In Our Time - Politics in the 20th Century

Episode Date: October 22, 1998

Melvyn Bragg talks to Gore Vidal and Alan Clarke about the future of the nation-state; is the concept dead and buried? And what is the relationship between politics and morality - have salaciousness and self-righteousness taken over where seriousness of intent and a strong nerve left off, or was it ever thus? With Gore Vidal, American writer, commentator and author of The Smithsonian Institution; Alan Clarke, historian, politician and author of The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State, 1922-97.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, my guest today are the novelist and commentator Gore Vidal, whose new novel The Smithsonian Institution is published this week. His historical novels Educate America.

His puckish novels such as Maya Breckenbridge and this one, delight us all, and his essays, Virgin Ireland is a new collection in Paperback, emanate from a man whom some say, and I agree, is the best President America never had. And a historian and politician Alan Clark MP, whose history of the Conservative Party this century has just been published. Since the donkeys in 1961, his histories have often been thought controversial, is also famous for his bare-knuckled diaries

and noted for, let us say, a certain independence of opinion. Corvidal, in your essays, the new collection, Virgin Islands, you refer to Plato's view of the cyclical nature of human society, the way it evolved. And you go to the Neapolitan scholar Vico, and you talk about society going from theocracy to an aristocracy to a tyranny, and then into a time of chaos. And you characterize our time as a time of chaos. That's the title of the essay. How would you characterize, why do you think of this as chaos, and how do you characterize a chaos in which you see us today?

Well, we're sort of at the end of the American Imperium, and we're the end of the nation. state. Everybody's sick of that. And if Vico, working from Plato's Republic is right, we're about to enter a new phase, or we're in it now, which is chaos in which the future

arrangements are not very clear. We had a speaker of the House of Representatives in the 19th century who was so politically reactionary that they said if God had asked him, his opinion of creation, he would have voted for chaos.

Well, I'm afraid I'm in his position. I like chaos. And I dread the coming centrifugal forces that will be uniting Europe, will be uniting, I don't know what they'll do with the American Empire. But you see the centrifugal thing going on, which is the wish of the banks, let us say, in regard to a European monetary unit. They think simultaneously, Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, practically every country, Scotland, you see people wanting to get out from under nation states and do their own thing.

Well, I'd rather like that pluralism. There are two things I'd like to say, though, before I talked to uncle. One is, does the cyclical nature assumes that things will go on going on, and yet you're deeply pessimistic about that happening because of the presence of the discovery of the nuclear bomb. So just because we were cyclical before, are we going to continue to be cyclical? it going to go in this nice, nice and nasty for a lot of people, but this progression, that's one thing? Well, now we move, I'm happy you'll brought that up to the Hindus. Now the Hindus are always on my mind, and they think that creation ends in conflagration, and then this

cycle begins all over again. Presumably a few monkeys that have survived. The great smash-up will evolve into a new human race. We don't know what's going to happen. All I know is the dream of helmet coal of creating a united Europe based upon the Deutsche mark which would then change its name and nature scares me to death to have a common currency

and bank with no parliament to oversee it with no one to control it and the kind of world mess going on economically I'm very frightened of what's happening with money. Forget the cycles of whether the human race will survive. Will the currency survive this great shift in order

that Mr. Bismarck, Mr. Bismarck, Mr. Cole would be thought of as Bismarck too. But you're very much in favor of things falling apart, as you've said with chaos. And you refer to the Soviet Union wanting to put away the Yugoslavia spitting up, but why that's happening? That's resulting in extremely bitter, savage, apparently uncontrollable wars. What's good about that? I'd rather have some small balkan wars. No matter how awful they're living there, you wouldn't, wouldn't? No, I wouldn't.

But on the other hand, if we didn't have CNN, we wouldn't know about them at all. Isn't that better than having the world wars that we used to have? I'd rather not have CNN and not have a war. I don't think there's a balance there. I don't think there's any balance in the human being. They must have their wars. That has been the nature of our species from the very beginning territorial wars. And it doesn't seem to be stopping.

Everybody wants the United States to step in and be a world policeman. I mean, we can't even police our own country, much less go around the world, trying to regulate Southeast Asia. No, I'm for letting every country do its own thing, and if they want to have a civil war with the people next door, there are at least a thousand of them going on, but because the people are black or yellow or green or brown, we're not interested.

For those blonde, blue-eyed Balkans who get us into such trouble, thank you, 1914, I'm for leaving them alone. Alan Clark, what do you think of this view that we are in a time of chaos and that's a good thing, according to Gobed by Dal? He likes to sort of swim in this ocean. Yes, I mean, I think the trouble about chaos

is that the next stage is a revival of authoritarianism to reset. Well, that is what DeVico and Plato both said. I fear, too, the theoretic state. Yeah, you've just got to love that. But the trouble is, the chaos is not global. The chaos is confined. much more to the United States Imperium, certainly,

and to the soft countries of the West. And the barbarians, of whom there are great many, and who are acquiring various types of weaponry, almost on a par with our own, are, to a certain extent, they're more disciplined, they're more motivated, and they're certainly more aggressive. And if we let chaos degenerate too far, we may find that it becomes as unpleasant as the little wars, which as Gore-Ractor says,

are covered just by CNN at the moment. When you say the barbarians, you mean small countries now able to afford nuclear weapons. Well, they're not so small. Some of them have enormous populations. I mean, there are the standard sort of baggie countries like Persia and China. And one billion Muslims. Exactly, the Muslim and the northern.

Anyone you like in North Korea, all these countries have, in their different ways, are striving for one thing at the expense of living standards of their people, and that is sophisticated weapons of mass destruction. And so in that sense, given the way you put that argument, you're coming over as very pessimistic indeed. Well, pessimism, I mean, you know, the time scale is very long, if your history, you regard all timescales, it's very long. There may be a bad patch coming, but the trouble about survival under really apocalyptic conditions is, I mean, go to sort of a few monkeys may survive.

It tends to be always the lower forms of life, flies, sharks. I somehow feel that what life will survive on this planet will not be the sophisticated intellectuals in. in Britain and the United States. They'll be wiped out. In your books, you give an awful lot of presence and power and authority to individuals. And in your book about the history of the Conservative Party, you talk about individuals who could have, in this country, could have done something different about the start of the Second World War, for instance.

But just on that idea of individuals, do you think that given what you've said and what Gauva Dahl said, I like, you think that any individuals around can do anything positive about recharging, redirecting this situation, or is it all a mass drift towards that anyway, sort of Marxist mass drift that we can't do anything about? It's very hard to tell. I mean, it's easier to identify the individuals with hindsight

when you look at the historic pattern that developed and then you can try and isolate points where we went wrong and so on. Clearly the most powerful individual, the one who has the most leverage is the President of the United States, but it's unfair to judge them on a day-to-day basis. But you do say in your book that you do talk about individuals in this country, let's take the beginning of the Second World War, who could have prevented Britain going into the Second World War,

something which you think might have been a very good thing. Do you think that was really possible? Yes, it was. Curiously, it was much more important that we shouldn't have got into the First World War, of which the Second was a kind of continuation. But the trouble about the Second World War was that it was a completely idiotic concept for Britain to think that it was. could defend Poland against the Germans.

It's the mathematics and the balance sheet simply didn't work out. We were going to lose. And so anybody who had a head screwed on could see that and should have tried to work out. A solution. The trouble was that the Nazis and Hitler were so odious and so difficult to deal with and so unreliable that the deal didn't ever really take shape.

And anyone who, any politician who tried to. bring it about was discredited. It was discredited in a domestic context. But just to see how individual can sort of affect this sort of torrent of history that goes on, do you think had Churchill's voice been defeated in 1939, we would have taken different course which have led, I mean, Gauvidar's new novel

is full of alternative possibilities of American history, but our history would have been, it could have been different, or were we inevitably going to go into that war once Hitler got cracking with his imperial march to the east? No, I don't think Churchill can't is for so much in 19th century, none, although he's waiting in the wings, and he's scared Chamberlain all the time about what might happen. I think if Halifax had been chosen instead of Churchill, and you must remember that the court wanted Halifax, the civil service wanted Halifax, the Tory

party wanted Halifax, and the only reason that Halifax stood down and let Churchill take it was because he calculated that Churchill would make such a muck of things that after a bit they'd have to send for Halifax, a huge personal miscalculation, of course. But if he had gone for it, I think we would have made peace, a very bad piece. It would have just been a kind of auditors' bankrupt deal. This rather accords with your view, Gauvidar, which you inherited from your grandfather, who was a great influence on your life in Washington, a great man in many, many ways, himself. But you said your grandfather said, quote,

no foreign war was worth the life of any American, unquote. You add, when you quote that, neither do I. Do you hold to that? Yes. We started the United States to get away from wicked old Europe, that we might be wicked on our own terms toward other people, something else again, but we wanted to stay out. Apropos, England and the Second World War, I have a very perverse British friend who blames your entry into World War II

on Jenny Jerome. Had that woman been a better mother to Winston, you could have avoided that war. and the peace, the intolerable peace. It was to be the peace of the desert. No, the First World War, had there been a fair vote in the United States, the people would have voted two, maybe three to one, against coming in on the side of the Allies.

There was a lot of pro-German sentiment, too, in the country. So in the Smithsonian Institution, my young character goes back into time to try and keep Woodrow Wilson from becoming president. Had he not been president, a great angriophile, and in thrall to the banks. In 1914, when Asquith ran out of money, rather idly one day, and had to finance a war, he went to Wall Street, and he went to J.P. Morgan,

and Morgan supported the pound. After about a year of this, by 1915, J.P. Morgan went to president, Wilson said, look, I'm just one banker. I'm supporting the largest world currency there is. I can't go on much longer. We're going to have to get into this war, or show some support for England. And that really is how it happened.

That's lovely foreshortening. I love the sequence and the argument. It's shot full of kind of presumptions. About going broke in 1914, because that's when the money power shifted from London to New York. soon as that, no, the curious thing was in 1914, in the run-up to the war, the pound increased in value on the foreign exchange, to a dangerous extent, because it was a currency of refuge. In 1939 in the run-up to war, the people were selling pounds as fast as they could, and exchange control had to be put in, you know, on the date we declared war.

I think that what this illustrates is that actually there was a point at which the British Empire could still have got out of that in terms of. and would have retained its prosperity, its social structure, its omnipotence, really. This is World War II. No, this is World War II, no. World War II, no. World War II, we started off practically bust, and with a whole military balance sheet hideously against us. And then if the United States had not come in, I suppose in the end we'd have been worn out. I mean, the Russians have played a big part in this too.

But you do come back to Alan Clark to you do come back to individuals which is interesting I'm trying to get something going between individuals and this idea of the inevitable

cyclical nature which Govidal runs through that one of his essays but you say sorry a review of your book said it's a well

sustained critique of the guilty men whom the author believes first threw away the empire and then try to chuck the British nation state so you think

this was in the hands of a few people who they did that, whatever as it were, the forces of history were, America taking over in power and Russia growing in its own way, fascism growing in Germany, these few people, I'm just interested to know. Do you think that they just did that? Yes, I mean, I think this was a great endemic fault of the Conservative Party through that period, which was that it believed that its own perpetuation in power was in the national interest. and therefore what appeared to be the national interest

on the Rousseau distinction between the free will and the real will, what appeared to be in the national interest could be subordinated to the more benign concept of perpetuating the Conservative Party in power. So that meant that you actually got a lot of bad decisions were made. And when these accumulated, the country actually got steadily weaker, and that is the history of the second half of this century. But you regret the decline. of the empire.

But of course I regret it. And the decline of the nation state. Of course I regretted because I'm an old-fashioned conservative and I've never had to personally to consider to weigh the balance of remaining empire and what should be the national interest. And I'm quite clear in my mind what was. Gold Be down, what about the end of the empire?

You've talked a lot about the end of the American empire. What about Alan Clark's view of the end of the British Empire in the nation state? The damage to the nation state. He likes it and I... I'm not British, so I don't know that I have much of a view of it. I see that history passed over to us, the world empire, and we are the first people to have had a proper global one,

thanks to machinery, technology, fax machines, and so on. We have one that we don't really know what to do with. It's very expensive. We're $5.5 trillion into debt for armaments. We have no national health service. The people get nothing back for the taxes. except this extraordinary swollen military budget. It's wrecked us, and we have got nothing back from it.

Now we have, it's very hollow. We're a bit like Britain was. I was in front of Downing Street, September 2nd, 1939. It's a schoolboy. Neville Chamberlain came out to go to the House of Commons, say war is almost here, and it came the next day. And I have sort of that feeling about the United States now

when I stand in front of the White House, which you can't because people are terrified, somebody will blow it up. So the police ask you to move on. But I rather have the feeling that we are constantly thundering our orders. I mean, picking Madeline Albright from Prague as our Secretary of State.

I mean, this wet hand flapping about giving orders to the Middle East, giving orders. And nobody pays any attention. and the President otherwise engaged. I mean, it's ludicrous. Yeah, I think the trouble is it's the kicking sand, the old Charles Atlas of those, isn't it? I mean, if...

The 900-pound weakling in our case. The 900-pound weakling, you see, if he has sand kicked at him by the Serbs... There are one or two people that might not pick up this reference of Charles Aplettison, never mind. But anyway, yeah, well, I mean, this was an other advertisement. Yeah, yeah, nine-stone weakling, yeah, body-building. You see, and the real...

You can explain that mouth in a second, but the real point is if someone kind of heavy duty is giving trouble, they don't really like to do anything much about it. And this is a classic example of what's going on in Iraq, where the UN weapons inspectors have just simply packed up, really. They've reported all the breaches. They've reported the fact that Saddam Hussein is continuing to make all these weapons. And where are the B-52s? You know, the real exercise of US power is already atrophied,

and it's only taking place in a very minor concept. You regret the... You think that the British nation's... has been damaged in its fabric, you say, and you think that is a very regrettable. So you admire the power of a nation state. What do you find in that to admire on? It is not a fashionable view, and I say,

what do you find you admire it? I'm not bothered about fashion. I wouldn't dream for a second. I would never accuse you of that. Yeah, is it still built into people's instinct? And yes, it is, because the nation state is what should give them security. It's what gives them self-esteem.

It's what gives them all. what sustains them in making sacrifices. I mean, Gorvidal would be able to estimate whether the extent, I mean, the Russians should don't switch. The Russians loved Stalin. They were proud of Stalin. They were tell you what a wonderful time it was under Stalin because the whole world was frightened of them.

And you can talk to any Russian about that, and they lack of that. And this is something that the nation state will give to its subjects. And once it starts disintegrating into a lot of focus groups and, and kind of little regional assemblies, it loses the inherent strength, which is based in history, which is based in power, which is buried deep in people's psyche, and which is actually the most valuable political force that there is.

Do you find that in America, Gavidav, would you... No, I don't find it because we're so different. You are an island and more homogenous, and it was a joint venture. England Incorporated, and we are a continent and we didn't want a highly concentrated nation state. We didn't want a federal capital. We didn't want a standing army. And it was Abraham Lincoln who tore the thing to pieces.

And in many ways, he was the villain of our republic because he decided the civil war was not about sluble. You're making a dummy in your own new novel. It's a dummy, yes. He's had a concussion. No, he was, he had a mystical view of the union, which nobody else had. We had regions, and each region was the size of a European country or larger. And we liked this loose confederation. The articles of confederation began as in Lincoln, through this, the first modern war, 600,000 young men were killed.

It was the bloodiest thing the world had seen. at that time, and out of it came a highly concentrated federal state, which was by no means the dream ever of the occupants of the states, of the United States. In a sense, it might have been old Europe striking back. But can I move to something you've said, Gavid, politics is everything, everything is political. You've run for Congress, you've taken great interest in politics, you're a voice in politics of your country, and yet you've also written recently, we're not allowed to discuss politics anymore in the USA. All we have are personalities and sex. Do you think the effect of personalities

and sex is substantially getting in the way of any useful political discussion process in the States or even here? Well, discussion has been closed by the corporations who own the country. The only political debate of any importance is who raised. what money from whom to give to whom for what taxes, revenues, and the infrastructure, as they call it, of the state itself, we're not allowed to talk about that because the Congress is filled with people who are chosen by corporations and they represent the corporations. They are to see that the corporations pay minimal tax on their profits and so on. So there is no representation for the people at large and that that's why half of them never vote. They have given up. They're much smarter than the media, which also belongs indeed to the corporations, are very disappointed in the American people, particularly over the Clinton nonsense. Well, he tried to do politics in 1993. He tried to give us a national health service, which every civilized country has, but we're not allowed.

The insurance companies, together with the pharmaceuticals, together with elements of the AMA, the doctors, said, you are trespassing. You're only a lawyer that we put in the White House. What do you, you're going to taxes? You're going to remove one-third of our revenues, which go to the insurance companies for nothing. So they said, well, we'll take care of that legislation, and they did. Then they said, we're going to take care of you. And it's not because we don't like you, Bill and Hillary. We're sending a message to any politician in the United States. You try to do something for the people at least. large and you will end up like the Clintons.

I love that. I mean, I simply, you know, I can never resist a sort of king-sized conspiracy theory, particularly put with such a beautiful, lucid, sequential argument as that. But do you agree with this? You know, I mean, this is, this is, you know, it depends what sort of a society you live in, but you could say that the Nazi party dominated Germany to the extent that the corporations dominated the United States, certainly the Communist Party during the communist period, played exactly the same rally.

It made and broke people. You couldn't move without its permission. It was impossible to exercise any judgment without referring to them. But a conspiracy is still a conspiracy. I mean, I don't dispute it. But it's just interesting that what Gaw said, actually links very much what I said at the top of the programme, but by going for the individual and trivialising the individual,

as both of you have written and believe about Clinton, and I agree with both of you on this, by trivialising that, you are there by trivialising politics, and the political process in the United States. Do you think this is the... You think this is happening? No, I don't quite go for the course there being a conspiracy. I think this is simply a function of the communications machine now

and the appetite for artificiality and image and impurmembrance and ephemerality and so on. And they can't get enough of it. I think the media have a huge... The media are very willing co-conspirators with any form. so it wants to destroy somebody else. And so sex is just being used as something to destroy somebody. It's a diversion, but let me show exactly how that particular conspiracy worked because I was involved in some of it, anti-conspiracy.

This is how it works. If you want to kill a health bill, which profits insurance companies, the piggy bank of the corporations and the pharmaceuticals and so on, now here's how the conspiracy worked. They set out, they took ads, a half billion dollars, I am told. I couldn't be that much, but it was nearly that much. On television.

And they went like this. It showed a worried couple. And this went all over the country. That's a conspiracy to put those ads on, to raise the money, to put them on, and that killed the legislation. Harry, does this mean that we can't use kindly Dr. Haskins,

who delivered Arbuster Brown, our precious child? I'm afraid, Lorraine, it does. But Harry, that's communism. Then the Sixth Symphony would go booming in the background. Well, you do 10,000 of those ads. That's a conspiracy to put them on. That's a conspiracy to get them out.

And you've got everybody finally fearful of communism from the Clintons. Now, if that isn't a conspiracy, I don't know what it. Just raising the money. Yeah, but just a minute. I mean, that may be true. But how is it that Clinton's ratings have obstinately stayed in the high. 60s. If they thought he was a comedist, I mean, you know, I think he would suffer a bit. Gorse is the salvation of America in the those who don't vote because they have more sense

than not to vote. I'm paraphrase, but they've also more sense than to take the allegations against Clinton seriously. They don't. The press is enormously upset with the American people and they may very well get them out and get another people to come in and take their place. I mean, the press is not being listened to. The hysteria, these comments. That is far the most agreeable aspect of the whole crisis. The number of times we've had people in the press come on the screen and say, now look, he's really finished and now just you watch.

By Friday he's gone. By Friday he's gone and so on. And then he's obstinately, he bobs up again and he's still rated at 61%. Because the people like him. It's a very heartening reassertion of genuine popular feeling over those who are trying to tell them what they ought to be thinking. Is this a sort of re-emergence of a good, healthy paganism that you would approve of, Godfidal, in your country?

I would simply say that in the maelstrom of chaos, I see a glitter of common sense in my fellow countrymen. But it was always there. They just have no way of expressing it politically. Alan Clark briefly, do you see this applying to this country? Yeah, I do. I still believe that the common sense of the people, particularly their ability to pick and choose the items of news, so-called constantly being stuffed at them, will in the end get the better of the media. Well, thanks very much to Alan.

Clark and Garvidal. That's all we have time for. Next week I'll be talking to Richard Dawkins and Ian McKeown. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.c.co.uk forward slash radio 4