One line stands out after all these years from Alan Bennett's play The History Boys. "If Halifax had had better teeth," says a too-clever-by-half student, "we might have lost the war." What does he mean? That Lord Halifax, a less bellicose alternative to Churchill as the incoming UK prime minister in 1940, was at the dentist when the job opened up. In another timeline, therefore, Britain under his leadership made a miserable peace with the Axis.
If this sounds silly, it is meant to. Bennett wants you to tut at the kid's glibness, and at the idea that individuals can swing history like this. Larger forces -- the habitual over-reach of dictators, the rise of the US -- explain the war's outcome.
What a stylish disposal of the Great Man theory. And what a shame that it now strikes me as itself a little glib. As intellectually disreputable as this is to confess, I have been won over to Great Man-ism of late, and Donald Trump is the reason.
The trigger for this conversion? Watching free trade, support for which used to be so commonsensical as to be unspoken, fight for its life. This is disproportionately one man's doing.
Don't pretend there was always a latent protectionist tide whose breakthrough was inevitable. Polls show that American voters supported trade agreements. Even registered Republicans only soured in 2015 -- that is, when Trump launched his campaign. The flavour of populism before him was, if anything, the anti-government platform of the Tea Party. You'll say that decades of factory closures in the heartland would have given rise to someone of Trump's worldview eventually, who would also have been superb at politics. But this Jenga of assumption upon assumption is what our friends in academe would call "unparsimonious".
Trump's ability to warp the world around him, even inadvertently, is hard to replicate
No, the truth is elegant. An individual pursued a life-long obsession (Trump was protectionist before he was anything else-ist) until it changed the world. Tweak one biographic detail -- imagine that America elected a demagogue for whom trade was a, but not the, bugbear -- and we now live in a different Europe, China, everywhere. History can be as contingent and personalised as that.
Now, excuse a detour into some clerical tidying-up. The word "great" in this context means "important", of course, not "good". Protectionism happens to make me shiver. Also, it should be the Great Person theory, and not just out of good manners. If Thatcher hadn't restored Britain to basic governability, there is nothing to say that "forces" would have done so at some point.
You see, once you fall for the Great Person theory, you see proof of it everywhere. For all the commentary about what ails Britain now, the simplest answer is that we had several unusually bad prime ministers in a row. (Call this the Crap Person theory.) So much expert advice -- Britain must reform this, Britain must invest in that -- presupposes a leader with the gumption to act on it.
Anyone with ties to Singapore knows that a nation's destiny can hinge on the randomness of who enters politics when. There is, after all, a timeline where Lee Kuan Yew never leaves the Middle Temple bar. It is harder to credit that big countries are also subject to these vagaries of personnel, but that is national ego speaking, not a cold look at the available facts. Perhaps the most useful advice for Britain right now is to make do until a first-class leader turns up.
No individual has changed the global intellectual atmosphere on so large a subject quite so much in my time
Trump's ability to warp the world around him, even inadvertently, is hard to replicate. Woke-ism really took off under Trump, no doubt as a thermostatic correction against him. In two major democracies this year, Canada and Australia, a candidate has lost at least in part because of their perceived closeness to him. Repelling people is still shaping them.
But it is his effect on trade, an almost uncontested idea once, that stands out. Even in freewheeling Britain, whose state cannot build a high-speed rail line from Birmingham to Manchester, politicians feel obliged to yak on about "industrial strategy". No individual has changed the global intellectual atmosphere on so large a subject quite so much in my time.
Some Trump-watchers put it about that Barack Obama's mockery of him at a 2011 press dinner, which Trump attended, hardened his resolve to run. The free trader in me keeps imagining a world in which he'd had toothache that night.