Who Cares about the US Elections??

 I know I should care about the US elections and be happy that the Democrats won - but somehow I can't. This post from my Sri Lanka friend express it best

Who cares? Midterms, Presidential Elections, whatever the bribery festival is this week, who cares? The party that started a genocide just won over the party that continued it. The genocide continues because America is genocide, and there's no voting on that. Trump ran against stupid wars and the Democrats ran against stupid wars but there's always an evil war they're running between. Where are they going?

I used to care about US elections, for reasons I thought were my own and entirely reasonable, but they turned out to just be an imperial hangover and detestable. I was still in their White Empire, unawares, and I cared about their elections because I somehow felt represented there. I wasn't and they were always awful people, but that feeling was there. That feeling, in many ways, was the empire. They had lackeys all over the world, and the illusion of choice kept us there, in the cheap seats of the Cable TV Colosseum, cheering for glad-handing gladiators. But the feeling is leaving more and more people and make no mistake, that is the Empire leaving. Who cares? Midterms, Presidential Elections, whatever the bribery festival is this week, who cares? The party that started a genocide just won over the party that continued it. The genocide continues because America is genocide, and there's no voting on that. Trump ran against stupid wars and the Democrats ran against stupid wars but there's always an evil war they're running between. Where are they going?

I used to care about US elections, for reasons I thought were my own and entirely reasonable, but they turned out to just be an imperial hangover and detestable. I was still in their White Empire, unawares, and I cared about their elections because I somehow felt represented there. I wasn't and they were always awful people, but that feeling was there. That feeling, in many ways, was the empire. They had lackeys all over the world, and the illusion of choice kept us there, in the cheap seats of the Cable TV Colosseum, cheering for glad-handing gladiators. But the feeling is leaving more and more people and make no mistake, that is the Empire leaving. The good-cop/bad-cop act that enabled them to ratchet fascism up year after year has now devolved into open police-stateism. The only satisfaction left is periodically throwing the bums out, but it's two sides of the same ass and the same shit comes out irregardless. What is the practical difference between red and blue policies on Ukraine, for example? One venerates the Ukraine as they use it to attack Russia and the other denigrates it as it does the same thing, but they both do the same thing. The only difference is marketing. That's all US democracy is. The marketing department of rank oligarchy. What is the actual difference between the two parties on Palestine? One supports 'Israel' with wringing hands and the other with open hands but the blood on their hands is the same. Election after election you have to ask, what changed? How many cycles of this do people want to go through? I'm done with it.

As to the domestic issues that Americans say they care about, they don't get it. Just as 'Israel' and Ukraine are not real countries America isn't a real country either. The same forces starving children in Palestine and press-ganging and torturing men in Ukraine do not care about people in America. These forces are not people at all, just inchoate incorporations, incarnated algorithmic greed, the Corporate AI that has roiled the world for centuries and which happily devours its own 'people' because it's not human in the first place. There was once an coincidental advantage to being American, but if it comes down to profits vs people the profits will win every time, and there's no elections there. They just bribe both sides, lie and lie, and do whatever they wanted to do anyways.

It doesn't matter if Democrats win. There's nothing to win. Have people forgotten how Democrats just continue Republican policies more whingily? American democracy is designed this way, to have a weak central government so oligarchs and slavers can keep genociding, profiteering, and stealing unremittingly. The system is working exactly as the founders intended. At founding only a fraction of the people on the land could even vote and that's still how narrowly power is held. And those powerful people are just placeholders for capital, and the money always wins. The elections are just a stabilizer to avert an actual revolution. Which isn't that hard since Americans are the least revolutionary people imaginable.

American people are just spoilt colonizers concerned about their share of the spoils, not the inherent evil of colonialism. To be American is, by definition, to be a bad person. As long as you claim that identity you're claiming stolen property and elections do not legitimize this. However, for a long time they did legitimize this because A) the story was told well and B) the treats were distributed. Bread and circuses. But now it's just circuses and no bread. And while people at the imperial core might still be interested, the provinces are increasingly checking out. Which is bad if you're an empire, isn't it?

American elections were not merely a legitimizing festival for Americans, they were global events. They didn't just legitimize America to American people but American imperialism to everyone else. But now global events have superseded them. It doesn't matter what happens in this election, they are losing West Asia, from the Ukraine to Palestine. And it doesn't matter which party they choose, everyone knows it's one sex party under Epstein. This is a lot of ink spilt to say that I don't care and, legitimately who cares that a random Sri Lankan doesn't care about American elections? But I'm a canary in the coalmine there. Global randos caring and believing in America is what enabled them to sustain an empire on the cheap. It was gullible compradors like me that enabled them to extract value from a vast empire easily, and (former) immigrants like me that increasingly run operations at home. They need true believers to both have and run an empire but this idiotic tale they're spinning leaves them with idiots. And that leaves them with, increasingly, force as an option which, when it fails (and it has failed) just accelerates the spiralling crisis of legitimacy. Americans vote for domestic reasons but all they get is foreign wars and foreigners watch for foreign reasons but all we get is the same shenanigans. What are we watching for and what are they voting for? People are increasingly asking these questions, or just not paying attention. American elections were the public bribery festivals that bound a vast empire together, but now there's just a vast emptiness at its core and everybody can see it. Does anybody really care about this anymore? This was not a midterm election. This was an endterm as the world, inshallah, moves on.

DAWN OF A NEW ORDER

I’m excerpting from a book which is written from a Soviet perspective – largely because I like the author’s style and confessional note. It is Dawn of a New Order - geopolitics and the clash of ideologies by Rein Muellersen, published in 2017.

Throughout this I have worked for the United Nations, being a member of the UN Human Rights Committee, and later had a stint as the UN’s regional advisor for Central Asia – a region I had often visited before and since and where I have many friends. Having lived and worked at length in two imperial capitals – one being authoritarian, the other liberal-democratic – I may have absorbed some of the great-power arrogances and their visions of the world. However, being an Estonian, I am also familiar with smaller nations’ sensitivities and fears; I understand their points, without necessarily sharing them. Moreover, by nature I am hetero, in the largest sense of the term, which means that I like various kinds of differences. However, I well understand that not everybody is, or even wants to be, like me, and there cannot be anything wrong with it.

Having lived, studied and worked in different countries at length I have never felt the need to move in expat circles, as most expats usually do. Why be in Paris and look for Estonians to speak to? I am equally well enshrined in three cultures, which also means that, unfortunately, I am not completely at home in any of them. Moreover, today there is an intensive propaganda war ongoing between these very cultures; a war of such virulence that it forces most people to take sides. It is difficult to always remain unbiased, and it may not even be right to always remain neutral. However, if one is not impartial, how can one remain a researcher? In this book, this dilemma of taking the viewpoint of a researcher versus the position of an activist occasionally arises. If there is ‘advocacy journalism’, can there also be ‘advocacy research’? And is this, in such a case, research?

However, there have always been those who, for whatever reasons, often inexplicable ones, have been able to rise above the circumstances, above the intellectual environment by which they have been surrounded. In the relatively freer West, there were naturally more of them, but there were also quite a few in the East. There were dissidents who were ready to go to prison for views that they often expressed clearly and loudly. There were also highly intellectual persons who articulated their individuality in a less radical way. At Moscow University one of these was my teacher, Professor Grigory Tunkin, about whom I recently published a small review article in the American Journal of International Law1. I recall a trait which I took away from my close association with him – sometimes, while sitting next to him during various academic discussions, when a speaker explained in the best Soviet tradition just how important his or her dissertation was for the promotion of the USSR’s foreign policy interests, and also that this was the first time that so comprehensive a study of this topic had been carried out in the Soviet Union, he used to whisper, and I am not sure whether only to himself or for my ears too: ‘it does not matter whether it is first done in the Soviet Union or not, what matters is whether it is true or not; only first in the world matters’. Of course, this does not mean that he had become unbiased. Soviet ideology, notwithstanding that Professor Tunkin had been exposed more than most Soviet scholars also to Western influence, had of course left an indelible imprint on him too. However, he certainly felt the need, if not to break the intellectual bubbles within which we all inevitably find ourselves, then at least to see beyond them. 

THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM

Today I want to show some selected extracts from The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by The Economist’s Martin Wolf puvlished in 2023. First the contents -

PREFACE: WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

ONE: THE FIRE THIS TIME

Part I ▪ ON CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY

Prologue to Part I

TWO: SYMBIOTIC TWINS: POLITICS AND ECONOMICS IN HUMAN HISTORY

THREE: THE EVOLUTION OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM

Part II ▪ WHAT WENT WRONG

Prologue to Part II

FOUR: IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID

FIVE: RISE OF RENTIER CAPITALISM

SIX: PERILS OF POPULISM

Part III ▪ RENEWING DEMOCRATIC

CAPITALISM

Prologue to Part III

SEVEN: RENEWING CAPITALISM

EIGHT: TOWARD A “NEW” NEW DEAL

NINE: RENEWING DEMOCRACY

Part IV ▪ A HINGE OF HISTORY

Prologue to Part IV

TEN: DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM IN THE WORLD

CONCLUSION: RESTORING CITIZENSHIP

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

This book is a response to this new and troubling era. Its central argument is simple: when we look closely at what is happening in our economies and our polities, we must recognize the need for substantial change if core Western values of freedom, democracy, and the Enlightenment are to survive. But in so doing, we must also remember that reform is not revolution, but its opposite. It is not just impossible, but wrong, to try to re-create a society from scratch, as if its history counted for nothing. The outcome of such attempts has always been destruction and despotism. Only unbridled power can deliver a revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. But unbridled power is by its nature destructive: it shatters the security on which productive human relations can be based and decent lives lived. As Edmund Burke wrote in his response to the French Revolution, society is a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”8 Change is essential, both at home and abroad, but it must build on what is. Indeed, one cannot start anywhere else. The motto of this book is “Never too much,” as the ancient Greeks used to say.9 The health of our societies depends on sustaining a delicate balance between the economic and the political, the individual and the collective, the national and the global. But that balance is broken. Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa. We are no longer able to combine the operations of the market economy with stable liberal democracy. A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites.

Another is rising populism and authoritarianism. Another is the rise of identity politics of both left and right. Yet another is loss of trust in the notion of truth. Once this last happens, the possibility of informed and rational debate among citizens, the very foundation of democracy, has evaporated. In The Great Transformation, published in 1944, the same year as Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Karl Polanyi argued that human beings would not long tolerate living under a truly free market system.10 Experience of the past four decades has vindicated this point of view. This need to reform the relationship between democratic politics and the market economy is not driven purely by domestic tensions, important though they are. It is made more urgent by the rise of autocracy worldwide and, above all, by the apparent success of China’s despotic capitalism. Western nations must improve their economic, social, and political performance in response. 

CONCLUSION – to Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

Democracy and competitive capitalism make a difficult, but precious, marriage of complementary opposites. A market economy that operates under trustworthy rules, rather than the whims of the powerful, underpins prosperity and lowers the stakes of politics. In turn, a competitive democracy induces politicians to offer policies that will improve the performance of the economy and so the welfare of the people. Beyond these practical reasons for the marriage of liberal democracy and market economy, there is also a moral one: both are founded on a belief in the value of human agency—people have a right to do the best they can for themselves; people have a similar right to exercise a voice in public decisions. At bottom, both are complementary aspects of human freedom and dignity.

This is not just an abstract and theoretical notion, let alone a utopian one. The world’s stable liberal democracies have prosperous market economies, while the prosperous market economies are almost all liberal democracies. There are no exceptions to the former rule. Hong Kong and Singapore may be viewed as exceptions to the latter (though the former, alas, not for much longer). Yet both benefited from an exceptional phenomenon—a benevolent pro-capitalist autocracy. The template for Hong Kong was, however, created by colonial outsiders and is now disappearing under Xi’s heavy-handed rule. The rulers of Singapore not only inherited a colonial system, but also must give foreign capitalists, on whose knowledge and connections they rely, the security and openness they need. This is a vital constraint on what they may safely do: if voice is relatively impotent in Singapore, exit is not.

China might ultimately become a far more significant exception to the rule that rich market economies are also liberal democracies. But its gross domestic product per head (at purchasing power parity) was still eightieth in the world in 2019, between Suriname and Turkmenistan.3 For all its progress, it is a very long way from being a high-income country. It is also quite likely to flounder under Xi’s increasingly heavy-handed rule.

Prosperity is far from all that this is about, important though it is. On almost any measure one could imagine—life expectancy, educational standards, and the progressive push for equal rights—the high-income democracies are the most successful societies in human history. The freedom they grant, together with their opposition to ascribed status, opens opportunities for improvement of both individuals and society. And what is the alternative? It is either unaccountable rule by thugs and bureaucrats or the iron cage of custom. Both are recipes for stagnation and oppression. They are death to the human spirit and social progress. For all its faults, democratic capitalism is worth defending. But it is in grave peril. Remember what makes a working democracy: elections must be seen to be free and fair, and victors must be accepted as politically legitimate. For this to happen, the ties that bind participants to one another must be as strong as those that bind people to factions. In chapter 9, I argued that patriotism—a shared attachment to place, history, values, and culture—is the most powerful source of the needed sense of a common identity. Such patriotism may also be called civic nationalism. It may be based in part on myths. But myths are a universal attribute of human communities.

There exist other sources of democratic political legitimacy. An essential one is widely shared prosperity. Another is a shared trust in rules of the game viewed as fair by all. Yet another is confidence that, whoever may (temporarily) be in power, the government will be competent, the law will be impartially applied, and the rights of all people to live their lives freely will be protected. Expressing the foundations of a stable democracy in this way makes clear how fragile it is. Democracy is peaceful civil war. The divisions that emerge in democratic politics may, in the wrong circumstances and with the wrong people, become sources of insurrection, civil war, or creeping authoritarianism in the name of the people. The latter has been happening recently all over the world. It has definitely been happening in the US, the heartland of contemporary democracy, with Donald Trump’s insurrection against the presidential election. Democracy is not yet a lost cause. But it is highly endangered. Elite failures and malfeasance, along with the economic, social, and technological developments discussed earlier in this book, have broken the confidence of many people in the institutions and values of democracy. This has facilitated the rise of the demagogues against whom Plato warned. In the US, above all, the Republican Party has ceased to abide by core democratic norms. It resembles movements in which the Leader’s word defined what was true and right more than it does a normal democratic political party. The most notorious example was the Führerprinzip of the Nazis: if the Leader said jump, the question was just “how high.”4 So, too, it now seems to be with Trump. Yet, amazingly and depressingly, the subservience of Republican elites is the product not so much of fear, as it was for many in the Germany of the 1930s, as of personal ambition and moral collapse.

The danger Donald Trump posed to liberal democracy was clear when he was elected on a platform that was part nationalism, part xenophobia, and part cult of personality. As president, he rejected alliances, multilateralism, international rules, science, truth, and the reality of climate change. Yet in 2020, even after the disastrous experience with the pandemic, he won 46.8 percent of the vote. More important, the majority of Republicans agreed with him that the election had been rigged against him by the Democrats.5

This loyalty continued even after the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which he fomented. Indeed, believing in his “big lie” about the stolen election became a litmus test for recognition as a true Republican. The Republicans had moved from being a normal political party in the world’s most influential liberal democracy to embracing the view that not only was losing an election ipso facto illegitimate, but riot and murder were acceptable responses. The implications of this for democracy in the US and, given that country’s historic role in defending democracy, for liberal democracy worldwide are disturbingly clear. How did this happen, particularly after the euphoria of the collapse of Soviet communism? The Trump-led Republican Party, or for that matter the Johnson-led Conservative Party, did not come from nowhere. They came from forty years of elite failure. The fragile marriage of liberal democracy with capitalism requires maintaining difficult balances between individual and community, between private and public, between freedom and responsibility, between economics and politics, between money and ethics, between elites and people, between citizen and noncitizen, and between the national and global. This is why ΜΗΔΕΝ ΑΓΑΝ (Nothing in excess) has been this book’s motto. When these balances work, the marriage of liberal democracy with market capitalism is the most successful system in the history of the world. But liberal democracy is vulnerable to the selfishness of elites and ambitions of would-be despots. Historically, democratic republics have been exceptions. The normal human political patterns have been plutocracy or tyranny. The latter always waits in the wings. In today’s world, tyrannies—demagogic and bureaucratic—are not just in the wings, but on the march. 

Parts III and IV of the book set out an agenda for restoring a balance in both democratic politics and market economics. It takes into account both the internal weaknesses and global responsibilities of liberal democracies. The proposals are pragmatic, but also idealistic. They are based not on revolutionary transformation, but on reform of democratic institutions and economic policies. But we must recognize, too, the scale of the task: the combination of new technology with laissez-faire ideology has accelerated the emergence of a plutocracy dedicated to increasing its wealth and power and of new technologies with extraordinarily destructive potential.

We do indeed need to build on the foundations we have. But we cannot go back to the past. The world of the mid-twentieth century is, for both good and bad, gone forever. We need to “build back better.” The path forward is to adapt the goals of the reformers of the past to the needs of thepresent. The most important reformer of the twentieth century was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In his speech on January 1941 on the “four freedoms,” he laid out a role for the US in the world, predicated upon a domestic transformation. 

Building on this outline, chapters 7 and 8 set out the following goals for reform of the capitalist economy: 

1. A rising, widely shared, and sustainable standard of living

2. Good jobs for those who can work and are prepared to do so

3. Equality of opportunity

4. Security for those who need it

5. Ending special privileges for the few

Removing harms, not universal happiness, is the objective. The approach to reform is that of “piecemeal social engineering,” as recommended by Karl Popper, not the revolutionary overreach that has so often brought calamity.6

Behind these specific proposals is a wider perspective. A universal suffrage democracy will insist on a citizenship that is both economic and political. This means that business cannot be free to do whatever it wishes.

It means that taxes must be paid, including by the economically powerful. It means that the state must be competent and active, yet also law-governed and accountable. All of this was the clear lesson of the twentieth century.

There are, it is true, alternative ways to seek power under democratic capitalism. All will fail. One extreme is to offer a fully socialized economy. But the economy will founder, and the rulers will be forced out of power or seize it undemocratically, as happened most recently in Venezuela. An opposite extreme is to marry laissez-faire economics to a populism founded on anti-intellectualism, racism, and cultural conservatism. Such plutopopulism is also likely to end in an autocracy in which even plutocrats are insecure. A still faster route to autocracy is via a blending of the two extremes in nationalist socialism (or national socialism). This combines a welfare state with arbitrary rule by demagogues. This, too, will ultimately ruin both the economy and democracy, as the unaccountable gangster in charge rewards cronies and punishes opponents. Interwar Europe, the history of Latin America, and the more recent experience of many emerging and developing economies, including some of the former communist countries of central and eastern Europe, offer copious warnings. The greater the inequality, insecurity, feeling of abandonment, fear of unmanageable change, and sense of injustice, the more vulnerable to collapse the fragile balance that makes democratic capitalism work will become.

If the needed reforms are to happen, elites must play a central role. A complex society without elites is inconceivable. Alas, one dominated by predatory, shortsighted, and amoral elites is all too plausible. If such elites emerge in a democratic republic, it will collapse. That happened to the late Roman Republic. Anne Applebaum has described brilliantly how it has been happening in Hungary, Poland, and even the UK and US.7 Liberal democracy is a complex system of restraints, some of them in law, but many tacit. It depends ultimately on truthfulness and trustworthiness in those in positions of responsibility. The corruption, injustice, and lies of elites are powerful solvents of bonds that tie citizens together, inevitably replacing patriotism with deepening cynicism. As the great journalist Hunter S. Thompson declared, “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”8 Only a corrupt oligarchy or autocracy is then possible. Democracy will perish.

Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist has rightly argued that members of the elite need to be competent.9 This is one of the reasons why equality of opportunity is a founding value of a liberal democracy. There is no alternative to some form of meritocracy. All societies have mechanisms for training such elites. But it is not enough for members of elites to be clever, well trained, and ambitious if they are also self-satisfied, narrowly educated, and selfish, possibly even amoral. Members of a functioning elite, which includes the business elite, need wisdom as well as knowledge. Above all, they need to feel responsible for the welfare of their republic and its citizens. Indeed, if there are to be citizens at all, members of the elite must be exemplars. It is not hard: instead of lies, honesty; instead of greed, restraint; instead of fear and hatred, appeals to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” Elite failings are pervasive in today’s story of the democratic recession in the high-income democracies and elsewhere. This is true on both left and right. It is a failing of the Brahmin elites of the left to downplay the distinction between citizens and noncitizens fundamental to any functioning democracy. It is a failing of that self-same elite to despise the conservative and patriotic values of less-educated fellow citizens. It is a failing, again, to rail against the patriotism on which any liberal democracy must depend.

Yet it is an even greater failing of economically successful elites to push for policies that generate enormous wealth for themselves and insecurity for everybody else. It is a great failing to encourage the emergence of a rigged capitalism, which destroys the legitimacy of the market economy and of the state that protects and promotes it. It is a great failing, above all, to cement power by creating a pluto-populist coalition based on self-seeking at the top and rage at the middle and bottom. It is all too easy to motivate people by hatred and fear and so by a tribalism that divides the world into the “good people” like us, and everybody else. But as society becomes more plutocratic, the sinews that bind citizens together snap. Then comes the false reformer and, worse, the faux populist—the ambitious demagogue who pretends “to drain the swamp” as he makes it wider and deeper. In his Republic, Plato, a fierce critic of democracy, pointed to the likely rise of the sort of demagogue we see all around us today. Instead of democracy, he proposed the selection of “guardians,” or philosopher rulers. These guardians would not only be philosophers. They would also be freed from temptation by being without possessions or family. Their children would be raised together. These guardians then would be not just a meritocracy but a monastic one.

The logic is clear. The danger with any elite is that it will subordinate the fulfillment of its vital social role to its personal interests. It can be almost impossible to avoid this. A long time ago, I was told why corruption was rife in the bureaucracy of a certain large developing country. The mechanism was simple and effective. A young, able, and idealistic recruit would be offered a large bribe early in his career. He would refuse it. This would happen a few times. Then, in a private meeting, he would be told by a superior that if he did not take the bribe, he would never be promoted. He thinks of his wife and hopes for a family. And so, next time, he would accept the bribe. This is blatant. Yet there are so many more subtle ways of corrupting people whose roles in society are those of guardians: lawyers whose only interest is in winning cases; business executives whose only interest is in creating a dynastic fortune; creators whose only interest is in getting the money they need to make their creations a reality; politicians whose only interest is in winning elections; and so forth. As professional standards erode, it becomes ever more difficult to be the exception. Honor and decency come to seem old-fashioned, even ridiculous. And so, when a corrupt thug accuses the elite of being corrupt, not to mention incompetent, it is easy for a great mass of the people to agree, because it is seen to be true. Without decent and competent elites, democracy will perish. Alas, as I write these last paragraphs in the winter of 2022, I find myself doubting whether the US will still be a functioning democracy by the end of the decade. If US democracy collapses, what future can there be for the grand idea of “government of the people, by the people, for the people”?

We must not be complacent about this danger. Democracy is very recent: even a broad male franchise is less than two centuries old anywhere; universal adult suffrage representative democracy is only a little over a century old. For the first time in history, this system recognized the political rights of all adult citizens. It was a great achievement. It has already had to confront powerful enemies in World War II and the Cold War.

Yet the enemy today is not without. Even China is not that potent. The enemy is within. Democracy will survive only if it gives opportunity, security, and dignity to the great majority of its people. As Aristotle told us, it depends on a large, contented, and independent middle class. If, in contrast, the system benefits only the most successful, the most cynical, and the greediest, it will founder. If elites are only in it for themselves, a dark age of autocracy will return.

The renewal of capitalism and democracy must be animated by a simple, but powerful, idea: that of citizenship. We cannot just think as consumers, workers, business owners, savers, or investors. We must think as citizens. This is the tie that binds people together in a free and democratic society.10 It is by thinking and acting as citizens that a democratic political community survives and thrives. If that tie is dissolved, the democratic polity will founder. Its replacement will be some combination of oligarchy, autocracy, or outright dictatorship.

Citizenship must have three aspects: concern for the ability of fellow citizens to have a fulfilled life; the desire to create an economy that allows citizens to flourish in this way; and, above all, loyalty to democratic political and legal institutions and the values of open debate and mutual tolerance that underpin them. So, what might such a revival of the idea of citizenship mean, in today’s challenging global environment? Here are things this does not mean.

• It does not mean that democratic states should have no concern for the

• welfare of noncitizens. Nor does it mean that it sees the success of its own citizens as a mirror image of the failures of others. On the contrary, it must seek mutually beneficial relations with other states.

• It does not mean that states should cut themselves off from free and fruitful exchange with outsiders. Trade, movement of ideas, movement of people, and movement of capital, properly regulated, can be highly beneficial.

• It does not mean that states should avoid cooperating closely with one another to achieve shared goals. This applies above all to actions designed to protect the global environment.

Yet there are things it clearly does mean. It means that the first concern of democratic states is the welfare of their citizens. If this is to be real, certain things must follow.

• Every citizen should have the reasonable possibility of acquiring an education that would allow them to participate as fully as possible in the life of a high-skilled modern economy.

• Every citizen should also have the security needed to thrive, even if burdened by the ill luck of illness, disability, and other misfortunes.

• Every citizen should have the protections needed to be free from abuse, physical and mental.

• Every citizen should be able to cooperate with other workers in order to protect their collective rights.

• Every citizen, and especially successful ones, should expect to pay taxes sufficient to sustain such a society.

Those who manage corporations should understand that they have obligations to the societies that make their existence possible.

• Citizens are entitled to decide who is allowed to come and work in their countries and who is entitled to share the obligations and rights of citizenship with them.

• Politics must be susceptible to the influence of all citizens, not just the wealthiest.

• Policy should seek to create and sustain a vigorous middle class, while ensuring a safety net for everybody.

• All citizens, whatever their race, ethnicity, religion, or gender are entitled to equality of treatment by the state and the law. 

The West cannot go back to the 1960s. It cannot go back to a world of mass industrialization, where most educated women did not work, where there were clear ethnic and racial hierarchies, and where the Western countries still dominated the globe. Moreover, we face today, with climate change, the rise of China and the transformation of work by information technology—very different challenges. The world has changed too profoundly for nostalgia to be a sane response. Yet some things remain the same. Human beings must act collectively as well as individually. Acting together, within a democracy, means acting and thinking as citizens. If we do not do so, democracy will fail, and our freedoms will evaporate. It is our generation’s duty to ensure it does not. It took too long to see the danger. Now it is right there in front of us. This is a moment of great fear and faint hope. We must recognize the danger and fight now if we are to turn the hope into reality. If we fail, the light of political and personal freedom might once again disappear from the world.

The Master Switch

 Back in 2010, I missed Tim Wu's interesting book - The Master Switch – the rise and fall of information empires Tim Wu (2010)

Part I traces the genesis of cultural and communications empires, the first phase of the Cycle, and shows how each of the early twentieth century’s new information industries—telephony, radio broadcast, and film—evolved from a novel invention. By the 1940s, every one of the twentieth century’s new information industries, in the United States and elsewhere, would reach an established, stable, and seemingly permanent form, excluding all potential entrants. Communications by wire became the sole domain of the Bell system. The great networks, NBC and CBS, ruled radio broadcasting, as they prepared, with the help of the Federal Communications Commission, to launch in

their own image a new medium called television. The Hollywood studios, meanwhile, closed a vise grip on every part of the film business, from talent to exhibition. 

And so in Part II, we will focus on the consolidation of information empire, often with state support, and the consequences, particularly for the vitality of free expression and technical innovation. For while we may rightly feel a certain awe for what the information industries manage to accomplish thanks to the colossal centralized structures created through the 1930s, we will also see how the same period was one of the most repressive in American history vis-à-vis new ideas and forms. But as we have said, that which is centralized also eventually becomes a target for assault, triggering the next phase of the Cycle. Sometimes this takes the form of a technological innovation that breaks through the defenses and becomes the basis of an insurgent industry. The advent of personal computing and the Internet revolution it will eventually beget are both instances of such game-changing developments. And though less endowed with the romantic lore of invention, so too is the rise of cable television. But sometimes it is not invention—or invention alone—that drives the Cycle, but rather the federal government suddenly playing the role of giant-slayer of information cartels and monopolies that it had long tolerated. 

In Part III, we explore the ways in which the stranglehold of information monopoly is broken after decades. Through the 1970s each of the great information empires of the twentieth century was fundamentally challenged or broken into pieces, if not blown up altogether, leading to a new period of openness. And a new run of the Cycle. The results were unmistakably invigorating for both commerce and culture. But like the T-1000 killer robot of Terminator 2 the shattered powers would reconstitute themselves, either in uncannily similar form (as with AT&T) or in the guise of a new corporate species called the conglomerate (as with the revenge of the broadcasters and of Hollywood).

In Part IV we will see how the perennial lure of size and scale that led to the original information leviathans in the first half of the century spawned a new generation in the latter part. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the second great closing will be complete. The one exception to the hegemony of the latter-day information monopolists will be a new network to end all networks. While all else was being consolidated, the 1990s would also see the so-called Internet revolution, though amid its explosive growth no one could see where the wildly open new medium would lead. Would the Internet usher in a reign of industrial openness without end, abolishing the Cycle? Or would it, despite its radically decentralized design, become in time simply the next logical target for the insuperable forces of information empire, the object of the most consequential centralization yet?

Part V will lead us to that ultimate question, the answer to which is as yet a matter of conjecture, for which, I argue, our best basis is history. Reading all this, you may yet be wondering, “Why should I care?” After all, the flow of information is invisible, and its history lacks the emotional immediacy of, say, the Second World War or the civil rights movement. The fortunes of information empires notwithstanding, life goes on. It hardly occurred to anyone as a national problem when, in the 1950s, a special episode of I Love Lucy could attract more than 70 percent of households. And yet, almost like the weather, the flow of information defines the basic tenor of our times, the ambience in which things happen, and, ultimately, the character of a society.

Towards the Abyss - from Maiden to war Volodymir Ishchenko (2024) An interesting 
and useful take

WAYS OF SEEING

An earlier post I did in April 2017 is worth a rerun

In my 30s, as a senior local politician, I felt the pull between loyalties to local constituents; to party colleagues; to official advisers; and to my own conscience – and indeed developed a diagram for students to show the 4 very different pressures (audiences) to which politicians are subjected – 

- local voters (if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);

- the party;

- the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;

- their conscience.

Politicians, I argued, differ according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished – eg populist; ideologue; statesman; maverick.

- The "populist" (or Tribune of the people) simply purports to gives the people what (s)he thinks they want - regardless of logic, coherence or consequences. 

- The "ideologue" (or party spokesman) simply reflects what the party activist (or bosses) say - regardless of logic etc. 

- The "statesman" (or manager) does what the professional experts in the appropriate bit of the bureaucracy tell him/her - regardless of its partiality etc

- the "maverick" (or conviction politician) does what they think right (in the quiet of their conscience or mind - no matter how perverted) 

I tried to suggest that the effective politician was the one who resisted the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its element of truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership, 

Missionaries

A great new post from Richard Hamas about "Missionaries"  

I have spent twenty years watching a certain kind of man arrive in this part of the world, and I have never once managed to like him. Today the mercenary comes with a consultant’s slide deck. He has flown in from Geneva or Washington or, lately, from a regional office in Singapore that lets him claim he is local. He is courteous, often genuinely kind, and he is here to help. He has a framework. The framework has pillars. He will run a workshop, and at the workshop there will be a maturity model — a diagram, usually with five stages, along which your country can be plotted like a patient on a chart. Thailand is at stage two. Vietnam is showing even more promise. The framework doesn’t say where he is standing, because that’s stage five. Stage five is the end of the road. It’s the place from which the diagram is drawn. He doesn’t experience himself as standing anywhere specifically. He experiences himself as describing how the world actually is. I have watched him do this in ministries and in town halls and in the air-conditioned function rooms of hotels that charge more for a night than the people outside earn in a season. I have watched him explain participatory governance to communities that were governing themselves by consensus when his own ancestors were burning each other over the question of transubstantiation. And I have watched the faces of the people receiving the help — polite, attentive, entirely unconvinced — waiting for him to finish so the real conversation can resume after he leaves. They have seen him before. They saw him a hundred years ago. He was wearing something different then. He is not selling nothing. This is what makes him so hard to be rid of. If the consultant were a pure fraud, a snake-oil salesman with an empty bottle, he would have been laughed out of the region decades ago. He is not altogether bad. The commodities in his case are partly real. Independent courts do protect people from arbitrary power. Constitutional constraint does correlate with lower corruption. The dispersal of authority does, on the whole, make ordinary life less frightening, and I wouldn’t raise my children under a government that lacked these protections. I have lived close enough to the alternative to mean that without sentiment. The benefits are not propaganda.

And that’s precisely the problem. A man carrying something worthless is easy to dismiss. A man carrying something valuable, who has mistaken the value of his cargo for a licence to lecture you from a pedestal, is the hardest figure in the world to answer – because the moment you object to his posture, he holds up his cargo and asks whether you are really against good courts and clean government. Of course you’re not. You are against the posture. But the posture has hidden itself behind the cargo. It’s the oldest trick in the West’s book, and they’ve got away with it for so long. Pluck up the courage to pull the mask off the consultant, and you find the missionary. And behind the missionary, paying the fare for them both, is the mercenary who was always there. The resemblance is not a metaphor, nor is it an insult I have thrown in for effect. It’s a structure and a real one. Once you have seen it, you can’t stop seeing it. The missionary who came to this region in 1850 believed, as today’s consultant believes, that he had arrived from a more advanced situation. A place of authority. He read the people in front of him as lacking something – sophistication, perhaps? In his case, they were souls in the dark rather than institutions below benchmark — and he understood that lack as temporary, curable, and on its way to resolution under his guidance. He had a single path in mind. It was the one his own civilisation had walked, and he interpreted his presence as support along the way. The cruelty of what he was doing was folded, always, inside a promise. You are not being conquered. You are being saved. You are being given better knowledge.

Change the vocabulary and the costume and you pretty much have today’s consultant. Souls are institutions. Salvation becomes development. Damnation equates to underdevelopment, then transition, then the long purgatory of the almost-but-not-quite-democratic. And “transition” is not an abstraction. It’s the IMF arriving with a structural-adjustment programme, conditioning a nation’s place in the modern world on a plan it didn’t choose, drafted by economists who would have been wounded to hear the word ‘missionary’ — the cure once again administered from outside, for your own good, on terms you were not invited to set. The missionary’s Gospel becomes the consultant’s methodology. The custodian who once carried scripture now carries an index, and he would be upset — sincerely, deeply wounded — to be told he is doing what the missionary did, with the same zeal, because he has been taught that the missionary is the embarrassing ancestor his entire profession was invented to replace. He can’t see that he has inherited the man’s bones. He believes he has buried him.

Between the missionary and the consultant stands the whole imperial century. The mission civilisatrice — the civilising mission, France’s gift of itself to people it was simultaneously bleeding — kept the structure intact and only swapped the deficit from damnation to barbarism and the cure from the church to the lycée and the colonial administration. The white man’s burden was the same skeleton raised to the pitch of self-pity; the custodian is now so exhausted by his own benevolence that he asks you to feel sorry for him for the weight of all the help he is obliged to give. Heathen, savage, native, underdeveloped, transitional, not-yet-democratic: it’s one word, spoken across five centuries, and the word means ‘behind’. Behind us. Less advanced. On our path but not yet arrived at the place we already occupy and from which we so generously and so tirelessly reach back to pull you forward. There’s a name for what he becomes at that pitch, and it is not his to take. He becomes the martyr. The word belongs by right to the ones who died under him – the resisters, the burnt villages, the actual dead – and he claims it anyway, because he has discovered that suffering is the one currency a refusal cannot argue with. This is the custodian’s second face, and he turns it to you the moment the gift is declined. He does not withdraw from the road. He bleeds for it. He shows you the cost he has borne to bring it – the years in hardship posts, the fevers caught in your service, the comforts surrendered at home so that you might be improved – and the wounds become a charge against you. To say no to the offer was a disagreement. To say no to the martyr is ingratitude, an injury done to a man who gave everything for your sake. The colonised are not even permitted the dignity of refusal, because refusal now spits on a sacrifice. This is the cruellest turn in the whole repertoire: the subjugated is made to feel he has wounded the one who came to subjugate him. The declaration that announced the rights of all mankind was written by societies that held slaves and ran empires, and no contradiction was felt. I want to dwell on that for a moment, because the usual response is to call it hypocrisy and move on. ‘Hypocrisy’ is exactly the wrong word — it lets everyone off the hook too lightly. Hypocrisy is a gap between what you preach and what you do. This was not a gap. The men who wrote the universal declaration of human worth and the men who ran the plantations were frequently the same men, holding both notions in the same mind without tension. The absence of that strain is the whole point. The university was not betrayed by the empire. The universal was announced ‘from’ the empire, at its height, by its beneficiaries, and the colonised were not left out of the grand human family. They were given a place in it. That place was behind everyone else. They were inside the universal human family in the only role the universal had ever written for them: candidates, provisional members, interns who would receive the full dignity being described as soon as they had been developed enough to deserve it, on a timeline their liberators would set.

This is the discovery the postcolonial writers spent fifty years trying to force into the Western view, against a resistance that was itself the proof. Frantz Fanon, writing from inside the experience, described a colonised world in which every native value had been classified as an absence before the native could open his mouth — the deficit assigned in advance, the verdict entered before the trial. Edward Said showed how an entire scholarly apparatus had built the East as the West’s slow, sensual, backward shadow self, a shadow self to be studied precisely so that it could be administered. And the decolonial writers who came after, Walter Mignolo among them, pushed the hardest claim of all: that the West’s inspirational story of progress and its darker story of conquest are not two stories but one. This was the same movement seen from the sunny and the shadow side. The universal itself — the very ambition to speak for all of humanity at once — was not the cure for empire but its symptom. Only the powerful have ever been positioned to claim they speak for all of humanity but from nowhere in particular. They have made that claim every single time from a place as particular as a flag. You can wave the postcolonial writers away as the West’s guilty conscience talking to itself, and many do. So notice that the same suspicion grows in liberalism’s own garden, planted by people who owe Fanon nothing. John Grey, who reached the position from inside liberal philosophy rather than in revolt against it, spent a career arguing that the Enlightenment belief in one universal civilisation toward which all societies are heading is a faith and nothing firmer – the Christian conviction that there is a single truth and a single history leading to it, with the providence stripped out and progress bolted into the vacancy. Same shape. Same single destination. Same suppression of the local by the universal, now riding reason and markets instead of grace and mercy. Alasdair MacIntyre drove at the joint from another angle entirely: liberalism is not the neutral referee among rival ways of life that it claims to be. It’s one way of life among all the others, with its own parish and its own past, that’s pulled off the most audacious move available to any tradition — disguising its own explicit commitments as the absence of commitment, its parish as the whole of reason, so that to disagree with it is not to hold a different view but to be irrational and superstitious and behind. The referee is a player who has talked everyone into letting him keep score.

That is the reflex laid bare, and here is why it can’t be fixed by good intentions. Make the consultant kinder. Make his framework more participatory, his metrics more culturally empathic, and his workshop more humble. You have improved the cargo. You have not touched the posture because the posture was never in the cargo — it was in the standing-apart-from, the path that runs one way, the diagram drawn from a vantage that calls itself stage five and refers to you patronisingly as stage two. A gentler custodian is a custodian still. A more enlightened mission is still a mission. The structure is perfectly capable of absorbing its own critique and emerging unharmed, now with a chapter on listening and a budget line for local voices, still drawing the map from the same spot it always drew it. I have sat through that workshop too. The humility is new. The vantage point exactly where it was before.

I should be careful here not to swing to the lazy verdict waiting on the other side, because it’s just as false and far more popular. The lazy verdict says the cargo is fake too — that the rights and the courts and the constraints are nothing but the empire’s pretty packaging; that the West’s whole moral vocabulary should be binned as the cant of the strong. That is nonsense, and comfortable nonsense, the kind that saves you the work of discerning the real from the rotten. It can’t explain the dissident in the cell who reaches for the language of rights against her torturer and is not fooled into doing so. It can’t explain why the powerless, again and again, in Manila and Seoul and Jakarta, have picked up exactly this vocabulary and turned it on their own rulers — not because they were tricked into it but because it stung, because it worked, because there was something real in it to grip. A creed that was only a weapon of the strong would not fit the hand of the weak so well. Both claims are true at once. You have to hold them as that or you understand nothing: the goods are beneficial, but the manner in which they are carried into the world is imperial. The substance is defensible. The grammar is not. And the substance is the perfect hiding place for the grammar, because a man certain he is offering you something good can almost never see that he is offering it as a superior to an inferior. His sincerity is the disguise. The better his gift, the more total the blindness.

Blindness is the real cost, of course — not to us, the helpers, who can see him perfectly well and always could, but to him. This is the part the consultant would least expect and least believe. A civilisation that takes its own values as universal loses the ability to recognise them as values — as choices made by certain people under particular pressures that cost something and excluded something and might have gone another way. It can no longer find itself on a map that holds other positions, because it has confused its own position with the map. And a power that can’t see itself as one position among many has disabled the most fundamental instrument of statecraft: the ability to imagine how it looks from somewhere else. Somewhere that’s not itself. It reads every refusal as backwardness or bad faith. It can’t conceive that a society which has heard the offer in full and declined it might be neither stupid nor hostile, but simply standing somewhere else, on ground of its own, with good reasons. That man believes he is looking through a window at the world. He is not. He’s looking into a mirror, and the finer his civilisation’s real achievements, the more flattering the reflection and the less reason he has ever to doubt the glass. He cannot see past himself because he doesn’t know that’s all he has been seeing. I have argued elsewhere that the West misreads Xi Jinping’s China as an enemy when it’s better understood as a rival worldview. I will not repeat that case here. I want only to land it where this argument has been heading all along. Because China is where the whole five-hundred-year reflex meets, at last, a society too large and too old and too successful to be plotted at stage two and told to wait. Here is what the West can’t hear Beijing saying. The sharpest charge China levels is not that liberalism is false, or that rights are a fiction, or that democracy is a Western swindle—those are charges the West knows how to answer, and answering them is almost entertaining, because the answers are good and the answering changes nothing. The charge that really lands, and that draws no reply because it can’t even be received, is this: that the West has lost the capacity to tell the difference between ‘we believe this’ and ‘this is universal’. That it can no longer feel its own deepest commitments as commitments — as the hard-won inheritance of a particular people — and so can offer them to the rest of the species only as a standard the species is failing to meet. The accusation is not aimed at the content of the creed. It’s aimed at grammar. It says: your empire didn’t end when the flags came down. It changed clothes. It set down the rifle and the Bible and picked up the benchmark. The path was the same path. It has only ever led to one place – back to itself.

And then the trap snaps shut, and it’s worth watching the mechanism, because the West springs it on itself. When China declines the benchmark — when it refuses to accept that liberal procedure is the measure of its legitimacy and insists that a different history has produced a different and equally mature form of order — the West reads the refusal as ‘the proof’. Only an enemy, the logic runs, would reject what is self-evidently meant for all mankind. But the refusal is not enmity. It’s the wholly predictable act of a civilisation confident enough to look the custodian in the eye and decline his path and his gifts. And by misreading that confident refusal as aggression, the West confirms the precise charge being made against it: that it can’t conceive of a genuine difference, only of a defective sameness, of a student who has not yet been brought far enough along. And beneath the strategic alarm runs something older and more wounded, which the martyr explains and fear alone does not. There is an injured astonishment in the way the West receives China’s refusal — a sense that Beijing has not simply declined a model but failed to be grateful, snubbed a gift the West suffered to extend, and withheld the thanks owed for a century of being shown the path to enlightenment. We did not only offer; we sacrificed, or so we have told ourselves, and a civilisation that will not walk the road we bled to build is guilty of more than rivalry. It is guilty of ingratitude. This is the martyr’s logic arrived at the largest scale history affords, and it blinds at exactly the moment clear sight is most needed because a man waiting to be thanked cannot hear what is actually being said to him. China is not refusing to honour our wounds. China is telling us the path was never universal — that it led, as every path we have ever offered has led, only back to ourselves — and we cannot receive the message, because we are still standing there, holding the gift, nursing the slight, and waiting for a gratitude that is never going to come.

The evidence for the prosecution is placed in our hands, and we seize it gratefully, because seizing it spares us the one recognition the reflex exists to prevent — that we are standing somewhere in particular, that our universal is a local inheritance that once travelled under arms, and that the people who will not treat it as the measure of all the earth are not lagging behind us on our path at all. They are somewhere else. On their own ground. The Chinese see us clearly. We have spent five hundred years making sure we could never see them back. The missionary and the consultant would still despise each other if they met. Each would see in the other everything he had defined himself against. Neither could afford to notice that the heathen and the not-quite-yet-democratic are the same person; that the path to salvation and the path to good governance are the same path; and that in five hundred years of arriving in other people’s countries to bring them forward, we have not once managed to imagine the people we found there as anything other than slower travellers on a path we own. Until we can — until the West can experience even one of its own convictions as a conviction rather than as the structure of reality itself — every difference the world presents will keep reaching us as a threat. And we will keep doing what we are doing now, with the largest civilisation on earth, which is mistaking the edge of our vision for the edge of the world.