Posts Tagged ‘politics’
On a couple of repulsive dictators, mostly
So in my old age I’m finding that the world is going to pot. Under the circumstances I’m lucky to be living in Australia.
Of course the world is much more than China, or the USA, or Russia (in population order), but these are the potty countries I’m referring to – or to be fairer and more accurate, the countries with the pottiest leaders – that I know of.
China has Xi Jingping, the first of the scumbags – not necessarily in order of scumbuggery. He’s in a battle of sorts with his military leaders, apparently because they’re not being warmongering enough. The USA has Trump – need I say more? And Putin – it’s now more or less official – has failed in his brief military operation against Ukraine, with a loss of men, or drone fodder, coming up to 2 million. Not that psychopaths care about such numbers.
Of these three horrific scenarios, the one I’m probably least willing to look at is the Trump shite. So… well let’s, look at Putinland. I’ve been watching The military show on Youtube, which can get quite technical at times, but they generally present a scenario of Russian failure. This is of course what I want to hear, but I’m also quite skeptical. The Russians surely aren’t this stupid. I’m surprised that Putin has miscalculated so badly, but I just can’t see him giving up after having invested so much in this invasion. And yet… if he had something more substantial to throw at the Ukrainians, leaving aside the nuclear option, he surely would have used it by now. And surely, even Putin’s position must be less secure after such devastating losses.
So… I’ve been watching more of The military show, which presents the devastation being wrought upon Kiev – so maybe they’re not being so one-sided, though it’s clear this is no Russian propaganda show, to put it mildly. I just hope their stuff is accurate. Recently they’ve presented ‘the most dramatic naval upset in modern history’, no less – that being the destruction of Russia’s naval blockade in the Black Sea. Ukraine, as even I knew, has long been a massive wheat and corn exporter to many NATO states, as well as China and other rather powerful countries. When the war started, those exports were reduced by almost 50%, and things were looking very grim for the country’s ability to fund its defences. However Ukraine and its allies appear to have outsmarted and out-manoeuvred the Russians, using mines, artillery and missiles – a ‘defensive triangle’ (watch The military show for details), and then developing its unmanned drone defence/attack systems with a rapidity that has apparently astonished the military world. They seem to be underwater drones, or not, pardon my ignorance, and they were designed to attack en masse. A second iteration of these drones, far more powerful than the first, has been launched successfully, and Ukraine’s exports have more or less completely recovered. And much of this response happened within the first year or so of the war! They’ve described it as ‘one of the most successful blockade-breaking operations in modern history’. Of course, I’m not sure if there’s been much competition – I’m such a spoiler.
So, hats off to Ukraine, in a situation in which the US ‘superpower’ under Frump has been mostly less than helpful, and NATO seemingly bound up by a less than helpful bureaucratic structure. Meanwhile, how is Mr Pudding faring after all these years of anti-Ukraine warfare – arguably starting in February 2014? Well, it seems that, though he’s nowhere near winning, he’s also nowhere near giving up. In fact, it seems he can’t give up after all his rhetoric and all his losses. This just can’t be all for nothing. And that of course is a dangerous situation indeed, because there is only the nuclear option. He can’t win otherwise, he can’t go on forever, but then, how can the nuclear option be a win? It won’t of course, so the whole thing becomes a monument to stubborn stupidity which can only end with the end of Putin. It’s truly tragic for the Ukrainian people, and the Russian people too.
So let’s look at China, which I’ve not really been focussing on (nor Russia really, for why focus on god-awful governments that are far away and you can’t do anything about? Hmmm). One website called China Update has the headline ‘Total Annihilation’, just in case people aren’t paying attention.
So apparently a couple of the top military figures of the country have been arrested by China’s dictator, Xi, and what with other brutalist changes, the military leadership ‘group’ has now been reduced from seven to two – but effectively one. Meanwhile a long-term anti-corruption drive, aka Bullshit Incorporated, has been fuelled by Xi’s paranoia and hubris, and has left ‘command chains fractured and experienced leaders sidelined’, which has supposedly degraded the country’s capacity to ‘conduct complex operations, particularly against Taiwan’. That sounds promising for Taiwan, but my impression over the years has been that Xi really really really wants to attack Taiwan and kill people there, and to do it yesterday. The reports I’m hearing about the situation, though, are confusing and conflicting. He likes ‘anti-corruption’ purges apparently, and he has, over time, trimmed down the political and the military leadership, the latter to just two. All of which can only make one laugh, or cry, at the Orwellian newspeak. We mock the North Korean title for its country – the Korean Democratic Republic – but surely the Chinese government, or leadership, calling its country ‘communist’, is even more risible, considering that communism is meant to be about collective control and sharing of government, labour, resources, etc. On that definition, China must surely be about the least communist nation on the planet, and more than 1.3 billion more Chinese people are being hoodwinked than North Korean people. And surely a large proportion of them know they’re being hoodwinked, but – what can they do? If you’ve lived such a lie all your life, that lie just becomes the reality.
So the number of party members who have been removed or disciplined for corruption during Xi’s rule has increased year on year, and it would be impossible to tell whether this purge has been fair given the lack of oversight of of what is essentially a dictatorship. And according to the video referenced below, Xi has managed to concentrate more power in his own hands, at least militarily, than any previous Chinese dictator of the ‘communist’ era (or at least since Mao, the greatest mass-murderer the world has ever known). He has also presided over a massive increase in military expenditure, with obviously ominous connotations. I mean, what could this ballooning expenditure be for?
I worry for Taiwan, which was experimenting with participatory democracy, according to Jess Scully’s hopeful Glimpses of Utopia.
References
The USA has the worst political system in the democratic world, but they don’t think so
full democracies in v dark green
Okay, so I’ve written along these lines before but I need to double down. The USA has a problem with its history, as well as its national ego. The obvious needs to be pointed out to United Staters – that no other democratic country has ‘no kings’ rallies, because no other democratic country has what is in effect an elected monarchy, with massive pardoning powers, massive immunity, and power to appoint never-elected individuals to positions of great power and impact on the welfare of the state. And he gets to live in a massive white palace surrounded by courtiers for the four or eight years of his reign (and it looks like this king will always be male). Even the judiciary is overly politicised. And there seems to be no limit to the amount of money that can flow to favoured candidates. And yet, ask more or less randomly any bunch of United Staters to name the world’s greatest democracy, and we all know what the answer will be.
Here in Australia, voting is mandatory for citizens of 18 or over. Of course such compulsion is out of the question for ‘the land of the free’, but I do think that mandatory voting does remind us that we’re all in it together, that we’re fundamentally social creatures, and that we would do well to consider seriously the kind of society we want. It is a kind of participation in the broader society, which hopefully should bring us together. But when Australians vote, we vote for a local candidate as well as a set of policies. We don’t vote for anything like a king, or an ‘I alone can fix it’ superhero. As in the USA there are two major parties, but the parties decide on their leader, and they can dump that leader by a simple vote of no confidence if they feel she’s ineffective, or if they feel it’s time for a change, or whatever. She’s like the captain of a soccer team, she’ll be dumped if the team is performing poorly, or if they lose confidence in her leadership and so on. It’s all about collaboration, and the success of the team.
Of course, there is no perfect political system, and reform needs to be ongoing as societies evolve. The White Australia policy, which existed in my lifetime, now strikes us as an embarrassment, and it’s possible that much that seems normal now will strike others as an embarrassment in 60 years time. Maybe by that time the USA will have dumped its monarchy – but probably not.
Change often occurs when a crisis reveals serious problems with a system, and Trump, who is essentially a crime machine, as many have pointed out, has certainly shown how bad a so-called democratic state can get, but there seems to be something in the US psyche, something profoundly insular, and blindly nationalistic, that prevents it from engaging in the kind of root-and-branch reform that outsiders see as necessary.
The Trump saga continues because he hasn’t suffered a moment’s harm from the criminal convictions against him, in a nation that has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any democracy, by a very large margin. The only other countries with a higher rate are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan, but it’s unlikely that most United Staters are aware of this revealing fact. It seems clear that those being incarcerated are not the ultra-wealthy, a tiny minority that wields a highly disproportionate degree of power. The vast rich-poor gap and the high incarceration rate are clearly related.
This is a nation that really struggles to be clear-sighted about itself. Its influence on South Korea’s type of democratic system – an imperialistic Presidency, rather than the more party-based, team-focussed system more or less successfully used in Australia and other Westminster-style democracies, has been disastrous, as it would be anywhere else. It’s my own view that even many of these variants of democracy are too individually-focussed. We need governments to be as collaboratively and inclusively based as it is possible to be. We need to reduce, as far as is humanly possible, the old left-right divide, in which one government dismantles the policies of its predecessors, only to have its policies dismantled in turn, often at great cost to the public at large. A more inclusive and collaborative system, devoid of ‘I alone can fix it’ hubris, must surely be the politics of the future, but that future, I admit, seems distant. There are few nations following this model, and if they are, they’re largely being ignored by the rest. I can’t pretend to be an expert on global political systems, but I suspect that some Scandinavian systems are heading in the right direction. I shall look at some of those systems in future posts.
I’ve referenced below an interesting 2020 survey by Wurzburg University, ‘Ranking of Countries by Quality of Democracy’, which tends to confirm those suspicions. The top 5 countries, in order, are Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Germany (perhaps a bit of local bias for number five!). These countries, along with the next 30, are classified as ‘working democracies’. The next country, number 36, the USA, is the first of the ‘deficient democracies’. Few people in the USA would agree, of course.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
Rutger Bregman’s Reith lectures – an amateur commentary. Lectures 1 & 2
As I’m thinking of picking Rutger Bregman’s Humankind as my 2025 book of the year, I noticed, through browsing someone else’s youtube feed, that he has delivered this year’s Reith Lectures. I listened to the first lecture today, but due to a surfeit of Christmas cheer I was barely able to make sense of it. I also don’t really know what the Reith Lectures are supposed to be about, so let me start there.
They’re a BBC thing, named for Johnny Reith, first BBC director-general, and a Lord and a Baron and such, though whether he became the BBC’s D-G because he was a Lord and Baron, or vice-versa, I don’t want to know. Anyway the inaugural lecturer was old Bertie Russell back in ’48, so that was definitely a good start. Apparently the topic can be anything that ‘enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation’ – and presumably other nations too.
Humankind had a very international, humanist approach to society and its problems which certainly gave me something to hope for, what with Putin, Trump, Gaza and such, so I’m sure these lectures will be worth listening to. However, he warned that the first lecture would be focussing on the bad stuff – the problems before the possible solutions. So, in this lecture he talks about the survival [and thriving] of the shameless. ‘A time of monsters’, he calls it, after Antonio Gramsci. According to Bregman, focussing on the USA, we’re hearing a lot of BS from private companies as well as the giant, prestigious educational institutions about the great example they’re setting in corporate citizenship. It’s hard for me to make a judgment, as I live on a different planet, but it’s obvious that big tech, big oil and the like spend vast amounts in trying to convince us of their wonderfulness, while global warming accelerates, the rich-poor gap widens, and many basic needs, such as housing and healthcare, are left unmet.
What Bregman seems to be emphasising in this first of, I think, four talks, in which he quite deliberately discusses fascism, a term that I notice is beginning to be used almost favourably by some, is the rise of corporations answerable to nobody, and able to buy and manipulate politicians, and whole political parties, to particular ends. This is particularly evident in the US, while Europe is mostly overwhelmed and dithering, unable to choose between opposing or placating. Bregman puts the situation in neat soundbites regarding the self-serving nature of elites – ‘a meritocracy of ambition without morality, intelligence without integrity’. Those with integrity, he claims, are outnumbered, though I think it’s better to say that they’re outmanoeuvred, due to inequalities of wealth and power. There are many who are so powerless that they simply aren’t counted or considered. In any case, he finishes this lecture with a call to a moral revolution. Of course – we just can’t continue like this. So, on to the second lecture.
The abolitionist movement, something that comes up in my reading of Darwin’s life, notably his disagreements with the great US botanist Asa Gray during the 1860s and their Civil War – Darwin being a fierce abolitionist, not much interested in the nuances of north-south USA politics – that’s the major topic of Bregman’s second lecture.
I should point out here something fairly obvious – that I’m summarising, perhaps badly, these lectures entirely for my own edification. The lectures are available online and it would of course be better to watch them than to read me. Oh, that’s right, nobody reads me.
Bregman does a good line in soundbites – this is about seriousness v laziness, determination v apathy, good v evil, and so on – that’s how he starts each lecture, with a nice optimism, or at least hopefulness. Humanism, no less. So he starts the lecture with the downfall of the decadent Tzarist regime in Russia and the horror of the Bolshies, with the ideologue Lenin giving way to Stalin the nihilist terrorist. But then remember the goodies – Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur, the suffragettes, Norman Borlaug and the green revolution. He then quotes Margaret Mead, very nicely:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
I’m writing this largely for my own sake, to focus on the important stuff, as I’m going through some personal difficulties at the moment, and focussing on these global issues is a help and reminder.
Bregman, though, is following up on Mead’s remark, and the individuals and groups who made a positive impact. So while the current ‘unravelling’ of humanism is going on in Gaza, in Ukraine and in the US, he takes us back to late 18th century Britain – the ‘redemption’ part of his ‘three-part sermon’ (his words), ‘misery, redemption and thankfulness’. Interestingly, he wants to focus on those individuals and ‘small groups’ aforementioned, rather than the larger forces such as the ‘scientific revolution’ or ‘democratisation’, and as I come to the end of Janet Browne’s second volume of Darwin biography, The Power of Place, I recognise Darwin as one of those individuals, who risked so much, especially at the beginning, to bring attention to our connection with all other life forms…
So the anti-slavery movement of the late 18th century was essentially British. Britain was for a time the largest slave-owning and trading nation, Liverpool being its major trading centre. This trade rose with the British Empire itself, but the backlash, according to Bregman, was sudden and surprising. Starting with a small London-based group of twelve men, the anti-slavery movement took hold throughout the island surprisingly quickly, and nowhere else, at least at the time. The whole of the US economy was based on slavery well into the 19th century, and Britain was heavily involved in the slave trade in previous centuries, but it was British pressure that ended the slave trade in Europe. Bregman describes this anti-slavery push as weird and unlikely, more or less coming out of nowhere:
In the summer of 1787, it spread up and down the country like wildfire. It was all over the newspapers and in the coffee houses there was talk of little else.
No sure how Bregman knows this, but he goes on to mention how impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, himself an apostle of equality, was by the speed and brilliance of the movement.
In Bregman’s account, it was all about those 12 black-hatted men and their meeting in that year, 1787, to initiate perhaps the world’s first human rights campaign. It’s easy for us, in retrospect, to see slavery as morally repugnant and patently unjust, and yet, clearly, this was not the general attitude in the ‘free’ USA of the 1860s, nor in the thoroughly Catholic Spanish colonies that Darwin visited, and was appalled by, in his Beagle days. Bregman emphasises the lack in Europe of anything like the anti-slavery movement in Britain. It was only British pressure, apparently, that slowly turned the tide. Or not so slowly:
The Royal Navy launched a massive campaign against the slave trade, which would go down in history as ‘the blockade of Africa’. It has been described as the most expensive international moral effort in modern history. Two thousand slave ships were seized and 200,000 enslaved people freed. Researchers have estimated that direct British efforts brought about the eradication of 80% of the global slave trade.
No wonder Chaz Darwin could consider himself at the pinnacle of the most civilised nation on the planet, tut-tutting at his less benign neighbours’ treatment of the world’s savages. But I judge from a world well into the 21st century, changed mightily by the ground-breaking work of Darwin and others.
Bregman feels that today, the west’s best and brightest are generally not driven by solutions to climate change, the next pandemic or democratic collapse, that’s to say, ethical or humanitarian issues – and my own limited experience of the young and bright chimes with this, I must say. And yet the British abolitionist movement, according to Bregman, was largely an entrepreneurial one – with William Wilberforce, something of a Johnny-come-lately, being given much of the credit. Deserving of more attention was Thomas Clarkson, the youngest founder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. His involvement started at Cambridge, when he won a prize for his essay on the topic, which may have started as a vanity project, but afterwards consumed his life. Other experts claim that Clarkson was the ne plus ultra of British abolitionism.
So the late 18th century was a time of decline, according to Bregman. There was of course the French Revolution and its subsequent reign of terror, and in Britain, parliamentary drunkenness and decadence was commonplace, and George IV, who became Prince Regent in 1811, was notoriously repulsive. London had gained a reputation as the world’s sex capital – petty theft for young men and boys, prostitution for young women and girls. Public executions were a popular spectacle, and mistreatment of animals was in vogue – foreigners were horrified at the decadence.
So it was within this context that the abolitionist movement – of Quakers and other evangelicals – evolved. And according to Bregman, it was all about practising good behaviour. He ends this second talk by advertising his own project – ‘The school for moral ambition’ – something to raise us out of the mire of selfishness, incompetence, ethnic hatreds, greed, callousness, dishonesty and indifference that makes the news so hard to follow these days.
And so ends his second lecture.
women and leadership in Australia, etc
Australia currently has a Labor government with a larger number of women in the cabinet than at any time in its history…. but before I go into that – why Labor and not Labour, the general English (ie British) spelling? It’s a minor issue, but I’m torn between a dislike of the USA and its fulsome jingoism, and a preference for simplified spelling (labor, color, etc). Apparently, back in the 1880s, the trade union movements that went on to form the Labour/Labor party were enamoured of a number of US texts such as Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking backward. The USA had over time adopted the simpler spelling, perhaps largely due to the impact of the 1828 Webster dictionary of American English, while Australian spelling, at least of that particular word, had/has been equivocal. Theories vary, but some have pointed out the usefulness of distinguishing between Labor, the party, and the labour movement in general, with its appropriately labourious (actually laborious) spelling.
But back to women. There are 23 members of the Federal Cabinet, including the PM and Deputy PM. Twelve of them are women, and I vaguely wonder whether the leaders, such as Albanese, Marles, Wong and, say, Plibersek, tried to arrange it so that they would just manage to have more women than men, to create some kind of record for the books. Margaret Thatcher apparently had no women at all in her cabinet in eleven years as British PM, and the new, first-ever female PM in Japan, Sanae Takaichi, is apparently a big Thatcher fan. She has, at least, appointed two women to her cabinet, which has rather disappointed the media there. The USA’s Congress is currently 28.65% female (155 women in House and Senate), and a significant majority of them are Democrats. Their numbers are way up compared to 30 and 40 years ago.
So Australia is at the forefront of creeping changes in the political empowerment of women. I should also mention that the current leader of the Liberal opposition is a woman, Sussan Ley, and that our PM, Anthony Albanese, was brought up in a single-parent family, which very much helps to explain his faith in female leadership.
Female political empowerment, in Australia as elsewhere in the WEIRD world, has been slow, too slow from the perspective of one lifetime, but steady. We had our first and only PM, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013, and before that we had female state leaders, starting with Rosemary Follett in the ACT in 1989, then Carmen Lawrence (WA) and Joan Kirner (Victoria) in 1990. In 2001 Clare Martin became Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, and in 2007 Anna Bligh became Premier of Queensland. In 2011 Kristina Keneally became the first female Premier of NSW and Lara Giddings became the first female Premier of Tasmania. Finally, in 2015 Annastacia Palaszczuk became Queensland’s second female Premier.
From all this, one might think female leadership has become run-of-the-mill here, and that ‘patriarchy’ is over, but that’s definitely not true. Of the six current state Premiers, only one, Victoria’s Jacinta Allan, is female, and that’s a fairly standard situation, though interestingly the Northern Territory’s most recent three Chief Ministers have been women. My home state of South Australia is the only state that has never had a female Premier.
There’s also the question of economic power. The mining sector, which is of course male-dominated, is the most fundamental sector in our export economy. Domestically, there’s a persistent gender pay gap, and a lower participation in the workforce vis-à-vis women, with men holding more senior positions. Business leadership and related wealth generation continues to be overwhelmingly male. AI (never lies) tells me that ‘men have approximately 40% more net wealth than women’, but, though I know I should worship the never-lying god, this time I’m skeptical. Wealth is surely about far more than salary. The world’s, and Australia’s, wealthiest are not ‘paid’, their financial worth is not so easily measured. And they are overwhelmingly male, without a doubt – but I value my life too much to try and uncover the murky details.
Of course, if we think in terms of centuries – not a long time in the scheme of things – women have come a long way, all over the WEIRD world. From being largely barred from universities in the early 20th century, they now head departments, even in the so-called ‘hard sciences’. They’re prominent in the judiciary, and in law generally, and in medicine, journalism, the media, the arts and so on. In fact the changes have been so great in the last couple of lifetimes, I’d love to see how things are in 2225, if humanity is still kicking….
Perhaps by then we’ll have realised how vitally important female leadership is for the survival of just about everything that lives on this planet.
References
Conservative Christianity is strange
choose your messiah
I’m not a Christian and never have been, though I was sent to a Salvation Army Sunday School every week, from about the ages of six to ten, where I listened with bewilderment to very serious stories about our father in heaven, who made us and loves us and who we should be endlessly grateful to for our existence, and who knows our every thought, and who will punish us for our bad deeds, and who is everywhere though he lives in heaven, which is in the sky somewhere, and we should pray to him regularly, because then he’ll know that we love him, though he doesn’t really need our love because he is omnipotent and omniscient and words like that, and he had a son who lived for a while on earth, but that’a another story.
It all sounded pretty unlikely to me, but it was actually scary how seriously these Salvation Army people took it all. However the Jesus stuff seemed a bit more comprehensible, as mostly he seemed to be a real person who lived long ago preaching kindness and forgiveness and telling stories about good deeds and healing the sick and saying nice things about the meek and the weary and the heavy-laden. His being the son of this invisible all-seeing and all-knowing god bloke didn’t make much sense, except that he also performed miracles like his Dad, who miraculously created the whole world. But what seemed to make sense was that Jesus was like some model human being, a kind of example to us all as to how to live a good life.
Which brings me back to conservative Christianity, especially in the USA, where Christianity holds sway more than in any other putatively Christian nation. Interestingly, the two countries I’m most associated with, Scotland, where I was born, and Australia where I’ve long lived, are both leading the field in abandoning that religion, doubtless due to my enlightening, or baleful, influence.
The question being, was Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, a conservative?
Some years ago, during Trump’s first term, I went to a meet-up, of sorts, called ‘deep thinkers’, which turned out to be a bit of a joke. At the bar I encountered a bloke who I deemed to be of Middle Eastern origin (I had a lot of Arabic-speaking students at the time, and he looked similar), and we talked briefly about his work in computing. Then I asked him where he was from. ‘Port Pirie’, he said – pointedly, it seemed to me. Oops, he didn’t want to be considered a ‘foreigner’, presumably. Then, more or less out of the blue, he announced that Donald Trump was the greatest President in US history. Well, I never. He also described himself as a conservative Christian – I can’t recall which announcement came first, but the combo immediately linked Jesus and Trump in quite a curious way.
Years ago in either this or a previous blog, I wrote, over a number of posts I think, an analysis, of sorts, of the gospels, influenced no doubt by the classical scholar Robin Lane Fox, especially his books The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible, and Pagans and Christians. There are many difficulties – different translations soften or ‘beautify’ the original language, the gospel of John differs markedly in its account from the synoptic gospels, some events, such as ‘the woman taken in adultery’ (John 7:53–8:11), are later interpolations, and the whole Christmas day as the birth of Jesus thing is of course spurious. Arguably, the Jesus character is full of contradictions – ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ on the one hand, and ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword …. to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’, etc, on the other. But generally I’ve always preferred the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ version – I mean, who wouldn’t?
But again I ask myself, did he preach conservative values? Not consistently. If this means ‘family values’, I’ve just quoted his words against them. In another speech he says ‘Whoever reviles his father and mother must surely die’, which doesn’t leave much room for nuance – but then again, everyone must surely die, so it’s a bit meaningless. And what if the mother of X is an axe-murderer and the father of X is a whore?
Anyway, I was wanting to argue that conservative Christianity is self-contradictory but now I’m not so sure, since Jesus himself is not as coherent a character as might have been hoped. My vague image of him wandering around Judea barefoot, healing the sick, telling stories about good Samaritans, changing water into booze, and encouraging little children to come to him, for some reason, is one of a well-meaning, slightly eccentric Mr Nice Guy, a bit pompous at times, but, according to his many portraits, quite nice-looking in a pleasantly effeminate, and surprisingly non-Jewish, non-Levantine way.
So I like to take the view that Jesus was a nice guy who mostly promoted peace and love, so I wondered at this conservative Christian being a fan of Donald Trump. Surely no Christian, conservative or otherwise, could possibly see ‘Old Shitmouth’, as a like to call him, as bearing any resemblance to their religious hero. And yet, my Christian interlocutor did talk about ‘illegal people’ on the USA’s southern border – this at a time when the news was full of children being locked in cages in southern Texas. I have to say that I was so flabbergasted that someone who was so keen to announce to me that he was a Christian should talk about people being ‘illegal’ in any sense, that I was rendered speechless. Much later, the Yiddish term trepverter, picked up from a Saul Bellow novel, came to mind. It’s about thinking of a smart retort, or comeback line, after the moment has passed – though for me it was less a retort than a disquisition on the legality and legitimacy of all creatures great and small, because, after all, the Lord God made them all….
And that’s the point – many of the biggest US supporters of old Shitmouth label themselves as conservative Christians, which raises the question of what Christianity actually means to them. Love thy neighbour? Blessed are the peacemakers? It can’t mean these things. It must mean that sword stuff, the crucesignati, the fight to death against the infidels – with Old Shitmouth as their Dear Leader….
From this distance, in Australia, it’s tragicomedy on a grand scale. We shall see how it all ends…
dithyrambs and dead ends….
So how does the great, yet still prospective, Trumpian dynasty finally establish itself as the ne plus ultra of all dynasties Americanian? How does it rid itself of the pestilence of the other? There is surely much work to be done. The current, almost too-belated and yet still maligned Apollinian leadership must, in its height and depth, ensure that the Dionysian dithyrambs of the soi-disant ‘Democratic’ canaille be rendered down to their most lassitudinous level, a level to which they are all-too naturally inclined. These untermensch have stained the great Americanian nation and threatened its proper and all-too-deserving ubermensch place in the political and all-essential financial world for too long, and their grave must not be risen from.
Voting, I can assure you, does not occur in heaven. What purpose would it serve but to lower standards? And when heaven is created on Earth, there is nothing for it but to celebrate, and fill ourselves with the love of the eternal. But we must have keepers at the gate, and be ever-vigilant regarding the enemies within, for in this soiled world impurities lurk everywhere, even our heavenly corner is not entirely safe, and nothing is forever, though we must strive to maintain our dynasty as thoroughly enriched as it could possibly be, as a haven against the levelling forces of inferiority.
So let’s have no more polling, and no more useless, disruptive, and profoundly unvisionary dissent. We are better than this. The future is already here. We will never dismantle it.
Okay, enough of the bullshit. I’m thinking, if that’s what it’s called, of doing a course in economics, to try and understand how the super-rich get away with paying far far less than their fair share of taxes, and what can be done to change this, and how it is that the US can have a national debt of over $37 trillion and yet be described as the world’s richest nation or biggest economy or whatever. According to AI, which never lies, the US has a projected deficit for the 2025 fiscal year of about $1.9 trillion. A fiscal year is apparently a 12-month annual accounting period, with the dates varying from country to country. In Australia it’s from July 1 to June 30, and I always thought that dating was a global thing, so parochial and untravelled am I.
I recently watched, with some skepticism I must say, a video recounting the fall of empires – that of Rome, Spain, Britain, Russia and – just stay tuned – the USA. It argued, in a rather pat and I should say smug way, that they all followed precisely the same pattern and the USA would inevitably follow suit. Obviously, being a 20-minute video it was a wee bit short on detail, but of course it was broadly correct in that no empires, or dominant nations, last forever. One thing it didn’t mention of course was the USA’s nuclear arsenal – or that of Russia. Both of these countries will remain a massive global threat for as long as those arsenals are maintained, and there’s absolutely no sign of them being dismantled in the foreseeable.
I was told today by a woman in the conversation class I help to facilitate – all the attendees were Japanese, as it happened – that Japan now has its first female Prime Minister. How did I miss that? Does she wear high heels? Anyway, it’s a good sign, But Sanae Takaichi, the new PM, has only 2 women in her 19-member cabinet. Then again, Margaret Thatcher never had a single female in her cabinet in her eleven and a half years as PM. Australia’s current 23-member cabinet under Anthony Albanese features 12 women – the first-ever female dominant cabinet in our history, and likely a world record for Prime Ministerial governments. Can’t wait for it to be the first female-only one. Sigh. But it’s interesting that Japan has a Prime Ministerial system, which I tend to associate with English-speaking, Westminster-based political entities. Clearly the fact that it still has a monarch, or emperor, and feels a strong need to maintain that imperial link as fundamental to its history, would make a constitutional system like that of Australia, and of course Britain, very appealing.
So the emperor plays much the same ceremonial role as the monarch in Britain and the Governor-General in Australia, but I note that Japan hasn’t gotten on board with female succession, unsurprisingly, being one of the most patriarchal nations in the developed world. This could cause problems in the slightly distant future, as current Emperor Naruhito, in his mid-sixties, has no sons. He does have a daughter, Princess Aiko, but it’s claimed that his nephew, the young Prince Hisahito, is being groomed to take the throne when the time comes. Now, I’ve mentioned that Japan is quite patriarchal, but feminism is certainly raising its voice there, and I’m hearing it. A lot of women are not happy that the succession is not going to Princess Aiko, which would create the first Japanese Empress. Modernising to maintain an ancient tradition – sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
Continuing on the feminism theme, I wrote recently on wealth-is-power, wondering just how much wealth/power is in the hands of women. My vague guess was 1% female compared to 99% male. AI (never lies) tells me that 86.5% of billionaires are male, 16.5% are female. There are no trillionaires as yet (which is why autocorrect thinks I’ve made a mistake in writing the word), but they’re getting there. Anyway I’m guessing that the 1% figure is still correct, as it’s likely most of the females on the list are thoroughly impoverished compared to the top males. Female empowerment is all very well but let’s not get ridiculous.
Economics is a subject of some interest to me, and I’m wondering if I might do a thorough study of it my old age. Courses are available at the usual institutions, but unfortunately not for the impoverished. Funny that. Meanwhile there’s economics talks on youtube which might be worth commenting on, so that’s a start – but the news is, we don’t have to worry about trying to work out how to make money or regulate our economies, whether we be families, nations or planets, because never-lying AI will be doing it all for us, so effectively that we won’t be needing economists or indeed humans. The BBC World Service, no less, has kindly informed us that artificial intelligence will ‘go rogue’ by 2027, leading to human extinction about ten years later. I’ll be only about 81 or so by then – way too young to die… but then, I’ll be in great company. Maybe that’s what happened to all those dead exoplanets out there….
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c751z23n3n7o
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-general/japanese-monarchy-0016250
AI2027: Is this how AI might destroy humanity? – BBC World Service
the worst of the English-speaking democracies – 1
five Australian PMs, from 2010 to 2019
I don’t like the USA very much. I suppose that’s putting it mildly.
I’m not a nationalist. I was for some years involved in the humanist movement, attended meetings and gave, I recall, three talks to humanist groups, one on the free will issue, one on the decline of Christianity here in Australia, and one on the rise of internationalist organisations over the past century or so.
Lately, like many, I’ve become – I don’t know what to call it, concerned, transfixed by the USA, not wanting to know, not wanting to miss anything, a mixture of horror and schadenfreude. But generally, I find it more valuable to listen to those outside looking in, than to US commentators, with their ‘how have the mighty fallen’ fantasies.
This is generally a sound approach. As I’ve written before, if you want to know what an individual is like, don’t take it from the horse’s mouth, because she’s understandably (and healthily) biased. So you ask the people around her, who’ve had dealings with her, some friendly, some not so. This is ‘solid science,’ as they say. And the same goes for countries, generally.
So the most appropriate countries to compare the USA with are, surely, the other English-speaking democracies. That’s to say, Britain, the ‘mother’ of them all, and Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It’s important to note that Australia and New Zealand became separated from Britain more or less amicably, while the USA did so via a war of independence. Canada’s history lies between these two extremes. These facts help explain the differences in their polities.
So, to start with Australia, and I’ll try to be brief. It started in 1788 when a British flag was hoisted in what is now known as Sydney Harbour, claiming, rather outrageously, on a ‘finders keepers’ basis, that all of the surrounding land, the extent of which was largely unknown, now belonged to that small densely populated island on the far side of the globe. It all seemed perfectly cromulent to the colonists, and to be fair they had no idea quite how massive the land area was. Later, in spite of the rather obvious presence of non-British humans in the region, the land was declared ‘terra nullius’. Whether this was a convenient fiction, or simply a joke, is anyone’s guess.
The colonists used this harbour region as a prison camp for some decades, adding other camps in the north and south. Crime and punishment was rather fetishised in this period, to the detriment of the so-called lower classes. But further into the 19th century, after the Australian continent became more fully surveyed and explored, free settlements, or separate colonies, developed along the eastern and southern coasts, and in Tasmania, each governed by officials tied to the motherland. The Aboriginal population, more sparse and scattered than the Maori population in New Zealand, and considerably less given to warfare, tended to be brushed aside in the early decades.
The important Sydney region began its transformation from a struggling and near-failing farming and rum-guzzling community into a more civil society under Lachlan Macquarie, governor from 1810 to 1821, yet this seemed to encourage the motherland to send out more of their unwanted. The colonial population rapidly increased, and farming, often conducted illegally (squatting) became quite lucrative for some. Settlements grew beyond Sydney, as well as in modern-day Melbourne, Hobart, Launceston and Adelaide.
So, jumping to the late 19th century, the colony was more or less thriving in spite of a serious shortage of women, especially in the early years. This actually led to supportive treatment such as assisted migration and favoured settlement and employment terms. A mid-century gold rush boosted the population while further contributing to the gender imbalance, as well as racism.
Voices for independence were being raised from the 1830s in Australia, and even in Britain by the 1850s. The self-government process developed in different regions, and was less a national than a colony-based development, since each region had already created governmental systems. Constitutions were created in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania and South Australia and approved in Britain by the end of the 1850s. Western Australia was officially self-governing by 1890.
So with constitutions came legislative councils for each of the far-flung colonies. With variations they created lower and upper houses, with the upper houses being based on a very limited property-owning male franchise. My home state, South Australia, was the first to introduce universal male suffrage in the lower house in 1956. It was also the first electorate in the world to introduce female suffrage, and the right to stand for office, in 1895. Only for ‘white’ women, of course.
So Australia’s move towards complete independence from Britain was piecemeal and peaceful. 1901 was the year that it became a national federation of states, with a governor-general and state governors linking it to the motherland and its constitutional monarch, but with all legislative power in the hands of the federal and state governments. On the federal level it operates largely under a two-party system, with smaller parties on the left and right fringes, sometimes forming coalitions with their corresponding larger parties, and independent members of various types. The head of government, the Prime Minister, is not elected directly by the people, as is the case in the USA, but by the elected members of her or his party, and she can be removed from her position by a vote of no-confidence from those elected members. The opposition leader attains her position by the same process. New legislation is introduced by the incumbent government, debated and voted for in the lower house (the House of Representatives), after which it passes to the upper house (the Senate) for confirmation.
In all of this there’s, unsurprisingly, little difference between the Australian system and the British one. There’s a two-chamber parliament that meets regularly, all made up of locally elected members. Those members choose their leader – the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader, and they in turn choose their ministerial and shadow ministerial ‘teams’, e.g the Treasurer, the Foreign Minister, the Education Minister, the Attorney-General, the Deputy Prime Minister and so on. This collection of ministers is called the Cabinet. Australia also has a Constitution, like the USA, but unlike the USA, it virtually never gets mentioned. It basically explains how the government or parliament is constituted, and there seems to be general agreement about it.
The important difference between Australia’s Westminster-based system (and those of Canada, New Zealand, and of course Britain) and that of the USA is the absence of anything like a President, or immunity from prosecution for any member of government. Pardoning powers are in the hands of the Attorney-General, in consultation with the Cabinet, and are very seldom used. The seven-person High Court of Australia is the equivalent of the USA’s Supreme Court, but nowhere near as controversial (very few Australians would be able to name anyone who’s on it). Mandatory retirement age for its Justices is 70, and new members are selected by the Attorney-General in consultation with the Cabinet.
New Zealand’s democratic or political history (I suppose I’m trying to say ‘white’ history without sounding racist – of course its Maori history was full of politics in the broad sense, as was Australian aboriginal and native American history) can be dated to 1840, the year of the Treaty of Waitangi, and the declaration of British sovereignty over the islands by its first governor, William Hobson. The Maori people, Pacific Islanders who first settled on the North Island some 12,000 yers ago, were generally much more difficult to deal with in these early years of white colonisation than Australia’s Aboriginals. Given to tribal warfare before the whites arrived (much like the whites had been in Europe for millennia), they were well prepared to make life tough for the newcomers. This led to serious warfare from the 1850s to the 1870s when, for some odd reason, many Maori groups refused to accept that their 12,000-year island home now belonged to Britain – or possibly Australia. The British government, which by the mid-19th century had become somewhat overwhelmed by the burden of its own colonial enterprises, generally left developments in New Zealand, which mostly centred around the Bay of Islands at the very northern region of the North Island, to those ‘over there’ who thought they knew what they were doing.
This was generally a good thing. The New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852 led to the first elections in 1853. There was a property qualification, of course, but it was more liberal than that of Britain at the time, and a large number of Maori chiefs could vote. All Maori men over 21 could vote by 1867. This was way ahead of anything in Europe or North America. However, by the early 20th century, Maori had been stripped of almost all of their land. Unsurprisingly this led to uprisings and plenty of violence.
New Zealand adopted a Westminster-based system of course, with a ceremonial Governor-General representing the British monarch, a Prime Minister, and two major parties, Labour on the left and the Nationals on the right. There have been a number of minor parties and independents over the years and recently coalition governments have been more common than not. Here’s how Wikipedia recounts it:
In 1996, New Zealand inaugurated the new electoral system (mixed-member proportional representation, or MMP) to elect its Parliament. The MMP system was expected (among numerous other goals) to increase representation of smaller parties in Parliament and appears to have done so in the MMP elections to date.
New Zealand’s judicial system has been independent and largely uncontroversial, though there have been some important recent changes. A body called the Supreme Court of New Zealand came into being in January 2004, replacing the right of appeal to the London-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. There was a certain amount of opposition from monarchists about this change, of course.
Although religion played some part in the politics of Australia and New Zealand into the 60s, both countries have been ‘losing their religion’, i.e Christianity, quite rapidly since that time, in contrast to the US. This is one of many factors separating the US from the Westminster-based English-speaking nations, as we shall see.
In the next post I’ll take a look at the USA’s unfortunate neighbour, Canada, which also has a Westminster-based parliamentary democracy, as well as the USA itself, as briefly as possible.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Australia
Keith Sinclair, A history of New Zealand, 1969
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_New_Zealand
patriarchal power, money, and endings
I’ve written before about how people make the category error of confusing patriarchy/matriarchy, which is a system, with men/women, which is about individuals. Of course we can think of woeful women and marvellous men, but that’s not at all the point.
And then there are others who say that the aim should be égalité, not oppression of one gender by another. Of course this is reasonable, but if we look at other primates we find a complexity that is hard to parse into neat categories. In a study of 121 primate species, published in PNAS, entitled ‘the evolution of male-female dominance in primate societies’, they start with this:
We show that societies where males win nearly all aggressive encounters against females are actually rare. Evolutionarily, females became more dominant when they gained more control over reproduction, as in monogamous, monomorphic, or arboreal species, as well as when they faced more competition, as in solitary or pair-living species. Contrarily, male-biased dominance prevails in terrestrial, sexually dimorphic, and polygynous species.
Human primates (and don’t we just hate being described that way) are, these days, mostly monogamous, very varied in terms of size, and generally terrestrial, so it’s hard to say how that works for gender dominance.
However, though it galls me to harp on human uniqueness, we have created or evolved these things we call civilisation, language, nations, technology, etc, which have complicated questions of gender dominance. For example, it’s clear that size would hardly be expected to matter so much in a technically-savvy society such as ours. Then again, male violence against women, as we all know, is far more prevalent than its opposite.
Male dominance is still very much the norm in human societies, and is often taken for granted in surprising ways. I remember as a mature-age student in the 90s befriending a young woman who was convinced that men had better, more complex brains than women, and that neural physiology would bear that out. What could make her think this? Did she also think that male cats and dogs had more complex brains than their female counterparts? It seems that our patriarchy, slightly declining though it is in recent times, is still doing its damage in terms of human ambitions and expectations.
One way that gender empowerment can be measured in human societies, and nowhere else in the living world, is wealth. Moulah. Wealth, they say, is power. And when we look at the USA, supposedly the richest country on Earth, with the greatest wealth disparity in the WEIRD world, it’s very clear that wealth is wielding its power there in rather disturbing ways. This has made me wonder – how much wealth, globally, is in the hands of men, compared to women? Would it be 90%? Surely more than that. Surely closer to 99%. In any case it makes a mockery of looking at gender dimorphism when determining the power imbalance between the sexes in humans. And it’s no good looking at the disparities of pay between Mr and Ms Average, I’m talking about the world’s controlling billionaires, all of whom are men. Here’s the opening paragraph of an essay from the Brennan Center for Justice, on money spent on the recent US election:
The 2024 federal election cycle was the most secretive since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. Dark money groups, nonprofits and shell companies that spend on elections without revealing their donors, plowed more than $1.9 billion into last year’s election cycle, a dramatic increase from the prior record of $1 billion in 2020.
Though it occasionally happens, the super-rich, pretty well all male, don’t contribute money to the left side of politics. There is an Emoluments Clause in the US Constitution, but it’s a sick joke, and I’m very doubtful about that $1.9 billion figure – surely it’s far more than that. And although it hasn’t been so prominent lately, the ‘project 2025’ agenda includes an assault on women’s rights and freedoms in that beleaguered country, including a nationwide ban on abortion care, with the further threat of banning all forms of birth control and fertility treatment such as IVF. It also plans to prosecute health professionals who engage in abortion care, and to largely curtail the Affordable Care Act, which would disproportionately disadvantage women in a number of ways.
Of course Trump, who is now clearly the dictator of that country, is less concerned with project 2025 than with prosecuting anyone who has slighted him, and with cashing in on his dictatorship, but his fellow-travellers are mostly of the macho-fascist type, so the assault on women’s rights, freedoms and empowerment will continue, perhaps into Trump’s third term. All we seem to be able to cling to is the long arc bending towards justice that Martin Luther King evoked.
I suppose it will all end by our discovering how smart we are, as opposed to how smart we think we are….
And then maybe bonobos will survive us, and evolve…
References
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