This Land is Your Land

Authoritarian politics begins with the body.

The diseased body. The covered body. The reproductive body. The foreign body. The body crossing a border. The body that refuses to remain in its assigned place.

In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, published in 1933, Wilhelm Reich rejected the comforting belief that fascism was merely imposed from above. Its power depended upon people who had already learned obedience within the authoritarian family: people trained to fear their own desires and seek release through submission to a leader.

Erich Fromm developed the argument in Escape from Freedom. Modernity had loosened the old bonds of church, family and inherited hierarchy, but liberation also produced anxiety. Freedom left the individual alone, responsible and uncertain. The authoritarian character escaped this burden in two directions at once: by submitting to the powerful and dominating the weak. Fromm described this as a mixture of masochism and sadism.

The subject kneels upward and kicks downward.

The Frankfurt School later tried to identify the kind of personality capable of becoming fascist even within a formally democratic society. Adorno and his collaborators found not simply a collection of political opinions but a structure: conventionalism, submission to established authority, aggression against those defined as deviant, hostility to introspection and an obsession with strength, sexuality and contamination.

Fascism offered the authoritarian personality a bargain. Obey, and you may participate imaginatively in the leader’s power. Accept your own domination, and you will be permitted to dominate somebody beneath you.

This is why the enemy is required.

In their analysis of antisemitism, Adorno and Max Horkheimer described a politics of false projection. The subject expels what it cannot tolerate in itself—dependency, weakness, desire, fear and disorder—and discovers it miraculously embodied in another group.

Lacan would formulate the mechanism differently: the subject receives its own message back from the Other in an inverted form. What the authoritarian denounces outside himself is frequently what he cannot acknowledge within.

The left is censorious.

Migrants are lawless.

Muslims are fanatical.

Women are irrational.

Scientists are conspirators.

Minorities are obsessed with identity.

Every accusation is also a confession.

Julia Kristeva called the disturbing remainder the abject: that which unsettles the boundary between inside and outside, self and other, purity and contamination. The abject is not merely something we dislike. It is what we must cast out in order to sustain the fantasy that we ourselves are clean and whole.

Hence the authoritarian right’s fascination with bodily boundaries. Blood, vaccines, masks, wombs, toilets, veils, skin colour, sexual organs and national frontiers become variations on the same question: what may enter the body, what may emerge from it, and who has the authority to decide?

In Washington, Republican Senator Rand Paul recently summoned Anthony Fauci before another hearing on the origins of Covid-19. Fauci repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment while Paul threatened contempt proceedings.

There are legitimate questions about laboratory research, government secrecy and the decisions made during the pandemic. Yet those questions have been absorbed into something resembling a purification ritual. Fauci must no longer be merely wrong, vain or insufficiently transparent. He must become the concealed source of contamination: the diseased organ whose exposure and removal will restore the body of America.

The fantasy is structurally impossible. Disease cannot be confined to one guilty scientist, any more than economic decline can be confined to a migrant boat or cultural anxiety to a woman wearing a veil.

But the more impossible purification becomes, the more urgently another contaminant must be found.

This is the central contradiction of the contemporary right. It rails against political correctness, censorship and the policing of language while constructing an ever-narrower vocabulary of permissible thought. It claims to defend free speech, yet demands ritual declarations about borders, biology, patriotism, gender and national innocence.

The accusation against the left—that it silences, shames and controls—is itself an act of projection. The authoritarian personality cannot tolerate ambiguity because ambiguity threatens the border of the self. Every contradiction must therefore be externalised. Every failure must belong to somebody else.

Hannah Arendt approached the same danger from political rather than psychoanalytic theory. Ideology offers relief from uncertainty because it explains everything in advance. Facts no longer have to be encountered. They need only be forced into the movement’s single logic.

Arendt also understood that domination begins by making certain human beings superfluous: people without a secure political identity, whose rights exist in theory but are guaranteed by no community in practice. Before people can be disposed of physically, they must be rendered conceptually unnecessary.

Europe’s migration system performs precisely this operation.

At the end of July, tens of thousands of people attempted to enter Ceuta, Spain’s enclave in North Africa, from Morocco. Many swam around coastal barriers or climbed fences. At least 57 people died, through drowning or in the crush.

The images were terrifying.

They were also politically perfect.

Seen through the authoritarian camera, individual people disappeared. The crowd became a substance: a flood, a swarm, a wave, an invasion.

The imagery recalled older propaganda in which unwanted populations were represented as infestation—not because these people were vermin, but because the political gaze had removed their names, histories, voices and human scale.

Europe created that image.

Its migration system operates through fetishistic disavowal: we know people will come, but behave as though determination can be abolished by making legal entry almost impossible. We enjoy the confirmation that Europe remains desirable, then punish those who act upon that desire.

The result is not control but a funnel. Refugees, workers, students, families, adventurers and criminals are forced towards the same narrow irregular routes. Smugglers profit. The strongest cross. The weakest drown.

Politicians then present the chaos created by the system as proof that harsher exclusion is required.

A functioning border is not a moral failure. Europe needs transparent procedures, workable legal routes, enforceable decisions and an honest relationship between labour demand, asylum and demographic reality.

What it has instead is theatre: walls for television, corpses for deterrence and permanent emergency for politicians.

Britain has perfected this symbolic geography.

Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle” becomes castle, moat and quarantine station. The small boats are treated not primarily as an administrative problem but as a wound in the national body. The migrant is imagined as something penetrating the coastline. The Muslim woman’s clothing becomes an affront requiring state intervention.

Reform converts economic decline and social loneliness into a morality play about visible aliens and invisible traitors.

They promise sovereignty while producing a country that is smaller, more frightened and increasingly dependent upon enemies.

Arendt’s warning matters here. Loneliness does not automatically produce fascism, but it deprives people of the shared world in which reality can be tested through encounters with others. The isolated individual becomes vulnerable to a movement that explains why he is lonely, why he is humiliated and whose removal will make him whole again.

Enter Count Binface.

The intergalactic waste receptacle may be the most serious figure in British politics because he does not conceal the absurdity of his performance. He wears the mask openly.

Binface understands that the mask is part of the performance. The authoritarian right does not. It believes the mask is its face—and that everything rotten lies outside it.

But satire is not enough.

A society cannot laugh fascism out of existence while leaving intact the loneliness, humiliation and political impotence upon which it feeds. Nor can the answer be another politics of disgust, directed this time at the ignorant, the provincial or the supposedly backward.

Contempt reproduces the structure it claims to oppose. It identifies another contaminated population and imagines, once again, that purity lies on our side.

The alternative begins with a different understanding of the body.

Not the body as fortress, bloodline or national property, but the body as vulnerable, dependent and shared. The body that needs food, shelter, care and company. The body that can be wounded by another and sustained by another. The body whose freedom depends upon institutions, neighbours, trade unions, hospitals, schools and strangers whom it may never meet.

Against the authoritarian fantasy of purity stands solidarity.

It is an old word, and perhaps we have become embarrassed by it. It lacks the glamour of disruption and the instant gratification of outrage. It asks people not merely to announce an identity, but to stand beside somebody whose life is different from their own.

Yet the tradition has never entirely disappeared.

It survives in the American labour movement, the civil-rights movement and the peace campaigns that brought together churches, students, workers, feminists, socialists, pacifists and veterans.

It survives in the British movements against fascism, nuclear weapons, apartheid and war.

It survives wherever people refuse the invitation to kick downward.

Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” not as a complacent hymn to national greatness, but in response to a patriotic mythology that concealed poverty and unequal ownership. Its less frequently sung verses ask who truly possesses the land and who is excluded from its abundance.

Pete Seeger’s “Ain’t gonna study war no more” was not an analysis of power.

It was a refusal.

There comes a point when analysis must become refusal again.

We will not accept that cruelty is realism.

We will not accept that refugees must drown so that borders may appear strong.

We will not accept that Muslims, migrants, women, scientists, gay people or trans people must be turned into vessels for a society’s unspoken fear.

We will not accept that freedom means the freedom of the powerful to humiliate the weak.

We will not accept the narrowing of language until only obedience can be spoken.

The anti-fascist tradition did not become obsolete because fascism was defeated once. The labour movement did not lose its purpose because factories changed shape.

These movements weakened because their victories were mistaken for permanent conditions rather than temporary achievements requiring constant defence.

Perhaps those of us who still believe in them are dinosaurs.

But dinosaurs, at least, leave evidence that another world once existed.

The time has come to stand up again—not in search of purity, and not because our own side is innocent, but because the fascists are crawling back through the cracks opened by loneliness, resentment and fear.

They arrive as jokes, provocateurs, television personalities and defenders of common sense. They speak of restoration while preparing exclusion. 

Arendt’s answer to loneliness was not therapeutic introspection.

It was politics: appearing among others, speaking, acting and creating something held in common.

The opposite of fascism is not simply tolerance, but participation.

It is the meeting, the march, the union, the choir, the picket line, the refugee centre, the classroom and the public square. It is the difficult practice of living among people whom we cannot reduce to reflections of ourselves.

And this is where the old song returns.

“This land is your land, this land is my land.”

That is the point.

We are all migrants. We are all moving, crossing, searching, fleeing, arriving, making homes and losing them. We are all scurrying somewhere, carrying our histories, our fears, our children and whatever we have managed to save.

Nobody is inherently foreign. Nobody is born contaminated. Nobody is naturally evil.

Without migrants, America does not exist.

Neither does England.

Ask the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish what English settlement, conquest and migration meant to them. The English themselves are the descendants of migrants, invaders, refugees, traders, soldiers and settlers: Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, Jews, Irish labourers, Caribbean families, South Asians, Africans and Europeans.

There is no pure beginning.

The people we now describe as quintessentially English often arrived from somewhere else, or were born to people who did. They became our scientists, musicians, nurses, politicians, writers, footballers, neighbours and friends. We no longer experience them as foreign because they helped create the country we imagine ourselves to be defending.

Migration is not something that happened to Britain.

Migration made Britain.

There is no moment when history stops, the population becomes complete and the drawbridge can be raised forever.

The land does not belong exclusively to the people who reached it first, nor to those who conquered it most successfully, nor to those whose documents are oldest.

We are one human family—not because we are identical, innocent or naturally harmonious, but because none of us survives alone. We depend upon people we do not know, people whose gods we do not share, whose languages we cannot speak and whose journeys we may never understand.