The Decline of Ideology and the Rise of Bigots

Today, universal political ideas—and their champions—are in retreat. We suspect ideologies the same way we suspect religion.  Faith in markets, in worker solidarity, and even in the West’s big one— that freedom of expression favors the truth—are thrown around as accusations.    Cynics are sure they don’t sell. Optimists hope that uncontaminated social-economic data can drive public discourse, forward.

Unhappily, bigotry isn’t retreating along with Matthew Arnold’s Sea of Faith.

Tory backbenchers in Westminster, urban reformers in Toronto, Quebec progressives all too often work from a common script: Those Europeans, those knuckle-draggers in the suburbs, and those polluters in Alberta are holding us back. If they got out of the way, we could make this a far, far, better place. (Of Course, along with our lousy neighbors, there is always the divisive state of American politics to reassure us that we are civil and that things could be worse.)

These new grievances, however, are the grievances of true believers who are failing at home.

The right-wing backbench of the British Conservative Party has made little progress de-regulating the British economy since Margaret Thatcher’s first term—over thirty years ago. Instead of asking the British people to shrink their own government once again, the Economist reports, they rail against the bureaucrats of the European Union. They seem to believe that if Britain got out of Europe, British voters would unreservedly embrace those famous British market principles they have so often compromised in the past.

Quebec progressives claim that widespread concern in Quebec over climate change is an expression of ‘Quebec values’ and promptly solve the problem by saying oil producers in Alberta should pay higher taxes.

In Toronto, this week, downtown Councilor Adam Vaughan suggested that one way to repair a freeway that links Toronto’s core to its regional suburbs—and workforce—would be to sell the whole freeway to the private sector. Supposedly, it would go for $billions, if the City allowed the new owners to levy commercial tolls. Last year, Vaughan’s allies rejected out of hand selling the downtown’s precious subway or electrical utility, or asking for the privilege of raising revenues by imposing pollution taxes on Torontonians.

The old divisions that were driven by big ideas were not consistently more attractive or safer. However, they weren’t only defensive and they didn’t consistently divide people geographically or stereotype the other. And, above all, their leaders could challenge their own voters and compromise their own interests.

Too often, today’s troublemakers, on both scores, are simply smaller. 

David Cameron isn’t ready to be a Norwegian or a Canadian

So long as political power within the European Union is weak and decentralized, Britain’s ultra-conservatives can tolerate being members of the club.

They get secure access to a gigantic market and participate as equals in decisions that usually require unanimity. They keep their currency and their conceit that the UK is still a first-tier power with its own unique way of doing things.

Despite their head shaking, British Tories can live with being members of a bureaucratic organization; they’re good at that. Their Commonwealth, monarchy, and House of Lords are all show and no beef.

Fear of dissolution and the unfinished necessity of creating a viable fiscal as well as monetary union, however, are raising the possibility that Europe will steadily come together as an effective federation—in which a substantial amount of power is centralized.

And in which Britain will be respected, but not as feared as Germany.

That kind of club—a federation eventually along the lines of the United States of America, which they thought would fall apart sometime in the 19th century—is not at all to their liking. So, they’re pushing for a national referendum in the hope of pulling the UK out of the European community all together.

To his credit, Prime Minister David Cameron is still rejecting the idea.

“Mr. Cameron said it was essential that Britain did not just have access to the single market but that it played a role in shaping its rules. He said he would not swap Britain’s position for that of a country like Norway which “only has access” to the single market.

“But in a sign of his precarious political balancing act, Mr. Cameron also refused to rule out the possibility of one day giving British people a choice on whether to follow the Norwegian model by leaving the EU altogether.”

Click on: www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/22e32380-c46d-11e1-a98c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1zkSHmX43

It’s ironic that Cameron would shrink at the prospect of living like a Norwegian. That’s exactly the status Tories in Britain and Tories in Canada have pressed on Canadians ever since the United States was formed. 

Like Norway, Canada was always too small (and, as individuals, probably too nice) to be full-fledged, vote for vote, members of a greater liberal democratic federation. 

They rallied against economic and political integration with the US because it was too liberal. Now, they dismiss the EU because it’s bureaucratic. 

Let’s hope Cameron doesn’t back down and that he decides to re-embrace the unfinished work of building a workable European federation.

It’s only a pity Canada’s Stephen Harper isn’t engaged in a similar fight with the defeatist dogma of his Tory forefathers.

George Will on the Glory of Messy Change

Bow ties are worn by men who take extra care to avoid common sentiment, and George Will has been wearing one as long as he’s been writing a national column. He’s tireless in exposing soft thinking and back-sliding in others:

“Creative destruction continues in the digital age. After 244 years - it began publication five years before the 1773 Boston Tea Party - the Encyclopedia Britannica will henceforth be available only in digital form as it tries to catch up to reference websites such as Google and Wikipedia. Another digital casualty forgot it was selling the preservation of memories, a.k.a. "Kodak moments," not film.

“America now is divided between those who find this social churning unnerving and those who find it exhilarating. What Virginia Postrel postulated in 1998 in "The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress" - the best book for rescuing the country from a ruinous itch for tidiness - is even more true now. Today's primary political and cultural conflict is, Postrel says, between people, mislabeled "progressives," who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism.

“Stasis’s see Borders succumb to e-books (and Amazon) and lament the passing of familiar things. Dynamists say: Relax, reading is thriving. In 2001, the iPod appeared, and soon stores such as Tower Records disappeared. Who misses them?”

Click on: www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/the-glory-of-messy-chaos-d24lm1g-143698876.html

Some of this is merely too simplistic and some is bad because it is simply partisan nonsense.

First, individuals everywhere are of two minds about change and their own futures; they’re not divided on these questions according to whether they’re on one side of town or the other, or live in one class or race or another, read romance novels or went to Rocky films—or whether they live in public housing or Tribeca, Manhattan.

Does Will honestly think that his faithful reader living in his gated community in Naples, Florida, is “exhilarated” by perpetual change? Does he really think the phrases “globalization and “free trade” are doing poorly in Newark, New Jersey, because young men there have a “ruinous itch for tidiness"?

Change, as Robert Kennedy warned, always has enemies. Unlike Will, however, he was not referring merely to sentiment and nostalgia.

The change in North America for 200 years has been relatively unrelenting, not because North Americans lost the reflex to look back, romanticize, and fight for what they have, but because change in North America kept producing great material dividends, across the board.

The real challenge serious conservatives are engaging with progressives today is how to ensure that capitalism, in a global context, can again produce a dividend for society at large. If 97% of the dividend is going to go to the top 1% on a regular basis, then “creative destruction” will become an untenable sick aesthetic.

Red-Tory-flavored British chauvinism

Phillip Blond is the red-Tory intellectual who coined the phrase “big society.” He imagines that civil society can voluntarily take up many of the tasks modern societies have assigned to big government. As George Bush took up “compassionate conservatism” an amazingly long decade ago, David Cameron has taken up the “big society.” It allows conservatives to be hard on government spending and regulation, and to be more optimistic about people than their more pessimistic left opponents.

Blond has now lent his optimism to British conservatism’s most dangerous proposition: the idea that the 27-member European Union (starting with the 17-member Euro-zone) can be managed down to something less than it is now—that European prosperity and democracy need more independent nation-states, a less bureaucratic federation.

Defending David Cameron’s decision to not participate in building the fiscal machinery necessary to complete the Euro-zone, Blond writes, “Britain can build a Europe outside the Euro.” He concludes his column on a convoluted and utopian note:

“Britain needs to stress that it sees the euro as the great danger to Europe and, rather than bizarrely pushing for its centralization under a German economic aegis – a provision that will ensure permanent proletarianisation for the southern nations – it needs to seek and create a new EU growth pact for those who wish for an alternative outside the euro but in Europe. For the common currency area that might mean separate euro zones or parallel currencies with greater or smaller spreads in relation to the euro. Rather than letting domestic policy-needs trump any international dimension, if Cameron is clever he could utilize one to augment the other and create a euro opt-out for nations for whom saving the euro would mean their own democratic erasure and impoverishment . If Cameron can make the most of this policy opportunity he will have created a vital exit strategy for European nations from a policy and a position that has every chance of failing. And, in time, Europe may thank Britain once again for saving them from themselves.”

Click on:www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/15/britain-build-europe-outside-euro?INTCMP=SRCH

So, let’s go back just half way—to when Europe had numerous national currencies and only a few fascist governments, when it was respectable for heads of state to design “pacts” to expand co-operation, reduce national barriers to the movement of goods, services, money, workers, and innovation, and avoid beggar-thy-neighbor currency and fiscal policies, and harmonize their individual efforts to be taken seriously by the super-powers.

Federal states are complicated, difficult to explain, and easy to attack. The EU is famous for its bureaucracy. Progressive nationalists like Blond, however, wouldn’t necessarily lead Europe to less government, more democracy, or healthier markets. Progress requires stability. And European stability requires European unity—and unity is federalism’s core business, not a photo-op or a last resort.  

The German Government and the other Euro-zone members accept the need for greater fiscal integration because their federation is too decentralized, not because they like pushing each other around.

The entire European Union’s central budget consumes barely 1 percent of the public sector of the European Union. The British Conservative’s most favored-neighbor—the United States of America—has one currency, 50 states, and a federal government that manages over a fifth of America’s Gross National Product. Britain’s federal creation—the Dominion of Canada—includes a federal government that holds close to a quarter of that country’s GNP.   

Euro skeptics: reactionaries without memories?

Politicians on the sidelines of the Euro crisis have been relatively free to think out loud. British Tories are having the most fun, getting fresh attention for diehard positions.

They’re didn’t like the century-long decentralization of their amazing empire and never accepted that political federations in North America, Europe, or elsewhere could ever govern as well as unitary states. The success of the European Union and its Euro-zone has been their longest frustration—since the American union climbed out of a civil war and saved their democracy in two world wars. 

Old ideas can look fresh when first brought in from the cold. Prejudice can sound like dogged principle.

The European Union, under the cover of a multilingual bureaucracy in Brussels, is a mongrel federation of tax and work-loving northerners and hedonist thieves along the Mediterranean. The Euro-zone, they exclaim, is “fatally flawed” because it’s incomplete. And, if its flaws are seriously addressed with greater fiscal integration, it will be run by the Germans!

Every whim of the whimsical bond market buoys their contempt.

British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has been cowed into vacuity.  He is now concerned that Germany’s Angela Merkel—who must raise additional hundreds of billions of Euros in Germany to calm the markets and save Europe’s commercial banks—may actually want a more accountable and more coherent EU in return.

Here’s Timothy Garton Ash’s summary of Cameron’s concerns:

Speaking at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London, Prime Minister David Cameron evoked a Europe “with the flexibility of a network, not the rigidity of a bloc.” “We skeptics,” he averred, “have a vital point. We should look sceptically at grand plans and utopian visions.” This crisis offers an opportunity “in Britain’s case, for powers to ebb back instead of flow away … and for the European Union to focus on what really matters.” In short: less Europe.

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/clarifying-europes-choices/article2238496/

This is the same wordsmith who claims as Prime Minister that he can close the gap between severe austerity and compassionate conservatism by bringing to life a “Big Society” of community activists.

Former British Labour Minister for European Affairs Denis MacShane provides the rebuttal.

“Euro speculators want to claim victory by seeing Greece forced out of the euro zone – followed by Portugal, Spain and Italy. A return to drachmas, escudos, pesetas and lire will be good for millionaire Brits and Germans with villas in southern Europe, where life was so much more agreeable when their neighbours were poor and used “Mickey-Mouse money”, as one British eurosceptic Conservative described the drachma.

“Only one force can stop the speculators from winning. That is the power of the democratic state organized in an unbreakable alliance with other democracies. More Europe is the answer to the disintegrating Europe we now confront.”

Click on: www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/86788aea-1048-11e1-8211-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1dy9XhTJY

The pursuit of a European federation is, first and foremost, a political idea. It is not the surest way to make money or the best stage for a Britain or a German politician to play politics like a true Britain or a true German. It is certainly not a utopian idea.

It is amongst the skeptics you are most likely to find rosy memories and little Utopian visions.

The European Union was created to make it less easy and less profitable for nationalists to divide Europeans as they have so often done in the past. That prudential vision obviously still disciplines Europe’s decision-makers. It fends off so-called “skeptics” who would play dice with Europe’s future.