I haven’t written anything new for today as I figured you’d all have plenty to digest and perhaps what we all really need now is just to sit in silence with our thoughts for a bit. However, in case it’s a comforting perspective, I’m republishing a piece I wrote in the summer of ‘23 originally entitled “Happy New Year” about a period I dubbed “The Long 24”, a period soon to draw to a close.
Of course there are some key things I did not foresee, others I write about with hopes that have now been dashed. However my central point about the commodification of truth seems like something I at least will reflect on in the coming days now the clocks have gone back.
Thank you for your support, paid or purely emotional, I’m very grateful to start this new year in your company. Yes, new year. It’s not just that as the father of two young children it’s been a long summer. I say Happy New Year as a fan of the hack historian’s game of redefining the boundaries of an era based on events, on narrative, rather than the bland fact of time passing.
I think this game first entered my life with Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 which came as answer to his vast three volume study of “The Long Nineteenth Century” which he kicks off in 1789 with the French Revolution. To be fair though it might have come from my mum’s observation that “the sixties” of popular imagination didn’t start until 1969 and most of the actual 1960’s were, in her view having lived through it all, basically still the 1950’s. Save your breath arguing this point, sadly both Eric and Linda died during the long teens (2007-2019) that fatal austerity period between the global financial crash and covid where we followed The War On Terror with a brutal war on ourselves.
It’s harder to tell stories, sorry, write history, up close. Did the covid pandemic end last year when most restrictions finally expired or this year when the WHO declared and end to the global health emergency? Or will its shadow shape the narrative for years yet? Still, knowing such questions can’t be addressed now and never really get answered anyway, I’m still foolishly sticking my chin out and saying Happy New Year and welcome to the Long 2024. Which, to be accurate, if I had to pick a date, I’d say actually began on the 23rd August 2023.
The content of the first Republican Presidential Nominee debate which happened that night was entirely noteless (Unless of course Kendall Roy impersonator Vivek Ramaswamy is catapulted into the front line of American politics by the unexpected death of Donald Trump through excess consumption of cheeseburger). Nevertheless it marked the first official shots of an American election cycle which will hang over us at least until inauguration day on 20th January 2025.
The 23rd August also saw the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin (through excess consumption of surface to air missile). Seeming to stabilise Putin this locks the Ukraine war to the American political cycle - a Trump presidency likely meaning disaster for Ukraine, as well for the climate and US democracy.
Here in the UK our own political cycle has fallen into step too. Perhaps, free of Europe, the special relationship is now closest to two flat mates who begin to menstruate in sync, not an alliance but a sympathy. However whilst the outcome of Biden vs Trump hangs on a broken electoral system and a few tens of thousand swing voters, our own broken electoral system makes Starmer’s elevation seem increasingly secure. Whether it was the collapse of Truss last autumn, the collapse of the SNP in June or the collapse of an aerated concrete roof in August, Sunak’s chances of mounting a last ditch surge in the polls seem ever more unlikely. A shame only insomuch as seeing him and Ramaswamy embrace as Heads of State in ’25 would have been edifying proof that we were living in age when you don’t have to be a white man to be a total cunt.
Of course all this speculation and future history is deeply myopic. Open to corrections but I think my Long ’24 currently means little in Europe or Africa and nothing at all in China. That though is part of why I like this form of time-telling. It makes sense locally like time always used to.
Until the coming of industrialisation and train timetables our clocks did not necessarily tock to the same rhythm either across the year or across the country. The national standardisation of time was not a truth uncovered but a mechanism imposed, largely for the benefit of commerce. Yes my next point must be balanced against the fraudulent misuse of party funds, but I still think the simplest case the SNP can make is the way the UK government shackles the Scots to a timezone which plunges them into polar darkness.
If standardised time was a truth imposed by the coming of the railway, then the Long ’24 could witness a key moment in the story of a standardised truth imposed by the coming of the internet. American politics terrifies not because the partizan divide is felt so deeply but because at the same time it is horrifically shallow. There is no Overton Window in a fight where both sides tell the same story of an ancient corruptor who represents an existential threat to democracy.
The American Civil War was a conflict of economic self interest hand-in-glove with an ideology of freedom, the right to be free of government vs the right to be free. There are big political issues at stake in the US election, not least women’s medical autonomy and the role of the state in combating climate change. But these issues parasite the conflict, they are not really what the battle is about. On abortion it’s frankly bizarre that Biden, a Catholic and Trump, a man who has surely paid for a clinic trip in his time, have ended up on the sides they have. As the majority of republican voters oppose the kind of abortion bans their political representatives have imposed, the evangelical right’s hijacking of the MAGA agenda with this issue remains their greatest weakness. This is not the fight America wants.
At heart the battle in the US is about character, about narrative. Either Trump is a failed dictator, criminally unfit to return to office or Biden is a successful dictator bent on destroying his enemy with all the corrupt machinery of the law he commands. When one side puts forward facts, the other doesn’t argue, it just denies those truths like a Scotsman looking out the window and saying “Get tae fuck this is never 9am…”
This is a divide born of the internet, born in chat rooms and infinite scrolling. In the past truth moved slower than steam trains, it could remain localised. The statues to someone else’s monster could stand like town clocks, set to tell whatever time was useful there. The victory of GMT was not a revelation about the motion of the universe, rather the national clock obscures the seasonal reality that not all 6ams are the same. Time became an economic advantage no one could fight. If truth is to remain the international commodity it has become, it will not be decided by an election but by whom it best advantages, even if that leaves some of us staring into the darkness.
Truly brilliant!
I like the way you make us think, not forced , but I mean that your writing stimulates reflection . Thank you, Marcelle