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In the Mike Leigh movie High Hopes (1988), Rupert, a character representing nostalgic, as opposed to Thatcherite, Toryism explains the greatness of the British Empire that he hopes to see restored: there was “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.” This is an effective characterization of the Second British Empire that emerged following the recognition of the American republic in 1784 and entered into terminal decline following the outbreak of the First World War, two hundred and thirty years later.
Unlike the First British Empire (1536-1783), in which great expense and brutality were undertaken to convert Irishmen into Protestant Englishmen, in which legal differences between the English and Scots were systematically worn down, in which a million colonists on the Atlantic Seaboard originally rose up over their inequality with the Englishmen of the Eastern Hemisphere, the Second British Empire rejected assimilation as a doctrine. The reason America had risen up was because its residents had come to understand themselves to be entitled to the same rights as those of Great Britain.
So, the Second British Empire became all about difference. Welsh, Scots and Indians were to be understood as colonized peoples and, at the same time, colonizers on behalf of the British: distinct, inferior, yet powerful colonized peoples. The Welsh were massively over-represented in the colonial administration of India, the Scots in British North America and the Indians in the administration of Africa. One colonized people managed another at the level of the imperial state.
But below them were hierarchies of the colonized, recognized and supported by the imperial state. In this way, the British abandoned the project of Protestantizing Québec and instead empowered local bishops to sit at the top of a theocracy that ran Lower Canada until 1960. In India, dozens of principalities and emirates dominated or snuffed-out by the Mughal Empire regained a nominal independence under the British East India Company and, later, the British Raj, each with its own prince, courtiers and set of laws. The “trucial states” of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai and less-remembered names were monarchies selected by the British to rule their populations independently but backed by the power of the Royal Navy.
The Second British Empire was based on the understanding that hegemonic power arises from recognizing as many kinds of people and as many kinds of peoples as possible and, wherever possible, making their elites not competitors but collaborators in a vast and elaborate system, one offering “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.”
These ideas did not come to the British Empire out of nowhere. They came from the systems of government developed by the Ottoman Empire, the first modern state more committed to systematizing than erasing the traditions and hierarchies of the past. The Ottoman Empire had succeeded in claiming the title both of Caliphate and Roman Empire during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries by modernizing and systematizing the things that had made medieval Islamic civilization the juggernaut that it had been: religious diversity, cosmopolitanism and hierarchy.
The Ottomans were the one modern state that sought to reinvigorate a legal principle of the Ancient World: personality of law. From Spain to France to England to Japan, the other ascendant states of the early modern world were interested in processes of assimilation, homogenization and the tying of law and culture to geography. These states assailed minority languages and religious difference in an effort to forge the first true national identities.
But the Ottomans took the opposite approach, instead reinvigorating institutions and practices that had atrophied in the Middle Ages. Self-government rights for linguistic minorities were restored. The milet system, whereby religious minorities governed themselves, was established throughout the Empire, granting Nestorians, Chalcedonians, Orthodox and Catholic Christians different governments. The court of the Caliph drew Egyptian Copts and Albanian Muslims, with powerful government positions carefully doled-out to those who sat atop various hierarchies representing ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. There were different streams for civil service and mercantile jobs based on region, language and religion. In the Levant, Orthodox Greeks were preferred for civil service posts, Sunni Arabs for mercantile monopolies and oligopolies, but the same did not hold true in Egypt or Albania. The Ottomans, more than any empire before or since, nailed the “politics of representation.”
Underpinning this was the principle of “personality of law,” the idea that the laws that applied to a person were not the derived from the polygon in which one was standing, etched onto the surface of the planet (the way the law works today) but rather from what sort of person one was, a Christian or a Muslim, a Turk or an Greek, a speaker of Arabic or Serbo-Croatian. This proved a highly effective means of social control. Because every group in the empire was “represented,” there was an elite to which every Ottoman could aspire, and there was an elite willing to defend the Ottoman state in order to safeguard its privileges, its representation.
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Before resuming the history lesson, let me be clear about what the politics of representation is not; it is not affirmative action. Affirmative action programs are necessarily part of larger state-led efforts to make sure that all participants in the workforce are treated fairly and that all parts of the workforce are representative of the population as a whole. The politics of representation does the opposite. By creating token elites from every group, it seeks to quiet the voices of non-elites by co-opting them into identifying with “their” elites in their putative competition for influence with “other” elites. Will the next vizier be a Copt or a Greek? And when the former succeeds, this politics sells this as a victory for the million Coptic fellahin toiling in cotton fields throughout the Nile Delta. That is why affirmative action works against any job being viewed as the province or specialty of one particular religion, gender or ethnicity but instead tries to create the most representative, mixed group possible in all jobs at all levels.
What once was the politics of affirmative action in the 1970s has, just like the rest of America’s welfare state in the ensuing forty years, been slowly turned into its opposite, cosmetically similar and yet for opposing purposes, with opposite functions. The Third Wayers who remade the Democratic Party and its trade, welfare and criminal justice policies under the Clinton Administration were also key agents in the transformation of affirmative action from a legal practice focused on working people to a symbolic discourse focused on elites.
The vision of diversity espoused by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is the modern politics of representation: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. In this politics, America’s first black president could preside over a net annual transfer of wealth from black America to white America, with black Americans poorer relative to whites and more segregated relative to whites than at any point in the preceding forty years. That is why America is hitting a forty-five year nadir in reproductive freedom following the first major party candidacy for the presidency by a woman and her victory in the popular vote. It is because when you conflate justice for groups with symbolic and elite representation of their elites, those groups don’t just fail to benefit. They lose.
The idea that the composition and conduct of a royal court determines what happens in the world below is a myth with long legs: Oberon and Titania’s court in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Arthur and Guinevere’s in the grail stories, the Jade Emperor’s in Chinese myth, etc. We love those old myths and have been seeking to shoe-horn them into reality since Procopius blamed Justinian and Theodora for the Darkening of the Sun. But it’s just sympathetic magic: a theory of cause and effect that seems aesthetically intuitive but is actually bullshit.
Many things can cause an elite to be demographically representative of the population it purports to represent; one is a successful program of affirmative action and economic equality. Whatever legitimate criticisms we make of Fidel Castro’s Cuba when it comes to democratic rights and freedom of speech, by 1991, Cuba’s Communist Party had come to reflect the population below it in terms of racial representation because this diversity arrived from below. Black Cubans achieved parity as hotel managers before they achieved it in the Party. But although this representation has been maintained at the party level, that representation was no safeguard of equity below. Two generations of Cuban leaders have had to sacrifice economic equality for success in the tourism economy and have exiled black Cubans to the back of shop after shop. In this way we can see that diversifying those in authority has no causal relationship to diversity or fairness below. But diversifying below almost always is expressed in diversity above.
Of course, the transparency, the hollowness, the cynicism of the Ottoman politics of representation wears people down and angers those who see that it does nothing materially for the lives of ordinary people. In the nineteenth century, a Turkish nationalist movement emerged in the Ottoman state, demanding that, as creators of the Empire, Turks- all Turks- should enjoy superior political and economic authority. The Turkish nationalists focused their sense of injustice on the minority groups that they believed enjoyed greater power and opportunity than ethnic Turks. Because every group in the Empire was headed by corrupt elites, examples of Arabs, Greeks, Copts and Albanians screwing good, honest Turkish people out of their birthright abounded. Of course, this new Turkish nationalism led to Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and others seeking better deals outside the Empire, which in turn provoked the pogroms of the 1910s and 20s for which the term “genocide” was invented.
Today, America stands somewhere similar. Donald Trump’s agenda is that of the Turkish nationalists of the nineteenth century: to cleanse the elite of minorities and restore them to their proper place either at the bottom of society or outside of it altogether, behind walls or prison bars. The Democratic Party’s decision to respond with the politics of representation sealed its fate and caused it to lose in 2016. Whatever movement triumphs over Trumpism, it will not be the defenders of a corrupt and broken status quo, but one that offers a more compelling and inclusive idea of universality: one pulling a thread through Americans, as workers, as citizens.
Within the US Democratic Party, there is only one candidate who stands for that. And my American friends, you should back him. He is here to smash capitalism, not fix it. And that is what all Americans need. What keeps Hispanic communities from being raided and terrorized is not a Hispanic Secretary of Labour—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people safe from police violence and wrongful imprisonment is not a black Attorney-General—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people from being segregated into inferior housing is not a black Secretary of Housing—America has one right now under Donald Trump. What keeps women’s reproductive rights safe is not a female Secretary of Health—American had one under Obama. The only force capable of fighting racism, authoritarianism and misogyny is socialism—and not the elite espousal of socialism, but its socialist enactment, the mobilization of millions of people across differences of sexuality, race, religion and gender.
What matters and must matter is that Donald Trump is opposed by a politics of equity and equality, not the broken and corrupt neo-Ottomanism of a place for everyone and everyone in their place.
