Parliamentary options to protect democracy are limited, but we can use mass civil disobedience to create a situation politically unbearable for the Tories.

We’re being collectively gaslighted, and we know it. When Boris Johnson and a string of ministers tried to tell the British people that it was “routine” to suspend Parliament for five weeks, we could see from their faces and body language that they knew it was a lie.

But this cynical deployment of the smirk and the shoulder shrug comes at a cost, as Johnson will now find out. Last night, as I joined the thousands occupying the greens and squares around Parliament, I met people furious at the blatant theft of their democracy. Some had simply left their office with a hand-scrawled sign, to take part in their first ever political act.

They did so because they have an innate sense of the beauty and fragility of parliamentary democracy, even if they don’t get the intricacies.

They know that Johnson has broken our constitutional principles in two ways: first, he used a technical suspension of Parliament that normally lasts days to call a shutdown of Parliament against its will, for five weeks. Parliament has never been shut down against its will in our lifetime.

Hundreds marched through the Cotswold town of Malvern on Thursday evening

Secondly, his staff briefed the media that, should Parliament vote to stop him, or to remove him as Prime Minister, he will ignore them. We are now warned, again by his unseen spokespeople, that he will refuse to forward any emergency laws passed to the Queen for Royal Assent. That’s what makes this a coup.

This is such a clear attack on parliamentary democracy that it not only brought progressive people to the streets, it has knocked the wind out of the middle class racists and xenophobes who support the Brexit Party and No Deal as a project.

The moral strength of the Leave argument was always that we would “take back control” via parliamentary sovereignty. It drew on a strain of radical democratic principles that has always been strong within English nationalism, and which stand at odds with what Johnson has done. So, from today, the struggle is no longer about Leave versus Remain. It’s about whether Britain is going to be a political and economic colony of Trump’s USA.

But where do we go from here? It’s said that Johnson wants exactly this kind of confrontation. We know his backroom mastermind, Dominic Cummings, revels in military geek-speak from the Vietnam War era. For Cummings, the aim is always to “make the enemy react to you” – and to shape the battlefield in advance so that we lose.

Looked at this way, Johnson’s parliamentary shutdown was simply the programmed response to opposition MPs throwing him off-balance. On Monday, MPs from across all parties agreed to take control of parliament and block No Deal. So within 24 hours, Johnson’s playbook meant he had to do something to throw that off balance. The coup was the result.

The parliamentary options are now limited. Phase one is for MPs to take control of the parliamentary agenda, through something called Standing Order 24. Phase two – being prepared right now – is to publish legislation stopping No Deal. Phase three is preventing Johnson and his allies from filibustering or sabotaging that legislation.

If we get through all these phases by the 14th of September, when parliament is due to be suspended, Johnson has the following options: he can ignore the new law, triggering a total constitutional meltdown that will see my friends and I transfer our protests from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace, or he can call a snap general election.

In that case, the opposition parties have 14 days to form a replacement government with a majority in Parliament – and my hopes are growing that they will do so.

But our secret weapon is ourselves. Whether it’s at the Oxford Union or on the wretched PPE course the elite all seemingly have to attend, what I’ve noticed is the total disdain among otherwise clever people for mass action. People in these elite circles regard the spectacle of the streets like dog-dirt on their shoes. As a result, they have no idea of its power – both to change politics and to transform and exhilarate the people taking it.

What we need now is a mass peaceful movement of civil disobedience. Protest theory tells us that if around 4 percent of the population simply refuses to comply with the powers that be, we win.

Authorities can tolerate mass demos, even isolated sit-downs in Whitehall. But Tory MPs live in the real world of high streets, shopping centres, village fetes, private members clubs – the very civil society that Margaret Thatcher once claimed did not exist. There are not enough security guards, police or cameras to prevent every public space – from a football match to Westfield on a Saturday afternoon – becoming the venue for some goodnatured and peaceful symbolic action that starts a conversation and calls people onto the streets.

Add to that the power of networks. The three tools you need for mass online movements are networks of activists, some Twitter “superstars” and a technology platform that can leverage all the power into one place at the right time. By my reckoning we have the first two, and could have the third going by Sunday night.

Another thing we have is the power of laughter; these dour-faced hypocrites in oversize twill suits most certainly don’t.

With all these things – mass action, networks and humour – we can, like the Hong Kong protesters, “be water”. Flow around obstacles in a way that makes their Vietnam-era political combat strategies irrelevant.
At our impromptu meeting last night I heard a refugee from Chechnya, a migrant worker from Poland and a 13-year-old schoolgirl take the mic and call, in simple language, for a radical change. Here’s why that is important: it may be that we can’t stop Brexit. It may be that Johnson crashes us out on the 31st of October, to cheers from Trump and the tabloid press. But we can make the overhead cost of that – and the chaos that follows – politically unbearable for the Tory party.

Even No Deal is not the end of Brexit. In the end, Britain will have to sign a deal with Europe. It will be a straight choice: Trump’s terms or Europe’s terms.

A government of progressive parties, determined to make that deal fair and keep Britain close to Europe, would stop Farage and Johnson’s attempts to hand our economy over to the USA – and leave a pathway for the next generation to re-enter the EU, if they’ll have us. This massive self-own by the Tories makes that much more likely.

But the best case scenario is that we drive Johnson from office, and in the process shatter the tawdry alliance of billionaires and racist pensioners who support No Deal.

I’ve learned – from reporting the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Greek crisis and the Gaza war – that the most important question in a crisis is: “Where am I going to put my body?” By turning this from an issue about Brexit into an issue about democracy, Johnson just gave millions of people a reason to ask themselves that question.

@paulmasonnews

If racist, misogynist, Islamophobe Roy Moore is elected to the Senate it will show the cumulative radicalisation of the American right is fully underway.

Source: The Guardian

Roy Moore, who is expected to win Tuesday’s special election, hit the headlines after several women came forward to allege that he had sexually assaulted them in the 1970s while they were in their teens. Moore denies this, saying the accusations are a conspiracy by “lesbians, gays, bisexuals and socialists” – a claim made from the pulpit of an evangelical church. He has refused to debate with his Democratic party opponent on the grounds that he has supported transgender rights. After the allegations surfaced, 37% of white evangelical voters in the state said it made them more likely to support Moore.

Although the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, called for Moore to stand down, Donald Trump has supported him. Ousted strategist Steve Bannon, previously executive chairman of controversial rightwing news site Breitbart, has harangued rallies in Moore’s support. But the core activists supporting Moore come from networks including the League of the South – a white nationalist group that wants to re-form the Confederacy – and extreme anti-abortion activists who justify killing medics who work at abortion clinics.

What matters to these people is not only defeating the Democrats – it is widening the scope for defying rights for women and minorities guaranteed at a federal level. Moore has been twice suspended as chief justice of Alabama for refusing to implement parts of the US Constitution – in 2003 by defying a federal court order to remove a religious monument from the state courthouse; and in 2016 for defying a supreme court ruling that legalised same-sex marriage. Despite the massive reputational hit to the party if Moore is elected to the Senate, the Republican National Committee has endorsed him.

If you breathed a sigh of relief when Bannon and a slew of crazed rightwingers were expelled from the White House in August, Moore’s likely win should be making your stomach churn once more with fear.

What is happening to the Republicans under Trump is a process whereby the base radicalises the establishment, and the establishment then feels empowered to begin dismantling aspects of democracy. Moore has stated that the last time the US was great was “at the time when families were united – even though we had slavery” – although not the families of black people, which were, of course, torn apart.

However, the historical parallels are more recent. In his study of the rise of Nazism and the fall of the Weimar republic, the leftwing German historian Hans Mommsen identified three destabilisers defying the textbook explanation that “Nazis were evil and the German bourgeoisie naive”.

The first was the rise of conservative paramilitary combat leagues, numbering at least 400,000 before the Nazi brownshirts took off. Although their aim was always declared to be keeping order, the combat leagues created a paralysis in the official policing structures that the Nazis exploited in their march to power. The second was the corruption of the judiciary. In a series of court cases, most notably when they upheld the libellous charge that the moderate socialist leader Friedrich Ebert had committed treason, the German courts eviscerated the republican constitution on which Weimar democracy had been based. The third destabiliser was the resort to rule by decree under conservative chancellors after 1930, sidelining the elected parliament – again with the approval of the courts.

Following this process through the collapse of Weimar democracy, the Nazi years in power and the Holocaust, Mommsen dubbed it “cumulative radicalisation”. Far from exhibiting naivety, the German business class became increasingly complicit in hollowing out parliamentary democracy, always under the pressure of a radical, plebeian, racist voting base.

It is hard to look at the US today without seeing the cumulative radicalisation of the right: there are militias – not just of the classic gun-toting variety, but regimented groups of younger, more urbanised men, mobilised via internet message boards devoted to violent misogyny and racism, such as the Proud Boys. There are figures such as Moore prepared to defy the constitution, and a network of more than 200 law enforcers in the “constitutional sheriffs” movement – which claims that an elected local sheriff should be able to overrule federal law.

And now we have the beginnings of rule by diktat, not only in the frequent presidential decrees and arbitrary sackings of officials by the White House, but in Congress itself. The Republicans sprang a massive and detailed amendment to the tax bill just a few hours before it was due to be voted on. Trump’s Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, has offered scant analysis of the effects on debt or distribution arising from the new tax bill and deleted a study from the Treasury website that was implicitly critical. The normal processes of democracy are being short-circuited.

A victory for Moore on Tuesday will up the tempo of rightwing radicalisation. Nobody needs to say that a new secession by the south, as his backers want, is impossible, or that a US run by local sheriffs in defiance of the federal courts is a neofascist fantasy. These are signifiers for a more practical programme of tolerance for racist policing, limits on abortion rights and the shrinkage of the state.

There is not a single major company in the US whose material interest aligns with the political programme of Moore, not even Koch Industries, which has bankrolled the Tea Party movement, nor Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, which has boosted the rightwing agenda. In most global corporations, the language Moore and his supporters use could not even be uttered in the restrooms, let alone the boardroom.

Yet US business carries on giving money to the Republicans – and receiving its rewards twenty-fold in the form of tax giveaways. It is an implicit deal that does not seem to trouble the well-heeled, coastal conservative elite enough to make them do anything other than signal distaste. Unfortunately, distaste does not uphold the rule of law, nor keep ethnic supremacists in check.

Raoul Peck’s chilling James Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, features original footage of swastika-toting white youths in southern states during protests against desegregation in the 50s. Young people I’ve discussed it with professed astonishment that, so soon after the second world war, Americans could publicly fly the Nazi symbol. Now at least we know what all those lean, button-collared white Nazis from Alabama in the 50s went on to do. Half a lifetime later, a man they believe shares their values could get into the Senate.

CREEPING FASCISM – BREXIT, TRUMP, AND THE RISE OF THE FAR RIGHT

This book by Neil Faulkner and Sam Dathi is an urgent call to arms. It argues that the film of the 1930s is running in slow motion, and that we face the clear and present danger of ‘creeping fascism’.