No-one should be surprised at the sending of pipe bombs to the Clintons and Obama. This is precisely the kind of activity encouraged by a rogue president who supported the lethal fascists of Charlottesville and attacks on journalists. This White House of certifiable crazies makes nothing impossible. One wouldn’t be surprised if Trump pardoned and released the Unabomber to become his next Secretary of State. Only because Timothy McVeigh isn’t available for rehabilitation. There’s someone who rolled back the state, or part of it.

Not that Britain has anything to be relaxed about, as its parliament nods through a counter-terrorism and border security bill in time to weaponize the country’s borders post-Brexit. The liberal media warn that this will curtail free speech and human rights, to which the obvious rejoinder is “that’s the point, stupid”. Our own crazies know that their determination to bankrupt the economy will provoke some reaction, as people go without essential foods, medicines and technical spare parts. They will need substantially increased police powers to control the inevitable civil disorder, and criminalizing journalism which reports this will be a useful part of their apparatus.

Many people are confused about the purpose of breaking from the European Union, and of a Conservative and Unionist party, over three-quarters of whom believe this act of suicide would be worth the break-up of the United Kingdom and the failure of the Northern Ireland peace agreement. Yet history is littered with the damage done by zealots, from Cromwell’s Model Army trashing medieval church imagery to Isis blowing up ancient archaeological sites. There is something about such crusades which releases endorphins in the collective brain, disinhibiting the more civilized impulses of restraint and reason.

Elias Cannetti writes of this in Crowds and Power, where the individual crosses a boundary from independent existence in the street, carefully avoiding contact, to the immersive experience of the crowd at a football match or rally, exalting in that physical contact and the collective sense of power. Brexit was the collective cry of disempowered individuals, initially expressed as a revolt against the posh boy government that had trashed their hopes, but now coalesced into a movement that claims a permanent legitimacy from that one moment of madness. The more the result tears down the system they feel has rendered them impotent, the more sense that act makes to them. Even if it throws them out of work, impoverishes and starves them and their families*, this has restored their sense of agency. The child experimentally tearing the wings off an insect is the parent to this wounded adult. The pipe bomber is merely the one who brought the bits together – to help blow them apart.

 

[*A new EHRC report notes a marked increase in the UK of infant mortality and child poverty in the last three years.]