A Legion of Sovereigns
Alastair Campbell appeared on my radar again recently, with a piece he’d written for Tortoise media.
It’s hard to know what to make of Campbell from the viewpoint of 2020. Tony Blair’s personal attack dog, on whom the granite-headed and foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker was based in TV satire “The Thick Of It,” it’s hard to separate Campbell and Blair from one another, and as such it’s tempting to see Campbell as merely an apologist for an avaricious war criminal.
Campbell has, however, always stuck to his own principles, regardless of whether or not they were popular. It’s tempting to think that he may have thrown his lot in with Blair because of Lyndon Johnson’s old maxim that in government it’s better to be inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent trying to piss in, but we may never know.
More recently, Campbell has focused his efforts on trying to prevent Brexit. It’s interesting, in a detached kind of way, to see someone who was so instrumental in the ushering in of Blair and modern British politics looking so outdated when faced with 21st century natonalist and conspiracy thinking. He honestly seems to think that his old playbook of ideals and aspiration might be of some use against the lazy, one-click xenophobia of Farage et al.
In his piece for the Tortoise, Campbell seems to have finally found the root cause of his bette noir in a book published in 1997 by Lord William Rees Mogg, father of current Brexit cheerleader Jacob Rees Mogg, a man so ludicrous he would be rejected as a Viz Comics character for a lack of subtlety.
In “The Sovereign Individual,” Rees Mogg Sr. and co-author James Dale Davidson (an American listed on Wikipedia as a professional “investor” and looking exactly like you’re already picturing him) propose that the then-nascent online culture would lead to a mass wave of deregulation and the ultimate abolition of nation states, with taxes and inflation becoming a problem for the have-nots who are still confined by physical limitations, whilst men of means and taste such of themselves would be able to permanently “off-shore” their money in cyberspace and be free from the petty regulations of more concrete nations. Nations which will increasingly descend into factionalism and chaos, thereby providing more opportunities for the gleeful carrion birds of capital.
Rees Mogg and Davidson envision a world full of “sovereign citizens,” as the title suggests, who rule over the rest of us whilst answering to nobody, hidden from view by the cloak of technology. Basically it’s the plot of “Atlas Shrugged,” except that the strapping He-Men of Ayn Rand’s vision have been replaced with the Rees Moggs, an un-needed answer to the question “What if Oedipus had Marfan Syndrome?”
Still, the phrase “Sovereign Citizen” struck me as interesting. Those with particularly stupid friends and relatives may have seen it crop up on Facebook from time to time as a declaration. The thinking is that by publishing a public notice that you are a sovereign citizen, you are not bound by the laws of your country as you have publicly renounced them.
If you want a good laugh, find the nearest black person and ask them how effective they think “declaring that you can’t be arrested because you said so” would be in real life.
Nonetheless, the intersection of idiots on social media telling you that they are sovereign citizens and Rees Mogg family plan to actually avoid the law is interesting. In effect, it betrays the same sort of capitalist house-slavery evidenced by poor people who oppose tax increases because they hope to one day become wealthy themselves. The rich and powerful are literally planning to cause global chaos and the implosion of nations in the hopes that they can rule the wreckage, answerable only to themselves as Sovereign Citizens. And their idiot mouthpieces on social media think that they, too, can be part of this cabal of kings if they simply decide to be.
The real tragedy in all of this is the same as it has alway been — the naive willingness of the poor to believe that the rich have their best interests at heart, and that these same rich oligarchs would view them with anything other than utter revulsion were they ever to improbably interact. They think that if things go the way the rich and powerful would like, we’ll ALL become masters of our own destiny.
Of course, you don’t actually get to be a sovereign citizen if you post it on Facebook, but Jacob Rees Mogg and his dad may succeed at it if they get their way, and engineering Brexit whilst stoking people’s rage at the evils of a globalised community is key to that plan. If the real, monied, corrupt sovereign citizens envisioned by Davidson and the Rees Moggs come to exist (and in a scary number of ways they already have) they will revoke every hard won right of the Facebook-posting wannabes and condemn them to modern serfdom, working unlimited hours every week with no protections against accident or injury and no minimum wage to pay for the eventual, now-costly hospitalisations that their exhausted, ruined bodies will doubtless require.
In the meantime, the most we can say is that the delusions of the right wing poor — that they will be free from laws and pay no taxes, in this instance — are at least intructive in reflecting what their ideological (and potentially very literal) masters really think and intend.
What this says about the number of red state Americans crying “fix” over the recent election — especially in light of some interesting discrepancies in Mitch McConnell’s (wattled, sagging) neck of the woods — remains, for now, an interesting hypothetical.