Tag: New Deal

The distant roar of a B1 Lancer

One minute I’m listening to the repeating call of a nuthatch. A few minutes later, the distant roar of a B1 Lancer bomber heading for Iran. I’m in the Cotswolds, about ten miles from RAF Fairford. Iran, and as Trump would have it, Iranian civilization, is under immediate threat. (They are as I write gathering in Islamabad for ceasefire talks.)

I’m wondering how the world got into such a mess. How conservative America having elected Trump hasn’t drawn a line when it came to his excesses in the Near East. (Or his pandering to Putin, and disdain for Ukraine. Though the likes of Tucker Carlson are challenging his support for Israel.) Or how they came to elect a charlatan in the first place. This is my attempt, and it is only an attempt (and written, at a distance, by a Brit), at an explanation. Apologies for its length. But if you’re interested in such things, do give it a read.

I’ve always advocated for liberal democracy in this blog, for parliamentary democracy and freedom of speech and association. At the same time, I’m a traditionalist, a lover of country, our institutions, our way of life. I’m sure of my ground on issues of climate change and immigration, race and gender. But in an open, non-ideological society my views may not carry the day.

We’ve always found consensus but now, in the USA, the very idea of consensus is under threat. For decades the far left were seen as a potentially subversive force, and for many on the right social agendas and immigration were seen in the same light. But the actual processes of democracy were only questioned on the fringes. No more.  

I’ve found it useful, especially in the American context, to explore the roles of neo-conservatives and neo-liberals as precursors to the current debates, and current events.

Neo-liberals focussed on free markets, de-regulation and limited government. Individuals were left to help themselves, with minimal support from the state. Neo-conservatives, on the other hand, while economically liberal, and more interventionist when it came to foreign engagements, advocated an explicitly socially conservative agenda.

Early neo-cons such as Irving Kristol had intriguing backgrounds as Trotskyites in the 1930s and 40s: their opposition to the straitjackets of Soviet Communism morphed in the post-war years into an advocacy of unfettered free markets. The counter-culture of the 1960s was anathema to them. Also anathema were Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s had left the existing dispensation regarding race in place. Not so the Johnson reforms.

To liberals back in the 1970s and 80s neo-conservative ideas constituted a separate world. In a sense they triumphed with Reagan but any social conservative agenda never really took hold. Nor did it, as you’d expect, under Clinton, but in the House of Representatives in the 1990s Newt Gingrich did draw up battle lines. You didn’t communicate with the other side. Universities and the radicalism of both faculty and students, and policies of positive discrimination became, the more so as decades passed, anathema to many. Identity politics on the left as they impacted race and gender became defining issues. So too a government which attempted to dictate on education and welfare.

Both sides dug in their heels, both sides demonised the other. Men who worked across the floor of the Senate like Edward Kennedy and John McCain are remembered as relics from another age. The Obama years, aided by Trumpian malice, only served to harden these battle lines. Issues were weaponized. Conspiracies, not least the birthing conspiracy invented around Obama, became common currency. When conspiracies take hold in a society, they are hard to counter, so much more with the growth of social media.  

Many of the left demonized the right on issues of race and gender and immigration. Climate change was drawn into the argument. Changes allowing electoral funding by third parties exacerbated the divide. What had seemed to the political centre-left to be a debate they would win, all in good time, as they’d seen every debate won over the post-war years, was of a sudden very much open to question. What could be seen as arrogance on the left would only have riled the right further.

Battle lines were hardened during the first Trump administration. Battle was joined, and it became brutally one-sided, in January 2025 when Trump returned. Just how much should we pin on Trump? The MAGA movement which he’s help crystallize is small state and conservative and, compared to the hardened neo-liberals, naïve. Trump’s deal-making philosophy gave an opening to others with a far more thought-through agenda, above all the radical neo-conservative agenda of the Heritage Foundation. What the likes of Irving Kristol back in the 1970 and 80s could surely never have envisaged is the venom of the attacks on government institutions and the universities.

It’s given space to outright opponents of democracy such as the libertarian tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Where might unconstrained free markets take us? Democracy could only be an impediment. Just where might AI in the hands of the likes of Thiel and Musk take us?  And Thiel is now giving lectures on the Antichrist, venturing as far as Rome. Whether the Christian nationalism of the likes of Pete Hegseth goes that far, I don’t know. Hegseth of course has the weaponry.

If we are liberals by inclination and belief, especially if we’re watching all this fury from the relatively safe remove of the UK and the even further remove of the Cotswolds, must we wait on the mid-terms and see how much the Iran fiasco has damaged Trump?

An early indicator might be the Hungarian election next week. Can this new breed of autocrats, hiding behind a democratic veneer, so subvert the democratic process that there is for some countries, Hungary, and, in that terminal scenario, the USA, no way back?

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.