Do we know who we are?

“ Sometimes the world seems against you
The journey may leave a scar
But scars can heal and reveal just
Where you are
The people you love will change you
The things you have learned will guide you
And nothing on earth can silence
The quiet voice still inside you
And when that voice starts to whisper
…Do you know who you are?”

— Lin-Manuel Miranda & Opetaia Foa’i, Moana

After watching the film with my five year old, I’ve had these lyrics from Moana stuck in my head for the past few weeks.

Duncan Weldon’s despair blogging reminded me of the last line of the song: “Do you know who you are?”

Duncan writes:

What’s really got me down this weekend is the combination of our craven kowtowing to Trump coupled with the almost inexplicable decision to be the first Western leader to visit post-coup Erdogan. We are now supposed to celebrate arms sales to a country which has imprisoned 100,000 in the past few months.

…

The logic of a hard Brexit is that our trading links with our biggest trading partner will diminish. The only question is by how much.

That gap will be filled — at least initially — with grubby deals with the likes of Turkey and the Gulf States. We’ll do those deals both because we need the markets and because domestic politics will need quick wins. And those are the quickest “wins” we’ll be able to pick up. The image of the “free trading, buccaneering global Britain” will give away to a reality of Britain as the despot’s friend.

As he notes, the world of commercial diplomacy and in particular arms sales is always “murky”. [Full disclosure: I work for the national aerospace and defence trade association. I’m not going to talk about military sales here.]

I think the problem is that the cold, hard (and short-term) practicalities of realpolitik had previously been within the wider context of the UK’s long-established values and global standing.

But beginning with the post-Iraq invasion soul searching through to the financial crisis and the Brexit vote, it feels as though we are less sure about the role we want to play on the global stage.

Do we know who we are?

The Left forgot how to connect its internationalism with the average worker. The Right couldn’t quite pull off delivering open markets with closed borders.

All we have left now is a ‘Global Britain’ in which we ask despots not bully us while hoping they’ll do a deal to buy our property, infrastructure and, well, anything, really.

Hence Duncan’s despair: is this who we really are?

Professor Daniel Kreiss has scoured Brietbart and believes that Bannon and Trump are fostering and exploiting this moment:

Broadly, Breitbart contributors espouse an American nationalism, one that explicitly turns inward to the United States for its source of moral values and strength. At the same time, this is linked to the critique of elites, who are seen as looking down upon ordinary Americans and their values in favor of an other-directed, outward-oriented, cosmopolitan outlook. Cosmopolitanism here is a cultural critique, linked to a perceived style of being and carrying oneself in the world, in sharp distinction to ‘American’ identity and values.

The critique of globalism on Breitbart specifically offers an assault on global financial flows and international financial capitalism and free trade in favor of protectionism.

As we have questioned the moral values that underpinned our global confidence, the Bannans, Trumps and Farages of the world have given the average voter a new narrative around national values and strength:

Breitbart is, in part, about defining the symbolic border of the nation and protecting the white, Christian body politic in a way that is premised on exclusion.

At the same time, the embrace of globalization and multiculturalism are cast in Breitbart as anti-civil: policies that result in the weakening of services for white, working class Americans.

It’s been said that the primary political divide in the West is no longer left or right, but open or closed. But as 2016 has shown, arguing for an open, internationalist national identity can be, as Kreiss says, a very fragile thing:

People are more instinctively drawn to small groups, whether that is their local communities or their near to hand social affiliations and identities. Constructing civil solidarity on the basis of an abstraction such as a pluralistic and multicultural nation is difficult and, ultimately, fragile.

Hopefully, Eliot Cohen is right and Trump will be a clarifying moment for America (and the wider West):

This is one of those clarifying moments in American history, and like most such, it came upon us unawares, although historians in later years will be able to trace the deep and the contingent causes that brought us to this day. There is nothing to fear in this fact; rather, patriots should embrace it. The story of the United States is, as Lincoln put it, a perpetual story of “a rebirth of freedom” and not just its inheritance from the founding generation.

As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s song says, the journey might leave a scar, but that scar might just reveal who we really are.