My take on Charlottesville (When the Nazis come marching in)

One of my most controversial predictions is that North Americans are sleepwalking towards a Second Civil War in which the growing estrangement of the increasingly polarized halves of its electorate will have to act out the enormous reservoirs of animosity and spite they have been building towards each other for the last decades. The recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which rightists and leftists clashed in the streets causing enough turmoil to force Governor Terry McAuliffe to declare a state of emergency, and a counterdemonstrator (32 years old Heather Heyer) was killed, would seem to be a validation of the direness of my predictions, and a clear harbinger of the more virulent clashes to come. However, as is usually the case, there is more in the picture than meets the eye, and a sober assessment of the events rather makes me be more cautious, and even a bit more optimistic. Let’s see why.

1-    What happened (are the streets burning yet?)

First let’s unpack what actually went on in the Virginia locality (population: 48,210 as of the 2010 census, and home to the University of Virginia) had announced its intention to remove a statue to Confederate general Robert E. Lee from the eponymous park (previously renamed Emancipation park, which already tells you a lot about Charlottesville municipal government). 

A loose network of rightist groups opposed to the measure plan a rally on Saturday, Aug 12^th under the denomination “Unite the Right”. Such rally is duly notified to the authorities and nominally permitted. The previous day (Fri, Aug 11^th) Governor McAuliffe notifies via Twitter that, although demonstrators are protected by their constitutional right to express their views, he finds such views “abhorrent” and encourages Virginians of all persuasions to stay away of the march.

The night of the 11^th hundreds of demonstrators march through the campus of the UoV carrying torches (as seen in countless photos, most seem to be oddly out-of-place tiki torches that would be more fit for lighting a barbecue in a patio in the ‘burbs than to be wielded in an exhibition of white power or whatnot…) and chanting niceties like “White lives matter”, “you will not replace us” (most journalists transcribe it as “Jews will not replace us”, as it has more sinister overtones and surely sells more papers) and “blood and soil”. Along with the torch-carrying and white-supremacist slogan chanting, a number of marchers can be seen unequivocally extending their arms in what undoubtedly can be construed as the traditional Nazi salute. Such march is widely and luridly transmitted by all major media organizations in the country.

On the morning of Saturday, Aug 12^th demonstrators start gathering around Emancipation park, both for the planned march and to protest against it. A significant number on both sides are armed with visible weaponry and paramilitary gear that would be unimaginable in any other country but, Virginia being a permissive open carry state we can assume nothing out of bounds in the USA. To the surprise of exactly nobody, given the level of publicity achieved by the rally, as many counter-demonstrators as potential demonstrators can be seen around the park, and there are a number of clashes between both (check the NYT account: People pretending to fight - badly ). Around 11:00 AM Governor McAuliffe declares the state of emergency, revoking the authorization for the Right’s march, and ordering the attendants to the rally to abandon their location and dissolve. It has to be noted that such “dissolution” would force them to march through the throngs of  counterdemonstrators gathered around the park, multiplying the chances for fights, clashes and brawls (check the alternative account of an avowedly alt-right attendant: What Loretta saw at C-ville ).

Clashes and widespread violence continue (but, amazingly given the stupendous amount of guns seen all around in every video and photo, no shootouts are reported… of the somewhere north of 30 wounded most are by punching and being beaten with blunt objects, plus some pepper-sprayed), reaching its high point (regarding lethality) when a Dodge Challenger driven by a James Alex Fields Jr. slams a group of counter protestors, killing the aforementioned Ms. Heyer. Later in the day, the crash of a police helicopter monitoring the day’s developments would add two officers to the total body count.    

To top off the division and shock of the nation, the President famously talked to reporters from his golf resort in Bedmister, NJ, condemning the violence, which he blamed on “many sides”, causing not only liberals and progressives, but members of his (purportedly) own party like Speaker Paul Ryan to denounce him for “putting on the same moral plane” the “Nazis and anti-Nazis”. Not one to back off or publicly retract any proffered opinion, Trump later would say that a lot of “very fine people” attended the alt-right rally, and would insist in equally apportioning blame to “both sides” on a speech to reporters at Trump Tower the following Tuesday (Orange one's response ).

2-    How the media reacted (burning? Man, they are exploding! Crumbling! Sizzling!)

Before I offer my interpretation of the facts I’ve just described, I think it’s worthwhile to reflect on how the media has portrayed them, from different points of the political spectrum. We have grown accustomed to the very post-modern idea of there not being a “true-truth”, but just different discourses, or narratives, weaving a hermeneutical network of signifiers that denote no precise significant at all. What that somewhat obscure assertion means is that for the few that still read news from outlets with different political alignments it is pretty common to find entirely diverging descriptions of a single event, to the point of making it difficult to identify such descriptions as applying to the same underlying facts. In the case under consideration, the differences have been predictably magnified: for the mainstream media it has been a national disgrace, the symptom of a seriously corroded and corrupted social compact that not only allows, but apparently encourages normal, seemingly well-adjusted young men (wearing that ultimate symbol of successful integration into middle-class status: khakis and polo shirts! That is no way to dress for the fascist takeover of the state, sir! What self-respecting revolutionary would exchange his jackboots and brown shirt for such a bland attire?) to publicly and unashamedly proclaim their Nazi sympathies and their scorn for every ages-old convention of what is acceptable and proper in a democracy. Nazi salutes? Check. Open proclamation of racial slurs? Check. Embracement not just of somewhat morally tainted past (the Confederacy and the Old South) but of beyond-the-pale fringe elements (like the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke and even ol’ Adolf himself)? Double check.

Unsurprisingly, both MSM and left-leaning circles have been having fits of apoplexy and denouncing the whole thing as furiously and unambiguously as possible, while at the same time pointing to the (at best equivocal) reaction of the White House as the undisputable proof  of the racism and unabashed association with White Supremacism of not just the President and his inner circle, but the whole Republican establishment (the most commented piece along those lines is surely the one penned by Ta-Nehisi Coates in “The Atlantic”: The first white president (how much does the USA suck?) ). For them the right in general is racist, no exceptions allowed. And with fascist tendencies all along, so no surprise they resort to threats, violence and finally murder. The sad outcome of the many clashes in Charlottesville is not an isolated incident carried out by a mentally unstable individual, but the unavoidable consequence of a noxious ideology that, left unchecked, will cause many more eruptions like that one, and many more deaths (hence, combatting it with any means is the only rational and commendable action). 

Fox News, the right leaning talk-radio hosts (Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, etc.), the Murdoch press and the abundant orthosphere, NeoReaction and alt-right sites in the Interwebz see the whole story under a very different light. Their sympathies were since the beginning clearly with the initial demonstrators, not just because they fully endorse the country’s racist past, which they more or less unabashedly do, and thus also oppose the removal of any statue of Confederate heroes by the -in their eyes- minor feature of having led a rebel army against a constitutionally legitimate government for the sacred cause of being able to keep humans of a different skin color enslaved, but because in general “uniting the right” is something they all can rally behind (sharing, all of them, a sense of dread and disgust towards what they see as an almost unstoppable tide of progressivism and leftism that constitutes an existential threat to everything they hold dear and consider sacred). For all those media, the counterdemonstrators were an unholy and ragtag alliance of everything that is wrong with America today: feminists (“feminazis”), BLM sympathizers (“race traitors”), LGBT advocates (“faggots and butches”) and in general progressives and liberals. Instead of “proud boys” impeccably white and well-groomed marching in their khakis and polo shirts (oddly complemented by a peculiar assortment of shields, kneecaps and helmets), a bunch of blacks, short-haired girls and old hippies with questionable fashion sense carrying bullhorns and placards that seemed plucked from some outdated documentary about racial protests of the 70’s (but let’s not forget the mobile phones, which where mercifully absent back then… one can only wonder about the volume of uploads in Instagram, FB and the like of demonstrators from every sign preening about their exploits, in a new and social-media age version of the old “radical chic”).

Few have claimed that the victim between the counterdemonstrators somehow deserved it, or “had it coming”, but the narrative they weave leaves little doubt this is how they see it. For the right-wing media the whole episode is a further illustration of the inability of the current state (seized by liberals and traitors) to protect decent citizens, from the declaration of the state of emergency (which only served to further curtail the constitutional right to freely express its opinion to the always silenced part of the social body that does not share the left’s worldview) to the failure to protect the people gathered in Emancipation park from the taunts and aggressions of the dangerous “Antifa” mob. Never mind that the only actual casualty was in the ranks of the supposedly aggressive, dangerous and deranged anti-American extremists that went to disrupt a perfectly peaceful and tranquil event. Again, it was all the fault of the “Cathedral”, in this case personified in the Democratic Mayor, the Democratic Governor, the mob of dangerous radicals bent on violence and mayhem grouped under the label “Antifa” and, of course, the devious mainstream media that distorted and manipulated the emotions of some young man so he ended committing a crime. 

3-    So, all of this validates the narrative of “civil war tomorrow”, right?

Er, actually wrong. Always the contrarian, I see more positive than negative aspects to take into consideration after the events in Charlottesville. And remember I could construe it as a validation of my predictions of quick descent of the American polity into fractiousness and conflict (Guys, you're screwed ). But that’s not how I read it. For one, I won’t claim to be the greatest street brawler and bruiser of all time, but I’ve been involved in my share of fights (most of them had unwise amounts of alcohol involved, so take my account with a pinch of salt) and I was surprised, watching the many videos of the “violence”, by how… “performative” it looked like, and how little actual rage or aggression they showed. The few punches that are exchanged in front of the cameras (whose presence may be a distorting factor, or the other way round, the catalyst for all the action) resemble more a limp attempt to swat a mosquito than an actual intent to cause maximum damage whilst minimizing the puncher exposure.

We humans are a social species, and as every military instructor will tell you, getting normal people ready to shoot towards their fellow human beings (even at considerable distance, where the feeling of common humanity can be more easily overcome) requires quite extensive reprogramming. When I was younger (actually, much, much younger) I knew my share of seedy neighborhood gyms, all of which had its crew of testosterone-addled asocial troublemakers (and yes, a disproportionate percentage among them were already “extreme-right” and trained to either join the armed forces, the police or any self-styled anticommunist crusade in not-so-distant-Francoist Spain, their fathers or grandfathers having typically fought side by side with actual, honest-to-God German Nazis and Italian Fascists, the real thing and not the imagined bugbear so easily peddled in leftist fantasies). Even the most apparently psychotic between them had some difficulties overcoming the innate human revulsion towards doing harm and seeing other people suffer (although in some cases, it has to be said, they became quite good at such overcoming). I’ve seen how those guys hit, and that’s very different from what the footage by the NYT, CBS, ABC, WaPo, CNN or Fox shows. What that footage (much of it seem to be the same limited number of events shot from different points of view) depicts are a certain, limited number of posers running in front of the camera to have a go at throwing a (typically ineffective) jab at the least-imposing element of the opposite tribe, and then retreating precipitously back to safety among their own numbers, having accomplished its main goal, which we can surmise was never to gain territorial control of the contested streets, but snatching a nice graphical testimony to hang in their snapchat or Instagram account.

As I was not present in the city during the events, I can not say for sure that all the “street violence” so luridly reported by alarmed journalists was of this theatrical nature. Obviously the guy who rammed his car against the multitude, killing one and wounding multiple others was not “just doing it to look badass on Instagram”, and caused real, grievous and irreversible damage. Additional people were physically damaged to the point of requiring medical attention (19 in the car accident and 14 in other incidents) but if what the newsreels show is any representative indication, I think Charlottesville was a hybrid between a theater and a not-fully-grown-up kids’ giant playground, where self-styled radicals from left and right enacted their fantasies of being badass, rebellious and violently (and valiantly) opposing the unacceptable ideas of the other side:

Please note with this first interpretation of the events I’m not pretending to establish any moral equivalence between both sides, or pretending that white supremacism, racism and even ol’ Nazism are somehow OK (or not, I really don’t buy pieties or second hand opinions from any peddler of political correctness, and my opinions about such issues are really my own and not to be discussed here). I hope we can all agree the “Unite the Right” organizers had considered that their little show turning violent was a real possibility (heck, if not, why come with all the defensive gear, the shields, helmets, and, specially, the “security details” of the most prominent figures?), and that organizing a public event knowing it will turn violent (and thus, assuming people will be hurt) is at best irresponsible, and at worst outright evil. Yep, I know oppressed minorities in repressive states may be excused to resort to violence as no other way of redressing their grievances is open to them, and for many people in the USA “alt-right” theirs is precisely that kind of state. We’ll get back to that contention in a moment…

But similarly irresponsible/ evil is attending such event to be part of that same violence from the other side, regardless of how virtuous your ideas are. The traditional distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” violence does not apply, as we are not dealing with people that were going about their  daily lives and suddenly were presented with a bunch of aggressive fascist threatening them, but of groups of activists that travelled to the scheduled demonstration location to harass and confront demonstrators for expressing their ideas, with the justification that such ideas are obnoxious and morally indefensible (again, I’m not yet declaring if I concur or not with such characterization). It is the embrace of violent means which constitutes a) the essence of totalitarian regimes (which define themselves by abandoning the public, pacific discussion of policy alternatives as main way of consensus formation and resort instead to its unilateral imposition, by whichever means -that’s when violence comes in) and b) the most salient and morally repugnant of its features (an imaginary “benevolent dictatorship” that never inflicted any pain on any of its subjects would be much less evil than one which systematically did -see “enlightened despotism” as proof). Am I saying with this that Trump was right, and we should condemn violence “from all sides”? does such generic condemnation mean that we indeed consider both sides “morally equivalent”? (let’s call them, for greater clarity, fascists and anti-fascists, or white supremacists and anti-white supremacists -or would it be more accurate to call the latter “white subserviencists “?). Not to put too fine a point about it, yes and no. I do indeed oppose (and condemn) every kind of violence, regardless of how honorable the cause it defends, or how ignoble and vile the cause it attacks. In cases of terrible oppression, when any other means of redress are closed, it could be justified to resort to causing pain (including to innocent people), always in a most limited, most circumspect manner, but those cases are few and far between, and certainly none of them obtains in modern day America (or in modern day Europe).

Which is not to say that, once violence is unleashed, every participant is similarly to blame: Those that start it (those who hit first) are normally more to blame than those that respond to it. Those that lose their temper and escalate it (and respond to a taunt with a punch, or to a punch with a shot to the head) are more to blame than those that keep their cool and show some restraint, trying to keep it proportional and not inflict more pain than what they themselves may have suffered. And yes, those that engage in it to advance a “respectable” cause (for a Kantian like me the proof of respectability is pretty straightforward: those that act according to a maxim they can universalize, so they would like to see it become a rule of nature or, alternatively, those that treat other people as ends in themselves and never as means) are less to blame than those that defend dubious, non-universalizable, particularistic causes. Only according to the first two criteria are the white supremacists who intended to march in Charlottesville morally equivalent to the counterdemonstrators that tried to stop them, as according the third their cause, being associated with racial segregation, a celebration of slavery and sedition (which entails a violation of the rule of law), and thus strictly non-universalizable, they are clearly inferior to those that showed up to oppose them.

Now that has been taken out of the way, let’s go back to why I find the sad and tragic events that unfolded the 12^th of August still contain a reason to rejoice: essentially, what they showed is that the US of A is much farther from a civil war than what I feared, as the most vocal proponents of the de-humanization of half of the country that is required for such a confrontation to take place are a really tiny minority, unable to inflame the passions of a sizeable amount of their countrymen (as of today still very, very far from reaching a critical mass to have any significant impact on the political, let alone military balance of forces of the country) and willing to fold when confronted with the possibility of a real fight. During the campaign of the presidential election I tended to disagree with many analysts on the left that dismissed the perils of a Trump victory saying that the amount of his followers that bought into white supremacist phantasies was very minor, in the order of a few thousands, but now I think they were spot on, given how easy it was for a bunch of ragtag organizations to outnumber them on very short notice. Breitbart may claim some hundreds of thousands of readers, and the Daily Stormer (now disappeared from the “public” internet) some tens of thousands, but we’ve seen that lurking in unsavory virtual places while safely seated in your parents’ basement is one thing, and hauling your ass to a demonstration with fellow extremists where said ass can be repeatedly kicked is a very different one. A lot of people seem to have signed for the first, but precious few for the second.

And the media in the right have noticed, as the diagnostic I’ve met more frequently is that the “Unite the Right” rally was an unmitigated disaster, brought tons of bad publicity and has probably set up the movement a few years, if not decades. A lot of people, even those of a most conservative persuasion, still balk at being identified as Nazis, or being associated with the Ku Klux Klan. If I were a cynical I would show some surprise at the apparent inconsistency of endorsing blatant discrimination towards certain ethnic/ cultural groups (browns and blacks) but being uneasy about being associated with those who demonize others (Jews), as that’s where the line seem to be drawn. Sorry, but I fail to see how a Nazi is so much worse (and thus so amazingly more evil) than a super-nationalist, jingoistic hick that wants to send “people not like him” (because he considers them inferior and not fully human) back to their countries of origin, just because the former includes in the “not like him” category some people externally indistinguishable from himself (Jews) and the latter does not. And just to be clear and avoid mistakes, it is not because I sympathize with one more than the other: for the record, I consider both equally unacceptable and indefensible. However, a number of alt-right bloggers and neoReactionary thinkers seem to be happily aligned with the super-nationalist jingoist but reject being labelled as full-throat Nazis (see Mencius Moldbug, for obvious reasons).

But enough cynicism already, back to the uplifting consequences of proto-fascist thugs being routed in the streets, we can expect much less visibility from them, and that is not a bad thing. We will see similar levels of rancor and spite and foaming-at-the-mouth between progressives and conservatives, we will see one or the other condone ugly behaviors (both in words and deeds) as long as it is exhibited by someone from their tribe and causes harm to someone of the opposite’s, but such ugly behavior will return to the electronic realm: the usual trolling, badmouthing, toxic name-calling and occasional banding together to be overheard in front of niche audiences (sad puppies) but no street fighting (and hopefully, no car ramming in the enemy’s ranks). So cheer up, Americans! It seems like your simmering Second Civil War will remain a virtual conflict still for a few years to come. If and when it becomes real (not that original an idea, see American War by Omar el Akkad -oh, I forgot you barely read, and much less a book by an Arab-sounding author) is still up to you to decide. 

Tired of winning, already? (to my American friends, with love)

Like with so many subjects, the Clash said it better (and shorter, and louder) forty years ago: ”I’m so bored of the USA”.

I know, I know, they are still the “indispensable nation”, an economic giant (their economy alternates as the world’s second biggest with the whole EU, which is not technically a country, both being already smaller than China), its military might far bigger than all the rest of the world combined, a cultural beacon shining its rays over all aspects of the life of the mind (from academic philosophy, whatever that is, to popular music and films) and of course an exemplar for the ages of what inclusive government (“of the people, by the people, for the people”, in the unforgettable words which close Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) should look like.

Only what it actually looks like nowadays seems to have lost some of its luster… and from the inability to properly govern itself a lot of noticeable cracks are becoming more noticeable, like:  

·         An economy that not only finds it more difficult to achieve past rates of growth, and seems every decade more stagnant than the previous one (a recurrent theme of this blog, and not confined to the USA), but that is becoming more blatantly unequal and has serious problems distributing the wealth it still manages to create (and that stupendous growth of inequality is what would constitute a distinctly American phenomenon: Europe outperforms the USA economically )

·         No noticeable cracks in the military front, except for why on God’s green Earth do you, guys, spend so God damn much in it, given the rest of the world doesn’t really care? It’s all right to claim that Europeans have been free riding for decades under Washington nuclear umbrella and they should spend more to defend themselves (but from who? From the evil Russians, who in 20 years will be less populous than Vietnam and haven’t been able to bring to heel tiny Ukraine in five years of low intensity war? From the threatening Muslim and Sub-Saharan nations to the South that would rather migrate than invade, because their citizens emphatically do not want to live under their current social arrangement?). It’s all right to get your pants in a bunch about the increasing assertiveness of a rising China, but if after 16 years you still have not been able to pacify Afghanistan (or whatever you were trying to achieve there) maybe it is time to reassess if more aircraft carriers (price tag: 13 billion USD) or more F-35 jets (a real bargain in comparison, only 100 to 150 million USD a pop, depending on how many are finally manufactured) are really needed to combat today’s real threats (as opposed to those envisioned by military planners three decades ago)

·         A culture that seems to cannibalize itself in an endless repetition of trends and mods that stopped being original in the late 60’s of the past century. Look, I love classic Rock’n’Roll as much as the next guy (and my share of Country, too, and I unashamedly declare myself an avid fan of the Star Wars saga, so don’t take the following as preaching from my high horse or trying to claim some extra legitimacy from being the most highfalutin’ guy you’ve ever heard). Thomas Pynchon is still my go-to fiction writer, and I find John Rawls one of the deepest thinkers of the XXth century. Norman Mailer was absolutely tremendous (more at the beginning of his career than at the end), Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike… they all taught me profound and subtle and… TRUE things about human nature in this particular time of our history. European thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer or Herbert Marcuse produced some of their best work there and even Derek Parfit visited frequently and benefited from discussion with local scholars. And, although I haven’t seen a full TV show (not even a complete episode) for decades, I hear that this is the golden age of television and that the amount of creativity and brilliance and genius in exploring the nuances and follies of the human heart have reached heights never heard of in the history of our species. Which is all great and good, but kids go less and less to the movies (another cultural form traditionally dominated by Hollywood) and watch less TV, preferring to spend time in social media (yep, I know Facebook and Instagram are both based in the USA) and playing videogames (an industry that is geographically highly dispersed). Let us leave it at the point we can all agree: cultural dominance, understood in the traditional sense of “soft power” (the ability to promote one’s own values and tastes) is increasingly slipping away from the USA.

But of course all those cracks are being exposed, deepened, accelerated and highlighted because of the rot at the core of the American social system: a political process that seems to be dramatically out of whack, as exemplified by the election of a person with the most “questionable” character (more on that in a minute) and, derived from that, in the inability of both elected chambers to agree on basic, necessary measures for the smooth functioning of the republic. Things like a Healthcare structure that doesn’t leave a significant fragment of the population frothing at the mouth (“socialized medicine!”, “death panels!”, “tax cuts for the rich in exchange for people being let die in ERs!”), increasing the debt’s ceiling so government can keep on working, simplifying a tax code everybody agrees has become dysfunctional and of gargantuan complexity or approving a budget that deals with the ballooning federal deficit in light of the upcoming massive increase in retirements of the baby-boomers.

Please note with the above enumeration I’m not saying the USA is in a particularly dire situation or in much worse shape than the rest of the world. Any regular reader of this blog already knows I tend to disparage the whole West in similar terms, and there isn’t a single nation or group of nations I would identify as distinctly virtuous or as being in a position to give moral lessons to the rest. The whole world already embraced the dominant reason of the age (Desiderative Reason) during the second half of the last century. Such reason is “exhausted”, meaning that it can not awake the enthusiasm of the masses, or gain its allegiance, or simply convince them to trundle along however unhappily. As a result, growing majorities reject it and express their dissatisfaction through the most intimate way such expression of their lack of identification with the collective future such reason dictates may take: what I have termed “gonadal vote”, choosing not to reproduce a form of life that at bottom they find not worth it. Furthermore, and in addition to not reproducing themselves they may reject each of the particular tenets of desiderative reason by not accepting the socially defined rules for determining social hierarchy (thus resorting to the biological default mode of such determination: strength and charisma in a new tribalism/ feudalism we already see becoming more prevalent in the economic realm) and by not accepting the socially determined set of sanctioned, “proper” desires (the alternative always being perceived by the majority of the social group as self-destructive and anti-social).

Again, par for the course, and as long as somebody doesn’t come along with a valid alternative (one that can be enthusiastically accepted by a sufficient majority as providing a better basis for collectively living) all we critical thinkers will be able to do is criticize this or that particular aspect of our dying, decaying, decomposing, increasingly clunky and malfunctioning system. Back to my dear and near USA, then, as it presents a particular form of decadence and decomposition I think it is worth noting.

Which will take me to a brief detour through my latest research in a particularly dark age of my native country: the years between 1930 and 1939 in Spain, the decade just before the Spanish Civil war (in which my grandparents were caught, and immediately after which my parents were born). The sad, worrisome aspect of those years is how people were studiously but inadvertently sorting themselves in two camps that were becoming more and more “irreconcilable”.  To facilitate the sorting and identification each half of the country felt the need to embrace a set of opinions and external signs that unceasingly became more encompassing. In the early thirties you could be politically progressive but still religious, a lover of traditional music and foods and maybe even enjoy bullfighting. By the middle of the decade it was getting harder to be “moderately progressive” in politics, as even the supposedly moderate socialist party (as opposed to communists and anarchists) was for the nationalization of the means of production and a quite interventionist program in the economy, education and organization of the workplace. But regardless of politics and its preferred orientation of the economy, a host of other aspects of being a citizen were being colonized by the political orientation: a “progressive” (a term not much in use then, for what I’ve seen, they would think of themselves as people “of the left”) should necessarily denounce the inherently reactionary character of religion, the constraints to human flourishing imposed by any tradition and thus reject traditional songs, cuisine, dressing and forms of entertainment (including, of course, bullfighting). That created some cognitive dissonances, as the popular base of many leftist parties was not as well educated as to thoroughly enjoy modern culture, but let’s leave that aside for a moment. The mirror image of such phenomenon could be seen at the other extreme of the political spectrum, as followers of “the right” had to necessarily embrace the Catholic faith, and every other traditional form of being in the social world, while denouncing vigorously any innovation as contrarian to the national spirit (in their parlance, “national genius, bequeathed to us by the blood and the sweat of our hallowed ancestors”).

Seen from the perspective of almost eighty years it is clear that in both sides there should have been scores of people of honor and integrity, of common sense and decency, but one of the amazing results of my diving in the period is how little trace they have left. What you read (and occasionally hear in the radio addresses that have survived) is more and more rancor, more and more depictions of the other side as a conglomerate of pure viciousness and pure evil, more and more cartoonish misrepresentations of what the other side thought and said. No discourse of them was less than a bunch of hideous lies and irrational threats. No program was less than an all-out, uncompromising effort to erase the own side from the face of the Earth that, if put in practice, represented an existential threat to every decent man’s and his family’s existence. And as each side ended up reading the same (disjoint) set of newspapers, hearing the same radio programs (no TV yet) and talking to like-minded fellow travelers, all seemed to reinforce one another’s worse fears, all contributed to exacerbate one another’s basest impulses until they were actually killing each other, starting with some elected representatives and escalating in a bloodbath from which the country, almost a century later, has not fully recovered (as attested by the never ending trickle of books and films that still deal with the conflict, the majority of them in such a partisan manner that it is difficult to believe they are attempting to reflect such a distant event).

¿Sounds familiar? As well it should, because any casual observer of USA politics should recognize the dynamics just described as not too dissimilar from the one currently ruling the political discourse in their country. First, the never ending expansion of the badges of belonging to a definite tribe: if liberals say the world is warming and human activity is a main cause, any self-respecting conservative will denounce it as a hoax. If left-leaning media say the theory of evolution is the cornerstone of all the biological science any proud right-leaning citizen will educate himself to find the cracks and faults in the theory to “disprove” it. If progressives favor cosmopolitanism and the adoption of foreign tastes in music, clothing, literature, movies, food or even sexual preferences any traditionalist properly bred will reject such tastes and adhere to the good old cultural forms of the hallowed 50’s of the past century. And, of course, as liberals, left-leaning people and progressives cluster together and end up forming a homogeneous, internally consistent tribe, so will conservatives, right-leaning people and traditionalists, each group having more widely encompassing norms and behaviors to better identify themselves and exclude the others.

Second, the two major tribes are sorting themselves out and having decreasing contacts between them. Without a compulsory military service (the draft) and an increasing ideological alignment within professional occupations (so university professors, movie industry executives, hotel workers and software programmers increasingly vote Democrat; whilst military personnel, rust belt industry workers, investment banking analysts and policemen lean more heavily towards the Republicans), and the advent of e-commerce allowing each citizen to obtain the necessities of life without human interaction,  it is more and more common for Americans to spend their whole lives without having to interact with anybody from a different political persuasion (which, as we have seen, encompasses more and more of their vital outlook).

As a necessary consequence of the first and second observations, it comes as no surprise a third one: each half of the country thinks in increasingly more disparaging terms of the other half. What you hear in Fox news (but again, it would be an error to think that it is a problem circumscribed to just one of the sides, the same happens in Salon, the Daily Kos, the Huffington Post…) about “libtards” is just shocking. How can such a bunch of unprincipled, unpatriotic, overall silly and amoral and depraved bunch of degenerates hold such sway over public opinion (the maligned “mainstream media”) and be so close to forever ruining the shining “city on a hill” that the forefathers so arduously built by turning it into a communist dystopia? Seen from the other side of the aisle, how can a cabal of greedy, selfish, scheming billionaires have so utterly brainwashed enough of their fellow citizens to be so close of thwarting the promise of the republic and turning it into a fascist dictatorship? Seen from afar, I see America as distinctly far from becoming either, but when I read some of its media I wonder to what extent my perception may be deluded.

What I do see, as I’ve already predicted (Whoever wins tomorrow, everything is going to hell! ), is them advancing at increasing speed along the slippery slope of dehumanizing the political adversary ,with too many people already caught in that poisonous dynamic. We know how that game ends (not only Spain has the blemish of a Civil War in its history, you know), what we do not know is, alas! how such dire consequence may be prevented. 

A little political philosophy won’t kill you (or will it?)

Some anxious readers of this fine blog have been complaining of late that the frequency of my musings has decidedly diminished of late, and wonder if my much decreased output is due to an irreversible disenchantment with the medium, or is rather a temporary blip, hopefully to be soon reversed. Difficult to say for sure. I enjoy writing furiously almost unintelligible blabber as much as ever, but it’s true that the number of my commitments has increased, with the career in mathematics and the demands of the weightlifting club. It doesn’t help that April and May are usually the busiest months at work (I’m the head of the quality organization within my firm, and in May we pass our annual certification with external auditors, which require a lot of attention). So for the foreseeable future my posts will be few and far between, and I’ll need to compensate my faithful followers with extra doses of quality (in the form of pungency of the commentary on the follies of our current and past mores, rather than in brevity and pithiness, of course) as a form of compensation for the decrease in quantity…

Now to the matter at hand: I finished a couple weeks ago a rather infuriating book by a retired editor that had published too many Marxist historians, and it showed, as he had himself imbibed too much of their wacky outlook during his professional career. Nothing unusual or shocking that would merit a post to comment, as Marxist historiography in Continental Europe held almost a monopoly position within the opinion of the learned since the end of WWII. To make things worse, the author in this sad case was Spanish, where a Marxist orientation was almost mandatory if you wanted to be published in the post-dictatorship squalid intellectual milieu of the last decades of the last century. The result could be summarized as a mediocre book by an incurious author (incuriosity masked by the mandatory hundred pages of bibliographical notes containing all the canonical leftist blabber, plus some liberals in the Anglo Saxon tradition to keep the appearance of academic impartiality) that leans too heavily in every conceivable stereotype and commonplace to describe a century (the XVIII) whose intellectual forces he barely understands. But such lack of understanding is in itself revealing, as he essentially takes a trope well loved by left-leaning thinkers the world over, namely, the fact that every product of the human spirit, be it art, political discourse, philosophy or the arrangement of society itself, is a manifestation of “ideology” to mask the only thing that really matters: the relationships of production (in Marxese, the fact that owners of capital force the proletariat to sell their labor for a pittance, to extract from them the maximum benefit trying to compensate for an ever diminishing rate of return on their investments) and runs with it as long as it would allow (it could be argued that he indeed runs with such tired trope a few hundreds of pages longer than what it would allow, but let’s be charitable here).

Our author (whose name will be left unsaid, there is no need to publicize mediocre writing) doesn’t resort to the pseudo-economicist language his brethren is so sadly famous for (I use the prefix because the relationship between a Marxist and Economics is similar to that between a logical positivist and Religion; they may dabble in opinions about its syntax and how their statements are built, they may, that is, pontificate about the “object language” without actually being able to use it for its original purpose, without really “getting” it), and relies instead in a simpler concept that seems easier to grasp: what makes our own age awful, and made the XVIII century in the West even more awful (and I would argue made the whole of human history everywhere else the absolutely most awful thing ever, but the author seems strangely unable to reach that self-evident conclusion, as it would imply that our current age was the less-awful actually obtaining in the real world’s history, something no self-respecting leftist could ever agree with) was its appalling inequality, an inequality whose defense and justification is the ultimate explanation of everything that every historical character of that time and place set out to do: Mozart operas (“the magic flute” first and foremost among them)? A mere justification for growing differences in wealth and income. The American, English and French revolutions? A shameless power grab by elites to ensure they could increase their exploitation of the hapless populace. Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant’s philosophy (an odd mixture if there ever was one)? All barefaced defenses of the great unfairness of their society. The ultimate force behind the Industrial Revolution? The desire of greedy capitalists to amass more material goods and differentiate themselves from the toiling masses (and their sequestration of the legislative process to ensure they could do so in ever more egregious ways).

Not especially subtle (or original, again) but it got me thinking about how the perspective of every author is tinted (defined by) his previous political persuasion, and how a few simple concepts (like inequality, in this admittedly somewhat extreme case) are marshalled to provide an explanatory scaffolding far beyond what their ramshackle frame would allow them to comfortably do. It is probably an unavoidable part of our mental architecture, and surely we all do it to a greater or lesser degree. So I started considering how my own thinking may be constrained (or oriented) by my own big idea (the fact that a lot of social constructions, from the most complex organizations to the most everyday individual decisions, are guided by what I’ve called “dominant reason”, which can be summarized as the collectively agreed upon answers to three key questions: “what is the ultimate goal of life?”, “what desires are socially legitimized to attain such goal?” and “how is socially precedence determined (and thus, how are conflicts between individual’s desires solved)?”). And it dawned on me that such big idea could indeed be applied to classify, and better understand the political persuasion of most people, not only the residual and somewhat nostalgic leftovers that constitute the dwindling crop pf disciples of Marx.

It stands to reason that although everybody participates in the main tenets of such dominant reason (everybody is aware of them, as they constitute the default answer to such questions that he may individually offer, prior to any reflection), not everybody endorses them with the same enthusiasm. Every society has its critics, and some are more vocal than others. While most criticize some accessory aspects of the social organization, advocating very minor changes (like the substitution of one governing party by another within the same constitutional framework, which I’m learning more and more is of very little consequence), a few others go against the most fundamental elements that serve as foundation for the whole social edifice. That allows for grouping very naturally political tendencies that, although apparently very different, share between them a definite “family air”, just by considering their attitude towards the current dominant reason. That way you may find that certain strain of conservatism and certain strain of progressivism have more in common than what immediately meets the eye. When the terms “right” and “left” were coined (that was in the States General of France in 1788, according to where the representatives of the Nobility, Clerisy and the “third state” sat), being more or less for maintaining the institutions of the Ancien Régime could be a meaningful distinction, but nowadays it most certainly is not.

Accepting then that such attitude towards the dominant reason of the age is one defining feature of every political persuasion, we may identify a further dimension for distinguishing between those that reject it (or share a basically negative outlook) if we focus on what they would replace it with. Is it something that has already been dominant in our history, or something entirely new? If the former, how close is what they yearn for in time? If the latter, how hierarchical is what they envision as an alternative to today’s system?

Given the characterization along those two dimensions, we could elegantly plot the existing political options in the following diagram:  

Which I would argue defines the different political outlooks of our days better than other, more traditional classifications, typically along a single axis (like progressive vs. conservative, or democratic vs. authoritarian, or individualistic vs. communal). Our taxonomy would then classify the different political philosophies:

-          According to their attitude towards the dominant reason we find first the ones that enthusiastically endorse it (considering more of it should be applied, so it more fully and completely determines your own and everybody else’s life). Let us call them either libertarians (desiderative reason is highly accommodating to possessive individualism, and it can be argued that it has indeed provided for unprecedented levels of individual freedom) or neo-liberals. Both groups overlap, albeit do not entirely coincide: the first appellation is most used in the USA and the 2^nd in Europe, but both refer to people relatively opposed to state intervention in the economy and oriented to a mythical laissez faire economy in which the “market” optimally regulates what is produced and how it is distributed, externalities be damned. Note that the opposition to state intervention can be construed as a rejection of any interference with social status being determined by anything different than the possessions any individual is able to acquire all by himself (one of the central features of desiderative reason), as the dreaded state intervention introduces a redistributionist tendency that necessarily alters the “natural” outcome of the market with some exogenous criteria. Distinct from those enthusiastic endorsers we would have people which overall agree with the prevailing dominant reason, but rather than making it “more” desiderative would try to fix it in its current form, which already requires a significant participation of the State in the economy (understood, in opposition with the former groups, as acceptable), and which could admit of an even greater intervention to reduce the inequality of outcomes that the unfettered operation of the markets may produce. As the size of the public sector in most advanced economies is relatively high compared with the historical standard (much, much higher if we extend the comparison to the eras before the development of modern, technologically advanced Nation-States) such people today tend to be classed broadly as conservatives, if they are happy with the last four decades of growing inequality, and consider such an acceptable price to the concomitant increase in GDP (however inequitable distributed -they tend to be in the winning side) or social-democrats (a more European label, in the USA they are simply those aligned with the Democratic party) if they have become increasingly queasy about it. The important thing about those two latest groups is that, as we’ve already stated, they are both essentially happy with the status quo, and think that very minor tweaks are necessary to maintain it humming along (just putting their preferred representatives in power, identified with a political party within the purported democracy in which they think they live). Also happy with the current desiderative reason, but unhappy about how it is being applied we have the populists, with which we will deal in more detail separately. For now, it is enough to note that they are attracted by the current system of values (which they understand as a meritocracy) but not by the way it’s being, or has recently been, applied (as it enhances the social recognition, and gives all the spoils of the social product, to “others” defined in a way that excludes them, based on criteria they can not share) which makes them willing to bet the house on untested formulas that promise to correct such wrong. Finally, we would have the (so far mostly in the fringe, and with little prospect of acquiring political power anytime soon) outright critics (considering the current dominant reason, and its subsequent social system, an unmitigated disaster that cries for being replaced with something better).

-          To analyze the latter, it serves us better to resort to the second dimension, that is, which is the alternative dominant reason they consider optimal, be it a future (mostly undefined) one, or any of its past incarnations. In the former case, I’ve labeled anybody who doesn’t want to share in the dominant reason of any age, including the present one, an anarchist, as they obviously have a problem with settled and commonly accepted rules, be they for determining hierarchies (they would rather dispense with all of them outright) or for establishing what a life well lived looks like (better to leave each individual define it for him or herself -punctiliousness in gender assignations seem to be a fastidious feature of the anarchist tradition). As a brief aside, such outlook, which I have looked with great sympathy in the past, is extremely naïve (Duh!) and self-contradictory. As I’ve said in many other forums, people con not auto-legislate individually the foundation of their morals, or in other terms, give themselves an ultimate goal in life and decide in a vacuum what desires are acceptable and which ones are not. All of those have to be socially provided to boot, and they are both the prerequisite and the consequence of any minimally functioning society (as we see in our own current one, less functioning by the day as the agreement on such issues wanes and weakens). You can aspire to change the dominant reason, but it is irrational and misguided to aspire to live collectively without any reason being dominant at all in the sense I’ve described…

So let’s commiserate poor anarchists for a moment, forever doomed to vie for a dominant reason perpetually in the future because of their wholesale rejection of the current one, whatever the current one happens to be (indeed, since the creation of the movement they have already rejected, and rightly so, the two types of reason that have become dominant: both the bureaucratic one, against which they rebelled in the first international, and the desiderative one, which they currently fulminate). They are joined in their rejection by traditionalists and counterrevolutionaries and legitimists and reactionaries of different stripes, which similarly reject the current reason, but in their case because they would like it to return to a (typically highly idealized) past. Such past may be more or less remote: Marxists would like a restoration of bureaucratic reason, and have the state fully determine everybody’s position in the social hierarchy; Nationalists would like a restoration of romantic reason, and the genius (the ability to embody the spirit of the people, the mythical volk) of each gifted individual being again the sole determinant of the recognition (and eventually the material wealth associated to such recognition) to be granted to him; Alt-righters (or Neoreactionaries) have upped the ante, and are claiming for the rejection of the whole modern project embodied in the three last iterations of the dominant reason, which would take us all the way back to Baroque reason, where the ultimate goal in life was not to satisfy desires, but to prepare for the next life, social rank was determined by birth and only simple, survival-oriented desires (eat good food, have a nice house and a comfortable bed) were socially sanctioned. Surprisingly, they reveal their affinity with the other publicly visible group today that espouses such quaint views of how the good life and the good society that would nurture it look like: radical Islamists (Wahhabis) equally suspicious of modernity, that would like to take society to a pre-modern state not that different from the one proposed by Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, Andrew Anglin and the like (well, the clothing, the traditions and the race of the simple, contented masses lorded over by the übermensch that know better may be different, but that’s all).

But before leaving my readers to ponder about such fanciful taxonomy of the political kingdom and its consequences, I would like to dwell a little more on the particular taxa that has forcefully occupied the limelight of late: the populists. According to my schema, populists in all ages are essentially conformists that agree with the three tenets of the dominant reason, but feel slighted by the results of its application. There are interesting ways of interpreting great upheavals in human history as populist movements acquiring power and finding out that they could not just redistribute more of the social product to their followers while keeping the ultimate goal of life, the acceptable desires to achieve it and the criteria for deciding who should take precedence in case of conflicting desires between individuals intact, so ended up overturning the dominant reason in which they thought they were comfortable enough:

·         In a big European country, towards the end of the XVIII century (under Baroque reason, although a neighboring country on the other side of a certain channel had already started moving towards the next type), a relatively new class (the commercial bourgeoisie) just wanted to pay less taxes (but at the same time enjoying a similar level of national prestige and security, which required noblemen and priests to pay a bit more). They all publicly professed a religion that in private they mostly despised (but not as much as the aforementioned noblemen). They all harbored the same simple desires and, by seeking to buy a nobility title as soon as their rents permitted, agreed that birth was the main determinant of social precedence. They saw that poor harvests had bred a level of popular discontent between the peasantry that allowed for minor tweaks in the existing system they thought were enough to improve their lot. And they ended up causing the French Revolution, the Terror, the fall of the Old Regime and the consolidation of a new kind of dominant reason in all of Europe and its American colonies.

·         In a much bigger country, straddling Europe and Asia, at the beginning of the XX century (but living in a complicated mixture of reasons that had not fully congealed in a coherent whole that could be called dominant, hence the difficulties of the ruling dynasty to translate the country’s many natural riches in power and international recognition) a group of daring intellectuals tried to harness social discontent from a foreign war gone wrong to impose the rule of a tiny minority (nominally the urban proletariat, in reality y a cadre of opportunists and bandits extracted from the very scarce students of certain branch of German political philosophy) over a huge majority of illiterate peasants. In this case, they succeeded in imposing the reason that was already dominant in the rest of Europe (bureaucratic), developing it in the general direction of more despotism (the Asian tradition?) and less respect for human life and flourishing.

The two previous cases show us populism before democracy, so it was a populism of certain factions of the elites vying for power and trying to grab a larger share of the pie, that only in an advanced phase resort to the masses to strengthen their hand and unleash forces they are typically not able to contain and that end up consuming them (the proverbial revolution devouring its sons). I’ll analyze now two cases that happen in the more familiar milieu of representative democracy and party politics:

·         Again, big European country that had been the poster child of the improvement in material wealth and shared prosperity that bureaucratic reason can generate, with a vibrant cultural life and universities that, both in research and applied science cause the envy of the world. Unfortunately, its cultural and material success makes it arrogant, and it ends up caught in a global war that destroys most of its infrastructure and ends up losing. Far from uniting the population, it ushers a wave of cross-recrimination that is only exacerbated when an international economic crisis sinks its economy even further. Along comes a clear sighted leader, that tells everybody that everything will be OK. He’ll make the country great again without having to change mental habits or old hierarchies. Their dominant reason had not failed them, the motive it was not working any more was that a powerful cabal of secret conspirators was thwarting the normal outcomes of the democratic process, so if they kicked them out, everything would be good again. The guy barely wins a contested election, but scrapes by to form a government that in few months has monopolized all the levers of power within the country, and embarks in a furious program of public works to refloat the economy. Unsurprisingly (given the low level of resource utilization) it rebounds strongly, and in a similarly unsurprising way (given that the renunciation of previous international commitments has closed any means of foreign borrowing) in few years the economy overheats, inflation threatens to rear its ugly head again and corruption and graft in a single party state with no checks and balances are more and more prevalent. To extend the party’s grasp of total power the staid, vaguely boring bureaucratic reason is jettisoned and replaced by none other than its predecessor, romantic reason, as any appearance of fixed rules and impersonal merit recognition is displaced by party loyalty and belonging to the “right” race. You all know how it ends, when the need to keep growing the economy can only be met by crazy rearmament, then imperialist expansion in neighboring land, then total war and then near total annihilation.

·         A very big American country that has emerged from a series of fortunate historical circumstances as the single hegemon of the world system, with unmatched military power, at the beginning of the XXI century (the age of maximum dominance of desiderative reason). By the end of the previous century the system was giving clear signals of exhaustion: innovation was slowing (although most people were not aware, as the media kept reporting more and taller tales of breakthroughs and disruptions that somehow failed to materialize and actually affect average people lives’), median income had been stagnant for almost three decades, and even the frequent wars the country embarked on to keep hidden the continuous flow of resources from the public sector back to (few and well connected) private hands (“weaponized Keynesianism”) never seemed to be won, or even to actually end. Although the middle class has seen its fortunes dwindle, two classes have kept steadily improving: the super-rich (more and more visible in an era where the only true progress happens in communication technologies, thus making everybody’s lives more and more interconnected and visible) and the urban poor. Along comes a clear sighted leader, that tells everybody that everything will be OK. He’ll make the country great again without having to change mental habits or old hierarchies. Their dominant reason had not failed them, the motive it was not working any more was that a powerful cabal of secret conspirators was thwarting the normal outcomes of the democratic process, so if they kicked them out, everything would be good again. The guy barely wins a contested election, but scrapes by to form a government that in few months has achieved little, as checks and balances seem to preempt his every move. In the face of sinking popularity (the ultimate fuel that keeps him going, like most populist leaders) he makes more and more outrageous claims that somehow leave his followers undaunted…

Of course, the final outcome of the second case study has yet to be written. The orange one may be a blip, an anomaly after which the system regains its footing and continues towards ever more enlightened, fairer, more prosperous configurations (with or without desiderative reason that, long as its reign has already been, will some day be superseded, as all dominant reasons have been before). Or he may be the harbinger of something more substantive, a true (and infrequent) revolution that provides the final push to a crumbling system to force it to radically change, setting in motion the (typically serious) disturbances that announce (and are the prerequisite of) a change in dominant reason.

And what I’ve said of the American president could as well be applied to the many populist leaders-to-be waiting in the wings in so many other countries: Will Marine Le Pen end up inhabiting the Élysée Palace? Beppe Grillo in the Quirinal? Is it legitimate to compare the two, and both of them with the Donald? I’ll have more to say on the French election (summarizing: I think not in the end, but wouldn’t be surprised if she did), but I say the comparison is fully legitimate. What we see in all cases is a bare majority forming thanks to the discontent with a situation where no discontent is easily granted. Voters of populists are not the downtrodden of the Earth. Most are employed in economies that, in historical terms, are wildly successful and wealthy. But they all see the future with anguish and feel they are not getting from society as much as they should. I don’t understand them as saying that the rules are rigged against them, they seem to be fine with the rules, at least with how they were interpreted and applied twenty or thirty years ago (when their parents benefitted from them to achieve a standard of living unheard of, and most likely unexpected even by themselves). What has changed (it is important to note that in the populist imagination this is always the case) is that suddenly those same rules that benefitted their parents are benefitting somebody else, and not leaving enough for themselves. Those free-riding immigrants, mostly (although in the middle-class white North American the role the immigrant plays for the European is played by “blacks” and, a late addition, “browns”). It is them who have to be purged from the social body, put back in their place, so the current rationality works again for the benefit of the native sons.

I think that expectation is basically deluded. The generation that is nowadays beginning their professional careers (from the kids entering college to the thirty-somethings that should be settling in a job and being offered their first significant promotions, or starting to generate benefits in their self-started businesses) is working longer and longer hours for more meager rewards not because immigrants are siphoning off all the riches we are collectively capable of creating (what in its face is a pretty absurd notion), but because we have exhausted the possibilities of our current dominant reason, which at this point is not able to make us collectively produce more, or even just enough people to replenish the ranks of consumers that modern economies demand to keep chugging along. We could close our frontiers and prohibit trade as firmly and as tightly as we wanted, and our economies would still be in the gutter (again, compared with those of our parents, which still leaves ample room for them to be outstanding compared with 99,9% of human history) for lack of aggregate demand in the face of a dwindling population AND lack of Total Factor Productivity growth in the face of lack of innovation outside of Telecomms and video games. Want proof that getting rid of the maligned “other” used as scapegoat by the populist leaders rarely, if ever, works? The Germans kicked out the Jews really bad, and see where that took them (I’m aware revisionist historians see their defeat at WWII as the ultimate proof of the existence of that powerful cabal, which then successfully whitewashed history to exonerate themselves… hogwash, the German economy had proved to be inviable before the Nuremberg laws, and certainly long before the start of the war). Expect nothing different if Trump built his wall and repealed every single trade treaty (or Marine did the same). The ills that have created populism in the first place can not be cured with populism own recipe’s.

How could they be cured, then? That, thoughtful reader (you have to be really thoughtful to have made it up to this point!) would be the subject of another post. 

So how is decadence and societal decay going in your corner of the world?

Time for some merry thoughts and uplifting ideas, amid the general squalor of the latest news. Consider:

-          The probability of Geert Wilders winning the Dutch elections now stands close to 50%. They were as high as 80% in February, but latest polls give him about 22 seats in a 151 seats parliament, coming in 2^nd or 3^rd. Even if he wins, no other party has declared they would be willing to consider a coalition with him, so his chances of becoming prime minister and enacting any of his proposed policies (from a Muslim ban to leaving the European Union) seem basically zilch. According to the (mostly liberal) press Wilders is a bigot, a xenophobe, an anti-muslim candidate whose PVV party is the Netherlands version of the old German NSDAP, and whose election would usher in an age of darkness and turmoil in which his country would leave the EU, expel its foreign population and impose an ethno-state based on racial discrimination and exclusion. If you hear him without that filter, he is a mediocre candidate with a peculiar hair saying things that were non-controversial (and pretty commonplace) twenty years ago but which our politically correct times have turned unimaginable. As the vote is being conducted today, we will have a clearer picture in a few hours, but my hunch is that this first attempt at electing a “European Trump” will fizzle and turn out to be the proverbial storm in a teapot. Not so sure about what may happen in a month in France, though.

-          It’s been eight years since the last recession, and we don’t seem to see any major crises in the horizon, at least in the USA. So we may be on our way to beat the longest expanse of time ever recorded without a recession (10 years, achieved both between 1961-1971 and 1991-2001). Admittedly, like in so many periods of “great moderation” before things doesn’t seem so great for significant numbers. Even with technically full employment, labor force participation rate is the lowest ever, salaries have been mostly stagnant since the 70’s, median income has barely budged and there is an opioid epidemic (again, talking just about the USA here) that has contributed to life expectancy to decrease, a historical first in absence of major war or epidemic.

-          Although Theresa May announced last year that she would invoke Article 50 of the EU treaty on March, and thus effectively trigger the exit of the UK from the Union, she hasn’t taken the step yet, although she has just received the explicit authorization of parliament (with a majority of the MPs being less than enthusiast about such vote, one has to applaud the ability of the prime minster to strong-arm them and bend their will). With an unexpected gain for  the Republican party in Northern Ireland and the Scots threatening with a new independence vote (fueled this time by their desire to remain in Europe, regardless of what the English have decided, and apparently unconcerned by the barriers that countries with independent-favoring minorities of their own would oppose to any newborn state) it seems this would be the time for extra caution and circumspection. But after botching so badly the whole voting process and what has come afterwards I don’t expect this particular piece of cheerful news to last long… 

-          After more than two months in the Trump presidency, no major war has broken out, no twitter feud has absurdly escalated in a nuclear exchange, and no sector of the economy has imploded. Furthermore, every major initiative of the president has either stagnated or quietly fizzled. No wall is being built in the southern border. No commercial treaty has been repudiated. Obamacare repeal is growing more unpopular by the day (more markedly since the Republicans actually spelled what they would replace it with). There seems to be a “kinda” ban on immigration from seven (six according to last count) mostly Muslim countries more or less in place after a disastrous first attempt at implementation, but one has to wonder what percentage of Muslims traveling to the USA it has actually deterred (shocking piece of news for liberals -or Trump follower that believe their man is delivering on his campaign promises: there are many, many more Muslims living outside those countries than inside, and all of them are free to enter the USA without impediments). I know relaxing after so short a time, for lack of such astoundingly bad outcomes is setting the bar absurdly low, but remember we are trying to work up our spirits here… on the big order of things, what the 45^th president has done so far seems to confirm that inexpediency, ineptitude and stupidity will be the defining marks of his administration, and although an occasional nuisance such trifecta is likely to have limited effects on the global economy, which so far seems to be coasting along just fine.

I’m still uncertain about the effect it will have on the impending American (second) Civil War, as it doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all to ameliorate the venomous partisanship that has taken hold of the public. So far, his supporters seem to be very pleased of how well things are going, with his man keeping his promises (easy to do when you have promised every thing and its contrary) and showing the middle finger to the despised “establishment” with a new outrage every day (as long as you don’t include in such establishment, that is, the half dozen ex-Goldman Sachs Directors he has appointed to different positions in his administration), and the only remaining hope is that after a few more months of inaction and economic decline of the majority of whites without college education that gave him the crucial mid-Western states they will turn again him and his enablers, feeling betrayed (or duped, or manipulated) and stop watching Fox and hearing Rush Limbaugh and the like. Although that narrative is presented as highly likely by liberal sources, I’m somewhat sceptic about it, and can very well imagine Trump followers maintaining a Republican majority in both Houses in the midterms of 2018, and even giving him a second term.

-          China continues to grow at a reasonable pace, slowly converging to a rate more in line with that of an already advanced (medium income) economy, but still overperforming them all:

Although you have to (always, and the same applies to the national accounting of any developed world country) take the figures cautiously, it seems that the World’s most populous country (yet, soon to be surpassed by India, more on which in a moment) is advancing in the transformation of its economic structures from an export-driven model to one more supported by internal consumption, in both cases hugely dependent on a tremendous capital investment which will be more and more difficult to sustain (and that more and more exceeds its internal savings capacity, which in absence of a trade surplus explains its growing resource to borrowing, and hence increasing debt).

More interesting for the world’s poor, that other huge economy that in previous decades seemed condemned to eternal stagnation is for some years now showing signs of activity, and is slowly (but sure-footedly) in the path to growth, having the “advantage” of starting from a substantially lower level, and thus having more room to play catch up:

You may have noted that many of the reasons to be cheerful are things that have NOT come to pass yet, but will surely do, sooner or later. If not Wilders in the Netherlands, some populist will come to power in a European country (Marine Le Pen will have a good shot soon, Viktor Orban is already in power in Hungary, as is Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland -I know, the prime minister is nominally Beata Szydlo, recently injured in a car crash, but my Polish friends assure me it is Kaczynski who calls the shots). May will invoke article 50 and the UK will be gone, gone, gone, into international irrelevance and economic oblivion (more or less, not that Europe will be doing so much better), with or without Northern Ireland and Scotland. We will have another recession at some point. Trump, of course, may cause a catastrophe in any moment. China is building the World’s biggest credit bubble, and it will burst, and it will be pretty ugly (all the irrational investments made in the last decades to keep things going will be revealed, and forestall any possibility of state-led aggregate demand growth for many years, believe me, I know how it works).  

And we don’t have a clue of when any of those may happen, and how to prepare for them. What we do know is that economic growth will be disappointing and technological advance will be more hype than reality: no “general purpose” artificial intelligence in our lifetime, most likely no self-driving cars, for sure no commercially viable fusion energy, no human in Mars, no permanent base on the moon. Regardless of what wealthy investors and consultants with much to gain from causing “technological anxiety” in gullible CEOs will keep on parroting. Just wonder, who has more to gain from people fearing an ever-accelerating mysterious technology that, although somehow failing to materialize in any measurable metric like TFP growth or life expectancy improvement, continuously threatens every employee or boss with becoming obsolete if they do not pay the dues of the technologically savvy priests of progress that are always knowledgeable about the latest trends (maybe because they themselves conjured them from thin air, regardless of their actual existence)?

If the economy and technology are more likely to disappoint us than not, in the political realm is where things look positively grim. Remember, the dominant reason that allowed Western societies to surge forward since the middle of the XVIII century and that in its latest incarnation became global (desiderative reason) is broken beyond repair, and is not doing the work that a dominant reason is supposed to do: allowing people to coordinate their collective efforts towards a goal universally acknowledged as worthy, through the medium of satisfying socially sanctioned desires and the immediate feedback mechanism of a widely accepted criterion for determining each member’s position in the social hierarchy.

In its absence, what we have is increasing anomia, a proliferation of both self-destructive and society-destructive behaviors in expanding pockets of fundamentalism and nihilism, growing in the margins, fed by the many disaffected that perceive they have nothing to loose, whose attacks on the mainstream foster in response a growing tribalism and nationalism. And remember, economics without technological advance is entirely unable to make the economy grow, you need productivity to substantially improve for that (and such improvement is entirely exogenous in any model).

But as for how the benefits of what society produces are shared it is not economics, but politics who holds the key. And politics require a common understanding of what constitutes a reason for its arguments and conclusions to be accepted as legitimate by the majority. When such understanding is lacking, what we have is a ruling minority keeping most of the gains of whatever lackluster technological advances there still are for themselves, and a ruled majority disconnected from the values and worldview of such minority turning in what Toynbee called a proletariat (Those pesky rebelling proles). Hhmmmm… sounds like a pretty darn accurate description of what has been happening in most of the developed world since 1970, a small fraction of society (the infamous “1%”) hoarding all the gains, and hectoring the other 99% to be more industrious, more frugal, to invest more in their own development, as they bore in the end the sole responsibility for their ultimate failure: failure to cultivate themselves, failure to acquire the needed skills for the jobs of the “new economy”, failure to earn more than their parents, failure to ascend the economic ladder, failure to lead traditional lives with ever more hectic schedules, both parents working for longer hours and less benefits.

And, guess what? People get tired of being told once and again that it is all their fault, but that if they somehow try even harder (or teach their few kids, with unbelievable sacrifices, to work even more) they will reach the promised land of consumerist bliss, when they will all have a bigger house and a more expensive car than their neighbors and their in-laws (something, I almost don’t need to clarify, statistically impossible; that’s the downside of hierarchically ordered groups). Haranguing only works for so long, and people may accept their elder’s judgment at first and internalize their shortcomings for some time, but it is very hard to sustain such belief indefinitely. Sooner or later someone will find how irresistible it is to point to “someone else” as being the real culprit of people dissatisfaction, of them not living up to what is continuously being shown as proper and deserved. As I mentioned in the previously linked post, until now we’ve seen people have protested in a mostly peaceful way, simply voting for the most obnoxious candidate on offer (so expect many more of those to pop up like mushrooms). But, again, that will solve nothing, and will ultimately lead to the discredit of the electoral system itself.

And the prospect of the disaffected masses, having rejected the until now prevalent mechanism for aggregating their will (democratically elected representatives) and sniffing for those “other people” they think are to blame for the thwarting of their ambitions, the frustration of their expectations, the abandonment of their youthful dreams, is truly terrifying. Think in torches and pitchforks. Think in riot police and secret prisons. Think in 1789 France or 1917 Russia. But in the meantime, cheer up, as things are just fine and dandy and everything seems to be going OK!