Archive for the ‘government’ Category
on fascism, buffoonery, criminality and a pretty crappy political system
On asking myself what fascism is, considering that it’s quite topical at present, my first answer is ‘nothing much’, by which I mean, on an intellectual level. The standard fascists of the past, Mussolini and Hitler, could never be described as intellectuals, and nor could Trump, though all might be described as clever in their extremely self-regarding ways. Good old AI describes fascism as ‘a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology characterised by a dictatorial leader, a centralised, autocratic government, militarism, and suppression of opposition’. This certainly describes much of the current Trump playbook, though it says little about the psychology of the typical ‘fascist’ leader, who, it seems to me, is always noisy, extremely thin-skinned, and has huge problems with listening to voices other than his own (though of course it needn’t be an exclusively male thing, but few women have ever been given the political power that the aforementioned men have been given).
The term didn’t exist before the 20th century, but of course the character type certainly did. It was apparently born out of the first world war – think of Hitler’s war experience; but it was Mussolini in particular who was central to the term, founding the Partito Nazionale Fascista, (PNF) in the early 1920s. It involved wholesale militarisation of the state, ultra-nationalism, and was of course molto macho. With Trump the draft dodger, however, fascism has taken on a different character. Definitely not so macho (many of his fellow-travellers are women), and focussed more on bullying his own critics, as well as a collection of ‘outsiders’ and competitors, and generally seeing the world in terms of win-lose scenarios, with a brutal edge. Whether or not this can be called fascism is no doubt an open question, and it isn’t of huge interest to me. It sure isn’t what I would call humanism (I was formerly involved with the SA Humanists), or a fair, inclusive, healthy or effective approach to politics.
So, much as I’m depressed with current US politics, and have long found their politico-social system far less impressive than most United Staters seem to think it is, I can’t help but hope it can be reformed and improved, considering the power that nation wields globally.
Firstly the US presidential system is quite obviously a bad system – obvious to most people outside the US. It gives a ridiculous degree of power to one individual, with limited checks and balances. Not only the ridiculous level of immunity, and the over-reaching pardoning powers, but the power to choose any unelected person as ‘running mate’, a person who can become President if something unforeseen happens, as has occurred in the past. This is clearly not democratic. Another problem is the influence of the almighty dollar. Campaign financing is very inadequately regulated and has been rising steadily over the past 30 to 40 years. Obviously this favours the rich in a nation with a larger rich-poor gap than any other democratic nation.
This one-man rule (it has always been a man and I can’t see that changing in the foreseeable) seems unable to be stopped even by clear evidence of criminal activity (Trump was convicted on 34 counts of felony business fraud re hush money payments in 2024; was found to have sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll in two lawsuits, in which Caroll was awarded $88.3 million dollars in damages, the case being currently under appeal; was indicted on 40 felony counts related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents related to his 2016-2020 presidency; and of course Trump’s involvement in the violent January 6 2021 insurrection in Washington DC and subsequent fraudulent attempts to claim that the election had been won by Trump, have never received proper legal treatment from the court system, due to his re-election in 2024). It’s surely obvious that no other nation in the English-speaking world, or throughout western Europe, would have allowed such an obvious reprobate to continue to play a role in their political affairs. (I must also say that the Wikipedia articles on the above-mentioned Trump ‘activities’ are impressively detailed and damning).
So what is to be done? Is there any hope for a nation that allows such a felon to be their president twice, with no doubt the hope of evading justice by buying a third term? And the way things are going over there, he might just succeed.
I have many good, and screamingly obvious, ideas about how the US polity could be overhauled, but I’m absolutely certain none of them will be implemented. In order for that to happen, the nation needs to be far more modest about itself, and to subscribe to a philosophy of constant renewal, to match the renewal of social values recognised by most other WEIRD nations, and by some progressives within the US.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned some of these ideas before in this blog, but… first, scrap the presidential system, which is beyond repair. Giving such vast powers to one person, who doesn’t even have to subscribe to the discipline of a political party and its collectively devised platform, more or less understood by the voting public, or at least there for every voter to consider, is highly problematic. Such a system is tailor-made for wannabe dictators. Nobody in Australia, where I live, or Britain, where I was born, goes into politics hoping to be a dictator – they would have to win over their local electorate, as a member of a political party (if campaigning as an independent they would’ve had to gain a local reputation through commercial or community activity), and then, if elected, would have to impress their party colleagues vis-à-vis their ideas, their communication skills, all the factors that make for a good team captain. This isn’t to say all ‘team captains’ have been effective or anything much more than disastrous -in Australia I can think of Mark Latham for Labor, or Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott for the Liberals (aka Conservatives – yes, it’s confusing: it’s about individual liberty and small government – think Thatcher’s ‘no such thing as society’).
So if the US scrapped its much-worshipped Presidential system, what then? It already has a functioning Congressional-Parliamentary system, elected every four years (called mid-term elections). It seems to have become increasingly partisan, whereas in Australia, cross-bench numbers (independents or ‘mini-parties’), with stops and starts, have grown. In Australia, our national elections vaguely resemble the US mid-terms, in which we elect local electorate hopefuls to the parliament (or re-elect incumbents), most of whom are members of the right or left party. The leaders of those parties are chosen, and can be dumped, by their elected peers in the party. Thus we have a Prime Minister and an Opposition Leader, working in a parliament, defending their policies and attacking the policies of the opposition, as of course occurs in the US Congress. We don’t have this extra, surely unnecessary, layer of power, an individual who sits in the White House like a king in his palace, surrounded by courtiers and flunkies, appointing various unelected ‘Secretaries’ to positions of massive power and authority (Treasury, State, Defence, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Education, etc, etc, – and also members of the judiciary – all subject at least to Congressional approval). The same king also has massive immunity and pardoning powers.
What could go wrong?
Anybody who thinks this is a good, let alone great, political system has surely to be certifiably insane, or born in the USA. Propaganda, anyone?
I’ve touched on just some of the problems of the US system. There’s also a disastrous ideology of ‘individualism’, in which you’re on your own, you’ll get very little government help in terms of education, health and general welfare, leading to a massive ‘left behind’ population susceptible to obvious charlatans like Trump. Hilary Clinton once called them ‘deplorables’, an indication of the problems they face vis-à-vis the wealthy elites on both sides of the political divide. The nation seems to have no shame about having the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world (this is always arguable, as naturally the world’s vilest nations don’t come clean about their rates), and some of the most disgusting prisons.
All in all, it’s pretty depressing, and I don’t see any change on the horizon. Yes I’m happy I wasn’t born there – if so, I would surely have been marked as another deplorable, given my background. I just hope the country doesn’t infect others with its disease. We all have enough problems…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_(election_obstruction_case)
on neoliberalism, libertarianism and free will
some of the Grates of neoliberalism
Rousseau was wrong, humans are not born free. In fact this statement is pretty well meaningless, since our birth is dependent on the activity of those who conceived us, as well as those who helped our passage into the light of day, or the light of a home or hospital room. As to our parents, their genes and those of their relatives will determine our height and our general physiognomy, which our culture will deem to be attractive, hideous or somewhere in between. That culture and its subcultures will also determine the language we first speak, the food we are given, and the home, be it a mansion or a tent, we find ourselves living in. Our gender too will be determined, in a somewhat mysterious way.
The first few years of our life will be hugely determinative. We might be coddled, we might be thoughtfully raised according to the Montessori method, or we might be neglected or abused. We ourselves will have no say regarding those options. We know that those first few years will be hugely impactful for the rest of our lives. The Dunedin longitudinal study of personality types (among many other things), which I’ve written about previously, identifies five – Undercontrolled, Inhibited, Confident, Reserved, and Well-adjusted – which are generally recognised from the age of three, and are ‘observed to be relatively stable throughout life’. The study has been ongoing since the 1970s. As Aristotle is reputed to have said, ‘Give me the child at seven and I will show you the man’. This presumably also includes female men. Whether Aristotle meant that he could mould the child into whatever he wanted, or that the child already had the features of the man, is slightly unclear, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest the latter is true.
So where then does individual freedom, so highly valued by so many, come in? What do we make of the libertarianism touted by certain politicians, philosophers and economists? And what, exactly, is ‘neoliberalism’?
I’ll look at the last question first. Neoliberalism is associated with some late 20th century economic theorists, such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, though it harks back to Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations. It isn’t particularly new, or innovative, and it largely ignores the vast constraints (and advantages), mental, physical, cultural, familial, financial and so on, that we are subject to from the very beginnings of our lives. Here’s how Wikipedia jargonises it:
Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, labor market flexibilization, economic globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending.
People with a university education – that’s to say, a minority of people – might be able to understand some of these terms. Those who understand none of them have my sympathy, as they will most certainly be neoliberalism’s victims.
A little anecdote from my primary school days. I was one of the smarter students, naturally, and I remember the teacher asking another pupil to spell a not particularly difficult word. I remember the pupil’s name, Andrew Binney, and I’ve often wondered what became of him. Andrew tried, and his efforts caused titters around the room. But you could see he was really trying. The teacher persisted, not in a bullying way, but patiently, offering clues, and the scene went on for an excruciating amount of time, it seemed to me, because it was clear that Andrew just didn’t know. Eventually he too started to titter, and the teacher gave up on him. It wasn’t dyslexia – Andrew was just as clueless in arithmetic, etc. He wasn’t free to be as smart as the other pupils. I would go further and say that nobody is free to be smarter than they are, though many smart people might strive to be smarter than they are, by reading, studying, hobnobbing with other smart people and so on. But that’s what it is to be smart.
Neoliberalism is a lot like libertarianism, and there’s a question about how ‘neo’ it is. The idea seems to be to reduce government influence in all spheres where it might be expected to have an influence – education, healthcare, housing – just about anything to do with human welfare. All of these things should be ‘marketed’, taken care of by the market. And what does this mean exactly? What are markets, and perhaps more importantly, who owns them? Think of the various items and systems we need to sustain a viable modern human life. Homes, schools, food, electricity, communication systems, infrastructure, clean air and water, hospitals and healthcare systems. Most if not all of us have been born into these systems, barely aware of their life-sustaining existence. They are the necessities of a successful, even viable, life in our modern world. They constitute our modern society.
But neoliberals contest this. Take this 1987 quote from a doyenne of neoliberalism:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the government must house me!’ And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There’s no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
Margaret Thatcher, 1987 interview, quoted in The Invisible Doctrine, George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison, 2024, p 62
This is classic neoliberalism. It’s also classically inane. The late British PM would have us believe that she obtained her language, her upper-crust accent, the clothes she wore, the homes she lived in, the food she consumed, the education she obtained, the transport she availed herself of, and any or all of the jobs she worked at, from either herself or her family. This is obviously nonsense. To take just language – if this is solely provided by our families, there would be no possibility of different families speaking the same language. Language is entirely a socio-cultural phenomenon, that we all plug into, first at home, then in our immediate environment, then at school. As to any homes she lived in, her family didn’t build them, they didn’t act as architects, stone-cutters and bricklayers, as well as carpenters, plumbers. electricians and so forth – they plugged in to the wider society to provide these things. Cities, with their roads, bridges, vehicles, public transport systems, parks, entertainment centres, are clearly not the products of individuals and their families, they’re the result of planning on a large social scale. And I could go on, and on and on. I know I’m belabouring the point, but it’s astonishing how many people just don’t get it. How can they be captured by this imbecilic ideology? Qui bono?
The answer is fairly obvious. Success in the developed world is largely measured by wealth, and that means accumulating as much of it as possible. A business person is described as ‘successful’ entirely in terms of that accumulation.
I asked earlier who owns the markets. With the current fashion for limited, non-interventionist government, even on the left – and this has been the case, in the WEIRD world, since at least the late 70s – they have been owned by private enterprises, with profit as their motive. To maximise those profits, people and resources need to be manipulated and massaged to the maximum.
This is the world that Andrew Binney, and others like him, have grown up in. I can’t imagine him standing much of a chance in such a world. We need to do better than this – we owe it to our society, in all its variety.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz
George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison, The invisible doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism, 2024
They’re our servants, remember
Onya, Ben!
Having just read the US Special Counsel’s indictment against that thing wot once was Prez, or 165 pages of it at least (I keep hearing that it’s 180-odd pages, so where’s the rest?), I must say I’m not at all surprised. I mean I keep hearing the media using phrases like ‘bombshell after bombshell’, as if old Drivelmouth has changed a jot since he was Young Drivelmouth (and before that Baby Dribblemouth). So all the lies and threats and pathetic bluster catalogued in the indictment just reinforced my disgust and astonishment that this lump of faeces was allowed to become the leader of the world’s most powerful, and therefore potentially dangerous, nation on Earth.
I was, however, very much heartened by a quote that Jack Smith took from one of the USA’s most enlightened 18th century figures. But before presenting it here, some background.
I’ve written before about how politicians are public servants, not our bosses, and that they shouldn’t be put up on pedestals, and be given special powers – massive immunity, massive pardoning powers, power to shut down the government, power to keep themselves separate from the elected body (the Parliament or the Congress), power to surround themselves with their own unelected courtiers, shut up in a White Palace, power to select Judges and Justices, and Secretary of This or That, at their own whim. And this strong feeling I had about an ‘I alone can fix it’ four-year-dictatorship, and the danger it entailed, not least because of the effect such massive power has upon weak minds such as that of Old Drivelmouth, this strong feeling came rushing back to me a few years ago when I heard about France’s President Macron’s retort to a teenager who was presumably criticising some policy or other to Macron’s face – ‘call me Mr President’. Of course, this was an improvement on having the lad hung drawn and quartered in public, which would once have been the case (and that’s no joke), but still, I was white with rage at Macron’s effrontery – and immediately had him skinned alive in my mind, such is my own anti-authoritarianism.
And so, I come to the finest line in Jack Smith’s indictment, which had nothing to do with Old Drivelmouth’s specific crimes.
“In free Governments,” Benjamin Franklin explained, “the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors [and] sovereigns.”
GOVERNMENT’S MOTION FOR IMMUNITY DETERMINATIONS, p92
Thank you thank you thank you Ben. My sentiments exactly!
more on the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, and our future…
women of the world – heed this call!
I’ve written about this august institution probably too often before, but a recent conversation with a friend has prompted me to reflect further upon it. After all, it holds sway, even here in Australia, more than any other Christian denomination. It seems to me that the movement away from Catholicism to other Christian denominations is often a first step towards accepting a naturalistic understanding of the world (I adopt here Sean Carroll’s use of ‘naturalism’ as a more positive term than ‘atheism’, for reasons that are hopefully obvious).
During this conversation, I mentioned some rather shocking facts I read about in Angela Saini’s book The Patriarchs, from which I will quote:
In 1889, activists in the United States faced considerable resistance from local leaders when they tried to petition the state of Delaware to raise the age of consent to sex for girls from seven to eighteen. The age of consent in the state had already been lowered in 1871 to seven years from ten. In Georgia, the age of consent remained ten until 1918.
.. and as I often say, we tend to live in an eternal present, when in fact things were often very different in unexpected places not so very long ago.
So my friend then told me that the age of consent in the Vatican was ten until quite recently (ten years ago). I’ve since checked, and it was twelve, which is bad enough. The ‘country’ also has an exception – “the offence does not exist if the sexual acts take place within a marriage”, and marriages are quite legal there for girls from the age of fourteen. It hardly needs to be stated that no fourteen-year-old has anywhere near the neurological development of an adult. And one also should ask, why 16 for boys and 14 for girls, when after all it is the girl who risks pregnancy, especially considering the Catholic opposition to contraception.
The Catholic Church is a bastion of extreme patriarchy, but it endures better than any other Christian denomination. The reasons are clear enough. Unlike other denominations, the earliest of which were born of the Reformation in the 16th century (including Anglicanism, which is tied to its inglorious beginnings – an increasingly porcine monarch’s desire to be rid of his wife), Catholicism has claims to be the original Church, dating back nearly two millennia, and boasting a catalogue of saints, relics, architectural wonders, and above all, rituals. As such it is seen to form whole cultures as much as informing them, just as Islam is woven into the formation of many Middle Eastern cultures. Many people who rarely enter a church consider themselves Catholic – they see it as part of their identity.
And yet, it is fading slowly, here in Australia, and in western Europe. It needs to do so, of course, for women to rise to the dominant position in our society. And everything points to the ‘outlying’ WEIRD countries leading the way in this project (which is not yet a project – it may take a few more centuries for a public declaration of intent). Countries like Australia, New Zealand and the Scandinavian and Baltic nations – if nations in today’s sense are still in existence in the year 2500. For these are regions that wear their culture most lightly.
It’s best to take the long view, as countries like Australia often take in immigrants from heavily acculturated and patriarchal regions. In this respect they’re a ‘mixed bag’, torn between wanting to escape the most oppressive or ‘poisoned’ aspects of their culture in the old country, and wanting to maintain those aspects of the culture they see as constituting their identity. Assimilation into the more WEIRD forms of the new country, the ways of which are described in Joseph Henrich’s book The Weirdest People in the World, will be a generational process.
Meanwhile, how do we combat the patriarchal attitudes of the Catholic Church more directly? Of course, revelations of widespread child abuse, highlighted by the 2015 Academy Award-winning film Spotlight, and exposed by investigative journalists worldwide, have played their part, but the Church, even under the more responsive leadership of Pope Francis, can reasonably claim that abusers are in a minority, with other denominations, especially ‘evangelicals’, engaging in similar levels of misconduct. Heavily hierarchical systems are indeed, generally infected by abuse, sexual or otherwise.
However, it is extreme patriarchy that is the issue for me. The Church supposedly derives its power from being the earthly intermediary of the heavenly father and son gods of Christianity. So we have a six-level hierarchy of maledom – at the top is the father-and-son act of God and Jesus, with the second tier being the all-male Popes or Papas. Third comes the all-male Cardinals, fourth the all-male Archbishops, fifth the all-male Bishops, and sixth the all-male Priests. With all of this hierarchy pressing down upon them, it’s a wonder that female parishioners are able to breathe, let alone carry out their good works on behalf of their male masters.
The good thing is that the Church is taken far less seriously as a moral arbiter in the WEIRD world these days – which explains why it has tended to focus its outreach on the non-WEIRD world in recent decades. However, it is still a very wealthy organisation, and very much part of the Establishment in countries like Australia. Two of our recent Prime Ministers, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott were educated at Catholic schools, as well as other major political figures such as Barnaby Joyce and Bill Shorten. In 2019 the progressive think tank Per Capita produced a paper, The Way In: Representation in the Australian Parliament. The paper’s author, Abigail Lewis, looked at various elements of parliamentarians’ background, including gender, ethnicity and education, over a 30-year period from 1988 to 2018. This paragraph interested me:
Graduates from government schools were under-represented in 1988, and they are still under-represented today. Then and now, MPs are much more likely to be privately educated than the broader public, but an unexpected trend has been the surge in MPs who were educated at Catholic schools. A full quarter of 2018’s Parliament received a Catholic education.
This brings to mind, naturally enough, the remark of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Brotherhood -‘Give me a child till he is seven years old, and I will show you the man’. He had no interest in seven-year-old girls, obviously, but the Church has since been invested for some time in girls’ education – generally separated from that of boys, for reasons unknown. I’ve written about the generous government support of Catholic and other private schools previously. There seems an obvious connection between this generous funding and the over-representation of the Catholic and private school-educated amongst parliamentarians and government functionaries.
These things will change over time, but it’s hard not to feel impatient. Why sex-segregated schools when there are virtually no sex-segregated fields of employment? What is the underlying purpose of Church-based schools for young children? In a more participatory democracy of the future, these questions and others like them will be asked more frequently, I fervently hope.
References
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: how men came to rule, 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Europe
Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, 2020
on national and other origins, and good leadership
So Mr Pudding was going around saying that Ukraine wasn’t a real country for some time before he decided that he needed to abolish its nationhood once and for all, a decision that he clearly made well before the actual invasion of February 24 2022, as the long build-up on the border told us. The fact that he chose to call it a special operation was also a sign that he’d convinced himself that he was simply clarifying a border or territorial issue.
Well, this issue of real countries and not-so-real countries has exercised me for a while, I suppose ever since I started to read history, which was a long time ago.
How do nations come to be nations? Well, there clearly isn’t any general formula, but it more often than not involves warfare, rape, dispossession, and suppression of militarily weaker language groups and cultures. It rarely makes for fun reading. I could probably close my eyes, spin a globe of the earth around and if my finger stopped it on any piece of land, there would be a tale of horror to tell, in terms of the human history of that land, in, say, the last thousand or two years.
I should also say that nations, or states, have been phenomenally successful in terms of the spread of human nature and human culture. My argument against libertarians who inveigh against their bogeyman, the state, and its taxes and regulations and encroachments on our personal liberties, is to point out that we are the most hypersocial mammalian species on the planet. We didn’t get to be 8 billion people, dominating the biosphere, for better or worse, by virtue of our personal liberties. Those personal liberties didn’t provide us with the language we speak, the basic education we’ve been given, the cities and towns and homes we live in, the roads and the cars and bikes and planes we use to get around, and the jobs we’ve managed to secure over the years. All of us living today have been shaped to a considerable degree by the nation-state we live in, and our place in its various hierarchies.
So you could say that nations have become a necessary evil, what with the crooked timber of humanity and all. But it’s surely an indisputable fact that some nations are better than others. But how do we measure this? And let’s not forget the idea, advanced rather cynically and opportunistically by Mr Pudding, that some nations might be more legitimate than others. Afghanistan, to take an example almost at random, was for centuries a vaguely delineated region of various ethnicities – Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and others. Warlords from without and within have brought disintegration upon unification upon disintegration to its ‘nationhood’, while its mostly subsistence-level inhabitants have tried to avoid or ignore the mayhem. It’s likely that most of them don’t consider themselves Afghani at all, but stick to their own ethnicity. The Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan, for example, don’t pay much attention to the border that separates them from their Pashtun neighbours in northern Pakistan, so I’ve heard. And one has to ask oneself – why should they? The Durand line, separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, was created only in the late 19th century – by the British. So, is Afghanistan a real country?
And since I find that Afghanistan has a population of almost 40 million, let me compare it to a nation of similar population. Poland is a north-eastern European nation, inhabiting a region long contested between two expansionist states – Prussia/Germany to the west and Russia to the east. One of the largest countries in Europe, it occupies less than half the area of Afghanistan. It had expansionist ambitions itself a few centuries ago, as the senior partner in the Polish-Lithuanian federation, which dominated the Baltic and often posed a threat to Russia, but in the 20th century it suffered terribly in the second world war, and fell under the domination of the Soviet Union in the aftermath. Of course, if you take the history back to the pre-nation period there were various cultures and tribes, generally warring, with the Polans being the largest. By the Middle Ages, this region had become an established and reasonably sophisticated monarchy, though often struggling to maintain its territory against the Prussians, the Mongols and Kievan Rus. Naturally, its borders expanded and contracted with the fortunes of war. The region, though, reached relative heights of prosperity when, as mentioned, it became the dominant partner of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, for a time the largest state in Europe. Its fortunes ebbed and flowed in the 16th and 17th centuries, but at the end of the 18th it was partitioned between the ascendent powers in the region, Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Poland was finally reconstituted as a nation after the 1914-18 war, but arguably the worst was yet to come…
So again, one might question – is Poland a real country? As a working-class fellow myself, my sympathies go to the ordinary people who grow up gradually discovering what land they’ve landed up in, and the various vicissitudes that have given it the territory and the borders that it currently has.
This is the central point of this post. People are more important than nations. It’s ridiculous to compare them really. And, without getting too much into the free will issue here, it’s obvious that none of us get to choose our parents, or the place and time of our birth. That old philosophical chestnut of being thrown into this world has always rung true for me, and that’s why I don’t get nationalism, though I understand nations as a social evolutionary development.
I’ve been lucky. I was born in Scotland in the 1950s and was taken, with my siblings, to Australia, on the other side of the world. I’ve never seen warfare. I’ve never lived in a thugocracy, and I don’t know if I’d have been aware of living in a thugocracy, had that been the case – that’s to say, if I’d never experienced an open society, in the Popperian sense. I could’ve been born in the 1950s in Vietnam, In which case I may well have been killed in my village or field during what the locals call the American War, and others call the Indo-Chinese War, in which upwards of 2 million died. Or I could have been born in the Soviet Union, thinking who knows what right now about Putin’s treatment of his own and other countries. And so on. If we could all bear in mind that our circumstances, in large, are not of our own making, we might think in less nationalistic terms and in more humane terms. We might even begin to understand and feel a modicum of sympathy for the hill-top gated-community denizens who have grown up convinced of their natural superiority.
So I think in more personal terms. How well are nations, states, communities, cultures serving their members? Whether we measure this in terms of the human rights universalised after the world wars of the 20th century, or the Aristotelian concept of Eudaimonia as reframed and refined over the centuries, or some other valid criteria, it’s surely obvious that some regions are doing better than others, by all reasonable measures. For the sake of human thriving, we need to sympathetically encourage open societies, as well as to stand up en bloc, against bullying and coercion everywhere. There is, of course, no place – no culture or society – where such behaviour is entirely absent, but it’s worth noting that the world’s most authoritarian states, including all 59 of those classified as such by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index (I prefer the term ‘thugocracy’), are led by men, whereas, of the top ten democracies, as judged by the compilers of that index, more than half are led by women. Now, there’s no doubt a ‘chicken-and-egg’ issue at play here. That’s to say, do inclusive, participatory, diverse and humane democracies encourage female leadership, or vice versa? The effect, I’m sure, is synergistic, and it’s a positive effect that needs to be spruiked around the world by everyone with the power to do so.
democracy, women and bonobos
Jacinta Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand
Some people out there might not think that democracy is the best system, but I’d say that, given the crooked timber of humanity and all that, it’s probably the best we can come up with. One of its major problems, as I see it, is its adversarial, or partisan nature. Modern democracies are generally about two major parties, left and right, with power swinging on a more or less regular basis from one side to another. On the other hand, many European nations have evolved multi-party systems, with fragile coalitions always threatening to break apart, and negotiations often bogging down and ending with decisions nobody is particularly happy about, or so it seems. While this can be a problem, so can the opposite, when one party’s decisions and initiatives are swept aside holus bolus by a new government with a polar opposite ideology.
When I occasionally check out social media, I’m disheartened by the number of commentators for whom party x can do no right, and party y can do no wrong. It almost seems as if everybody wants to live in a one-party state – their party. This is a problem for a state which is diverse and necessarily interconnected. That’s to say, for any modern state. And of course there are other problems with representative democracies – generally related to wealth and power. Parliamentarians are rarely truly representative of their constituents, each vote rarely represents one value, and cronyism has always been rife.
And then there’s the maleness of it all. It’s not just that the percentage of women in parliament is always less than the percentage in the general population, but the movers and shakers in the business community, notorious for their pushy lobbying, are invariably male. And then there’s the military, an ultra-male bastion which must have its place…
So here’s a ridiculous thought experiment. Imagine a cast-iron law comes in, dropped from the heavens, that for the next 200 years, no male is allowed to be part of any government of any stripe. Women must, and will, make up every political decision-making body on the planet. Sure they can have the odd male advisor and helpmeet, but they seem to find female advice more congenial and useful. And let’s imagine that in this thought experiment, the males don’t mind their secondary roles at all. They just see it as the natural order of things. After two hundred years, from the point of our current ever-expanding technological and scientific knowledge (which women and men will continue to fully participate in), where will be in terms of war and peace, and our custodianship of the biosphere?
I told you this was ridiculous, but you don’t have to be a professional historian to realise that a more or less unspoken ban on female participation in government has existed historically in many countries for a lot more than a couple of centuries. And we’ve survived – that’s to say, those of us that have survived. Sorry about the tens of millions of Chinese that Mao starved to death in his Great Leap Forward. Sorry about the genocides of Stalin, Hitler, Leo Victor, Talaat Pasha, Pol Pot and Suharto, not to mention Genghis Khan and countless other known or unknown historical figures, again invariably male.
So returning to that thought experiment, we could take the easy option and say we don’t know how things would turn out – certainly not in any detail. But that’s surely bullshit. We know, don’t we? We know that the world, and not just the human world, would be a far far better place in the event of female leadership than it is today.
The evidence is already coming in, as creepingly as female leadership. I recently learned of the Democracy Index, a sophisticated worldwide survey of nations conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the people who publish the Economist magazine, among other things. The survey annually measures and ranks 168 nations according to their democratic bona fides, or lack thereof. According to Wikipedia, ‘The index is based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories, measuring pluralism, civil liberties and political culture’. The nations are divided broadly into four ‘types’. The top 21 are described as ‘full democracies’, the second category are the ‘flawed democracies’, the third are ‘hybrid regimes’ and the last and largest grouping are the ‘authoritarian regimes’. But when I looked at the very top ranking countries I found something very interesting, which prompted me to do a little more research.
In 2017, just under 10% of the world’s leaders were female. The percentage may have grown since then, but clearly not by much. We could be generous and say 13-14% at present. There are some difficulties in defining ‘nation’ as well as ‘leadership’, but let’s go with that number. So I had a look at the rankings on the Democracy Index, and the leadership of various countries on the index and what I found was very enlightening. Of the 21 countries rated as full democracies on the Democracy Index, seven of them were led by women. That’s 33%, quite out of proportion to the percentage of female leaders in general. But it gets better, or worse, depending in how you look at it. Of the top ten democracies on the list, six were led by women. Sixty percent of the top ten. Narrow it down still further, and we find that four of the top five democratic nations – which, in order, are Norway, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden and Iceland, are led by women – 80 per cent. It’s almost ridiculous how successful women are at making things work.
So what about the bottom of the barrel – the Afghanistans, the Burmas, etc. Of the 59 nations characterised as authoritarian by the Democracy Index, (though I prefer to call them thugocracies), zero are led by women. That’s nothing to crow about.
So, bonobos. The females, who are as small compared to their male counterparts as female humans are, dominate through solidarity. The result is less stress, less fighting, less infanticide, less killing and rape, less territoriality, and more sharing, more togetherness, more bonding, more love, if you care to call it that.
We don’t know anything much about the last common ancestor we share equally with chimps and bonobos. We don’t know about how violent Homo erectus or Homo habilis or the Australopithecines were, within their own species. We may never know. We do know that chimp troupes have gone to war with each other, with unbridled savagery, and we have evidence, from sites such as the Pit of Bones in northern Spain, of human-on-human killing from near half a million years ago. Our supposedly great book of moral teaching, the Hebrew Bible, describes many scenes of slaughter, sometimes perpetrated by the god himself. So it seems obvious that we’ve gone the way of the chimpanzee. Our worst leaders seem determined to continue the tradition. Our best, however, are making a difference. We need to make their numbers grow. Let’s make those female leaders multiply and see what happens. It may just save our species, and many others.
References
A bonobo world and other impossibilities 25: women and warfare (2)
Number of women leaders around the world has grown, but they’re still a small group
getting wee Donny 1: 2016 campaign finance violations
one of wee Donny’s ‘reimbursement’ cheques – a smoking gun?
Canto: So we both agree that free will is a myth, and that this has major implications for crime and punishment, but we’re also both human – at least I am – and we want to see nasties being punished, and in fact we delight in it. As a person with a lifelong loathing of bullies, I’ve too often fantasised about bullying those bullies, even torturing them endlessly. And I do wonder if my sudden interest in US politics from the time wee Donny looked like he might bullshit his way into their presidency has more to do with gunning for his downfall than anything else.
Jacinta: Yes we think similarly but we have the capacity also to step back and be more analytical and curious about a system that allows such an obvious scammer to take up the very top position in what so many ‘Americans’ – and I put that in quotes coz I’ve heard quite a few inhabitants of that double continent getting annoyed that these ‘Americans’ refer to themselves in that exclusivist way…
Canto: But what should we call them? Yanks? Uessians? United Staters?
Jacinta: Yeah, good, let’s call them United Staters from now on. So many United Staters think they have the world’s greatest nation…
Canto: As the Brits did in their days of glory in the 19th century…
Jacinta: True, the myth of economic power entailing moral superiority dies hard, and jingoism is a major barrier to national self-analysis. So we, as outsiders and non-nationalists might be better equipped to examine why it is that wee Donny, with his so obvious incompetencies, manipulations and deceptions, has gotten so far and damaged so much, with so few consequences. What does it say about the USA, are these deficiencies shared by other nations (leaving aside the out-and-out dictatorships and undemocratic oligarchies), and can the USA redeem itself by imposing some sort of justice on this character, for the first time in a long lifetime?
Canto: Yes, so this series, ‘getting wee Donny’ will look at his crimes, at the system that allowed them, and how the system might reform itself, or transform itself into something more respectable, so that nothing like wee Donny can arise again. And this means not only looking at their criminal justice system, but the anti-government ideologies that have supported wee Donny’s destruction of responsible and effective government. There’s a malaise in that country, which might prevent wee Donny from facing justice, for fear that the malaise turn into a pandemic of self-slaughter. Are we facing the downfall of the USA?
Jacinta: Unlikely. Too many WMD for a start. And the nation has a lot of smarts, in spite of all the morons.
Canto: Morons with guns, and lots of them. And enough brains to make plans…
Jacinta: Yes, there are a lot of obstacles to getting wee Donny, but first I want to look at the plans to get him, now he’s unprotected by infamous and absurd claims to presidential immunity, unworthy of any decent nation.
Canto: Actually, I’d like to look at how Australia and other Westminster-based nations, and other democracies in general, deal with crimes committed by political leaders while in office. I agree with you that immunity for those in the highest political office is absurd, they’re the last people to be given immunity, and should have a whole panoply of laws applied to them, but look at Israel, where Netanyahu appears to be getting away with all sorts of dodgy behaviour. We can’t go blaming the US without checking out any possible beams in the eyes of others, including ourselves.
Jacinta: Haha well I wouldn’t describe the USA as having nothing more than a mote in its political eye, but point taken. We’ll look at the legal accountability for Australian and other political leaders as we go along, but wee Donny is now a private citizen, and I recall that one of his first crimes in relation to the whole presidency thing occurred when he was a candidate, and he paid off a couple of women to remain silent during his campaign. His then lawyer and ‘fixer’ Michael Cohen was sentenced and imprisoned for a range of crimes, including campaign finance violations at the behest of ‘individual one’, known to be wee Donny. This was confirmed by Cohen in congressional testimony, and two cheques signed by Donny, reimbursing Cohen, were presented as part of that testimony. Six other reimbursement cheques were shown to the New York Times, but it seems none of these cheques provide details of what these reimbursement were for, if indeed they were reimbursements at all.
Canto: Mmm, so far, so weak. It would be worth having a closer look at that part of Cohen’s charge sheet that includes, from memory, two charges of campaign finance violations. Also, did his sentencing go into detail about what part of it was specifically for those violations? Clearly the fact that he was convicted of of campaign finance violations makes some sort of evidence in itself. Cohen wasn’t the one running for office, he did it for Donny, as the charge sheet presumably states…
Jacinta: There’s a press release from the Southern District of New York from August 2018 stating that Cohen pleaded guilty to, among other things, one count of ‘Causing an unlawful corporate contribution’ and one count of ‘Making an excessive campaign contribution’, each of which could incur a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment. But here’s the thing – Cohen pleaded guilty, and wee Donny would never do that. And another problem is that, according to Stephen Weissman, writing in the Washington Post, there’s a legal requirement for campaign finance violations to be ‘wilful’, that is, done with knowledge that they’re illegal.
Canto: So in some cases, ignorance of the law is an excuse.
Jacinta: Well, yes, perhaps because some kinds of law, like these, are intricate and complex, and it might be easy to break them in all innocence.
Canto: Innocent wee Donny, sure. I think you could make a case stick here.
Jacinta: Hmmm. We’ll have to wait and see – until after this empêchement shite has failed – if SDNY goes ahead on this front. Meanwhile there are many other trails – and possible trials – to follow.
References
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-michael-cohen-broke-campaign-finance-law
https://www.vox.com/2019/2/27/18243038/individual-1-cohen-trump-mueller
Will the USA ever reform its federal system? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
the USA is flagging
So I’m writing this on the last day of the Trump ‘administration’, and I don’t know if I’ll finish it today, and currently I don’t know if Trump will come out with the hundred or so pardons that some reporters are predicting, or if there will be one final attempt at insurrection, or if any more lives will be lost etc etc.
Whenever I write about Trump I feel as if I’m repeating myself for the nth time, and of course I know that virtually nobody reads my blog and I basically get no feedback on it. Still I feel compelled…
Robert Sapolsky begins his book Behave (and he presents this orally on a video available on Youtube) with a fantasy about what he would do with Hitler if he could’ve gotten hold of him at the end of the war. It isn’t nice. As he points out, he’s a liberal fellow, and opposed to capital punishment, but – humans are complex and contradictory. I’ve had similar fantasies about Trump, among others – in fact I might blame Sapolsky for giving me permission. But seriously, I’ve had fantasies about doing horrible things to horrible people long before I read Behave. I’ve long had a kind of visceral loathing of bullies and thugs, whether they’re world leaders or in the local neighbourhood, possibly because I was bullied quite a bit at school, being the smallest kid in my class for about ten years. When in the morning I read or listen to the latest horror story about Trump, or Putin, or some other apparently unpunishable tyrant, I get so mad that my dog, who regularly sleeps on my bed, starts shaking and looking at me with either fear or, I like to think, reproach.
I think I’ve been following the Trump debacle, or what I’ve called the slo-mo train wreck, because I’ve been wanting it to end like the movies, with the villain crashing and burning. And again to emphasise our complex and contradictory impulses, I’ve been hoping, and am still hoping, that Trump ends in gaol, but I’ve also been convinced, since before he decided to claim that he was a politician, that he wasn’t a ‘normal’ person, that there was something fundamentally wrong with him, and that he’s been this way for his entire adult life, and more. And I’ve become convinced, over the years, that free will is a myth, and that this has major implications for our systems of punishment, incarceration and the like. So what should be done with Trump? My feeling is that anyone with an average degree of intelligence and psychological insight should be able to see that this man should be kept away from any position of public responsibility. He’s an extremely, narcissistic, tantrumming pre-adolescent, and has been for 60 years. This is someone who couldn’t manage a public toilet, let alone the government of an uninhabited island. And yet he was put in charge of the most militarily and economically powerful nation on the planet. I don’t blame Trump for this, I blame the USA, and its federal political system.
The USA is, as I’ve written before, exceptional in two things, its religiosity and its jingoism. As a non-believing non-American, a dual citizen of the UK and Australia, where I’ve lived since the age of five, I struggle with my lack of sympathy for these American features. I’ve never waved a national flag or sung a national anthem in my life, and I never will. I feel a kind of emotional aversion to nationalism, and I suspect any explanation will simply be post-hoc rationalisation. So Trump’s patriotism, which is as fake as his religion, his complexion and his business acumen, naturally gets my goat, but it isn’t Trump I want to write about here.
Since realising that Trump was being taken seriously as a contender for US President, I’ve been following US politics like never before, and what I’ve learned has frankly horrified me, and continues to do so. Their federal system and their presidential system are real shockers, and frankly seem to be a disaster waiting to happen. There are plenty of pundits happy to dump on Trump of course, but hardly any are willing to dump on a system that allowed Trump to manipulate it so effectively (though it was more like bull-in-a-china-shop behaviour than calculated manipulation). I would cite Fareed Zakaria as an honourable exception, but his obvious Indian accent suggests that he hasn’t been fully infected by the native jingoism that his colleagues appear to suffer from.
So here – again, but with additions – are some of the glaring problems of a political system, and some political beliefs, that no nation in its right collective mind would want to emulate.
1. The ‘constitutional president’ becomes so as a result of a popularity contest between one superhero and another, in keeping, apparently, with ‘American individualism’. The ultimate recipe for demagoguery. These superheroes are either worshipped or reviled, and remembered by their numbers!
2. The Presidential candidate gets to choose his own running mate, plucked from the general population.
3. The President gets to choose a whole suite of personnel, or courtiers, to effectively run the country for the next four years, with only limited vetting, and has minimal contact with the parliament – living, during incumbency, in a White Palace.
4. Major elections occur every two years, last far too long, and involve obscene amounts of money, inevitably leading to corruption.
5. The political system is based on a much-worshipped, brief, vague and out-dated constitution, written for a small semi-democratic former British colony, and hopelessly inadequate for the needs of the third most populous country in the world. This urgently needs to be supported or replaced by laws, and lots of them.
6. The American people’s attitude to government, from the outset, has been disturbingly negative, so that interventionist government of any kind, to improve healthcare, education, race relations and so forth, is branded as socialism – the dirtiest word in the American language. And that’s something, considering the country’s religiosity, where the most lively and fun ‘curse-words’ aren’t even allowed on TV!
7. The popularity contest for the nation’s presidency is interfered with by an ‘electoral college’, which is state-based and regularly prevents the winner, based on popularity, from actually winning!
8. The President has exceptional pardoning powers, veto powers, government shut-down powers, power to select members of the judiciary and heads of innumerable government departments, as well as, apparently, total immunity from committing offences, however grave, while in office.
9. It follows from the above that the political process known as impeachment would be surplus to requirements, and all politicians’ wrong-doing, up to and including the President, would be dealt with by the judiciary on the basis of law.
The USA should look to the government of its neighbour, Canada, which has a far better political system, but it is of course prevented from doing so by its pathological jingoism. My hope is that the USA might be pressured by the international community to be more reformist in its approach to its national government. It’s a faint hope, of course, but the wreckery of the Trump period has, at least, exposed many glaring deficiencies. Gentlemen’s agreements aren’t anywhere near sufficient to keep ‘commanders-in-chief’, in a nation bristling with nuclear weaponry, with an at times disturbing superiority complex, in check.
covid19 – the European CDC shows the way
poverty and crowding in Peru – BBC picture
Canto: The US response to the pandemic continues to be massively hampered by political muzzling of and interference with the science, especially at the federal level, but the Medcram updates continue to inform us, and to be, or pretend to be, indifferent to this political interference.
Jacinta: Yes, and update 109 has introduced us to the European CDC’s website, which provides us with a wealth of information, on the progress of the pandemic itself in European countries, but also in the political response to it, and how those two things interact.
Canto: The country overview page, and it’s currently updated to week 39 of the pandemic, is as data-rich as anyone can imagine, a statistician’s wet dream, but interpretation of the data needs to be handled carefully.
Jacinta: Dr Seheult does some interpretation of some of the data in his medcram update 109, but there’s so much more in there, and so much more to say. So let’s take a European country at random – Denmark – and look closely at the stats.
Canto: But before that, let’s look at some general European trends they report. It’s fascinating:
By the end of week 39 (27 September 2020), the 14-day case notification rate for the EU/EEA and the UK, based on data collected by ECDC from official national sources, was 113.6 (country range: 9.9–319.9) per 100 000 population. The rate has been increasing for 70 days.
So the EU is the European Union and the EEA is the European Economic Area. I’m not sure what is meant by ’14-day’ but I presume the case notification rate is simply the case rate, as far as they can ascertain from the data supplied to them – the cases they’ve been notified about. It’s good that they make that distinction, shifting the onus on the notifiers. So it’s 113.6 cases per 100,000 population over the whole region, and has been rising for over two months – a second wave.
Jacinta: I think ’14 day’ just means the rate over the previous 14 days. They report every seven days for the previous 14 days, so there’s a 7-day overlap. That data is not only dependent on the reliability of particular reporting countries, it’s also dependent on testing levels, obviously. So in the general trends they tell us which countries are doing the most testing. Highest is Denmark, followed by Luxembourg, Iceland, Malta and Cyprus. Small countries, unsurprisingly.
Canto: With all this, it’s interesting from Dr Seheult’s analysis of the data that the death rate isn’t mapping with the case rate, thankfully, and that the age of people contracting the virus in the second wave is much lower, which seems weird.
Jacinta: Probably explained by an increase in testing since the early days. Now they’re catching milder and asymptomatic cases. It suggests, of course, that the case rate was much higher during the first wave, when the testing regime was still being put together. So let’s look at Denmark, and now we have data for week 40. There are four graphs, and in the first we see the case notification rate experiencing a big bump peaking in April with the death notification rate mapping pretty closely with that bump. Then there’s a gradual falling away in both figures, until August when the case rate starts to rise again, but not the death rate. Then in September that case rate rises very sharply, rising well above the April bump, though in the last week it seems to have leveled off at this high level. But the death rate has stayed pretty well level and quite low. Now that raises questions that the other graphs might help to answer. The second graph looks at the testing rate – tests per 100,000. The testing rate was pretty flat and low from February into April, but after the April rise in cases the testing began to rise from late April into May. It flattened and even dipped a bit into June. It stayed fairly steady through the northern winter, but of course at a high level compared to the earliest period, then it started to rise in August, presumably in anticipation of a rise in cases as the colder weather arrived. That rise in testing peaked at a very high level in late September, but has dropped quite sharply in the the last week or so.
Canto: Interesting, so that does strongly suggest a sharp rise in mild cases being ‘caught’, and presumably dealt with, as the death rate hasn’t spiked at all.
Jacinta: Yes, though we don’t know how well those cases have been dealt with – people are talking about ‘long covid’, people possibly having long-term issues. The two graphs don’t really give us granular detail – hospitalisation rates for example. So the third graph breaks the notified case numbers into age groups, and the results are fascinating. The first wave bump shows that most of the cases recorded were in the older age groups, particular those at 80 or over. There were cases in all age groups, but very few under 15. However, in the second wave, the cases found were predominantly in the young. In fact the 15-24 age group was way out in front, followed by the 25-49 group. Even the under 15s were well above the oldest age groups. So what does this mean? It seems to suggest that the older, and perhaps wiser, are recognising the dangers, especially to their age group, and taking fewer risks, and that the younger are still not very sick but can be carriers of the virus and more than ever a danger to the older generation.
Canto: I wonder is Denmark ‘typical’ in this regard?
Jacinta: There are variations of course, but the general trend is much the same. The fourth graph shows test positivity – the percentage of people who tested positive. There was a massive spike in positive test results in March, up to around 16 -17%, but this dropped as sharply at it rose, due presumably to the rapid rise in testing from that period. By May it was around 1% and it has remained much the same since, as the number of tests administered has never been higher, in spite of the recent drop I mentioned. It’s still much higher than it was pre-September.
Canto: But there are more than four graphs as we’ve found. We’ve looked at the data for notification rates and testing, there are other graphs which look at ICU and hospitalisation rates, public health response measures, and which break the nation down into specific regions.
Jacinta: Yes, it’s particularly important to look at public health measures – restrictions on mass gatherings, closures or partial closures of public spaces, workplaces and schools, the mandating or recommendations around face masks, and map them against notification rates, hospitalisations and so forth. The picture that emerges is generally pretty clear, though sadly some countries, such as the USA and Brazil, aren’t paying heed to the fact that public health measures save lives as well as a lot of suffering.
Canto: Well we should be talking about the governments rather than the countries, when we’re talking about public health measures. So I’ve assumed that the CDC in the USA has been hobbled by the Trump debacle, so I’ve gone to the Johns Hopkins site to see what detailed info they provide. Indeed they do have a lot of useful data both for the USA and other countries, though little on the effect of public health measures. An interesting graph they present on mortality shows that, in terms of deaths per 100,000 persons – and they show only the top 20 nations – Peru is on top, followed by Brazil, Ecuador, Spain, Mexico, the USA and the UK, in that order.
Jacinta: Well we know about the macho governments of Brazil, the UK and the USA – not that government is always entirely to blame, but it’s a key indicator – so what about the national governments of those other countries?
Canto: Well other key indicators would be the country’s wealth, or lack thereof, and its healthcare infrastructure, but as to government, Peru had a federal election in January this year – it’s a multi-multi-multi-party system with the most popular party getting only 10% of the vote. The result was that Martin Vizcarra retained the presidency. He appears to be a genuine reformist who has tried to implement stay-at-home orders, but widespread poverty and overcrowding are major problems there. Brazil we already know about. Ecuador’s current President is Lenin Moreno, a right-wing figure who has slashed government funding and seems obsessed with destroying political opponents. He has a popularity rating of 8%, according to an article in Open Democracy, and his mishandling of the pandemic has been extreme. Spain is a ‘parliamentary monarchy’, and its current Prime Minister is Pedro Sanchez, leader of a leftist coalition. Currently there’s a battle with right-wing local authorities, especially in Madrid, to enforce lockdowns as a second wave hits the country. So it’s the usual problem there of non-compliance, it seems. And Mexico is, as is I think well known, a country with a lot of poverty and a lot of problems. Its governmental system has long been a minefield – in fact I’d love to learn more about its chequered history. Currently the President is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a veteran politician who has been a member of various parties and is essentially a political centrist. So again it’s about lack of political control, poverty, lack of services, overcrowding and so forth. As to the UK, years of conservative government have gutted the NIH, there has been a ton of mixed messaging from the top… I’m getting sick of all this. I want to go to Taiwan.
Jacinta: Hmm. How’s your Chinese? Things are pretty covid-safe here in South Australia. Here’s hoping a safe and effective vaccine is ready by next year, and some big improvements are made in certain countries, with a return to justice and human decency…
References
Coronavirus Pandemic Update 109: New Data From Europe As COVID 19 Infections Rise
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/country-overviews
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-53150808
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31955-3/fulltext
Covid-19, politics, government – some observations
No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.
Aneurin Bevan, founder of the UK’s NHS
Let me look at Covid-19 cases and deaths in different countries in terms of the political persuasions (and gender) of their leadership, with some obvious caveats and reservations, e.g. that correlation isn’t causation, that there are a whole host of factors influencing how well or badly particular nations are faring, that the data coming from many nations is highly suspect, etc. My statistics come from the Worldometer site, which names a wide variety of sources, and notably tends to be slightly less conservative than the WHO and Johns Hopkins sites in terms of numbers. The differences aren’t great, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that the overall numbers are greater than even the Worldometer site has been able to confirm.
I’m doing this because I’ve been checking the stats on a daily basis for weeks now, and impressions have, not surprisingly, been forming about the relationship between national leadership and the impact of the virus. So here are some statistics, and some speculations on them, for what they’re worth.
The UK (I was born in Scotland) has fared worse than any other country, apart from Belgium, in terms of deaths per million. Conservative PM Boris Johnson, prior to catching the virus himself, seemed to suggest letting it run its course through the community, which of course would have led to a huge death rate, and generally the messages from the beginning were confused, and mostly of a softly softly nature, which has clearly proved disastrous. The NHS has suffered years of severe cuts under ten years of conservative government, and mixed messaging has continued to damage what has been a truly woeful governmental response to the crisis. Scotland, which has a female First Minister and a centre-left government, has a slightly lower ‘excess death toll’ than England, but it’s still high compared to most countries, and higher than those of Wales and Northern Ireland. England is, of course, by far the most densely populated of the four UK nations.
Belgium wears the shame of having the worst Covid-19 mortality rate of any significant-sized nation (of say, 5 million or more) on the planet. However, to be fair, Belgium appears to have an accounting system for the virus which is as anomalous as is that of Russia at the other end of the spectrum (a spectrum from inclusive, i.e Belgium, to exclusive in Russia’s case). This issue of accounting is too enormously complex and fraught to be dealt with here (though many are suggesting that measuring ‘excess mortality’ might be the best option), so I’ll take Belgium’s disastrous figures at face value for now. The country’s PM, Sophie Wilmès, is a member of the centrist Mouvement Réformateur, and heads a coalition government. In fact Belgium has long been so factionalised that coalition governments are a more or less permanent feature of government there, and internal squabbling in recent years has led to a lot of government inertia. Though clear information is hard to find, the lack of strong, supported central government is very likely negatively affecting the country’s Covid-19 experience.
Germany is generally regarded as the success story of Europe. It’s Europe’s largest country, and currently the 19th most populated country in the world. It is 12th overall in the number of cases, and 11th in the number of deaths. This may look bad, but we know that western Europe has been particularly hard-hit, and it’s worth comparing Germany to its neighbouring countries. Interestingly, Germany shares its border with no less than nine different countries, and in terms of deaths per million, which I think is a good guide of a nation’s internal handling of the pandemic, it is doing far better than its westerly neighbours (Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark), and considerably worse than its easterly ones (Austria, Czechia and Poland). Again I’m skeptical of some of the stats, especially in a country like Poland, which has descended into a quasi dictatorship under its all-powerful Law and Justice party, but there does seem to be a radical divide between the eastern and western halves of Europe in terms of the pandemic’s impact. Anyway, Germany’s centrist Chancellor Angela Merkel has been in power since 2005, and she’s recently suffered under the description, ‘leader of the free world’ in lieu of the USA’s absence of leadership. Being a former research scientist, she’s been credited, rightly or wrongly, with having shepherded the country through this crisis better than most. Wikipedia has this to say about the country’s response:
The country’s low fatality rate, compared to fatality rates in Italy and Spain, has generated a discussion and explanations that cite the country’s higher number of tests performed, higher number of available intensive care beds with respiratory support and higher proportion of positive cases among younger people.
Italy, a country renowned for its political instability, fared disastrously early on (in March and April) in terms of cases and deaths, but has reduced the numbers greatly in recent weeks. Even so, Italy’s deaths per million is one of the worst rates in the world, five times that of Germany. Italy has in recent years developed closer ties with China than any other country in western Europe, and evidence points to the virus arriving in northern Italy via a Chinese couple from Wuhan. It’s clear that there was early skepticism and government officials were caught unawares by the magnitude of the crisis, and the rapidity of spread. The wealthy and densely populated Lombardy region has been disproportionately affected. Italy’s PM, Giuseppe Conte, has held the position for two years, making him one of the longest serving leaders in Italy’s post-war history. The nation’s volatile political history makes co-ordinated strategic planning for pandemics very difficult. This article on Italy from the Harvard Business Review, aimed at an American readership, captures the problems that face individualistic nations who favour rights over responsibilities:
Consider the decision to initially lock down some regions but not others. When the decree announcing the closing of northern Italy became public, it touched off a massive exodus to southern Italy, undoubtedly spreading the virus to regions where it had not been present.
This illustrates what is now clear to many observers: An effective response to the virus needs to be orchestrated as a coherent system of actions taken simultaneously. The results of the approaches taken in China and South Korea underscore this point. While the public discussion of the policies followed in these countries often focuses on single elements of their models (such as extensive testing), what truly characterises their effective responses is the multitude of actions that were taken at once. Testing is effective when it’s combined with rigorously contact tracing, and tracing is effective as long as it is combined with an effective communication system that collects and disseminates information on the movements of potentially infected people, and so forth.
Clearly this information-collecting, when it isn’t coercive, requires compliance and collaboration for the broader good. Libertarians are reluctant, it seems, to admit this.
Sweden‘s record on the pandemic is worth comparing to the other four countries comprising Scandinavia – Norway, Finland, Denmark and Iceland. Sweden is certainly the most populous of the five, but its deaths per million tell a grim story – more than five times those of Denmark, around ten times those of Norway and Finland, and almost 20 times those of isolated Iceland. The rate is higher than that of the USA and France, and not far below that of Italy. Currently, the centre-left PM Stefan Löfven heads a highly unstable coalition, which clearly isn’t able to provide the co-ordinated response required in a pandemic. In fact the country deliberately took a ‘relaxed’ attitude to the virus, and are now paying the price, though some of the country’s epidemiologists are still standing by the nation’s approach, astonishingly enough. Around half of the country’s fatalities have occurred in nursing homes. Apart from Sweden, all of the Scandinavian countries have female leaders. Just saying.
Russia, which has recorded the third highest number of Covid-19 cases in the world, has a bizarrely low death-rate, which can’t be accounted for from an epidemiological perspective, as I’ve reported before. Dmitry Peskov, one of Putin’s favourite arse-lickers, defended the record, saying “Have you ever thought about the possibility of Russia’s health care system being more effective?” This in fact caused a spike in fatalities, as several thousand Russians immediately died laughing. A very brave doctor, Anastasia Vasilyeva, founder and head of the medical trade union Alliance of Doctors, is creating videos exposing Putin’s lies about Russia’s handling of the pandemic, showing run-down hospitals, sick and unprotected medical staff and a generally under-funded and unprepared healthcare system. She has, of course, been viciously attacked by Putin’s media thugs, arrested and generally harassed. It’s safe to say that nothing credible is coming out of Russia’s state reporting of Covid-19, and the same must be said of China, or any other state which has more or less complete control of its media. So the full truth of what is happening in Russia, and in other closed societies, will likely not come out for years.
Final remarks – from what we’ve seen so far, right-wing, limited government, libertarian-type governments do worse than strong, centralised governments, especially those led by women. Closed societies generally can’t be trusted on their reporting, so it’s virtually impossible to judge their performance vis-à-vis the pandemic.
Next time I’ll look at some countries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
References
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/04/tories-protect-nhs-coronavirus-slogan
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-18/why-belgium-has-a-high-number-of-coronavirus-deaths/12259032
https://www.livescience.com/results-of-sweden-covid19-response.html
https://hbr.org/2020/03/lessons-from-italys-response-to-coronavirus