Over the course of the last month, the British Prime Minister’s former chief adviser has escalated his ongoing war of words with the current incumbent of 10 Downing Street. The much-maligned ‘evil genius’ behind the campaign to secure the United Kingdom’s controversial exit from the European Union (though neither evil nor much of a genius), Dominic Cummings even took the rare step of going head-to-head with the BBC’s political editor in an interview whose recording was reported to have lasted several hours and whose highlights were broadcast on July 20, his first interview since quitting his government role last November.

Yet the UK media don’t quite know what to make of Dominic Cummings’s dramatic dishing of the dirt on the government. 

On the one hand, it makes attractive news copy. Scandals sell papers: there’s nothing the British public enjoys more than seeing their senior politicians publicly trashed. Some would say that this is a sign of a healthy democracy; others might suggest that it’s a symptom of a loss of trust in democratic processes. One could suppose that it’s reassuring that it can happen at all; but also that it can be worrying if it happens all the time. Of course, the established press has a strong motive for pushing these anti-politics agendas: when the electorate despair of their institutions of representation, the resulting power vacuum may be filled by unaccountable media organisations usurping the lead in the shaping of public opinion.

On the other hand, however, it’s unclear to what extent Mr. Cummings can be taken at his word. His best-known contributions to national discourse have been noted for their tendency to foster constructive ambiguity – to be, as they say, economical with the truth, as he’s pursued an unlikely principle of implausible deniability. During the Brexit campaign, for example, he famously launched a slogan which misleadingly claimed that the UK’s departure from the EU would free up £350 million each week from state coffers to be spent on the National Health Service. More recently, his various (and not entirely consistent) explanations for why, at the height of last year’s lockdown, he breached government guidance to drive his family hundreds of miles across the country have prompted both outrage and ridicule.

Mr. Cummings last month declared that having masterminded Boris Johnson’s landslide election victory in 2019, he had then immediately conspired with senior colleagues in a bid to oust the newly elected Prime Minister from office, as he believed that Mr. Johnson was unfit for his job. He’s suggested that Johnson opposed Covid-19 lockdown measures, because he cared little for the lives of the most vulnerable – an accusation which had once been levelled at Cummings himself. He’s even suggested that Johnson was willing to put the Queen of England’s life at risk by pushing to continue his weekly face-to-face meetings with her during the height of the crisis. Cummings wields his revelations like the bluntest of weapons. The brutality of his tactics in portraying this administration as sustained on cronyism and a pig-headed refusal to face the facts may, of course, be seen by some as just as thuggish as the government he once propped up and which he now seeks to knock down.

In the last few years, both the United Kingdom and the United States have famously seen political leaders adhering to the ‘hard man’ model of authority more traditionally considered characteristic of autocratic rulers, a bullish denial of truths and a shameless construction of alternative narratives, promulgating versions of reality which seem rationally flimsy yet remain utterly incontrovertible in their brash and unabashed aplomb. This towering, overweening confidence often appears to be the product of the leaders’ narcissistic personalities around which their electoral appeal has been built. Theirs is a politics which succeeds by shouting opposition into silence with empty rhetoric, meaningless slogans and unsubstantiated slurs, a cult of ideological machismo and wilful ignorance characterized by brazen defiance of facts, and an apparent belief in the capacity of the charismatic leaders’ strength of character to overwhelm all reality and reason. As such, their approach approximates an absurd parody of Nietzsche’s will to power, as articulated most terrifyingly in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. The holocaust survivor Primo Levi once warned against the devastating influence of persuasive words unsupported by intelligent reasons. It’s an influence we tragically continue to see practiced across the world today. 

The problem isn’t just that nobody knows exactly where the truth lies; it’s that no one seems to care very much anymore. If our leaders have dumbed down to the lowest possible common denominator, then we the people, by accepting this state of affairs, appear to have dumbed down even dumber. Our governments seem to think we’re stupid, and perhaps we sometimes are. But we may also be starting to wise up.

The fact that last month, Boris Johnson's Secretary of State for Health was diagnosed with Covid-19 two days before England lifted lockdown restrictions (at a point in the pandemic when 50,000 new cases were being reported each day), forcing both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor into self-isolation, could be considered a misfortune. Their decision to excuse themselves from the rules on isolation and immediately thereafter (following a public uproar) to reverse that decision looks like pure carelessness. Within a week, with one in seventy-five people now infected, the same Health Secretary then had to apologise after having caused a further furore when he crowed about his recovery and implied those continuing to take precautions were ‘cowering’ from Covid. Some administrations may at times appear prone to protracted streaks of bad luck, but such ill-fortune may well be prompted by the mindlessness of their complacency. 

In 2016, Boris Johnson and his Brexiteer allies announced that they’d had enough of experts. Mr. Johnson has adopted a similar attitude through the Covid-19 crisis, defiantly continuing to shake hands in its early weeks, and resisting scientists’ calls for the use of face-masks, lockdowns, border restrictions and statutory regulations. Like King Canute, Mr. Johnson sometimes seems to believe he can outshout the oceans and turn back the tides of history with the sound of his own voice, a sound he so obviously adores. This may be laughable, but his allies’ sneering dismissal of any expert knowledge which dares to diverge from their own perspectives has at times started to mirror – in slight yet unsettling ways – the anti-intellectualism of regimes which have banned dissent, burned books and silenced antagonistic media. 

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Mr. Johnson often appears to think he’s channelling the spirit of Winston Churchill, that myth of dogged determination against almost insuperable odds. Yet Churchill oversaw a politically divergent government of national unity, while the apparent antipathy to rational dissent displayed by some of Johnson’s colleagues perhaps more obviously recalls, in style rather than substance, the unequivocally rigid stance of that British bulldog’s Nazi nemeses. The notion of a leader burying their head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich may seem merely ridiculous, but there’s clearly something rather more urgently concerning a government which appears enmired in such a permanent state of denial. That administration’s ambiguous and vacillating response to expert opinion appears to boil down to the intimation that they trust the science rather than the scientists. This paradox is particularly problematic during a period of a global pandemic.

In recent weeks, the British government has again threatened to break the agreements regarding trade protocols which it negotiated with the European Union two years ago, while its response to an escalating refugee crisis looks set once more to contravene global norms and conventions. Boris Johnson’s willingness to breach international treaties and laws may be seen as taking the first tentative steps on the path towards that national conscience-lessness, almost a sociopathic state, typical of more overtly authoritarian regimes. Yet champions of progressive democracy should rejoice in one key piece of reassurance: the unprecedented levels of palace intrigue and venomous dissent propagated by disaffected former officials have at least demonstrated the ineffectiveness of this administration’s mechanisms of autocratic censorship and control, and have shown that even the most outspoken critics of such aspiring strongmen still have futures ahead of them, and indeed often political ones at that. The same might also be said of the United States as it struggles to emerge from the long, dark shadow of Donald Trump. The volume of protest is itself a sign of hope.

Both Johnson and Trump are natural libertarians who appear paradoxically to believe that the prerogative to articulate visions of liberty should be theirs alone. Like all would-be autocrats, they resemble children who are so outwardly assured they’re absolutely right that they dare not permit any opposing views to be voiced – for fear they may be proven wrong. Their bloated egos are extraordinarily fragile; their shows of superhuman self-confidence are performances designed to disguise the inadequacies of their arguments. They aren’t necessarily malevolent, and, despite their bellicose talk, they’re hardly warmongers. They may align their grandiose public images with those of the world’s toughest despots, but the depth of their demagoguery seems rather less draconian than their posturing might imply. They’re self-serving, no doubt, but also perhaps sincere in their belief in the value of the service they discharge for the benefit of their nations. Yet they epitomize the banality of an unthinking politics which seeks to impose easy solutions upon complex problems, a politics which lacks open-mindedness and empathy, a politics of intellectual blindness and stubborn bluster which seems uninterested in reconciliation and consensus. If we are to make any progress at all in a post-Covid-19 world, we surely need to move on from all that.

And perhaps we will. In the end, we may hope that liberal democracy is sufficiently resilient to resist the existential threats posed by these petty populists. America has, for the while at least, turned against the dumb macho of Donald Trump’s rhetoric, just as it eventually moved on from the moronic inferno of George W Bush’s catastrophic attempts to make his pugilistic presence felt upon the world stage. Meanwhile, there are still people in the frontline of British politics, and indeed in Boris Johnson’s own party, who continue to promote intelligent, informed and reasoned political debate. It remains vital that, across the world, we foster such voices of moderation, empathy and rational dialogue.

In a free society, the lies of even its most morally bankrupt leaders can never be allowed to grow so overwhelmingly large and loud that they eclipse our memories of truth. All nations, of whatever ideological hue, which cling onto those critical traces of idealism and integrity will continue to decry their loss of freedom and reason, and in those protests will sustain and start to realize the dream of their liberation from oppression. George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four imagined a culture so uncompromisingly totalitarian that any heretical thought would become impossible; yet, because there must inevitably be compromises to the persistence of cultural memory, those dreams of freedom will always find ways to survive. They may be repressed but they’re so deeply embedded in our culture and our consciousness that they are practically ineradicable.

However, living in a free society means sometimes having to tolerate the expression of political opinions of such insane stupidity that, by comparison, Mr. Johnson and his colleagues seem eminently sensible and wise. At the end of last month, a few hundred anti-vaccination campaigners held a rally in central London at which they denounced health workers as the contemporary equivalent of those war criminals who hanged at Nuremberg. Last week, with similarly rabid idiocy, the former leader of the UK Independence Party blasted lifeboat volunteers for daring to risk their lives to save the lives of refugees.

Such occasions serve to remind us that, though we may condemn the anti-intellectual populism with which its most senior figures like to flirt, this administration’s vaccine programme has nevertheless managed to protect the vast majority of the population against this terrible pandemic, and, while we may relish our freedom to berate our leaders, we might also admit that things could frankly be far, far worse. 

But they also remind us of that descent into national madness to which such anti-intellectualism, if unchecked by reason, can eventually lead. They remind us why it remains crucial not only to tolerate dissent but also to beware of those who don’t.