74 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER18, 2019
that “the party system has broken in our
hands,” and joined the Ulster Unionist
Party, exchanging his parliamentary con-
stituency for one in Northern Ireland.
It was, as Corthorn notes, an “unusual
step.” (The Scottish essayist Tom Nairn
once joked that Powell thought North-
ern Ireland “was a bit of England.”) Pow-
ell represented his Ulster constituency
until 1987, deep into the
Thatcher era. But he was
disappointed by Thatcher’s
peacemaking attempts in
Ireland, which he saw as
being the partial result of
American pressure.
Powell, along with many
contemporary Brexiteers,
could be called a Little En-
glander. In the nineteenth
century, the term was ap-
plied to Liberals opposed to the expan-
sion of the British Empire, but in the
postwar era it came to refer to resentful
Englishmen, frustrated with the rum-
blings of the outside world, and happy
to resist the temptations of globalization
and, naturally, immigration. Little En-
glandism, as the historian Linda Colley
has written, was “always the other side
of unparalleled imperial dominion, a
cleaving to the small and the relatively
known in the face of alarm or fatigue or
disgust at the prospect of the very large
and very strange.”
Between Powell’s time and our own,
the rifts have widened: the United King-
dom’s component parts began to express
their own identities more fully, and to
seek greater devolution from Westmin-
ster. (Polls revealed a large uptick in En-
glish people identifying as “English”
rather than as “British” after the Scot-
tish Parliament was established, in 1999.)
The Empire, which had once played a
part in stitching together English, Scot-
tish, Welsh, and Irish identities, was gone;
and a united Europe offered a potential
home for smaller countries. In this con-
text, O’ Toole writes, a distinctively En-
glish political community was bound to
emerge. And yet English nationalism
was largely relegated to the realm of skin-
heads, lager louts, and soccer hooli-
gans—“until David Cameron blithely
gave it a vast stage in June 2016.” The re-
sulting ironies are everywhere. The Brex-
iteers, O’ Toole notes, “would make much
of the idea of restoring the blue-covered
‘British passport’ as an icon of indepen-
dent identity. But asked in 2011 what na-
tionality they would have on their pass-
port if they could choose, fully 40 per
cent of English respondents chose En-
glish.” Brexit, O’ Toole persuasively ar-
gues, “is driven by a force—English na-
tionalism—that its leaders still refuse to
articulate. It draws on English disen-
gagement from the Union,
but wraps itself in a brashly
reassured Unionism.”
Any book that delves
deeply into the psyche of
a country—or even pre-
sumes that countries have
psyches—is bound to oc-
casionally skirt the edges of
absurdity. O’Toole, alas,
can’t resist seeing political
significance in the publish-
ing success of “Fifty Shades of Grey,”
imagining an audience for whom Chris-
tian Grey was the E.U. and Anastasia
Steele innocent England. But his sum-
mation of the paradox at the heart of
Brexit is succinct and shrewd: “There
is an imperial nationalism and an anti-
imperial nationalism; one sets out to
dominate the world, the other to throw
off such dominance. The incoherence
of the new English nationalism that
lies behind Brexit is that it wants to be
both simultaneously.”L
ast month, Boris Johnson broke with
the Unionist bloc in Parliament—
which had only recently given Theresa
May her majority—in order to reach a
Brexit deal with Europe. Because of the
fear that a hard border in Ireland would
undermine the Good Friday Agreement,
the only solution Johnson could find in-
volved putting a de-facto border in the
Irish Sea, separating the British main-
land from Northern Ireland, which would
essentially have remained a part of Eu-
rope. That’s why the most fervently anti-
Europe Unionists voted against John-
son’s deal. If Brexit does occur, Scotland
can be expected to hold another refer-
endum on leaving Great Britain, before,
presumably, applying for E.U. member-
ship. The Scots would join other Euro-
pean peoples, such as the Catalans and
the Flemish, who have pushed for in-
dependence at the national level while
still pledging support for the European
project. This brand of nationalism doesnot preclude approaching the rest of the
world with open arms.
But what of our Little American Pres-
ident? A reactionary of an earlier era
would have been shocked by, say, Trump’s
remarks about how America was no bet-
ter than Russia, but they haven’t affected
his base’s image of him as a patriot act-
ing in the interests of the majority. Sim-
ilarly, Powell would have been stunned
to learn that the Little Englanders who
revere him today, such as Nigel Farage,
don’t much care about Northern Ireland.
And yet Powell’s career is again instruc-
tive. Corthorn, noting the “inconsisten-
cies and contradictions in his thought,”
writes that Powell’s “diverse political
campaigns can be understood coherently
as part of a long-running and wide-rang-
ing public debate over the ‘decline’ of
the British nation.” Trump has reani-
mated and crystallized the sense shared
by many of his supporters that Amer-
ica is in decline, that others are respon-
sible, and that only he can fix it. The
plan for fixing it doesn’t much matter,
which is why the Republican Party is
likely to follow its leader down what-
ever path he chooses. The nature of Pow-
ell’s plan for his country wasn’t always
discernible, either, but it was always abun-
dantly clear whom he hated.
O’ Toole makes a startling compari-
son, late in his book, between Brexit and
the Confederacy. Brexit won an initial
victory in the form of the referendum,
but is doomed to fail, he believes, be-
cause it was based on deception—the
Europeans will never give the United
Kingdom a favorable deal. And then:
“The self-pity of Lost Causism will meld
with the rage of betrayal. Without the
EU as whipping boy and scapegoat, there
will be no end of blame and no short-
age of candidates to be saddled with it:
anyone and everyone except the Brexi-
teers themselves. That most virulent of
poisons, the ‘stab-in-the-back,’ is in the
bloodstream now and it will work its
harm for a long time.” If Powellite open
racism partially gave way to anti-Euro-
pean sentiment, the political currents
may change direction yet again, guiding
anti-European sentiment toward a differ-
ent target. It is not easy to decipher which
country is following which in the latest
transatlantic dance, but both America
and the United Kingdom appear to be
heading somewhere very dark indeed.