The cataclysmic stupidity of these people can’t be overstated. Disappointed Trump didn’t pardon him. As if that loud mouthed megalomaniac ever gave a sh!t about anyone but himself. His supporters must be the dumbest people on earth.
0 Replies
goldberg
-1
Fri 3 Sep, 2021 09:20 pm
From The Economist.
After Afghanistan, Europe wonders if France was right about America
"THE ANNUAL ritual of Bastille Day is a moment for the French to put up bunting, down champagne and celebrate the republic’s founding myths. On July 14th this year, however, when the French ambassador to Kabul, David Martinon, recorded a message to fellow citizens, gravity crushed festivity. “Mes chers compatriotes”, he began, “the situation in Afghanistan is extremely concerning.” The French embassy, he said, had completed its evacuation of Afghan employees. French nationals were told to leave on a special flight three days later. After that, given the “predictable evolution” of events in Afghanistan, he declared—a full month before the fall of Kabul—France could no longer guarantee them a safe exit.
When the French began to pull out Afghan staff and their families in May, even friends accused them of defeatism, and of hastening the regime’s collapse. Their evacuation effort in August (of 2,834 people, on 42 flights) was imperfect, and left some vulnerable Afghans behind. As allies scrambled to get their Afghan employees out of Kabul, the French found themselves as dependent as anybody on American security. Yet there has been quiet satisfaction in Paris. Their plans showed “impressive foresight”, says Lord Ricketts, a former British ambassador to France.
If the French acted early, making their own assessment of shared intelligence, this was due in part to a smaller footprint on the ground. France fought in Afghanistan alongside NATO allies from 2001. “We are all Americans,” ran Le Monde’s front page after 9/11. It then pulled out all troops by 2014, partly to concentrate on its own counter-insurgency effort in the Sahel. Yet the decision in Kabul was also easier to take because the French have fewer qualms about doing their own thing, even when this irks America. As Europeans think through the unsettling implications of the Afghan fiasco, and what it says about dependence on a unilateral America, the mood in Britain and Germany is one of shock and hurt. For the French, who drew from the Suez crisis in 1956 the lesson that they could never fully rely on America, a conclusion reinforced under the Obama presidency, Afghanistan has served to confirm what they long suspected.
It is no secret that not all Europeans share France’s view. When Emmanuel Macron took to the stage in the wood-panelled Sorbonne amphitheatre shortly after his election in 2017 and pleaded for “European sovereignty” and a “capacity to act autonomously” in security matters should Europe need to, his was a lone voice. In Germany and points east, Mr Macron’s plea was regarded with irritation: yet another pesky Gaullist attempt to undermine NATO and supplant America as the guarantor of European security.
Minds have moved a bit since, as Mr Macron has sought to reassure friends that his idea is not to replace but to complement the transatlantic alliance. Even so, as recently as last year Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Germany’s defence minister, wrote bluntly that “illusions of European strategic autonomy must come to an end.” In Britain, meanwhile, Mr Macron’s calls were disregarded as irrelevant to an island nation freshly free to forge its own global role. The pooling of European sovereignty over defence was something Brexit was designed to avoid.
The debacle in Afghanistan has shifted the rhetoric. Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative MP who served in Afghanistan, urged Britain “to make sure that we are not dependent on a single ally”, naming France and Germany as potential partners. Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, suggested that his armed forces should be ready to “join different coalitions and not be dependent on one nation”. He did not need to spell out which one. “We’ve all been equally humiliated by the Americans,” says a British diplomat, who points to a common interest in making sure this does not happen again. For conflict-shy Germany, Afghanistan was a formative experience. The disappointment has been wounding. Armin Laschet, the conservative candidate for Germany’s chancellorship, described the withdrawal as “the greatest debacle that NATO has experienced since its foundation”.
In short, Europe seems to realise that it will have to do more by itself. Whether the sceptics understand it or not, this is exactly what Mr Macron has been saying, and will say again in a speech ahead of France’s rotating presidency of the EU Council in 2022. Nobody, but nobody, will say so aloud. But the implicit recognition is that, zut alors, Mr Macron was right.
Two big questions for Europeans flow from this disconcerting thought, however, and easy answers exist to neither. First, what does Europe really mean by “European sovereignty” or “strategic autonomy”? Most countries vow to spend more on defence, even though Germany (unlike Britain and France) still fails to meet the NATO benchmark of 2% of GDP. Beyond that, there is little clarity, and even less agreement, not least because Brexit has put Britain in no mood to work institutionally with the EU.
Should Europeans aspire merely to limited management of a regional conflict, such as the Sahel or Iraq? Or do they hope to take on collective defence of their continent? Realists argue for the former, and only up to a point. Enthusiasts hint at the latter. Yet even in the Sahel, France still needs the Americans for intelligence and logistics. Second, is Europe really prepared to do what it would take to get by on its own? The evidence is unconvincing. Europe is better at devising acronyms than building capabilities. “If we can’t even look after the airport in Kabul, there is a big gap between our analysis and our capacity to act,” says Claudia Major of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
The implied effort would be huge. “I am not sure the Europeans are psychologically ready to face the challenge,” wrote Gérard Araud, a French former ambassador to America, for the Atlantic Council. Mr Macron, like his ambassador in Kabul, may have made the right call. But are Europeans ready to heed it? "
0 Replies
hightor
3
Sat 4 Sep, 2021 04:45 am
HCR wrote:
The new anti-abortion law in Texas is not just about abortion; it is about undermining civil rights decisions made by the Supreme Court during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Supreme Court declined to stop a state law that violates a constitutional right.
Since World War II, the Supreme Court has defended civil rights from state laws that threaten them. During the Great Depression, Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to use the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net—this is when we got Social Security—and promote infrastructure. But racist Democrats from the South balked at racial equality under this new government.
After World War II, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower, and Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Republican appointed by Richard Nixon, the Supreme Court set out to make all Americans equal before the law. They tried to end segregation through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision prohibiting racial segregation in public schools. They protected the right of married couples to use contraception in 1965. They legalized interracial marriage in 1967. In 1973, with the Roe v. Wade decision, they tried to give women control over their own reproduction by legalizing abortion.
They based their decisions on the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War. Congress developed this amendment after legislatures in former Confederate states passed “Black Codes” that severely limited the rights and protections for formerly enslaved people. Congress intended for the powers in the Fourteenth to enable the federal government to guarantee that African Americans had the same rights as white Americans, even in states whose legislatures intended to keep them in a form of quasi-slavery.
Justices in the Warren and Burger courts argued that the Fourteenth Amendment required that the Bill of Rights apply to state governments as well as to the federal government. This is known as the “incorporation doctrine,” but the name matters less than the concept: states cannot abridge an individual’s rights, any more than the federal government can. This doctrine dramatically expanded civil rights.
From the beginning, there was a backlash against the New Deal government by businessmen who objected to the idea of federal regulation and the bureaucracy it would require. As early as 1937, they were demanding an end to the active government and a return to the world of the 1920s, where businessmen could do as they wished, families and churches managed social welfare, and private interests profited from infrastructure projects. They gained little traction. The vast majority of Americans liked the new system.
But the expansion of civil rights under the Warren Court was a whole new kettle of fish. Opponents of the new decisions insisted that the court was engaging in “judicial activism,” taking away from voters the right to make their own decisions about how society should work. That said that justices were “legislating from the bench.” They insisted that the Constitution is limited by the views of its framers and that the government can do nothing that is not explicitly written in that 1787 document.
This is the foundation for today’s “originalists” on the court. They are trying to erase the era of legislation and legal decisions that constructed our modern nation. If the government is as limited as they say, it cannot regulate business. It cannot provide a social safety net or promote infrastructure, both things that cost tax dollars and, in the case of infrastructure, take lucrative opportunities from private businesses.
It cannot protect the rights of minorities or women.
Their doctrine would send authority for civil rights back to the states to wither or thrive as different legislatures see fit. But it has, in the past, run into the problem that Supreme Court precedent has led the court to overturn unconstitutional state laws that deprive people of their rights (although the recent conservative courts have chipped away at those precedents).
The new Texas law gets around this problem with a trick. It does not put state officers in charge of enforcing it. Instead, it turns enforcement over to individual citizens. So, when opponents sued to stop the measure from going into effect, state officials argued that they could not be stopped from enforcing the law because they don’t enforce it in the first place. With this workaround, Texas lawmakers have, as Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his dissent, “delegate[d] to private individuals the power to prevent a woman from…[exercising]...a federal constitutional right.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was more forceful, calling the measure “a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny.” And yet, the Supreme Court permitted that state law to stand simply by refusing to do anything to stop it. As Sotomayor wrote in her dissent: “Last night, the Court silently acquiesced in a State’s enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents.”
A state has undermined the power of the federal government to protect civil rights. It has given individuals who disagree with one particular right the power to take it away from their neighbors. But make no mistake: there is no reason that this mechanism couldn’t be used to undermine much of the civil rights legislation of the post–World War II years.
On September 4, 1957, three years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a crowd of angry white people barred nine Black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The white protesters chanted: “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate.”
In 1957, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower used the federal government to protect the constitutional rights of the Little Rock Nine from the white vigilantes who wanted to keep them second-class citizens. In 2021, the Supreme Court has handed power back to the vigilantes.
How Republicans Became Anti-Choice
"...Republican governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Therapeutic Abortion Act, one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country, in 1967, legalizing abortion for women whose mental or physical health would be impaired by pregnancy, or whose pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. The same year, the Republican strongholds of North Carolina and Colorado made it easier for women to obtain abortions. New York, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican, eliminated all restrictions on women seeking to terminate pregnancies up to twenty-four weeks gestation. (Reversing Roe shows young women in Dallas boarding airplanes headed to these states.) Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush were all pro-choice, and they were not party outliers. In 1972, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Republicans believed abortion to be a private matter between a woman and her doctor. The government, they said, should not be involved..."
0 Replies
BillW
1
Sat 4 Sep, 2021 03:07 pm
@hightor,
Quote:
On September 4, 1957, three years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a crowd of angry white people barred nine Black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
I was in 2nd grade at the going into school on the 1st day off school I Memphis, TN where a have a memory of this event from seeing it on TV. My thoughts were how unfair to those children that people were trying to prevent them from going to school and how much I respected Eisenhower!
0 Replies
Builder
1
Sat 4 Sep, 2021 04:33 pm
I wonder what the "experts" are trying to hide?
So much money to be made, they're ignoring evidence.
Oracle Films - An Arm of Oracle of God Drama & Film Ministries.http://www.oraclefilms.org
Oracle Films is an arm of Oracle of God Drama & Films Int'l Ministries, an interdenominational outreach arm of The Redeemed Christian Church of God
Dinesh D’Souza is a frequent guest star on that America’s Frontline platform.
Just sayin
0 Replies
snood
2
Sun 5 Sep, 2021 05:46 am
And just as a footnote here..,
When the messenger is the equivalent of a bug-eyed subway stalker shouting space invasion conspiracies at weary commuters, “Don’t shoot the messenger” just doesn’t have the same meaning.
David Icke famously claimed Cuba would sink beneath the waves before the end of the last Millennium, Builder thought it was proof he really was the son of God.
He thinks lizard people run the World, he makes Oralloy look like someone who has his finger on the pulse.
He’s from the planet mental, everything he posts is bullshit.
And this latest bunch sound every bit as lobotomised as all the other idiots he listens to.
I've said this before, but what’s the most insane, crazy thing you can think of about anything.
That is what Builder believes.
Take the Statue of Liberty, it wasn’t made by the French it was the sex toy of mythical giant Gogmagog that the French pulled out of his arse and gave to America because Grover Cleveland wanted to have a sniff.
Now I just made that up, but Builder believes it. Why don’t you try making up a load of old bollocks thatBuilder will believe.
0 Replies
Builder
-2
Sun 5 Sep, 2021 03:05 pm
@snood,
Quote:
the messenger is the equivalent of a bug-eyed subway stalker shouting space invasion conspiracies at weary commuters
Obviously too simple-minded to even watch the video.
Just drink the Koolaid, Kids. Yum-yum.
all the reputable authorities, the eople who actually know what the situation is, say the exact opposite of your conspiracy theory "expeerts". People getting very saick from covid are overwhelmingly the unvaccinated. the people dying from covid are overwhelmingly the unvaccinated there are a very very few cases of covid amon the vaccinated, but tjey don't get anywhere near as sick as the unvaccinated, and they don't die from covid. and that's the truth.
I just found a thought-provoking article written by The Economist's Adrian Wooldridge, who is said to be joining Bloomberg Opinion to work for his longtime friend John Micklethwait, who is the top gun at Bloomberg.
Notice: Adrian Wooldridge works for the liberal Economist, thus it's customary for him to rap conservatives and even speak for liberal politicians. He's just speaking for himself in this article.
Meritocracy v the people
"The biggest division in modern society is between the meritocracy and the people, the cognitive elite and the masses, the exam-passers and the exam-flunkers.
"Why did Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election? Why did Britain vote for Brexit? And why does Erdoğan win loud applause whenever he mocks liberal ‘blah blah blah’? Why, in short, is liberal democracy in turmoil and populism on the march? Commentators are competing fiercely to produce the best answer to these questions. But as far as this author is concerned the prize goes to a book that was published in 1958 – when Donald Trump was just thirteen and Vladimir Putin was seven. The book is Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy.
Young argued that the most significant fact about modern society is not the rise of democracy, or indeed capitalism, but the rise of the meritocracy, a term he invented. In a knowledge-based society the most important influence on your life-chances is not your relationship to the means of production but your relationship to the machinery of educational and occupational selection. This is because this machinery determines not just how much you earn but also your sense of self-worth. For Young, the greatest milestones in recent British history were not the Great Reform Act of 1832 or the granting of votes to women in 1928. They were the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854, which opened civil service jobs to competitive examinations, and the Butler Education Act of 1944, which decreed that children should be educated according to their ‘age, ability and aptitude’.
Young was a towering figure in British life – the author of the Labour Party’s 1945 manifesto, the founder of the Open University, and a pioneering sociologist. But for all his distinction many readers misread the book as a celebration of meritocracy. The likes of former prime ministers Harold Wilson and Tony Blair shamelessly marketed themselves as meritocrats – enemies of the fusty old order and embodiments of modernity and justice rolled into one. In fact, it was meant to act as a warning. Young believed that the rise of the meritocracy was dividing society into two polarised groups: the exam-passers and the exam-flunkers. This would inevitably end in tears. The exam-passers would become the hereditary elite: selected on the basis of their brain power they would nevertheless do everything possible to make sure their less than brilliant children were given every educational advantage. The exam-flunkers would become increasingly embittered, first turning in on themselves, in misery and despair, and then turning against the society as a whole, in pig-wrestling rage. The result would be a revolution: the ‘failures’ would finally rise up against their meritocratic overlords (abetted by members of the ruling class who could no longer tolerate the system) and wreak their revenge for all the snubs and sneers.
Look around the world and almost everything that Young worried about can be seen in action. His only mistake was one of timing. Young thought that the populist revolution would be delayed until 2033. In fact it is already occurring. The biggest division in modern society is not between the owners of the means of production and the workers, as Karl Marx posited. It is not between the patriarchy and women or the white races and non-white races, as the post-modernists posit. It is between the meritocracy and the people, the cognitive elite and the masses, the exam-passers and the exam-flunkers. The winners are becoming intolerably smug. The losers are turning in on themselves, with an epidemic of suicides and drug addiction reducing the life-expectancy of working-class Americans for the first time in a century. And the tumbrils are beginning to operate.
The global establishment is, above all, a meritocratic establishment: it consists of people who have done well at school and university and who have gravitated to jobs that require both intellectual skills and evidence of those intellectual skills in the form of credentials. There are various sub-divisions within this elite: people who work for universities and NGOs like to snipe at people who work for business and banks, but in fact all members of the global elite have more in common than they like to think.
They routinely marry other members of the meritocratic elite: the marriage announcements in the New York Times read rather like marriage announcements between blue-blooded families in the high Victorian age, with the lists of university degrees (Harvard and Yale marries Brown and Columbia!) replacing lists of family pedigrees. Only two out of every thousand marriages are between a partner with a university degree and a partner with primary qualifications only. They usually share a common outlook. They pride themselves on their cosmopolitan values partly because they live in a borderless world – they are forever hopping over borders, in their business trips and foreign holidays – and partly because liberal immigration policies provide them with all the accoutrements of a cash-rich and time-starved lifestyle, cleaners, baby-sitters and exotic restaurants. They like to demonstrate their sympathy with racial and sexual minorities: businesses are now busily importing affirmative action schemes and gay-friendly policies from universities. But they don’t give much of a damn for the old-fashioned working class: whether they will admit it or not, many exam-passers think that those left behind deserve their dismal fate not just because they are less intelligent than the exam-passers but because they are less enlightened as well.
The populist movement that is sweeping the world is, more than anything else, a revolt against meritocracy. The groups that are driving the rise of populism have disparate material interests: they consist of traditional working-class people, Main Street business people such as real-estate agents and old-line manufacturers, and older voters who came of age before the great university expansion of the 1960s. But they are united by their common opposition to the meritocratic elite with their cosmopolitan values and habit of valuing intellectual achievement over physical skills.
The biggest predictor of populist attitudes is failure in the exam race. In Britain’s EU-referendum, 72 per cent of people with no educational qualifications voted to leave, compared with only 35 per cent of those with a university degree. In America, whites without a degree voted 67 to 28 for Trump while whites with degrees voted 71 to 23 for Hillary Clinton. The first female presidential candidate for a major party lost white women without a degree by a margin of 27 points. For some strange reason the average waitress doesn’t care about getting more women onto the boards of Fortune 500 companies.
The western electoral map is increasingly a map of education institutions. In America the Democrats win places where colleges are thick on the ground – the coasts, the cities and the university towns. The Republicans win places where Wal-Marts and Dennys are more common. In Britain the Remainers won by huge margins in knowledge-intensive cities such as London and in college towns such as Oxford and Cambridge. The Leavers won in the provinces and in smaller towns.
One reason why the Leave vote proved such a surprise for pollsters in Britain was that it was driven by a surge in turn-out among people who had almost given up the habit of voting. Areas with large numbers of people with no educational qualifications witnessed a larger increase in turnout (8.4 points) than areas with large numbers of middle-class graduates (6.6 points). The estimated participation gap between highly educated professionals (who largely voted Remain) and people with lower levels of education (who usually voted Leave) was reduced from 39 per cent in the 2015 general election to only 20 per cent. Those who advocate a re-run of the referendum should think carefully about overturning a vote that galvanised large numbers of people who had given up the habit of voting precisely because they had come to the conclusion that their votes didn’t make a difference.
In the 1990s, American politics was profoundly reshaped by culture wars that focused on ‘gays, guns and God’. Today, it is not just American but global politics that is being reshaped by a new iteration of culture wars which focus on questions of education, identity and self-worth. Donald Trump proudly boasts that he ‘loves the poorly educated’. Trump’s enemies respond by questioning the ability of the ‘poorly educated’ to pursue their own interests. The most effective way to rile the meritocrats is to attack their faith in expertise: Lord Turnbull, a former Cabinet Secretary, has said that the Brexiteers’ willingness to question Treasury forecasts of the impact of Brexit was reminiscent of pre-war Nazi Germany. The easiest way to rile the populists is to imply that their attachment to symbols of national identity, such as blue passports or the Union Jack, is a sign of low intelligence.
Why is the revolt against the meritocracy so powerful? Why is it trumping economic factors despite stagnant living standards for the masses? And why does it persist despite concerted attempts to close it down from the establishment? Three things lie behind the fury.
The first is marginalisation. The meritocrats have progressively seized control of almost every institution of any significance and, almost without realising it, muscled aside anybody who doesn’t share their values and interests. Few people would begrudge the meritocrats their success in wresting control of the civil service from dim-witted aristocrats in the mid-19th century or wresting control of academia from ‘men of letters’ in the mid-20th century: you need a combination of brains and discipline to administer the modern state or to explore the universe. But recently the meritocratic revolution has advanced into more questionable areas. Businesses used to provide a ladder for people to climb from the shop floor to the corner office through practical success rather than academic qualifications. Now they are increasingly taken over by people with MBAs and a few years working for McKinsey. National newspapers used to recruit people from local newspapers who cut their teeth on the crime beat. One of the best columnists in Britain, the late Frank Johnson, left school at 16 and started his career as a messenger boy on the Sunday Express. Now journalism is becoming an all-graduate profession and you can pass effortlessly from studying gender studies at university to decrying sexism in a major newspaper without ever so much as meeting a member of the general public. Most damaging of all is the marriage between politics and meritocracy.
The essence of democratic politics is that it’s open to anyone regardless of background or education. The great democratic reforms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries removed successive barriers erected by property, biology or education. The great left-wing parties earned their spurs by helping working-class people into parliament. Before the Second World War, for example, most Labour MPs were manual workers who had been sponsored by trade unions. But across the West new informal barriers to participation are being erected by the march of meritocracy. Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille, two academics, talk about the rise of ‘diploma democracy’ or ‘political meritocracy’.
Parliaments are increasingly dominated by graduates. In many European countries more than 80 per cent of MPs have university degrees – and the figure goes up to almost 100 per cent when you look at the latest intake. In Angela Merkel’s third cabinet, installed in 2013, 14 out of 15 ministers had the equivalent of a master’s degree, nine had a PhD, seven had held some sort of job in a university, and two had held full professorships, before entering politics. (Having a PhD is such a boon in German politics that some politicians have awarded themselves degrees without going through the tedium of actually bothering to study.) More than 80 per cent of MEPs have university degrees and more than 25 per cent have PhDs. It is conventional to agonise about the slowness of the rise in the number of women or ethnic minorities in parliament. The simultaneous decline in the number of working-class MPs arouses almost no comment whatsoever.
Parliaments are the tip of an iceberg of educational privilege. The political parties are ceasing to be mass membership organisations and instead becoming professional bodies dominated by graduates. Most NGOs are now run by professionals rather than volunteers. Graduates are more likely to engage in political activities such as signing petitions or calling for boycotts than non-graduates. Even the bastions of the working-class, the trade unions, are being colonised by knowledge workers: in Britain the average trade unionist is a woman in her sixties with a higher qualification.
This has important consequences for the political agenda: the 70 per cent who didn’t go to university have different priorities from the 30 per cent who did. They are much more preoccupied by questions such as crime (which deserves stiff punishment), immigration (which needs to be curbed) and welfare scrounging (which must be stopped), and much less concerned about the environment and the travails of refugees. One of the most dramatic changes in the United States in recent years has been the reduction in the life-chances of a significant section of white America. In the 1990s the risk of a non-college-educated white person dying in his early fifties was 30 per cent lower than for a comparable black person. By 2015 it was 30 per cent higher. Non-Hispanic white males make up 31 per cent of the population but accounted for 70 per cent of suicides in the US in 2014. Yet politicians and journalists have paid little attention to these problems on the grounds that white men are, ipso facto, embodiments of various sorts of privilege. Between November 8, 2015 and November 8, 2016 the word ‘transgender’ appeared in the New York Times on 1,169 occasions. The word ‘opioid’ appeared only 284 times.
The second problem is condescension. The most common complaint made by populists is that the elites look down on them in every imaginable way. They despise the symbols that they hold dear. They chuckle at their favourite sports such as NASCAR racing. They make jokes about their favourite clothes (skimpy T-shirts are ‘wife beaters’). In many ways this is an age of hypersensitivity: commentators make jokes about racial minorities at their peril. But the working-class remains fair game. This attitude is revealed in a mass of off-the-cuff remarks – some of which, such as Hillary Clinton’s description of Mr Trump’s supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables’, have captured the public attention but most of which pass for normal. Anti-Brexit warriors such as AC Grayling routinely describe Brexit voters as stupid. The Sunday Times quoted an Italian lawyer describing his country’s populists as belonging to ‘another species’. Emily Thornberry, while Britain’s shadow Attorney General, chortled by tweet over an image of ‘white van man’ and his stereotypically crude predilection for the Cross of St George.
One reason why populists are so furious about political correctness – the majority of people who voted for Brexit and Trump put opposition to political correctness high on their list of reasons for so doing – is that they regard it as an exercise in condescension. Political correctness serves two covert functions for the elite. It allows them to demonstrate how virtuous they are by taking offence at ‘insensitive’ remarks. It also allows them to demonise blue-collar workers by stigmatising their traditional habits. In many ways it’s a postmodern version of conspicuous consumption: it allows its devotees to demonstrate their superiority over their fellow citizens by building mansions of virtue in the same way that 19th-century robber barons built physical mansions. ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’ wrote WEB Du Bois at the beginning of the century in reference to black people. Political correctness is today’s way of defining your fellow citizens as a problem.
The third problem is over-reach. The meritocrats – particularly the super-meritocrats who run global institutions – have repeatedly promised more than they can deliver. The architects of the Washington consensus presented two big arguments for globalisation, particularly financial globalisation. The first was that globalisation would make us all richer. A few bankers might get obscenely rich. But that was a small price to pay for the fact that overall living standards would rise. The second was that they knew how to control the gods of finance. Financial liberalisation might unleash a certain amount of turbulence. But wise men such as central bankers possessed the techniques that they needed to bring that turbulence under control. Gordon Brown, the UK’s former long-standing chancellor and short-lived prime minister, even boasted that he had ended the cycles of boom and bust in the British economy.
The financial crisis of 2008 blew these arguments to smithereens. The wizards failed to bring the crisis under control until it had destroyed billions of dollars’ worth of wealth. And the bankers continued to enrich themselves even as the global economy collapsed: AIG executives insisted on receiving their annual bonuses despite the fact that the taxpayer had been forced to rescue the company from bankruptcy. The hangover from that financial crisis is with us still. Britain’s Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that average living standards won’t reach the level that they were at before the financial crisis until the mid-2000s.
The same pattern of over-reach can be seen in the European Union. The EU unwisely introduced a common currency before it had the other prerequisites of a currency union such as a common tax system. The EU keeps insisting that the ‘four freedoms’ are indivisible, as if they were written on tablets of stone and handed down by God, and despite the fact that North America enjoys the benefits of free trade in goods and services without free movement of people. Indeed, freedom of movement is whipping up opposition to the other freedoms that might eventually result in the destruction of the entire edifice. The Brussels elite seems to think that repeating a phrase constitutes an argument and that sticking to your guns regardless of the evidence is proof of courage rather than stupidity.
The final problem is self-interest: the meritocrats have a remarkable ability to fix the rules to suit their own purposes, either by disguising self-interest as the common good or by rewriting the rules to save their own bacon. Many of the greatest 19th-century novelists such as Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert railed against the sheer hypocrisy of the Victorian middle class. But the Victorians were mere pikers compared with today’s meritocratic elite.
Take the question of immigration. Meritocrats benefit hugely from immigration because it provides them with cheap servants to raise their children (a necessity when two parents are pursuing their careers) as well as cheaper goods and services. For non-meritocrats the calculation is much more complicated: immigration frequently represents a direct challenge to their jobs or, at a minimum, a downward pressure on their wages. But meritocrats have done a brilliant job of presenting support for immigration as a moral imperative rather than as an economic calculation – and in implying that people who are opposed to immigration are moral imbeciles.
Or take the notion that the new division in global politics is between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. This is becoming axiomatic in meritocratic circles. But it is saturated with self-interest and self-adulation. The terms used to describe the division are highly emotive: proponents of the division contrast good things such as openness and cosmopolitan values with bad things such as nativism and being closed-minded. The old division between left and right at least had the virtue of being value-neutral. They are also highly misleading. The supporters of ‘openness’ are much less open than they like to pretend. They carefully protect their interests with all sorts of barriers to competition such as licenses, closed shops (try becoming a British barrister) and informal protections.
The meritocrats are adept at marking their own homework: most financial regulators have a background in the financial services industry for example. Senior corporate managers sit on each other’s boards and determine each other’s salaries. For some reason those salaries keep going upwards.
The meritocrats are also adept at changing the rules when they turn against them. The most infuriating example of this is the banking crisis. For decades financiers preached the virtues of competition red in tooth and claw. Remove barriers to competition! Pay people what they are worth! Let people eat what they can kill and only what they kill! But as soon as the market collapsed these adamantine capitalists suddenly became bleeding-heart socialists.
The danger is that meritocratic elitism and populist rage will become self-reinforcing. The meritocrats will double-down on their elitism in response to populist criticism. The populists will get ever angrier and more extreme.
This is already happening. America’s universities have become ever more preoccupied with identity politics, and more willing to shout down conservative speakers, in response to Trump’s policies. The world’s global institutions are also doing more to insulate themselves from the unwashed masses and their reactionary views. Liberal globalists have even taken to advancing a radical new notion of where sovereignty lies: not with the people, as the Americans have always argued, or with the state, as the French maintain, or with parliament as the British insist, but with a universal collection of rights, existing in a Platonic world beyond the reach of politics, that empanelled experts can discover and implement. The populists are replying in kind.
The populists are becoming more belligerent. In Britain, the Daily Mail denounces ‘Remoaners’ – those who voted to remain in the EU and who complain about the referendum result – as ‘traitors’ and called High Court judges ‘enemies of the people’. In America right-wing blogs proclaim that their aim is to make ‘liberal heads explode’ (‘It’s really funny to me to see the ’splodey heads keep ’sploding,’ says Sarah Palin). Under George W Bush, the conservative movement boasted a counter-establishment of conservative think tanks, high-brow journalists and policy intellectuals. Today they have been sidelined by an entertainment complex of shock jocks, cable news presenters and professional bigots who make their living by mocking the educated elite. Irving Kristol and William F Buckley have given way to Ann Coulter. The American Enterprise Institute has passed the torch to Fox and Friends.
It is time for responsible meritocrats to step in and restore some semblance of sanity. They bear a disproportionate share of the responsibility for the mess we’re in at the moment. They let their arrogance and self-regard get the better of them. They promised universal prosperity and produced turbulence and stagnation. They owe it to the world to repair the mess that they have created."
0 Replies
Builder
-2
Mon 6 Sep, 2021 01:05 am
@MontereyJack,
Quote:
all the reputable authorities, the eople who actually know what the situation is, say the exact opposite of your conspiracy theory
Wrong again, sunshine. Try and keep up, won't you?
Study: Fully vaccinated people with "breakthrough" COVID Delta infections carry as much virus as the unvaccinated
