Liz Truss believes, as most of us do about ourselves, that she is a decent, competent, smart, sensible person with good ideas. 1½ years ago she was humiliated to be told that she was a foolish, incompetent, naive person with bad ideas. This is a strong conflict.
So I think it's possible that she has grasped the populist idea that she was brought down by 'the blob' our 'the deep state' as a way of resolving this dissonance. For clarity, this means not that she's decided to adopt that idea to save face: she genuinely believes it.
(I also think this about Trump. I don't believe for a second that Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell or John Eastman believe the 2020 election was stolen, but Trump will have found the rejection more personal and maybe cognitive dissonance led him really to believe his Big Lie.)
Virtually no one thinks Liz Truss did a good job as PM, so the gap between her view of the world and everyone else's is very extreme, which - to preserve her fiction - only goes to prove how pervasive the blob is. Hence the grand/absurd claims in her book about western culture.
Reading about French culture in the late C19, I am struck by the number of progressives who sided with the populist demagogue General Boulanger in the 1880s and, when Boulanger was diminished, vaulted across to radical antisemitism a decade later in the Dreyfus Affair.
It happened very quickly for lots of people. From liberal, secular, republican politics to virulent, militaristic, ultra-Catholic antisemitism in a decade.
But this seems to be a way that people are radicalised at the moment. I am concerned, as a remainer, about the constant mockery of the Brexiteers.
(I'm not exempting myself. I find it hard not to pounce on yet another Rees Mogg self-own, etc.) I worry that this mockery drives them to more extreme face-saving explanations for Brexit's failures.
That the civil service 'blob' never gave Brexit a chance. That remainers sabotaged it. That secret forces are pulling the strings (we all know the groups the conspiracy-minded like to imagine). That their undermining of Brexit is proof of how good and dangerous an idea it is.
And that could drive people towards hard right demagogues like Nigel Farage or Richard Tice. Or indeed, oddly, Liz Truss. Is it possible that a large hard right faction might form in the UK, in part because becoming a fascist felt less embarrassing than admitting you were wrong?
The more laughable Liz Truss's ideas seem, the more worried we should be.
@DanRebellato The only reason Truss held power was because a 2019 80 seat landslide for the populist right only took 43%. Labour continue to back FPTP, & are likely to gain only 1 term before a unified right sweep back.
@DanRebellato I guess it's not an issue if it's only Liz who buys into the extreme ideas. Can her ideas make the leap into mainstream culture?
@DanRebellato It’s an apt comparison with The Dreyfus affair, which is so arcane when you first read it, responsible individuals able to rely on layer upon layer of understanding, deference etc, keeping an absurd injustice going for years.
@DanRebellato Firing Tom Scholar, the universally respected head civil servant at the Treasury, suggests she was already blaming Deep State obstructionism when in office, as well as since.
@DanRebellato Yes, all true, but Truss is only the latest example of what these Tories have done since 2016 ? Replacing genuine ‘popularity’ with ‘populism’, which then becomes ‘Sado-populism’, - which works by ACCEPTING that they and their policies are disliked, - but promises to be worse to
@DanRebellato The query I have is who’s backing her and why? She’s an absurd, mainly unpopular figure, yet, as you say, she’s acting as though she’s been deeply wronged and purposely driven to failure.
@DanRebellato Agree Dan. Why do none of these interviewers ask her why she chose to resign. She was either wrong and correctly resigned, or if she believes she was right, she resigned because she is too weak for high office. Which is it Liz?
@DanRebellato Are you going to write a play about this?