pandemic?

Daniel Hannan:

I stand by what I said in general. Australia, compared to almost any other country, has tended to be on the side of the angels when it counts. Most countries have patchy records. But if you look at the times when there's been a contest between civilisations that value freedom, and civilisations that value collectivism, Australia is in that pretty short list of countries that was on the right side every time in the two World Wars, in the Cold War and so on. Even now, with the whole world going through an authoritarian spasm in response to the COVID epidemic, I think a lot of countries would still gladly swap their problems for yours.

It may well be that people will look back on the last 300 years as a kind of libertarian blip in the otherwise much more autocratic pattern of government.

But that said, the fact is that even in Australia, or at least even in a big populous Australian state, people will not only tolerate, but will actually demand these extraordinary crackdowns and diminutions of their liberty. It is again a reminder of how fragile and precious, and in many ways how artificial an open society is. For the last few hundred years we've taken the idea that personal freedom is an inalienable right for granted, but most of the world doesn't think that way. Our ancestors didn't think that way for most of the time that they were thinking, and it may well be that people will look back on the last 300 years as a kind of libertarian blip in the otherwise much more autocratic pattern of government.

Nick Cater: One of the warning signs for me is this changing role of the police. We inherited, I think, that tradition which developed in Britain in the early 19th century, the idea that the police are citizens in uniforms, that they apply the law by consent; it's not enforcement. I think now we see what happens once the police are out there. There’s a Coronavirus enforcement division in the Victorian Police now, who have the power to enter people's homes now without a warrant, they can seize anything they want, destroy anything they want. Suddenly it seems to me that the police have jumped way beyond the idea of applying the law by consent.

Daniel Hannan:

When we had the statue smashing protests here two months ago, and indeed around the world... You could make quite an interesting competition of what is the stupidest statue from their point of view that they attacked. Was it Abraham Lincoln? Was it Winston Churchill? But I think you could make a case for the most bizarre statue to vandalise being that of Robert Peel, who came up with the concept of the policeman as a citizen in uniform and the idea that police are not the licensed agent of the state. That he has no more powers than you or I do, except in so far as those powers are temporarily and contingently bestowed on him by a magistrate. We’ve had this idea in Britain ever since, and other countries have copied our policing tradition.

Now over the world, we have seen abuses of police power. And then, the moment that people came out en masse to demonstrate for Black Lives Matter, they suddenly and literally fell to their knees before it. I think that was a real change, because it was such an obvious political move. What really triggered the iconoclasm of statue smashing was the attack on a statue in Bristol, where the local police watched it happen and didn't make any attempt to defend the property or enforce the law.

There has been a double standard in the way police have handled BLM protesters and lockdown demonstrators.

Afterwards, the superintendent said, "Well, it's been a very problematic thing for a lot of the black community." Yes, I accept that. It probably was, but that is not a decision for a middle ranking superintendent to make. That's why we have democracies and the Bristol City Council. It was, I thought, a very sad moment and something I hadn't really expected to see. We went from this extreme authoritarianism one day, to this sudden permissiveness, provided that you were demonstrating in favour of Black Lives Matter. God help you if you demonstrated against the lockdowns, then you would feel the full force of the law.

Nick Cater: I think there's a common theme here with what we've seen in Hong Kong, which I regard as the frontier for freedom right now. I think the role of the police there has been crucial. Early on in those big protests, the police were there with nothing more than a truncheon and a notebook. And then over the space of about six months the whole police force became transformed into an almost paramilitary unit. Did you observe that too?

Daniel Hannan:

Like the Australian and British police, Hong Kong’s was a police force founded in the same tradition. And I think there's been a real change, just in the last few months. Up until now, China has been pretty careful about observing the letter, if not the spirit, of the 1984 Accords. The PLA soldiers in Hong Kong didn't leave their barracks, the approximations of policy with China were always driven by Pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong, so they were technically legal; there was no abuse of the actual treaty until now. I think Hong Kong-ers now sense that they are going to be treated like Uyghurs, or Tibetans, or Falun Gong, or any other kind of suspect group.

On the morning that the new security law was promulgated, we had these previously quite correct, benign, well-behaved coppers arresting people for holding up placards, including one nine-year-old girl. It is scary how quickly that can happen. I think coming out of this crisis, there's going to be a lot of things that are going to be unpleasant for people of a liberal, free market bent. A lot of our own societies are going to have bigger governments which are more authoritarian and more indebted. But there is also going to be a big geopolitical change in that power will have shifted to these dictatorial regimes, and above all to China.

Nick Cater: It goes to the very delicate balance, doesn't it, in democracy? I mean, for a time we thought we could go around the world with the Americans and just put ballot boxes in schools in the most formerly despotic countries, and expect democracy to take over. But it's harder to get across the subtleties of democracy, isn't it?

Daniel Hannan:

This is it. Hong Kong had the rule of law, but not democracy. And if you've got to pick one or the other, that is definitely the one to go for. Because democracy, without the rule of law, will turn into mob rule, and very quickly descend into tyranny. Whereas the rule of law without democracy will over time be durable, and should eventually develop into a more representative form of government, as was happening in Hong Kong before the Chinese took over and interfered. But again, think of the double standards here. Think of the howls of protest, and the accusations of tyranny and so on, when Viktor Orbán of Hungary declared a state of emergency, which has now ended and he's restored the previous constitution. But did the people scream blue murder when he did that, complain when the same thing happened in Melbourne, on a much longer time scale? Did they complain when even more stringent measures were applied in New Zealand, where they're now saying you will be taken to a quarantine facility and kept there until you agree to take the test? Of course not, because people are displaying that plastic human inability to care about the process itself, rather than starting with, "Which is my team?"

Think of the howls of protest, and the accusations of tyranny and so on, when Viktor Orbán of Hungary declared a state of emergency, which has now ended and he's restored the previous constitution. But did the people scream blue murder when he did that, complain when the same thing happened in Melbourne, on a much longer time scale? Did they complain when even more stringent measures were applied in New Zealand?

Nick Cater: Back to the police, can you talk about the changing role of the police in the United States? I mean, there's a strong movement on there to abolish the police essentially. What do we make of that?

Daniel Hannan:

It’s a movement supported by everyone except the general population, right? Supported by all the talking heads and the grovelling corporates, and the Democratic politicians, and the Mayors. By everyone except the actual populations, especially the black populations which are the areas that have been most touched by the unrest. If there's one thing that's going to put Trump in, it's going to be that overreach, and the ensuing civil disorder. Voters absolutely hate it, you know? And the one thing that I learned in my 21 years in politics, is that the silent majority is almost always bigger than anyone realises. I can't prove it, but all my instincts tell me that it will include a large number of black American voters, whose first instinct, when they see young crowds including lots of white BLM protestors smashing things up, their first instinct will be, "Where the hell are their parents? Why are they coming in smashing up my neighbourhood?"

I think Donald Trump has done a lot of things wrong. He's done a lot of things that, if you like, he deserves to lose because of. But the one thing that might get him across the line is this fear of cities going up in flames, which, if you like, will make the middling voter, the undecided voter, much Trumpier. It will make everyone more Trumpy, because people absolutely detest the idea of property rights being insecure because there is no enforcement. And when they hear Democratic mayors and politicians saying, "Get rid of the police", they understand ... In fact, a lot of the traditional Democrats understand better than anyone what would be the immediate outcome if you were to pursue that line.

Nick Cater: You and I love the internet, of course. We wouldn't be able to do this for instance, without the technology. But I mean, one of the things is we're increasingly in these polarized search bubbles. One person will call up BP on their computer and they'll get, "Threat to the environment," their neighbour will call it up and they get, "Investment opportunity". But the consequence of that is, I find it very hard now to sometimes fathom the thinking on the progressive left, particularly with the Black Lives Matter movement, which just seemed to come out of the blue and became global in about two nanoseconds. What do you make of this?

Daniel Hannan:

The most foolish column I've ever written was at the very beginning of the epidemic in March, when I wrote a Telegraph column saying, "This will be the end of identity politics. It will all seem so unbearably petty and trivial now, because we've got a real thing happening. And there's going to be mass unemployment, and people are going to care about who's going to start the economy again, and no one is going to give two hoots about whether the epidemiologists are white men. And when there's mass unemployment, no-one's going to care about the gender pay gap, they're only going to care about people being in work."

I'm afraid that this perceived external threat of the pestilence has driven people into what future historians will recognise as a moment of religious fanaticism, however with the religion not being a belief in the transcendental but rather being this perverse form of identity politics.

Boy, did I get that wrong. And the reason I got it wrong is, I had underestimated the extraordinary religious fanaticism with which the woke cleave to their ideals. It's become a real cliche to say that it's a religion. And it's a good metaphor in the most basic sense, to the point that Jonathan Haidt keeps making, that the ideas associated with identity politics have been sacrificed in the sense that they've been lifted out of the sphere of rational debates, so that if somebody disagrees with the woke, they invite not disagreement, but disgust and loathing. But one of the interesting religious parallels is how plagues or other apocalyptic events always make people more religious. Before the pandemic I just happened to read Tom Holland's book, Dominion, which is a wonderful history of the thought of Christianity, and there's a lot of statue smashing in there. One of the repeated themes is people responding to bad things by smashing statues in a bid for purity. For example, there was a plague in Sienna in the 14th century, and the people in the town went and pulverised this statue of Venus, because they thought that that was demonic, and that if they only got rid of the statue, they would be cleaner, and purer, and everything would work better. If we think that we've changed psychologically since those days, the past six months have taught us rather better. What we've seen is a purity spiral, people reaching after more and more extreme forms of religious devotion. Even in the US, literally self-flagellating like medieval penitents, excommunicating people who disagree, declaring crusades and so on.

Identity politics has taken on a crusade-like fanaticism in the wake of the pandemic.

I'm afraid that this perceived external threat of the pestilence has driven people into what future historians will recognise as a moment of religious fanaticism, however with the religion not being a belief in the transcendental but rather being this perverse form of identity politics. It’s an identity politics that calls itself anti-racist, when of course, it's based more than any other ideology in the world now, on making everything about accident of physiognomy and ethnicities. It's the most backward looking of all creeds. And one of the oddest things is that the intellectuals who got it going, the people who laid the foundations for it on campus before it spilled out, call themselves and are called postmodernists. Meaning that they think the truth is not objective, but is a product of power, or of hierarchy.

Actually, a much better word for them would be pre-modernist, because they are reverting to the pre-Enlightenment idea that what counts is not whether something is objectively true or can be empirically proved, but what counts is whether you like the person saying it, whether they are from an approved category. And it's a terrifying thing how quickly we can strip away the reason, the logic, the scientific method, all of those rational processes that made the Enlightenment and made the modern world possible.

Nick Cater: It's a frightening thought to have, but we do seem quite clearly now to be quickly drifting away from the values of the Enlightenment. The idea that we could understand the world through observation, through the scientific method, and that through that we could gain technologies that would improve our lives for the better. That seemed to shift for me, I think, around about 1967, or '69 perhaps, with the moon landing and Woodstock following straight after that. And you suddenly got this feeling straight to the surface, that we're on the eve of destruction. I wonder if now, our culture has moved so much in that direction that we're seeking out things to be anxious about. We're seeking out millennial events, we're overdoing the climate change narrative, and now this pandemic is something about an existential threat, if you like.

Daniel Hannan:

I'm not sure that that's new. I mean, what you say is true, but I don't think it's new. I don't think it started in the '60s. I think human beings are programmed to pessimism, because we are designed for a much more dangerous world than this one. And our early hominid ancestors, if they were cheerful, optimistic, trusting souls, were less likely to survive and pass on their genes than the ones who were scared, and anxious and suspicious. And we carry the grumpy, suspicious genes of the survivors. So there is a long, indeed immemorial, record of people expecting the worst and then being pleasantly surprised by progress.

What I think is new, or at least is new in modern times, is that the breakthrough on which all of those technical advances rested, or at least that the mass acceleration of them in the last couple of hundred years, was empiricism. It was again this idea that is quite counterintuitive, that we're all quite ignorant, and that people we don't like might still have useful things to teach us. And that an idea can be true regardless of the merits of the person from whom you hear it, right? None of these is an idea that comes naturally. If they sound natural to you or to the people watching, it's because we've been taught it in schools. But increasingly, we're not taught it.

In fact, increasingly, schools and particularly universities are teaching the opposite. Instead of teaching the difficult, counter-cyclical idea that, "We're all individuals, free inquiry is the way to find the truth, let lots of different clashing ideas get out there and the best ones will rise," the universities, the places that should be temples of Enlightenment values, are the ones disseminating the old pre-modern idea that, "No, no, no. The only thing that matters about you is that you are a heterosexual white man or whatever, and that everything about you therefore, is defined by these kind of tribal or physical categorisations." And sure enough, that is how society worked for a long time. People were tribal, they divided into us and them, and so on. It's so bizarre, though, that the comeback should be coming through the institutions that were set up to disseminate the idea of science and reason.

This is a transcript of Nick Cater’s Watercooler interview with Daniel Hannan.

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