Category: Economy

Is it them or us?

We are no longer viewing events at a distance. This isn’t history. I’ve talked often about the dangers to democracy, our democracy. But now they are here, they are immediate.

Hilary Mantel referred to history as ‘the plan of the positions we take when we stop the dance to note them down’. We are the dance.

We’ve always had sharp differences of view, left and right and in-between. But the principles of representative government, freedom of speech and association, and the rule of law, have in the post-war era, in the Western democracies, never been under threat. Until now. Could it now be, literally, them or us?

We’ve always had a ruling class, defined by money or land, or both, but our democracy has over two hundred years more or less (we could of course go back much further) held them in check. But now we have social media businesses kowtowing to Trump (Silicon Valley likewise), while shedding the responsibilities they once avowed, And the message that they and other media convey so readily is that here – in the UK and in the USA – we’re broken societies, failed states.

We’re at risk of surrendering our democracy too easily.

Reading a review of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, ‘Shadow Ticket’, I came across the following. The words are the reviewer’s, not Pynchon’s. ‘Fearing disorder and rejecting freedom’s responsibilities, we willingly cede liberty in exchange for simplicity and a false sense of safety. Fascist tendencies have always been lodged deep in the American grain.’

Are we now more willing to cede power to a new ruling class, one that will be disinclined to relinquish that power through the democratic process?

Extending that line of reasoning… it’s argued we want safety from a defined enemy, who the media have helped define for us and who, in the case of the UK and the USA, is an immigrant population who are deemed to be taking our jobs and preying on our services, and on our women and children as well. Take it up another level, and there are conspiracies, and a class, in our case a self-serving middle-class, who are in effect conspiring against us.

The direction of travel is ominous.

Reading Paul Preston’s ‘Architects of Terror’ I’ve been made aware of the role that an entirely fictional ‘Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy’ played in justifying the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Franco likened his victory to that of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, some 450 years before: ‘We have not shed the blood of our dead to return to a decadent past, to the sad liberalism that lost us Cuba and the Philippines.’

Germany after 1933 and Spain from 1936 are just two examples of how easy it is to slip from democratic government, vilified as ‘sad liberalism’, to autocracy.

The violence in Palestine and Gaza, in the Yemen and Sudan, the brutality of ISIS, Boko Haram and Islamic State, have all seemed distant. We didn’t ourselves feel threatened. Putin invading Ukraine has brought it to our doorstep and yet swathes of people across Europe are willing to support him. He represents an old order which, however divided, gave people security. Young people headed to towns, to western Europe, industries closed or moved away, remittances from abroad weren’t enough to secure either prosperity or pride. We’re not yet faced in Europe with the effective transfer of power from the courts to one man, as is happening with the Supreme Court’s connivance in the USA. But we’re heading that way.

We liberals have always thought we had the moral high ground. We’re locked into the old post-war order and it’s as if nothing has changed. But swathes of our populations want to claim back that ground. They don’t have the same sense of moral niceties that we do. To them, our high morality is sham. Our cities prosper while local towns, once the backbone of our prosperity, are in decline. Democracy has failed them. It is our game, no longer theirs.

And look at the language I’m using. Is it really us or them? And which side am I on? Could I be persuaded that democracy has failed, and some form of autocracy, backed up as necessary by violence, might be the only answer?

OK, that’s a rhetorical question, for me at least. But for how many others might it be a reality?

Soft power in a weaponised world

Many themes in this Putin and now Trump-disrupted world are in play at the moment. One is soft power, which we in the UK have relied on, aided by the strength of our services sector, in the post WW2 years. Soft power requires a global perspective, anchored by a trade in merchandise and ideas worldwide, something which over the last ten years we’ve downplayed. It has little time for supremacist ideas. Country always comes first, yes, but in the same way that family comes first. A well-functioning society is one where cooperate with, we don’t denigrate, other families.

Cutting foreign aid is another very much related theme. It impacts directly in our soft power. So too does immigration policy as outlined a few days ago by Keir Starmer. Do we really risk becoming an island of strangers? And is he really doubting that immigration at least sustains economic growth, or doesn’t actually help drive it?

Here in the UK we’ve tucked in behind the USA, hugging coat tails, slipstreaming, over the last few decades. But you can’t slipstream a stalling vehicle, or one, worse, that wants to go the other way. Nor should a government be slipstreaming an opposition characterised by a total absence of workable policies.

We need, in the UK, a complete reevaluation in how we relate to the world. How our embassies, trade missions and aid policy function. How our role as educators to the world, through our universities, can be expanded. How we, in cooperation with other countries, face up to very real immigration issues. How we build on our digital strengths. How we rebuild our social capital (see below). How we rebuild our relationship with our European neighbours. How we can lead a green revolution. How all the above relate to building our output, productivity, trade and prosperity. Above all, how, in working with the EU, we can strengthen and guarantee our defence.

How, in short, we can relate to the world on our own terms and no longer as a smiling American lackey.

It also requires an end to defeatism. There’s a sense in some quarters that we’re in crisis. But that is in the nature of democracy. Democracies thrive on crises. They add urgency but within a broad boundary of shared expectation.

But is this true now? A related theme specific to our time is the apparent demise of the two-party system which has anchored our politics since as long ago as 1924, and the demise of the old Liberal Party. Tory and Labour long operated within a broad framework of understanding and possibility. With Reform in play, as a false prophet, and five parties in competition in recent local elections, our politics is open to more extreme views. In Germany the Christian Democrats would never cooperate (would they?) with the far right AfD, but our hollowed out Tory party might do just that with Reform.

Is ours in any sense a failed state? As Reform would have us believe. Yes, our self-belief as a nation is at a low ebb. Likewise our social capital, our confidence in our health service, education system, judiciary and prison service, roads and infrastructure, utilities. But in each area there’s a functional basis to build on. Disruption isn’t the answer. A key purpose of government has to be to re-create that sense of self-belief.

We require that same positive approach looking beyond our borders, as exemplify by Starmer’s just-announced deal with the EU. And the government’s India trade deal.

There is a sense in which we are, in the second Trump era, all so much wiser. Under Biden we could wander along the edge of the precipice, worried about falling, but not actually do so. I’ve often written about preserving liberal democracy, sensing that precipice, one of many waving banners with too few taking notice. Now we’re over the edge, and clinging on. With Trump in power we can see what falling might be like.

Making Things: Jony Ive and Elon Musk

Compare the worlds of Jony Ive, designer (with Steve Jobs) of the iPhone and iMac, and Elon Musk.

Both Ive and Musk are makers. Ive spends much of his time in his own mind, he tells us*, and he shows a remarkable contentment. It’s an inheritance from his father, a passionate and pioneering maker in his own right. He has always operated at a personal level. Musk’s aspiration from early on was to scale-up. Apple magic is small-scale, intimate, the hand and fingers. Musk it seems can only operate at mega-scale.

While Ive is always part of a team Musk has totalitarian instincts. Indeed, a totalitarian practice, as DOGE, his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, has demonstrated.

Human history is the history of making things. ‘Making maketh man.’ Back in the mid-sixteenth century even Michelangelo, dominant in his own sphere, relied on patronage, as artists before and since. Musk by contrast has no need of patronage. He has turned that old order on its head. He now patronises power. He is a would-be prince. If he’d been alive in sixteenth-century Rome and Florence he’d have pushed both Popes and Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici aside, as I imagine he’d quite like to do with Donald Trump.  

(The Doge of Venice back in the same era had limited authority but maximum glamour. Musk’s very different DOGE has maximum authority and nil glamour.)

He wants to get directly to the result. By the shortest possible route. Compare Boeing’s Starliner, so long in the making, and Musk’s Space X, already there. You focus only on what is important to efficient functioning. And you deal ruthlessly with any obstruction. (You also have to have luck on your side.)

If you apply that to people who work in government service, they can be dismissed as readily as Tesla employees. Processes can be engineered. Automated. Re-engineered. But can the efficient operation of a state with its very different objectives be compared to running a business?

We’ve not touched on methodology, in this case the callow youngsters that Musk is using at DOGE. A 25-year-old investigating Internal Revenue Service files. The clueless looking for clues. 340 million people. They are not spare parts, they have individual realities.

The result – the ‘baby’ of a caring and compassionate society gets thrown out with the bathwater. And compassion is somehow seen as criminal. Any gain is efficiency is unlikely. A wrecking ball produces – a wreck. To support this, a culture of dishonesty, and ‘accidental’ lies, is permitted, and more, encouraged, with Musk leading the way. And, to date, vilification is more than OK with the Republican base.  They’re used to it. It’s part of government. And if you lie to win power then you will lie to hold on to it.

Think back to Jony Ive. He speaks with a deep integrity, he evinces calm. How the world appeals in the hand and to the eye, to the user, is what drives him. His world and Musk’s didn’t have to be incompatible. But Musk wants to rule the world and if a Musk-style world implodes, then he will always have Mars to retreat to.  The rest of us will probably miss out.

*To hear Jony Ive talk about his life, check out a recent edition of the BBC programme, Desert Island Discs.

Goodbye to all that

If I can resist the temptation to hit the keyboard again – this will be my last post, after fifteen years. There is a time and a season for all things.

We’re in crisis times. The height of the Cold War might have matched them but I was a toddler or grubby-kneed kid at the time. We’ve lived in a blissful paradise in the post-Berlin Wall years. And we never doubted liberal democracy. But from our elevated heights we’ve looked down on other countries. Dictators and ideologues have seen their chance and fired up negative sentiment. They are calling the shots.

There is also a new and disturbing breed of doubters on the right of our own politics. They focus on a false dichotomy between liberalism and conservatism. Left matched against right is a better way of characterising differences of opinion. (We don’t have socialists in the manner we used to, but we do have wide sections of the population committed to social action.) Or engaged state versus small state.

Issues of immigration, race, gender, sovereignty, Empire and its legacy, all divide us. No liberal society or any part of it should seek to dictate their resolution. We must hold fast if we are to avoid the populism of a state-controlled media and courts (illiberal democracies as they are rightly characterised), and all that might follow.

As a good liberal I believe we will prevail again, with our freedoms to write and think and associate and vote intact. But any resolution will be well beyond my lifetime.

That’s driving my decision to bring this blog to an end. It was all, in those heady days fifteen years ago, about enhancing liberal democracy. It’s closer now to a behind-the-barricades defence.

A few final thoughts. All rather negative. But hang in there, if you can bear it, to the end.

Is there any optimism left in the world? Must we all now hunker down with our own private pleasures, treat wars in Gaza and Ukraine as on another planet, play wait-and-see with Trump, until the inauguration, and then wait-and-see what happens, and all the while acclimatise ourselves more and more to disaster, so that with each month that passes we hunker down yet further, retreating into rabbit holes?

Forget the geopolitical, you might say, what about the UK? We have farmers demonstrating over the introduction of inheritance tax on farmland above £1m in value, with Jeremy Clarkson a tub-thumping arch-hypocrite to the fore, and the Daily Mail et al stirring up their ancient readerships.

Surely, the government could have anticipated there’d be a furore?

Likewise on the Winter Fuel Allowance. Removing it within weeks of the election was a lousy idea. It has coloured everyone’s view of the new government.

So, yes, we can engage with our own home-grown politics. But it’s pretty bleak story. And then there are the climate-change talks in Baku, a fossil-fuel paradise, of all places. And I haven’t mentioned China.

How many more reasons for gloom? And yet, it’s always been like this, going back two centuries and more, bad times then good times then bad times. We’ve hung in there before. We have to now. Liberal democracy has been hard-won and it’s now in the gene pool of the world. Autocracies take many forms. Liberal democracy at its core has one simple core liberal message. One I’ve elaborated on it in this blog for fifteen years.

Keep the faith!

Next year in America

I posted a blog after the 2019 UK election which I intended as a marker to check, over the longer term, the outcome of the promises made by Boris Johnson. He failed on all counts. I’d like to do something similar for Donald Trump. I’m not, however, on such sure ground, expecting failure, as I was then. Trump has been through the hoops once and knows the route and can anticipate the snares, and he has his accomplices already in mind, if not yet in place.

I intend in a year’s time to check back with this post and see how it’s all working out. I’m not into predicting. Over the last ten, maybe fifteen years, we have seen the world turned on its head. I can’t see any kind of stability coming any time soon.

I’ll make the deep state my starting-point. Agencies such as the FBI and CIA and Federal departments have to function within government and cannot normally be held accountable in the public space. Under Trump they’ve been labelled the deep state and turned into a conspiracy against the American people which can only be rooted out by turning traditional merit-based appointments into political appointments. That includes appointments to the Supreme Court and Federal courts.

His appointment as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will ‘ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions’. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ in his mantra. ‘Government bureaucracy, excess regulations and wasteful expenditures’ are all in the firing line. Elon Musk will be a key figure.

He will continue to play games. Might he in a few cases row back on hard-line policies? His apparently amiable meeting with Joe Biden yesterday, and the orderly handover which now appears likely, took me by surprise. But, also yesterday, he’s put forward an ultra hardliner, Matt Gaetz, as the new Attorney General. He would end ‘the partisan weaponisation of our Justice System‘.

How will conspiracy theories, which thrive in this kind of environment, play out in the coming months and years? And will Trump continue to demonise opponents? He has made wild threats against journalists. Musk has helped enormously by turning Twitter into a right-wing promotional agency. Will the January 6th protesters be pardoned?

Fox News will have a free rein. The Washington Post and LA Times hedged their bets ahead of the election. Don’t alienate Trump has been the mantra. How much will free speech will be impaired? LGBTQ+ rights and critical race theory will be, more than ever, in the Trump media cross-wires.

What will be the effect on university campuses and by extension on anyone with a liberal arts education and a belief in an open, liberal democracy? The difference in voting preferences in last week’s election between locations which have high levels of college education and those that don’t were stark.

Are the old right/left dividing lines gone forever? A working class with socially conservative instincts is now firmly Republican. But might that change if Trump Republicans turn out to have feet of clay? Will Democrats realise how important it is to be a broad church on social issues?  Could the party re-discover its working-class roots? Might turncoat Latino voters turn back?

Disillusion with the Federal government in Washington has played into Trump’s hands. He has the blue Republican states very much onside and will use it to his advantage. One example may the abortion issue which he will probably leave to the legislatures of the individual states.

Trump will build his wall. His credibility depends on it. Deporting up to 12 million immigrants is a challenge at a whole other level, both logistically and in terms of the resistance and violent response it will engender. And heedless of the damage it will do to the American economy.

To what extent will tariffs, 60% on Chinese goods, 10% or more the rest of the world, impact the American economy and industry and patterns of consumption? Mercantilism, maximising exports, minimising imports, is a throwback to another age. The other side of American exceptionalism is and has always been America-behind-closed-doors. Leave it to the merchants, the industrialists and the money men to look abroad.

Taxes will fall (or, in the case the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, be renewed) and regulations cut back, with the aim of streamlining business. If high interest rates result might Trump intervene to keep then low? Might the Federal Reserve lose its independence? Can short-term stock market gains be sustained?

Related this is the rise of the plutocrats, the new libertarians, with Musk their primary example, and their likely role in a future administration, and their belief on a slimmed-down government. Michael Lewis points out that the gap between the billionaires who know how to manipulate finance and ordinary guy is getting ever wider. Financial markets will become ever more opaque.

With an avowed ‘America First ‘ and non-interventionist approach to foreign policy Trump could as easily be friends with autocratic regimes as democratic governments. We could lose any sense of American democracy as a role model for free societies worldwide

How will relations with Russia, Ukraine, China, Israel, Gaza, Iran work out? And North Korea. Might Trump have a better chance of influence because his government wouldn’t be trying to tell governments how to improve their human rights records? And what of the ‘friends’ of America and the West: the EU, the UK, India, Japan, South Korea, also Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Will they be kept onside?

The ultimate test will be 2026 mid-terms and 2028. Will Americans go into those contests with the same open debate (however fractious) and open and accountable elections as they’ve done in 2024? Trump, we know, has plans to suborn the courts. To what extent might he suborn the media, both social and imprint? Hungary’s Viktor Orban has pointed the way.

What might happen next in France?

The news from France last evening briefly pushed aside Emma Raducanu, Starmer’s whistle-stop journey through Britain, and Lewis Hamilton winning the British Grand Prix. That last one got a cheer from me, but the defeat of the National Rally (RN) in France really lifted the spirits. I’m not just a bit of a political junkie, I’m a foreign affairs junkie. What goes on in India, Russia, Germany, above all the USA, really matters.

Starmer’s election had already lightened the mood. Now the news from France: the National Rally pushed into third place in the second round of the parliamentary elections by the New Popular Front (NPF), with Jean-Luc Mélenchon France Unbound the lead party, ahead of President Macron’s Ensemble alliance.

Big questions were raised weeks back over Macron’s decision to call a parliamentary election in France. Various shades of madness. Rory Stewart on the Rest is Politics podcast was appalled. It made no sense. But to Macron it did.

I’m writing this from what might just be a Macroniste point of view. I have absolutely no inside knowledge. But I’m intrigued as to why he called the election.

He had a marginal, just-about-working majority but the RN had just won big in the European elections, and they had momentum. And it was building. Delay until the presidential election in 2027 and Marine Le Pen might just have been a shoe-in. France’s record as one of the strongest European economies and a leader in Europe would have counted for nothing. Maybe better to face the issue head-on now.

The assumption seems to be that he expected a centrist majority. A coming together of centre left and centre right. But did he? He will surely have factored in the possibility of a strong hard-left showing.

The Mélenchon left is France is well-entrenched and opposed to Macron on key issues like pension reform and retirement age. The financial markets see the NPF as ‘dangerous for the economy’. They may be right, but I don’t see them as an existential threat. They are not threatening the institutions of democracy in the manner of Victor Orban in Hungary. (Though Mélenchon has only recently come out with full-hearted support of Ukraine.) Also, the far right’s nativist agenda is anathema to the French left.

While I can’t see Mélenchon compromising I can see others on the left working with Ensemble to form a left-of-centre government. The aim of any such government should surely be to target the biggest issue, in France as it is in the UK – the sense of being overlooked, left behind, by a city-based, out-of-touch and (in France’s case – not the UK’s) overly technocratic government.

It may be that Macron had factored in something like the outcome we had yesterday. The European election may have convinced him that some kind of change of direction was needed. And he may indeed have no choice but to tack toward the concerns of small town and rural France, where the RN’s base lies. We will see how things work out over the coming days. Before the Paris Olympics get underway?

Beyond that – will it be chaos? Or disaster? In either case, giving the RN a free run.

Pandering to the old folk

We are overloaded in our politics toward older folk, of whom I’m one. I watched in 2016, as a teller, as sixty consecutive voting slips from my own area were unfolded, literally, as votes for Brexit. I’d moved a little further out of London, beyond the liberally-minded borough of Richmond, and into an area where immigrants rarely ventured but where they were often stigmatised.

Taking the tube, the mix of my fellow passengers changes from Hammersmith, and then on into town. I’m happy with that. It’s the way London should be – cosmopolitan. Ideas mixing, the serious and the radical and a little bit of the crazy too.

Why is it that as we grow older we narrow our horizons? Literally.  Live, maybe not so much in fear of, but apprehensive about, what we see as the unknown. Not least immigration and climate change. Every generation as it ages grips harder onto the world and institutions it knew in its prime. Being conservative becomes a badge of honour, it gives a sense of belonging. It reads the same newspapers. And it tilts toward UKIP and Brexit and now Reform and Faragist obsessions.

We run the risk of, by our attitudes, holding our country back. Politics demands change and adaptation, and we resist it. We need to allow the generations who do the work, and politicians who represent them, to be the primary policy-makers. They will, after all, fund the pensions on which our welfare depends.

By that argument, should not we, as the oldies, relinquish some of our power and influence over the future of the country? I don’t want to see politicians pandering to us to get our votes. We need instead local political parties, parliamentary candidates and MPs who have a single-minded focus on building both the country’s economy and its productivity.

We want policies decided not on the basis of jam for the oldies but on the economy and on investment, on housing, and working conditions, as they affect younger generations.

There’s one obvious problem – the young don’t vote in the numbers that we oldies do. The Tories have less than 10% support among 16-24 year olds. And yet how many of those who can, the over 18s, will actually vote?

But who will they vote for? Look to France. We used to think young people everywhere instinctively inclined to the left. A 28-year-old and charismatic far-right party leader, number two to Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, is giving the lie to this. He’s adept in using social media, TikTok especially. Gender and race are not the primary issues (though the old hard right wouldn’t agree). Instead, the focus is on insecurity, job prospects, and a future where the rising prosperity earlier generations relied on is no longer guaranteed for them. Also, a wider sense that traditional parties are compromised.

If we believe in the post-war world order of toleration and international trade, in open minds and open borders, we liberals (and we older liberals!) have to be pro-active. Maybe Labour under Keir Starmer, if elected. will take the first steps in that direction. Restore confidence among younger generations in our political system. So they don’t reject it. That’s no small ask.

We’ve been here before

We think our own times unique – but we’ve been here before.

I’ve been reading Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s autobiography. He has memories, almost fond memories, of the world before 1914.

In the decade before the 1914 war there was a political and social movement in the world, and particularly in Europe and Britain, which seemed at the time wonderfully hopeful and exciting. It seemed as though human beings might really be on the brink of becoming civilised. The forces of reaction and barbarism were still there, but they were in retreat… it looked as if militarism, imperialism and anti-Semitism were on the run.

We were of course mistaken in thinking that the world really might become civilised but the fact that it didn’t does not prove that our optimism was foolish or credulous… It was, I still believe, touch and go whether the movement towards liberty and equality – political and social – and toward civilisation which was strong in the first decade of the 20th century, would become so strong as to carry everything before it. Its enemies saw the risk and the result was the war of 1914. They postponed the danger of our becoming civilised for at least 100 years.

There is a terrible irony in that last line. Where they were before 1914 is not so far from where we thought we were either side of 2000.

The columnist ‘Charlemagne’ in an article in The Economist fastens on 1999 as ‘peak Europe’, when 300 of the world’s top listed companies were European, and and it looked as if China and Russia could be part of a Western-inspired economic and liberal order which could be ‘the end of history’.

We also had a sense that the forces of barbarism were still there but in Woolf’s words were ‘on the run’. We hoped, even thought, that the ‘movement towards liberty and equality – political and social’ was so strong that ‘it would carry everything before it’.

And yet … 2014, a century on from 1914, was just a year after Xi Jinping had come to power. Putin was confronting the Maidan uprising in Ukraine. The enemies of the liberal order ‘had seen the risk’. Ukraine and Hong Kong exemplify the threat today. Might other countries follow the example of Hungary, and indeed of Donald Trump, as might be? Where might Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella take France if their party, Rassemblement National, is victorious in the French election in three weeks time?

Woolf, in his seventies, was looking back from the late 1960s. There’s an almost elegiac tone. Yes, the Cold War was at its height and the nuclear threat had a stark reality. But we knew what we stood for. Do we now?

We do need certainties. And, indeed, defiance. ‘Charlemagne’ ends his piece by striking exactly the wrong note. ‘Perhaps Europe peaked in 1999. Or maybe it failed to see it was already in decline.’

Metropolitan – and other – elites

We’ve heard a lot of talk about elites. Am I part of one? With a university education. Middle class. Manchester-born and raised, I’ve lived in London for forty years. That may make me one of the one of the ‘metropolitan elite’.

Maybe I’m also an ‘anywhere’, someone’s who’s happy anywhere in the country, in the world, rather than a ‘somewhere’, someone whose happiest close to home. (We ‘anywheres’ are a species of public enemy.) Though, in truth, I’m both.

Then there’s Matthew Goodwin who imagines he understands the ‘ordinary working-man’, left behind in a hyper-globalised world by an elite who wilfully don’t care for his welfare. And yet – he fell in behind the free-traders, the globalisers, the Brexiteers who espoused a fanciful ‘global Britain’. Only, it seems the free traders aren’t responsible: it’s we university-educated types, who only care for themselves, according to Goodwin. Forgive our confusion.

Peter Turchin*, who I referred to in my last blog, defines four early warning signals for societies entering a disintegrative phase of a natural cycle to which all societies are prone. ‘Popular immiseration’ is the first phase, and the decline in real wages over the last fifty years can be seen as a cause of that. The fourth signal is competition and conflict between elites.

Turchin’s conclusions are based in some extraordinary statistical research but extrapolating to a natural cycle is a big leap. That said, is that what we have? A university-educated relatively liberal elite on one side and on the other a globalising free trade elite?

The curiosity has been the attempt of the free traders to get the ‘discontented masses’ on side, by adopting an anti-woke and socially conservative agenda, leading to the kind of populist rhetoric we’ve seen on both sides of the Atlantic, though far worse on the other side of the pond.

All this talk of elites has seriously, and dangerously, muddied the waters. Societies have always had and will always have elites of one kind or another, not least a financial and business elite, which has through history garnered wealth and privilege to itself, and an educated elite which seeks to pull up the drawbridge behind it.

There’s no better way of constraining that apparently built-in drift to elitism than a functioning liberal democracy which limits their influence on our politics and cuts the biggest egos who try to weaponise opinion down to size.

A nice, neat letter to Prospect magazine suggests that the ‘white working-class’ might actually want the same things as many other people, a decent job, a nice house, good schools – and, maybe, even, a university education of their children.

Make that our focus – and apply to everyone, all classes, colours and creeds. Not just white working-class males….

*Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, published by Allen Lane

Wiping the slate clean

Finding answers was always hard but it’s now in a different league of difficulty.

I began this blog a few years back wanting to write about how we could make liberal democracy function better. Now the issue is how liberal democracy can survive in the face of China, illiberal democracies in Hungary and Turkey, the Republican right in the USA, and, just recently, the ideas promoted by the recent National Conservatism Conference here in the UK.

The issue for many is a sense of lost power. Ideas of ‘nation’ muddled with social conservatism, as if this could be the way we Brits might claw back lost influence. Language and the Premier League mislead us.

Many on the other side of the spectrum would like to renounce power altogether, renounce capitalism, renounce politics, head for utopia.

What if we could go back in time. Start again. Wipe the slate clean.

Gillian Tett, writing in the Financial Times, refers to what she describes as ‘the ancient Mesopotamian idea of a wiping the slate clean’ – a wiping out of debts to allow a society to reboot. McKinsey estimates it would ‘wipe out $48trn of household wealth in the coming years’. That I assume is just the USA.

That takes me to another theme, growth, or the absence of it, the post-growth advocates and as the Economist describes them, ‘the actual de-growers’. We stop caring about growth targets and GDP. Or we go further and actively ‘shrink the pie’.

Only, it won’t happen, can’t happen. For one we’d have to rein in population growth. And if we take that too far we’ll have a massively reduced younger generation to fund the lifestyles of a vastly increasing older generation. The answer – we voluntarily cut back on our lifestyles. Which isn’t going to happen. More likely, the world economy would implode.

Tett quotes a biologist Peter Turchin, ‘a biologist and complexity scientist who employs Big Data to study ecosystems’. Studying reams of data over thousands of years he identifies a fundamental pattern whereby an elite grabs power and ‘tries to protect itself by grabbing more and more resources’. This leaves poor people even poorer and an ’over-production of the elite’. It’s a recipe for a social explosion. Is this what we’re currently seeing in the USA?

Tett suggests the only way ‘to shift this trajectory is to re-play the New Deal policies of the 1930s and the immediate post-war years in the USA, using redistribution to reduce inequality’. She’s not saying that Turchin is right, but that the symptoms he describes are indeed deep-rooted in modern American society.

There are many other parts to this jigsaw. Climate change, generative AI, China, Ukraine. Regarding China it’s been interesting to listen to what Henry Kissinger, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, has to say. Lowering the temperature is key, contrary to what the new breed of American hawks, and a good few British, are arguing. That requires building confidence step by step. Establishing and maintaining a conversation, however deep the divide.

There is in all this one constant – our liberal democracy. Hold to that and we can still find answers.