Headline: The Tories must mobilise soon in the culture wars, or they may find themselves outflanked
Mr. Colvile’s opening paragraphs is a tale of victimhood, once in the reactionay imagination the province of ‘The Left’.
Last week the journalist Suzanne Moore wrote a lengthy, powerful essay about leaving The Guardian. She described how 338 of her colleagues complained about the paper’s “pattern of transphobic content” — a reference to a column in which she supported the idea that sex is innate and biological. She wrote of receiving “death and rape threats for me and my children”, after being judged by “an invisible committee on social media”.
The Moore saga is the latest episode in Britain’s culture war, which had already turned JK Rowling into an online pariah for expressing similar sentiments. Yet for something so central to our politics, the culture war is surprisingly ill-defined.
The evolution of Colvile’s argument reads as shopworn, as it has been endlessly repeated, the reader need only look to the eminence grise of Alan Bloom, and his ‘The Closing of The American Mind’ and its successors in the 1980’s and 1990’s. This in an American context, yet Bloom acolytes are the expression of his less than ardent cosmopolitanism, allied to his self-assigned status of Platonic Guardian. Which leads to a kind of political intoxication. Look to the rise of the moralizing charlatan Jorden Peterson and Andrew Sullivan as the legatees of Bloom’s Anti-Student polemic.
Much of the discussion of the culture war, especially on the left, starts with Brexit. Yet for Tories this conflict had a much longer gestation. What started as “political correctness” has mutated into an ideology that has captured not just the left but much of the ruling elite.
At the heart of this world of “safe spaces”, “cancel culture”, “no-platforming”, “cultural appropriation” and “critical race theory” is a world-view built on grievance, which argues not just that western societies were founded on slavery, imperialism and discrimination, but that they remain defined by them.
This American reader can’t shake his feeling of deja vu , of having read this before, authored by Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher or any number of New York Times scribblers, who act the role of generic apologists for the political present. I think what Colvile misses, in the above paragraphs, is what so many have found to be a politically potent target , which is Critical Theory itself, and it’s sorcerer , in the Conservative Imagination, Theodor W. Adorno. A book recommendation for Mr. Colvile:
Mr. Colvile presents the Tory position on the ‘Cultural Apostates‘:
Hostility to “woke” ideology — so called because its adherents believe only they have awoken to the dark truths of our society — has duly become one of the binding agents of the Tory coalition. Not least because it is viewed as an existential threat, with the left waging a long-term and alarmingly successful campaign to render Toryism illegitimate. There is particular vitriol aimed at perceived traitors such as Priti Patel and Sajid Javid, for combining brown skin with blue rosettes.
Mr. Colvile turns to the descriptive and then to the prescriptive. His political admixtures are rife with political malapropisms, bordering on caricature, or something like mendacity?
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Many Tories feel that if the government leads the charge in the war on woke, it will take the majority with it — and force Labour to ally itself with the defunders of the police and topplers of statues.
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There is also the problem of finding convincing messengers, given that the people most likely to fulminate online about critical race theory also tend to refer to masks as “muzzles” and tweet about “Adolf Johnson” plotting to end British liberty.
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Mr. Colvile’s political propinquity with Johnson is demonstrated in the last two paragraphs of his essay:
This plan reflects the prime minister’s character. For Johnson there is no contradiction between backing gay marriage and backing Brexit. He is instinctively liberal, in the old-fashioned British sense: he believes everyone should be free to live as they wish, but that this should include not getting death and rape threats for saying things others disagree with.
Johnson’s government is fighting on many fronts, but this is arguably one of the most important for his party. For if the prime minister cannot articulate and defend a liberal vision of Britain, it will become that much harder to defend a Conservative one.
Alexander Douglas reviews two books, that led me to some thoughts and considerations.
Adam Smith Systematic philosopher and public thinker Sympathy not selfishness By Eric Schliesser
The Infidel and The Professor David Hume, Adam Smith, and the friendship that shaped modern thought By Dennis Rasmussen
Just reading this first paragraph I could only think of Amartya Sen’s introduction to the 250th Anniversary edition of ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’. Google Books has made available a 48 page preview, that makes Sen’s revelatory introductory essay accessible. Mr. Douglas reduction of Smith to the level of ‘mascot’ is dismissive, not to speak of degrading !
Adam Smith has achieved his greatest fame neither as an economist nor as a moral philosopher but rather as a mascot. His name and image symbolize a single thought: that individuals considering only their own advantage can bring about a result that benefits others. Selfish actions can have, in fact, the consequences that unselfish actions have in intention. Smith has also widely been taken to have justified free-market liberalism with that thought.
Douglas opines, sometimes thoughtfully, and at other times, within the same paragraph, he lapses into flaccid ideology, or something resembling that rhetorical creature:
Schliesser argues that Smith’s thought amounts to a coherent system of “anthropic philosophy”: a comprehensive understanding of human life and all its social possibilities. In doing this, Schliesser seeks to renew the intellectual foundations of modern liberalism. Both projects require a proper appraisal of Smith, going well beyond the famous bromide about selfish actions having happy consequences.
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As Mark Blaug once noted, “the prejudice that every action motivated by private gain must be antisocial by virtue of this fact alone was widely current in the 18th century”. Those who held this prejudice presumably believed that too few of the games we play in society are positive-sum for us to expect many social benefits to arise from individual self-interest. Smith’s claim was that, on the contrary, our social life is full of positive-sum games, or at least can be with the help of some institutional reform. Proving this involves a detailed moral psychology and an analysis of our social institutions. These are mostly found in his 1759 treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and his much more famous work of 1776 on political economy, Wealth of Nations. Schliesser also finds a great deal of insight in Smith’s lesser-known early and unpublished works.
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On the question of ‘Modern Liberalism’ it seems to have been answered, at least in part, by Liberalism : A Counter-History’ by DomenicoLosurdo. It reads like a well deserved indictment!
Douglas then moves from ‘Sympathy’ to ‘The Impartial Spectator’, and a telling quote from H. L. Menken couched in moral cynicism, that riffs on the notion that God sees and knows every human action, as in Johnathan Edwards hysterical Protestantism.
Sympathy is also interestingly reflexive in Smith’s theory. As we observe someone and project ourselves into her situation, she also projects herself into her spectators, imagining what it would be like to observe herself from the outside and then feeling what she would feel in this case. From this root the tree of morality grows. Our natural projection into the imagined vision of an “impartial spectator” develops into moral conscience, which Smith calls “reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct”. But for all Smith’s lofty rhetoric, he isn’t far off H. L. Mencken’s definition of conscience as “the inner voice that warns us somebody may be watching”.
Mr. Douglas rambles on at some length about The Wealth of Nations, and its impact on thought and action, since its publication. It could be argued that Smith once looked upon the rise of Capitalism as emancipatory, the poor no longer tied to a Landed Gentry, or long apprenticeships, but could strike out on their own to earn a living. ‘Wealth’ has been the ur text of the Neo-Liberals and their Trinity of Mises/Hayek/Friedman, and other apologists for the excesses of institutionalized Capitalist Greed.
Smith embraced ,within his writing, the two seemingly antithetical worlds of Capital and Morality. The Legacy of Smith awaits its successor. Perhaps Piketty will write such a volume?
‘You’ quote two members, in good standing, of The American National Security State. Brennan is a notorious liar, not speak of a maladroit practitioner of subterfuge: he is an incompetent liar and propagandist!
The significance of the latest killing is contested. “It no doubt undermines morale and might temporarily disrupt whatever projects Fakhrizadeh might have been working on,” says Eric Brewer of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, and a former director for counter-proliferation on America’s National Security Council.
John Brennan, head of the CIA in 2013-17, says that Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s assassination was a “criminal…act of state-sponsored terrorism” which would risk “lethal retaliation and a new round of regional conflict”.
Katrina Manson opens her essay with Linda Thomas-Greenfield. She is part of ‘A global team of respected professionals’ at Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Biden can respect a fellow self-promoter! Joe Biden & Son is a Corporation with a Vision for the Future!
After Thomas-Greenfield makes her appearance garnished with home-style kitsch, comes the appearance of ‘a senior Republican congressional aide’. Nothing adds to the piquancy of a political commentary like an anonymous source.
Next in order of appearance is part of a tweet from ‘Marco Rubio, the Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee’
Then Joe Biden’s appearance on NBC pronouncing that a Biden Administration is not an ‘Obama Third Term’.
The utterly amorphous ‘Some in the US foreign policy establishment’ makes its formulaic appearance. This rhetorical strategy makes possible the opinions of a ‘reporter’ – it adds a necessary strategic distance from the writer.
The next ‘walk -on’ is ‘Washington foreign policy veteran Tony Blinken’ For the particulars on Blinken. see America’s Political Gossip Sheet Politico:
Blinken is a partisan of The American Empire, and its ‘Middle East’ ally of the Zionist State. ‘talked of a need for “equal measures of humility and confidence” on the world stage while also praising America’s history as the “last best hope on earth”.
More walk-ons:
Jake Sullivan: Mr Biden’s pick for national security adviser, pledged to be “vigilant in the face of enduring threats, from nuclear weapons to terrorism”.
Karim Sadjadpour, a foreign policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador now at the Council on Foreign Relations,
Charles Kupchan, an informal Biden adviser during the campaign
Andrew Bacevich the last and most valuable comment, to be quoted in this essay, not a member, but a dissident to this collection of Foreign Policy Technocrats: who express a full, but chastened faith in the Manifest Destiny writ large of the American Empire.
“The notion that we are called upon to be the world’s moral leader is presumptuous,” said Andrew Bacevich, president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a non-partisan think-tank that advocates for greater restraint in US foreign policy.
Note that the Foreign Policy Technocrats are afflicted with a sclerotic conformity. How could a possible critic, of American Exceptionalism, rise from within that academic lock-step? All those who might supervise a dissertation, that takes a critical stance to the myth of American Exceptionalism – where might they be?
The most prominent critics of that ‘Exceptionalism’ are Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté etc. None of these writers/thinkers are members of that Foreign Policy Establishment, which is what makes them so utterly valuable, as critics of this toxic mythology!
Should the reader look to Robert Colvile’s essay in The Sunday Times of November 22, 2020, for his answer to the conundrums enunciated by Mr. Sunak, and reported upon here at The Financial Times ? The headline gives the game away:
Headline: In case no one has told you yet, debt’s piling up and there’s only one way out — growth
The headlines could have been from parallel dimensions. One day the prime minister was announcing the biggest boost to the defence budget in decades. The next, the Treasury was reported to be preparing a public-sector pay freeze amid record borrowing figures and a national debt topping £2 trillion.
This hairpin turn from boom to bust doesn’t just suggest schizophrenic media management. It reflects the fact that despite the ejection of Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain, the government is still deeply divided over the fundamental issue of how much we can afford to spend.
During the pandemic, the government has spent and borrowed at extraordinary levels. Billions upon billions have been ploughed into furlough, test and trace, the desperate trolley dash for PPE and all the rest of it. It will surpass the 2018-19 budget for NHS England three times over.
Its ‘as if’ the ghosts of Hayek and Thatcher have conspired to inhabit Mr. Colvile, in tandem, producing the tinny echo of Neo-Liberalism’s collapsed Utopianism.
Bagehot ( Adrian Wooldridge) in his November 21, 2020 essay at The Economist:
Headline : In search of a modern Machiavell
Sub-headline: The ideal political adviser is hard to find
After some preliminary commentary on Johnson’s advisers, their costs and their ‘bromides’ Bagehot offers this advice to Downing Street ,not to Boris Johnson.
But a better way would be to read a few books. Start with Machiavelli’s “The Prince”—the first book on politics to describe men as they are, warts and all, rather than as moralists would like them to be, and a wonderful source of eternal insights. Then imitate Machiavelli’s method and “step inside the courts” of previous leaders by reading lots of history.
According to Bagehot, the vital part of the success of a politician is her/his chief advisor, names ‘James Baker, chief of staff to both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush’, ‘Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff’.
But Bagehot’s political ignorance or mendacity gets in his way with this: ‘Patrick Moynihan brought out the best in Richard Nixon.’ Moynihan provided the political twin of the Southern Strategy, un-mentioned by Bagehot.
The complete text of Moynihan’s “benign neglect” memo was printed in the New York Times in January 1970. Particular sections of this explosive document bear reproducing:
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You are familiar with the problem of crime. Let me draw your attention to another phenomenon, exactly parallel and originating in exactly the same social circumstances: Fire. Unless I mistake the trends, we are heading for a genuinely serious fire problem in American cities. In New York, for example, between 1956 and 1969 the over-all fire-alarm rate more than tripled from 69,000 alarms to 240,000. These alarms are concentrated in slum neighborhoods, primarily black. In 1968, one slum area had an alarm rate per square mile 13 times that of the city as a whole. In another, the number of alarms has, on an average, increased 44 per cent per year for seven years.
Many of these fires are the result of population density. But a great many are more or less deliberately set. (Thus, on Monday, welfare protectors set two fires in the New York State Capitol.) Fires are in fact a “leading indicator” of social pathology for a neighborhood. They come first. Crime, and the rest, follows. The psychiatric interpretation of fire-setting is complex, but it relates to the types of personalities which slums produce. (A point of possible interest: Fires in the black slums peak in July and August. The urban riots of 1964-1968 could be thought of as epidemic conditions of an endemic situation.) . . .
The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of “benign neglect.”The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades. The Administration can help bring this about by paying close attention to such progress — as we are doing-while seeking to avoid situations in which extremists of either race are given opportunities for martyrdom, heroics, histrionics, or whatever, Greater attention to Indians, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans would be useful.
How could Bagehot have so missed the mark? Undaunted Bagehot continues his testament to ‘adult supervision’ in first term of Clinton by David Gergen. The 1996 best seller Primary Colors by Anonymous could not have been stopped, by even a master of ‘supervision’ like Gergen? Here is a link to an insightful review by Alexander Cockburn. He was on the campaign with the Clintons.
What follows is a two paragraph testament to the value that the ‘modern Machiavelli’ can offer. It is the two most interesting paragraphs of the whole of his essay, although, at times, couched in the vocabulary of such current political catch phrases as ‘when to play nice‘.
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The modern Machiavelli has to be willing to prick ideological bubbles. There is nothing more dangerous for an organisation than self-congratulatory groupthink. Advisers need to be well versed in past mistakes so that they can probe their bosses’ ideas and plans for weaknesses before rivals or reality expose those flaws. At the same time, whenever hubris turns to despair, as it so often does in politics, they need to be able to put the babble of daily headlines into perspective. Machiavelli’s injunction that both princes and advisers should study history and “note the actions of great men” is even more germane today, when too many politicians study economics or, even worse, management science.
The ideal adviser needs to know when to pick fights and when to play nice. Machiavelli was right that change is dangerous because “he who innovates will have as his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new”. But too many Tories have come to believe that, because you can’t make progress without making enemies, the mere existence of enemies is a sign that you’re making progress. Demonising the establishment as a reactionary blob is less effective than co-opting its members by appealing to a mixture of their ambition and their better natures. Not all of the government’s ideas for universities, the civil service and the bbc are daft, and a little digging reveals that many insiders agree with some of them.
Advisers need to help their bosses build coalitions across the political nation, supping not just with journalists, mps and civil servants but also with city mayors, who rightly feel slighted by the London-focused political system.
On the Rubber levers of power:
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Finally, successful advisers also need to roam beyond Downing Street. One of the commonest complaints of prime ministers is that they grasp the levers of power only to discover that they are made of rubber:
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Note that this attempts to offer an explanation of the self-interested manipulation of ‘the rubber levers of power’: the Grand Game as described by an Oxbridger, who is in search of a rhetorical formula, to impress his readers, that he has grasped the essentials, of the care and maintenance of that power. What is left out of Bagehot’s list of imperatives, is the power that a Leader can exert, via the expressed will of his followers to influence, pressure, demand political action, from the lower orders of that political system. Bagehot is the natural inheritor of an Economist tradition, whose self-presentation is that of the inherent virtue of a class of men, educated and convinced of their natural affinity for the management of that power.
Boris Johnson plays a minor role in Bagehot’s self-congratulatory polemic, as an object of scorn.
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But none of his fine words about the green industrial revolution will mean a fig unless he can find a modern Machiavelli strong enough to drive policy forward and self-effacing enough to devote himself to the greater glorification of King Boris.
Reading Robert Colvile Sunday Times essay titled ‘In case no one has told you yet, debt’s piling up and there’s only one way out — growth’ of November 22, 2020 demonstrates the Thaterism isn’t quite dead yet.
As Mr. Colvile ‘runs’ , his own words, the Centre for Policy Studies, which declares itself ‘Center Right‘. Its ‘as if ‘ the Economic Collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle of 2008 had not occured, nor a devastating Pandemic and the near total closing of Capitalist enterprises, and its newest iteration chronicled by Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake. Here part of an interview with co-author Westlake by James Pethokoukis of AEI :
“The right should be unashamed of the fact that it wants to make Britain boom again — to create good jobs, to enrich people in the places they live, and to give them the freedom and opportunity to lead better lives. Informed by the principles we’ve identified – the importance of productivity growth, agglomeration effects, intangible capital, and Britain’s persistently low levels of investment – the policies we set out below are a plan for creating prosperity in the UK.”
Mr. Colvile’s unalloyed enthusiasm for ‘growth’ in the Age of Global Warming, and its various expressions, like melting glaciers, rising seas, out of control wild fires and other phenomenon. Is about the fact that Thatcherism, and its epigones, are a destructive political anachronism, still mired in the Economic Romanticism of Hayek, and his ‘Road to Serfdom’! This coterie has been eclipsed by the cumulative effects of that Free Market toxicity, since 1976: the immiseration of the working and middle classes. A quote from Westlake is instructive about that ‘Capitalism’:
Westlake: This big change that’s been going on in the economies of the rich world is about the nature of capital. The nature of what businesses invest in.
Once upon a time, what businesses invested in was mostly physical things — machines, factory buildings, vehicles, computer hardware — things that, if you hit it with your foot, you’d stub your toe. That’s been gradually changing for at least 40 years, and each year, businesses gradually invest less in that physical stuff and more in what we would call “intangible assets.”
These are things that, like physical capital, have a long term value. But they’re immaterial. Things like research and development, designs, organizational capability, and even brands, marketing, and artistic originals.
The reader need only look to the Financial Times of November 18, 2020, by Jonathan Wheatley, for a panoramic perspective on the effect of The Pandemic on debt levels
Headline: Pandemic fuels global ‘debt tsunami’
Sub-headline: Governments and companies took on $15tn more borrowing in first nine months of 2020, says IIF
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The rise in emerging market debt was driven by a surge in non-financial corporate debt in China, bringing total emerging market indebtedness to $76tn. Excluding China, the US dollar value of debts in other emerging markets declined this year, reflecting the falling value of local currencies against the dollar.
Mr Tiftik said financial institutions had tried to “build buffers against the Covid shock”. “A significant proportion of their new debts has been directed to clients, which has been very useful in absorbing the initial shock of the crisis,” he said.
Debts in advanced economies rose by more than 50 percentage points this year to hit 432 per cent of GDP by the end of September. The US accounted for nearly half of this; its debts are set to reach $80tn this year, from $71tn at the end of 2019.
Mr. Colvile is just another Political Technocrat, and newspaper pundit, in either case, with a product to sell. Though the vexing, many layered political/economic crisis, renders his notion of ‘growth’ into a convenient reductivism. That is in fact propaganda, with Boris Johnson acting as it’s spendthrift villain. The reader can only wonder what Mr. Colvile would write, had Corbyn been elected?
Should any reader be surprised that Beddoes is an Oxbridger? It’s an Economist Tradition. Note this from the Economist:
Ms. Minton Beddoes joined The Economist in 1994 after spending two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programmes in Africa and the transition economies of Eastern Europe. Before joining the IMF, she worked as an adviser to the Minister of Finance in Poland, as part of a small group headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University.
Wikipedia supplies more detailed information on Beddoes IMF responsibilities:
Beddoes is member, in very good standing, of the Economic Elite, that is only reinforced by her service with the IMF. She worked with the ‘Shock Therapy’ obsessed Prof. Sachs, who now denies his toxic prescriptions, for implementing those destructive policies across Eastern Europe. See ‘Europe Since 1989: A History’ by Philipp Ther for a telling history of Sach’s destructive ideological fixsation.
Chapter 4: Getting on the Neoliberal Bandwagon
Chapter 5: Second-Wave Neoliberalism
Beddoes being the first women to be the Editor of the Economist. She is a long time employee of the newspaper since 1994. Her ideological conformity is a proven political quantity. Reading the opening paragraph of her essay demonstrates that fact.
Some years loom large in history. Usually it is the end of a war or the onset of a revolution that punctuates the shift from one chapter to another. 2020 will be an exception. The defeat of Donald Trump marked the end of one of the most divisive and damaging presidencies in American history. A once-in-a-century pandemic has created the opportunity for an economic and social reset as dramatic as that of the Progressive era. The big question for 2021 is whether politicians are bold enough to grasp it.
Call this restrained political melodrama. She has been schooled, by that Economist team of Micklethwait & Wooldridge, that team of Economist Writers, who have proven to be the best re-write men in Journalism. Taking their shorter Economist articles and fleshing them out, into those best selling 400 page paperbacks.
Next:
Covid-19 has not just pummelled the global economy. It has changed the trajectory of the three big forces that are shaping the modern world. Globalisation has been truncated. The digital revolution has been radically accelerated. And the geopolitical rivalry between America and China has intensified.
Then comes this astounding sentence, ever uttered by any editor of this reactionary newspaper:
At the same time, the pandemic has worsened one of today’s great scourges: inequality.
One of the most enlightening aspects of reading ‘Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin is that a self-serving political/moral hypocrisy is the very sine qua non of this newspaper. So Beddoes mention of inequality brings to mind:
From May 5th 2014
By R.A.
Headline: Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarised in four paragraphs
Sub-headline: A very brief summary of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”
It is the economics book that took the world by storm. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, was published in French in 2013 and in English in March 2014. The English version quickly became an unlikely bestseller, and it prompted a broad and energetic debate on the book’s subject: the outlook for global inequality. Some reckon it heralds or may itself cause a pronounced shift in the focus of economic policy, toward distributional questions. The Economist hailed Professor Piketty as “the modern Marx” (Karl, that is). But what is his book all about?
Sub-headline: Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book is a great piece of scholarship, but a poor guide to policy
WHEN the first volume of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was published in 1867, it took five years to sell 1,000 copies in its original German. It was not translated into English for two decades, and this newspaper did not see fit to mention it until 1907. By comparison, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is an overnight sensation. Originally published in French (when we first reviewed it), Mr Piketty’s vast tome on income-and-wealth distribution has become a bestseller since the English translation appeared in March. In America it is the top-selling book on Amazon, fiction included.
The book’s success has a lot to do with being about the right subject at the right time. Inequality has suddenly become a fevered topic, especially in America. Having for years dismissed the gaps between the haves and have-nots as a European obsession, Americans, stung by the excesses of Wall Street, are suddenly talking about the rich and redistribution. Hence the attraction of a book which argues that growing wealth concentration is inherent to capitalism and recommends a global tax on wealth as the progressive solution.
To be fair R.A. published a revelatory set of essays on Piketty’s book. The first essay in this valuable set of commentaries on ‘Capital’.
LAST year Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics and a renowned expert on global inequality, published a book titled “Capital in the Twenty-first Century”—in French. It will be released in English on March 10th. We reviewed the book earlier this year, but it is detailed and important enough, in our opinion, to deserve additional discussion. We will therefore be publishing a series of posts over the next few weeks—live-blogging the book, as it were—to draw out its arguments at slightly greater length. Starting today, with the book’s introduction.
Capital, as I will refer to Mr Piketty’s book from here on out, is an incredibly ambitious book. The author has self-consciously put the book forward as a companion to, and perhaps the intellectual equal of, Karl Marx’s Capital. Like Marx, Mr Piketty aims to provide a political economy theory of everything. More specifically, he attempts to re-establish distribution as the central issue in economics, and in doing so to reorient our perceptions of the trajectory of growth in the modern economic era. Mr Piketty’s great advantage in attempting all this, relative to past peers, is a wealth of data and analysis, compiled by himself and others over the last 15 or so years.
This newspaper has never had any interest in ‘inequality’. Look at this depiction of Jeremy Corbyn, the foremost political reformer in British politics. Who attacked the very ‘inequality’ of both New Labour and the Tories, that Beddoes finds so compelling. This is pure political pose!
A selection of quotations from the Beddoes essay is instructive, of the level of political posturing, wedded to an unslakable hypocrisy-the very life-blood of this newspaper! As Beddoes moves from imperative to imperative, as she describes it, I will try to be brief and make some choices that will incite criticism:
On Globalization:
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Although globalisation will still be about goods and capital crossing borders, people will travel less. The Asian countries that controlled the virus most effectively were also those that shut their borders most strictly. Their experience will shape others’ policies. Border restrictions and quarantines will stay in place long after covid-19 caseloads fall. And even after tourism restarts, migration will remain much harder. That will dent the prospects of poor countries that rely on flows of remittances from their migrant workers abroad, reinforcing the damage done by the pandemic itself. Some 150m people are likely to fall into extreme poverty by the end of 2021.
Global commerce will be conducted against an inauspicious geopolitical backdrop. Mr Trump’s mercurial mercantilism will be gone, but America’s suspicion of China will not end with the departure of “Tariff Man”, as the president was proud to be known. Tariffs, now levied on two-thirds of imports from China, will remain, as will restrictions on its technology companies. The splintering of the digital world and its supply chain into two parts, one Chinese-dominated and the other American-led, will continue. Sino-American rivalry will not be the only fissiparous influence on globalisation. Chastened by their reliance on imported medical supplies and other critical goods (often from China), governments from Europe to India will redefine the scope of “strategic industries” that must be protected. State aid to support this new industrial policy has become and will remain ubiquitous.
With the West battered and China crowing, plenty of pundits (including in this publication) will declare the pandemic to be the death knell for a Western-led world order. That will prove premature. For all its “vaccine diplomacy”, China inspires fear and suspicion more than admiration. And for all his determination to bring China centre-stage, its president, Xi Jinping, shows little appetite for genuine global leadership. Although Mr Trump’s contempt for allies and forays into transactional diplomacy have shaken trust in the American-led global order, they have not destroyed it.
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On Biden, as the political antidote to a ‘dangerous Leftism’ = Left-Wing Social Democrats. Medicare for all is not an integral part of ‘Bidenomics’ (Call this neologism what it is a dull-witted placeholder for actual argument)
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But he could be just the right person. Mr Biden’s policy platform is ambitious enough. Behind the slogan of “build back better” is a bold, but not radical, attempt to marry short-term stimulus with hefty investment in green infrastructure, research and technology to dramatically accelerate America’s energy transformation. From expanding health-care access to improving social insurance, the social contract proposed by Bidenomics is a 21st-century version of the Progressive era: bold reform without dangerous leftism.
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This selective quotation, from the final paragraph of Beddoes’ essay is less that enthusiastic about Biden, that descends into demotic moralizing.
… Mr Biden himself is too focused on repairing yesterday’s world rather than building tomorrow’s, and too keen to protect existing jobs and prop up ossified multilateral institutions to push for the kind of change that is needed. The biggest danger is not the leftist lurch that many Republicans fear—it is of inaction, timidity and stasis. For America and the world, that would be a terrible shame.
Beddoes is like so many self-appointed political technocrats ,obsessed with ‘policy’, rather than what effect those policies have on human lives. Its ‘as if’ these technos are in a laboratory, rather than the unpredictable, and utterly ungovernable human world. This was called ‘Social Engineering’, in the days of the Soviets, but not a subject that the once ascendet Neo-Liberals, and their fellow travelers, would dare to broach about their own Utopianism, now in a state of ungovernable collapse.
Mr. Edsall’s opening sentence: ‘The Democratic Party is struggling with internal contradictions, as its mixed performance on Election Day makes clear.’
It doesn’t dawn on this writer, that the ‘internal contradictions’ facing the Democrats is about a conflict between the New Democrats, Neo-Liberals, and a resurgent New Deal Democrats, following the 2008 Financial Collapse. Not to mention the rise and destruction of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ by Bloomberg and Obama. Or the rise of Piketty, as, perhaps, its intellectual contemporary ? The next sentence should not surprise:
Analysts and insiders are already talking — sometimes in apocalyptic terms — about how hard it will be for Joe Biden to hold together the coalition that elected him as the 46th president.
Mr. Edsall frames his comments via the opinions of these ‘anaysists and insiders’. And quite impressive they are! Call these political actors, what they are ‘Technocrats’ as is Mr. Edsall. But his cast of players is epic, like Cecil B. De Mille’s cinematic hyperbole.
With all the rhetorical ballast, not to speak of a rampant appeal to authority, Edsall ends with well worn political cliches, in these two paragraphs:
It is the very determination of each of these blocs to place a priority on its own agenda that casts doubt on the ability of the Democratic Party to unite in support of the kind of economic platform Rodrik describes, a step that would require the subordination of narrower interests in favor of the party’s collective interest. Unfortunately, this demand for a willingness to sacrifice or compromise factional interests comes at a time when there has been a steady erosion of a national commitment to collective responsibility.
In a way, this is yet another tragic legacy of the Trump administration. Liberal advocacy groups have become more in-your-face, more intense, partly in reaction to the intransigence of the Trump regime, a development that is in turn irrevocably linked to the intensity of the conflicts across the country and within the Democratic Party itself.
The fact that Neo-Liberalism, in America, from Ronald Reagan to the political present is ignored. The ‘as if’ here is that the economic collapse of 2008 was, somehow, not about the very failure of that Economic/Political Mirage of the Free Market. That was to be the beginning of a New Age of prosperity, much like the post-war boom, and its twin the Cold War, and a Defense Industry that fueled that prosperity.
It was the Clintons and Joe Biden, the New Democrats, whose: ‘The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996’ , the 1994 ‘Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act’ and Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999. These laws Reagan could not enact , but the Clintons and their ally Joe Biden did, with catestprohic effect.
Mr. Edsall wan attempt to diagnose the state of the Democratic Party’s ‘internal contradictions’, fails to confront the betrayal that the Clintons and Joe Biden are to that New Deal Tradition!
“Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.”
And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?
“That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.”
And in our case it effectively justifies a population transfer.
“That’s what emerges.”
And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The burning fields and the devastated villages of the Nakba?
“You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that’s peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well.”
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