Brexit villains: old ideas and bad men

Historians and long-view intellectuals teach us about our giants. And audiences in the tens of thousands listen to them. This year has already produced villainous buffoons of historic proportions, on both sides of the Atlantic. David Brooks provides a handy list of Englishmen to complement every thinking Englishman’s choice of Manhattan’s Donald Trump.

Playing with the fatal flaws of David Cameron and Trump—one’s disastrously obsessive calculations and the other’s terrifying crowd-pleasing impulses—confirms that entertainment can be educational. Otherwise entertainment would’ve already destroyed our species.

Also, of course, getting personal can win elections and does assist voters in selecting whom they want to lead from the menu they’re offered on Election Day. Focusing on the individual is fine for partisans and their Facebook chorus. But it’s for the moment and not obliged to tell the whole story. We leave that work to trusted historians.

History’s professional storytellers do influence us, but they too consistently emphasize the players, not the ideas that keep holding us back. They warn us that history repeats itself because humans don’t learn from their mistakes. They too are human.

Historian Barbara Tuchman wrote a highly influential blockbuster The Guns of August about the leadership that launched the First World War. Following her lead, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Margaret Macmillan and other esteemed scholars have also produced highly influential books on the prejudices, secret demons, and follies of the leaders at Versailles, the launch of two world wars and the second Iraq War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and the Great Recession of 2008.

Bad things happen when the bad guys get power.

We’ve all grown up to despise the carelessness of the aristocrats that launched the First World War. Yet we know relatively little about the power of the popular convictions—especially, a righteous nationalism—that they relied on to keep the slaughter grinding on for four years.

We read widely—including the gossip of maids and former employees, psychobabble, and the hunches of speech and body language experts—to get a fix on the temperament of the next man or first woman to carry America’s nuclear Red Button around for the next four years. However, the climate of laissez-faire tolerance toward the existence of that insane Red Button receives only passing notice.

Observers spot crypto-fascist flashes in the words of the Brexit leaders and the tweets of Donald Trump. Further, they see their wins as evidence of a raging, hurting middle class, brutalized by globalization. Yet not one of these demagogues has demonstrated excessive passion, either right or left, for exercising state power. At the same time, we also know that real family incomes are up and that government spending as a share of GDP is today approximately what it was back in 1970—when Reagan was a governor, and Margaret Thatcher a backbencher.

Be hard on politicians, by all means. However, worrying that today’s clowns are working up to match the monsters of the 1930s is a waste of time. Let’s be harder on the old abstractions they’re playing with. How nationalist emotions, unbounded by external entanglements, can be both self-destructive and dangerous.

Let’s drop ‘secular’ and start saying ‘liberal’ again

The Quebec government’s latest initiative to keep Quebec safe will be called a Charter of Quebec Values. It’ll be color-blind; it will only decide how you must appear in public institutions. Preventing religion and its weird trappings from ever again contaminating the state is its stated purpose. However, Sophie Cousineau in the Globe and Mail offers an interesting twist:

“The Parti Québécois campaigned heavily on identity issues during the last election, which struck a chord with its traditional supporters. Ms. Marois promised to establish a secular charter for the province’s public institutions. However, her minority government stopped referring to the plan as a secular charter last spring after it discovered that appealing to values would sound more positive and would resonate with Quebeckers.”

This is progress, darkly.

With “Quebec values,” we have a slogan to energize, hopefully, both the liberal and illiberal forces in Quebec.  

After all, the “secular state” is a bloodless abstraction. Many in Quebec probably don’t know what it means literally and, in their guts, its antagonism toward religion must seem a tiny bit forced. In truth, the religion—in Quebec and elsewhere in the West—that does threaten rational, civil (liberal, right?) discourse is nationalism.

People who connect the nation-state of Quebec, or Canada, or Holland, Germany, America, and England, for instance, to the word values are slipping away from reason—from the political enlightenment they secured collectively and, on tragic occasions, put aside.

They are being pulled, not by a ravenous new religion but by that old winner: nationalism.

Quebec’s touchiness about marginal religious practices and outside cultures is not fueled primarily by fear. As elsewhere, it is born by a certainty that Quebec is better and already worldly and sophisticated enough.

The Parti Québécois dreams of a seat at the United Nations, amongst history’s greatest assembly of minor gods.  

There’s no escape even in Rome?

Watery-eyed building manager briefs us on garbage collection, electricity outlets, laundry and WIFI services, back-up heating, and apartment security. He’s thorough and, in places, non-committal.

He’s French: works in Rome in the winter, and will return to Paris in May.

The local weather’s been “horrendous.” It will improve. But, generally, we’ll have to be patient. “Italians,” he explains, “have no government, and are poor workers.” 

What would any of us do without lousy neighbors?

Nationalism: today’s poison of choice in Quebec (cont.)

Put Samuel Johnson’s observation in the past tense, my friend Tim Knight suggested: patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels—now, nationalism, it’s vulgar cousin, usually comes first.

In the US, Republican governors claim that state-based healthcare programs are innovative and that federal healthcare programs are bureaucratic socialism. In Canada, separatists claim that Quebec can be more efficient and expressive by simply by not playing politics within the Canadian federation.

In the United States and in Western Europe, the left remains very squeamish about nationalist claims: historically those claims have separated workers, sheltered privilege, distracted the weak and lead to violence.

In Canada, the left is rather ambivalent: it now embraces Canadian nationalism and, consequently, concedes that there’s something admirable about Quebec’s more intense nationalist spirit. For instance, it’s considered plain good manners to accept that the leaders of the Parti Quebecois are social democrats in good standing, as well as soveriegntists.

Why, however, should we accept that they would govern faithfully in the interest of Quebec workers, even if their ultimate aim is a pipe dream?

We’re told that they’re pragmatists; they’ll prepare the ground for Quebec independence by launching a series of popular campaigns to capture individual powers from “Harper’s Canada”; Stephen Harper, naturally, will resist and further weaken the case for a federal Canada. Clever allegedly, but would it be in the interest of Quebec workers? Would Quebec workers buy it?

The PQ’s most significant opening proposal—pulling Quebec out of the Canadian Unemployment Insurance Program—certainly is not.

For over half a century the UI fund—the multi-billion dollar pool of contributions by all employed Canadians—has been a significant net benefit to unemployed Quebec workers and a significant net benefit to employed Quebecers as well.

Sure, along with their allies in Eastern Canada and elsewhere, they’ve have to keep fighting to protect seasonal unemployment benefits that especially benefit high unemployment regions across Canada. Consequently, on their own, with their own Quebec fund, they would be entirely free to increase or simply not change the present cross-subsidization of seasonal unemployed workers in Quebec. 

However, no matter how close they then decide to respect or stretched the insurance principles of unemployment insurance, Quebec workers would be left to pay the whole shot without the help they presently receive from the all-Canadian worker-funded UI program.

Defending the cross-Canada pooling of worker income insurance, as a cross-Canada social benefit should be a no-brainer for real social democrats as well as federalists in Quebec and elsewhere.

It’s a tribute to the amazing credibility of nationalism and the confused state of the left in Canada that the PQ that would offer such a reckless proposal as the front-runner in the present Quebec election.

Heh, if Harper is just  a brute from Alberta, he might just accept the idea.

Crisis fatigue—moderates can lose it too

Maybe it’s only further evidence of our world’s diminished attention span. However, it’s extraordinary how easy it is for even cerebral conservatives to rebel against stubborn problems—a long recession and chronic public indebtedness, for instance—with ideas that could make matters worse.

Bravery—and pure-heartedness—is pleasing to the eye. And hesitant management isn’t.

New York Times’ columnist David Brooks doesn’t like what he sees in Washington and in Europe and, so, is tempted by heroic memories of the past. In two recent columns—“The Two Moons” and “A House Full of Strangers”—he rails against minority government in Washington and the embattled European Union. He recalls periods of dynamic, representative, and virtuous national government.

Weary moderates can also be attracted by the élan of radicals and the afterglow of past extravagance.

Brooks remembers kindly the “Sun Party” of FDR and the “Sun Party” of Ronald Reagan. They didn’t have to worry about the views and votes of their opponents. Conversely, he assigns “stagnation” to those periods dominated by “Moons.” Brooks assigns Obama’s moment to the Moonies—presumably, along with Nixon’s and Eisenhower’s.

He concludes with the cry of a petulant child:

“So it’s hard to see how we get out of this, unless some third force emerges, which wedges itself into one of the two parties, or unless we have a devastating fiscal crisis — a brutal cleansing flood, after which the sun will shine again.”

Click on: www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/opinion/brooks-the-two-moons.html?ref=davidbrooks

Catastrophe being much closer on the other side of the Atlantic, he’s a little more precise about Europe.

“In the short term, the European Central Bank, the stable European nations and even the U.S. will have to take extremely big and painful action to stabilize the situation. But, after that, it’ll be a time for chastening. It’ll be time to discard the technocratic mind-set that created this inherently flawed architecture and build a Europe that reflects the organic realities of those diverse societies.”

Click on: www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/opinion/brooks-the-technocratic-nightmare.html?_r=2&ref=davidbrooks

Just for now, Brooks concedes, it’s fine to have the “arrogant gray men” around to avoid another global financial collapse. But, once we’re all safe, he argues, it would be best for Europe to get rid of those pan-European technocrats and their “fundamentally flawed” European Union.

He damns too freely Europe’s young federal system, imagining its underlying problems can best be solved by smaller problem-solvers. This is voyeuristic mischief—from an American federalist.

Brooks complains that Europeans don’t all agree on what the word “federalism” means. A union that’s barely two decades old somehow shouldn’t be arguing about matters that still divide Americans, after two centuries.

He complains about elitism, that many in the Brussels bureaucracy don’t trust the people—while he lives in a federation that decided to constrain the people’s will in its founding constitution, and he works in a capital that would secretly love to strike a “grand bargain” against the populist excesses of its democracy.

He ridicules post-war efforts to build governments that were less organic and more transnational, passionless, and safe.

He invents a pretty picture of America—as united, sharing, and committed to one national destiny—to diminish the unity of Europe.

And, yet, Brooks invites Europe to return to the high stakes games that drove its affairs up to 1945. Does he believe, after all he’s said, that Europe is just sufficiently united, reasonable, and passionless to turn its leadership over to the ethnic and language nationalists of the past?