Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party won big in the United Kingdom’s recent election, establishing a clear path — or more precisely, a clearer path — to Brexit Jan. 31. Amid all the questions of winners (the Tories) and losers (the Labour Party, its unpalatable former leader Jeremy Corbyn, and quite possibly the British worker, London as world financial capital, immigrants, globalism, Scotland, the Irish backstop), was the notion that the Conservatives succeeded because of Johnson’s Trumpian charisma, which he damped down for the occasion by corralling his usual hijinks.
Really? What about driving a jeep through a fake wall — what is it about narcissists and walls — to show he was getting Brexit done? Or the political spot that cast Boris not Godunov as Mark Lincoln and the voter as Keira Knightley in a takeoff on the cue-card scene from “Love Actually” ?
Since when did buffoonery become charisma? Since real life was hijacked by “reality.” My uncle, a devoted Trumpette, encapsulated for me what that reality is the other day. When I told him “evil, violent, liberal” New York was the safest big city in the U.S., with a crime rate as low as it was in the 1950s, he said, “I don’t believe in statistics.”
That’s right, we now live in a world in which statistics, numbers and facts mean nothing. Such a world is admirably suited to the mutability of the narcissistic strongmen who dominate the political landscape and who may not be right but are never be wrong.
If facts mean nothing, what about words? The word “charisma” comes from the ancient Greek meaning “gift of grace” from the gods, a meaning it hung on to during much of the Judeo-Christian era. But in age of the digital god, charisma has come to mean a person whose value depends in part on the faith of his followers.
That should give Boris and The Donald pause. Those who are made can be unmade. And no amount of cutesy stunts and bellowing can change that.