All the pressures of the 1930s were collected in the Spanish Civil War, which reminds us that progressives must unite and start writing the story of our times

Image: Flag of the Second Spanish Republic from Pixabay (License)

This summer marked the eightieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War and this week, eighty years ago, the International Brigades marched into Madrid to defend the Republic from Franco's Nationalists.

The volunteers of the International Brigades came from around the world, including much needed experienced soldiers from the Great War. Of the first three thousand soldiers, most died in the first days of the Battle of Madrid, to stall the fascist advance and delay their victory - even as the Republic's nominal international allies stood by and watched, moderates outraged by Republican radicalism and hoping to merely contain or appease the far right.

Ultimately, however, the Nationalists conclusively conquered Spain and completed their mutinous coup d'etat. But it would not have been possible without plenty of international help of their own, from the fascist dictators of Germany and Italy - who sent professional forces and materiel to Franco.

These tales of the far right spreading, of progressives and moderates lost and struggling to unify or to recognise their commonality, of strife between progress and tradition, is a compellingly recognisable one today for those watching the rise of Trump in America, or Brexit in the UK and the Front National in France. So too is the appeasement and the retreat to reactive, surrendering the creation of the story of the times to the far right.

Spain's second shortlived Republic died beneath the boot of international fascist cooperation, even as the dozens of progressive factions fell upon each. And with it was swept away the achievements of the Republic's almost recklessly progressive government.

Under Manuel Azana and his Republican Left, an amalgamation of different republican parties, the dismantling of the overbearing establishment began. First as Prime Minister and then as President, Azana led efforts to modernise Spain, to make it secular, open and tolerant.

It pursued the three most prominent aspects of the establishment: the army, the church and the landowners. An Army with 800 generals, but just 16 divisions in need of them, was faced with reforms, redundancies and cuts. The Church, as under the Radicals in France a few decades earlier, faced the secularising of education - ostensibly to take the poor out from under its grip and influence. And an agrarian reform program, sought to confiscate large private landholdings (latifundia) and distribute them among the rural poor.

However, these progressive and secular policies - sought by the Republican Left in a Popular Front partnership with regional nationalists, discontented workers with strong trade unions, and an anarchist movement without parallel anywhere in the world in either scope or success - were being pursued in a country with a deeply embedded and deeply conservative establishment, only recently shorn of its figureheads, that felt vulnerable and was not yet ready for such radical reform. The pressed on, but did not take enough of a frightened people with them.

Violent clashes erupted between the Left and establishment Right. Propaganda was everywhere. Into the vacuum opened by the old establishment's ousting stepped fascism and it spoke to conservatives of all classes: it spoke to their prejudices and condoned them, spoke to their fears and made them feel strong, spoke to their problems and offered scapegoats.

In the time of Brexit and President Elect Donald J Trump, were the centre is failing and the radical Left and far Right are competing for the support of the disaffected, it seems that the problems of the 1930s - crystallised in the factional divides of Spain - have resurfaced.

The poor, the 'white working-class', found themselves on many sides - Left, Right and Centre - in the 1930s, and do so again today. Roosevelt built an alliance with them in the United States, but Hitler rallied them in Germany. In Spain they were divided, progressive from conservative. International allies, progressives and moderates, did not get behind the Republic and only reacted, seeking only contain, embrace and control the far right movements.

The question being asked - honestly, since as long ago as 2008 and the start of social democracy's decline - is how progressives can 'reconnect' with the working class, seemingly more convinced by the far right's appeals to their conservative values.

One argument that has persisted, and has been seen most readily in the UK and distressingly amongst moderates, has stressed the need to at least lightly indulge bigotry with populist appeals. To abandon openness and tolerance, in the name of the allegedly 'greater good' of grabbing power.

The trouble with that argument is that it treats the views of the people as innate and unshakeable values, even adopts them and praises them as 'tradition' - with nationalism, for instance, treated as a universal given. All that has done is fan the flames, encouraging and spreading intolerance, helping it to find a language and context to legitimise itself.

It also discounts the possibility of changing minds. While there are surely some with deeply ingrained and unwaveringly intolerant nationalism beating in their breast, history teaches that most just want a better life and are looking for a compelling narrative that inspires their confidence.

The times, the pressures, and the dominant narratives by which we understand them - these things play crucial roles in where the people will place their confidence, whether in the Left or in the Right. And it is control over these forces that progressives have surrendered, too much for far too long, in the name of an electoral strategy aimed at taking and holding power.

In the 1930s, fascism spread while its opponents were divided and weakened - often co-opting the establishment and its traditional values as its own. The Republic in Spain was left isolated by international allies even as the people took up arms, in many countries, to defend it.

But the Republic also lost an important fight: it failed to organise, to coordinate, to align its factional narratives into a single compelling story. And many of those factions saw those supported more conservative groups as inherently opponents, and attacked them and alienated them.

As in the 1930s, the far right has gotten to grips with the forces at play and produced a seductive narrative, absolving national majorities of fault and offering them simplistic, crude solutions that play to revisionist nostalgia - aided by a conservative elite that still hope to exploit or control these movements as they grow.

But where is the progressive alternative?

The American Presidential Election is yet another warning to progressives, of all factions from radical to moderate, that differences must be put aside in pursuit of the broader aims of justice and liberty, equality and empowerment, and in all of these sustainability.

The issues affecting the working poor are clear: housing and energy cost too much, work is precarious and pays too little, opportunities and security are scarce and fragile. Ideas around community and cooperative action, of democratic empowerment, that confronts these ills even exists.

So where is the progressive narrative?

It isn't progressive to dismiss the fears of the working class, but nor is it to blindly embrace the narratives spread among them by the far right. The reality is that to achieve true progressive reform you must take the people with you.

To do that, if the Left is to reach out to people, it needs its own compelling story to explain the times. That means bringing together policies into a vision, of the present and the future. And for that to be effective, the Left has to stop surrendering to the Right the creation of the story that explains our times.

US Presidential Election 2016: Alexander Hamilton said it had fallen to America to prove citizens capable of unselfish government that served the public good

Alexander Hamilton, Founding Father of the United States and the chief champion of its constitution. Image: Alexander Hamilton from Marion Doss (License) (Cropped)

In The Federalist No.1, arguing for the ratification of America's then brand new constitution, Alexander Hamilton wrote that:

"It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force."

Hamilton drew up an image of a grave responsibility having fallen upon America, as the symbol and example of citizen government, to prove that government by consent, by reason and by dispassionate and sound judgement was something of which ordinary people - once removed from the compulsions of force or fear or hierarchical and servial duties - were capable.

But Hamilton also warned of the prejudicial interests which the new Constitution must overcome to pursue that ideal. Not least the "perverted ambition" of those who seek to "flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation" or "aggrandise themselves by the confusions of their country".

Sound like anyone?

Donald Trump has, at every turn, taken the path of division and self-aggrandisement. At every turn he has taken the low road, driving wedges into the heart of the country to exploit fear, disenfranchisement and confusion.

As much as the citizens of the United States likes to see their country as something that stands apart, it has nonetheless remained on trend. The rise of the language of far right politics - sectarian, intolerant - is not unique to America. It is feeding on desperation and hopelessness wherever it can find it.

Around the world, opportunistic individuals are stoking confusion to aggrandise themselves and pursue perverted ambitions at the expense of the public good. Trump is part of that: someone who will use the people while they're useful, only to drop them and persecute them the moment they're not.

At the Presidential Election, and at the many Senate and Congressional and other elections happening this week, America faces a stark choice - almost nowhere else in the Western world has two-party politics so deeply embedded itself.

On the one hand, the Republican Party has been consumed by its own folly. Trump is just the vile symptom of a deeper sickness - the boil than alerts us to the plague hidden within. Intolerance and sectarianism were seized upon as electoral tools in the Sixties and the price is now come due: to be overthrown and subsumed beneath an egotistical populist.

For progressives, the failures of the Democrats are different. They are the product of compromise, of playing within the system, of trying to achieve gradual reform from the inside - that has left them tainted by association with those they have had to work with to build consensus.

Hillary Rodham Clinton symbolises those compromises to many on the Left, and beyond, perhaps more than any other Democrat. A life long career of those compromises have also made her perhaps the most qualified Presidential candidate in history.

That is the upside and down of trying to get things done from the inside: there is a cost to claims of being a reformer when you have been part of the establishment for so long. If a person spends long enough in the political arena, it becomes hard to see for what they actually.

But that is where the people come in: the activists, the radicals, the social reformers, ordinary citizens in thousands of constituencies. As Laurie Penny argues, those who want radical change always see those in power as an enemy and Hillary Clinton is the enemy she has wanted all her life.

Clinton is a centrist, a moderate, a woman, a political insider with a lifetime of experience: a graduate of Yale; a consistent campaigner for healthcare reform, achieving successes for children and reservists; as First Lady, she spoke in China to tell the world that Women's Rights were Human Rights; she built an international consensus to pull Iran in from the cold; and her name is cited as a leading campaigner for numerous reforming policies - like equal pay and care for 9/11 first responders.

For progressives, with narrow but stark options, voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election is a vote for the public good. In his own time, Alexander Hamilton stood opposed to the political fortunes of Aaron Burr, because he believed him to serve no interest but his own. Between the pragmatic public servant and the self-serving egotist, there is no debate as to who the arch-Federalist Hamilton would have supported between Clinton and Trump. As Hamilton argued:

"Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good."

But it doesn't stop there. One person alone does not make the future. No President, no leader, of no country, not even America, wields that kind of power. That is the work of movements. Progressives must find theirs and with it their voice. Remember: politics doesn't end with an election.

Vote Hillary, but don't do so expecting that you can just leave everything in her lap. Hillary Rodham Clinton is not a perfect candidate. No candidate is. She is human and flawed. So progressives voters must be prepared to hold her to account, to provide scrutiny and be critical, prepared to demand excellence at every turn.

High Court rejects Theresa May's interpretation that she could exclude Parliament because referendum result gave her executive authority to pursue Brexit

Today the High Court handed down a judgement that Parliament must have a vote on how and when to proceed with Article 50 (BBC, 2016). While the Government will appeal, the ruling is nonetheless a blow to Theresa May's approach so far: to interpret the 'Brexit' vote as a mandate to exclude Parliament and wield the executive prerogative.

If the ruling stands up on appeal, what might be the impact upon any future referendum in the UK? One thing at least seems clear: it would be hard for anyone to argue ever again that it was constitutional to take a referendum was a legal basis for executive action.

In the UK, certain powers are 'reserved' - that is to say, that it does not require the assent of Parliament for the Executive Body (the Prime Minister and the Cabinet) to wield them. These powers are referred to as the Royal Prerogative, thought they devolved to the Prime Minister.

On assuming office as Prime Minister, Theresa May made one particularly huge decision: to interpret the 'Brexit' result she had inherited from the referendum as a mandate to exclude Parliament and proceed with the process by exercising her executive prerogative.

That, of course, provoked a reaction from Parliament. Without pursuing the blocking of 'Brexit, some, including MPs, argued that proceeding without Parliament's involvement and consent would be a violation of Britain's constitutional process (Politics Home, 2016).

It should also raise concerns. Whatever the perception of the referendum, it was legally only advisory and non-binding. To interpret such a mandate - popular acclamation, without legal basis - as justification for wielding unscrutinised executive power, would be to set a very disturbing precedent.

As the High Court ruling itself explains, Parliament is sovereign, with the law and the constitution being assembled and drawing their authority from its Acts. The exception is where it had explicit handed over, or shared, sovereignty explicitly in the form of an Act.

Britain's relationship with the European Union is in fact defined by such Acts of Parliament. These Acts form a part of the UK's constitution - and further, they confer certain Rights and Protections extended to UK citizens by Britain's EU membership.

To try and undo a significant part of the constitution, and to take away these significant rights - including, not least, European citizenship - without following constitutional procedure, was a dangerous path for May to tread upon. So why attempt it?

Perhaps the simplest answer would be that it was the only way in which the result could not be potentially challenged, and so potentially defeated. That, however, confers upon the referendum, retroactively, powers it did not possess. The referendum was not legally binding, yet Theresa May decided to interpret it as being so.

Further, Theresa May decided to interpret the referendum result as extending to her, as Prime Minister, the executive power to alter the constitution and the rights of citizens, without the checks, scrutiny or consent of elected representatives.

If the High Court ruling stands, then that interpretation will be invalidated it what could be seen to be a significant precedent: popular acclamation is not accepted as sufficient grounds for the unscrutinised wielding of executive power.

Yet trouble lies ahead. The ruling puts the Judiciary and the 'Brexit' voters at direct odds in their interpretation of what the majority won by the Leave campaign means. The opinion of Brexiters towards the 48% who voted Remain is already low and suspicious.

And what if Parliament should reject the kind of deal Theresa May is pursuing? Even if only the deal and not the ultimate end of exiting the EU, it may well be taken as a direct affront. There may even have to be an election before such a vote could take place, as the MPs who sit in the Commons at present have no mandate whatsoever for a 'Brexit'.

The High Court ruling has begun a new chapter in the Brexit story. Parliament, with or without an election, must now weigh in on the negotiations - meaning the Government must come clean about its plan and priorities in the process of untangling the UK from the EU. But if the ruling against the appeal is successful? It would set precedents that do not bear thinking about.