Liberalism needs protection

[Brad Sallows]

"I don't agree with what you say, but I will die to defend your right to say it"

I prefer the Patton formulation:

"I don't agree with what you say, but I will kill or imprison as many fanatical sons-of-bitches as necessary to defend your right to say it"

 

[a_majoor]

Collective rights are a fiction, since collectives are arbitrary, and also assume that all members of the collective have the same wants and needs. Community is not a "collective" like the Borg, it is a free association of individuals who share common interests, assumptions, goals or something else which causes them to come together. Communities can be strongly or weakly bounded, and as we all know from the real world, there are areas of overlapping interest and areas where people diverge. Individuals banding together to advance an interest they have in common isn't a collective right, it is people making a common cause and advancing a common interest. (once you get below the surface, you will find lots of uncommon sub interests and desires amongst the group).

The article upthread is a perfect example. Under the "collective" argument, there is no way that Alan Borovoy would have ever worked to defend Ernst Zundel, since that would be against the interests of the "Jewish" collective. Dr Condelezza Rice is another perfect counter example to the collective argument; playing neither the race nor gender card still became the 4th most powerful person on the planet. I'm sure you can find all kinds of examples closer to home; are all soldiers uniformly supportive of the CPC, for example? Even watching the news we can see this. The protesters who drove out the previous government of Ukraine because of the rejection of an EU trade deal in favour of a pro Russian one were united in the desire to change the government, but certainly turned out to be after multitude of different goals once the initial one was achieved; the was (and is) no "collective" there.

Even in the case where one might assume there is no ambiguity, the collective argument makes no allowance for individuals. A list of all left handed people (an unambiguous collective grouping) would not reveal any commonality beyond left handedness. Their political, social, professional and economic circumstances and choices would be different. Insert any other "collective" grouping where I wrote left handed, and you will have the same observations.

 

[Griffon]

Collective rights are a fiction, since collectives are arbitrary, and also assume that all members of the collective have the same wants and needs. Community is not a "collective" like the Borg, it is a free association of individuals who share common interests, assumptions, goals or something else which causes them to come together. Communities can be strongly or weakly bounded, and as we all know from the real world, there are areas of overlapping interest and areas where people diverge. Individuals banding together to advance an interest they have in common isn't a collective right, it is people making a common cause and advancing a common interest. (once you get below the surface, you will find lots of uncommon sub interests and desires amongst the group).

The article upthread is a perfect example. Under the "collective" argument, there is no way that Alan Borovoy would have ever worked to defend Ernst Zundel, since that would be against the interests of the "Jewish" collective. Dr Condelezza Rice is another perfect counter example to the collective argument; playing neither the race nor gender card still became the 4th most powerful person on the planet. I'm sure you can find all kinds of examples closer to home; are all soldiers uniformly supportive of the CPC, for example? Even watching the news we can see this. The protesters who drove out the previous government of Ukraine because of the rejection of an EU trade deal in favour of a pro Russian one were united in the desire to change the government, but certainly turned out to be after multitude of different goals once the initial one was achieved; the was (and is) no "collective" there.

Even in the case where one might assume there is no ambiguity, the collective argument makes no allowance for individuals. A list of all left handed people (an unambiguous collective grouping) would not reveal any commonality beyond left handedness. Their political, social, professional and economic circumstances and choices would be different. Insert any other "collective" grouping where I wrote left handed, and you will have the same observations.

This is exactly the point. A collective right to security for any identifiable group is merely the sum if the individuals' rights. No other sense of community was expressed or implied. 

 

[pbi]

Collective rights are a fiction...

I don't think that is correct. Labour laws over the last century (for example) have established the existence of "collective" rights beyond any question, whether we agree with them or not.

... and also assume that all members of the collective have the same wants and needs. Community is not a "collective" like the Borg, it is a free association of individuals who share common interests, assumptions, goals or something else which causes them to come together. .

Members of a society, IMHO, come together precisely because they do share in common some assumptions, interests, wants and needs, as basic as they may be. I don't believe for a moment that there is 100% congruency in all of those wants and needs and interests, but there must be a very significant amount or a society will not function, or will be dysfunctional. What is the law if not a codified expression of those commonly held  wants, needs and assumptions?

 

[Brad Sallows]

Some rights are natural and some are civil.  Collective security is a feasible civil right (power - see diagrams here for what I mean by "power").

(I don't want to go dancing around on the head of a pin again as to whether "natural" - or "negative", or "inherent" - rights exist for finely disputed values and shades of "natural".  I don't need Big Brother or anyone else to declare my rights of conscience or provide me with things to believe.)

 

[pbi]

Some rights are natural and some are civil.  Collective security is a feasible civil right (power - see diagrams here for what I mean by "power").

(I don't want to go dancing around on the head of a pin again as to whether "natural" - or "negative", or "inherent" - rights exist for finely disputed values and shades of "natural".  I don't need Big Brother or anyone else to declare my rights of conscience or provide me with things to believe.)

I think I am with you, but I was responding to Thucydides' assertion that collective rights are a fiction. They are not. They might be disagreeable, but they exist as wholly and completely as any other right that is capable of having a real effect on anything.

 

[Brad Sallows]

I think I am "with" you both - collective security is not a fiction, but it is not "natural" - it requires some sort of organized effort in which individual liberties give way to duties and obligations.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Collective rights, which I agree exist ~ consider language rights, gender rights and labour laws ~ are a very conservative notion in that they attempt to protect what could be a liberal, individual right (the right to use the official language of your choice in any federal legislative, legal or regulatory body) by turning the individual's right into a bureaucratic duty.

We, willingly, accept limits on our rights, to some degree even on our fundamental rights (life, liberty, property, privacy), when we live in an organized community. Sensible zoning laws, for example, or condominium by-laws, limit your and my freedom to use our private property as we see fit - and it's a restriction which we accept, generally, as the price to be paid for the benefits of a town or city or even a condominium community. But our fundamental rights - when properly expressed in law - are applicable to individuals and it is the state's duty to protect us from all comers: other individuals and collectives of all sorts, including the biggest collective of all, the state itself.

Some collective rights are probably necessary inescapable but we should not mistake them for 'good' things. (I would argue that language, gender and labour rights could all be guaranteed, in a liberal state as individual rights. It would be legally complex, I suppose, but I think it would be possible.)

 

[SeaKingTacco]

This has been one of the best threads, ever. It is the model of what the internet should be, instead of what it frequently is.

 

[pbi]

This has been one of the best threads, ever. It is the model of what the internet should be, instead of what it frequently is.

You could say the same thing about this site in general. That's why I love it.

 

[Edward Campbell]

We have a Conservatism needs work thread, but I don't agree with either:

    1. The current definition of conservatism; or

    2. That what most people define as conservatism needs much of anything, beyond a swift kiss in the arse.

But, liberalism, that wonderful idea best expressed for us by John Stuart Mill, over 150 years ago, and grossly misunderstood in America and most of Europe, does need work and, right now, a lot of protection, too.

This example, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisons of the Copyright from The Telegraph, is from Britain but it is a common theme amongst the illiberals who currently hold far too much power in far too many institutions in Europe, America and Canada, too:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10517111/Campus-segregation-religious-freedom-cannot-be-allowed-to-trump-equality.html

This is not about Islam, or any religion for that matter ~ Islam is not the only one that segregates congregations. It is about individual rights which must, always, in liberal societies, be protected from the depredations of all collectives, including churches and the state, itself. It's not about "equal rights" it is about individual rights: we all have 'em without any regard whatsoever about race, colour, creed or belief system.

You may not, ever, impose your beliefs on me. It is bad enough that we enshrine the customs of one religion into civic life - why on earth are Christmas and Easter public holidays, for example? Your freedom of religion is entirely offset by my freedom from religion: yours, his, hers ... all of 'em. The fact that a speaker, with deeply, sincerely held religious beliefs, demands a segregated audience is interesting, but, in any liberal society, wholly and completely irrelevant to anything. (S)he may not impose her or his beliefs on anyone: the fact that the speaker believes, sincerely, that a mixed audience is blasphemous is his or her right ... to believe. It does not provide a right to deny access or seating to anyone, ever.

So let's not worry about conservatism, the Chinese are working on it, it is their cultural norm, not ours; let's worry about what matters to us: liberalism, it needs a strong, active defence because it is under attack by barbarians, from within.

And, following this and the Brandeis University/Ayaan Hirsi Ali thing (on page 2 of this thread) we have another: Asuza Pacific University, which self describes as being "a leading Christian college ranked as one of the nation’s best colleges by U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review," has decided to "postpone" a discussion (public lecture?) by controversial, libertarian thinker/author Dr Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institution. Murray's public lectures are often controversial and illiberals routinely try to stop him from being heard by e.g. pulling fire alarms in auditoriums, etc.

I don't find Murray offensive, not, anyway, in the way I find e.g. Ann Coulter offensive - which is because she is shrill, strident and appears unwilling to consider, much less debate, any idea that does not conform to her conservative world view. But I agree they are both controversial and the both will, as they aim to do, provoke strong public reactions. That is no reason to deny them access to young, impressionable minds in universities - as Ottawa U did to Coulter, as Brandeis did to Ali, and as Asuza Pacific is doing to Murray. Universities that are afraid that their students are intellectually unable to cope with ideas that are not part of the 'received wisdom' is suggesting, to the world, that they, and their faculties, and the high schools that feed them, are failures at their business ~ teaching people to think for themselves.

The brarbarians aren't just "at the gates," they are ensconced in the faculty clubs and university administrative offices.

 

[pbi]

I don't find Murray offensive, not, anyway, in the way I find e.g. Ann Coulter offensive - which is because she is shrill, strident and appears unwilling to consider, much less debate, any idea that does not conform to her conservative world view. But I agree they are both controversial and the both will, as they aim to do, provoke strong public reactions. That is no reason to deny them access to young, impressionable minds in universities - as Ottawa U did to Coulter, as Brandeis did to Ali, and as Asuza Pacific is doing to Murray. Universities that are afraid that their students are intellectually unable to cope with ideas that are not part of the 'received wisdom' is suggesting, to the world, that they, and their faculties, and the high schools that feed them, are failures at their business ~ teaching people to think for themselves.

The brarbarians aren't just "at the gates," they are ensconced in the faculty clubs and university administrative offices.

I agree with your principle. Much as it's true that a life unexamined is a life not worth living (...or something like that...), I think it's probably true that an idea or belief that has never been "examined": i.e; challenged, exercised and tested against a coherent opposing argument-is probably something not worth believing in.

That approach scares many people: note that one of the first targets of authoritarian governments, religious fundamentalists, ethnic nationalists, etc is always the education system. It is important for all these groups that critical thought and analysis, logical argument, or anything else that challenges the "holy writ" are disabled, suppressed or demonized.

Unwittingly or consciously, that is what these institutions are doing. IMHO they are saying two things (equally harmful to true "education" as opposed to  "training".

First, they are directly saying "those are bad thoughts and words and we will not allow them here because they will offend someone ". Second, what they are implicitly saying is "...and our beliefs/values are so weak and ill-founded that if we were exposed to these bad thoughts and words they might collapse. We might even agree with the bad thoughts! Horrors!"

And, maybe (although I'm not quite as certain about this part, as I alluded to earlier in this thread...) that's what we do in society at large if we prevent certain types of expression. But others here have pointed out that a certain danger might lie in screaming inflammatory rants in the town square.

As I think I've made clear elsewhere, I don't like most of what I see from many of these nasty mouthpieces who identify themselves as champions of the Right, and triumphantly parade their ignorance. (And, yes, the Left has its clown acts, too...) But, if they are in fact wrong, and ignorant, then the way to deal with them, at least in an academic setting, is to expose them to rational counter-argument.

Not screaming to drown out the speaker, or running up on stage with banners and paint, or with threats of violence, and certainly not with physical bans or removal.

 

[Brad Sallows]

They (universities, academics) are neither concerned with anyone taking offense nor fearful of a battle of ideas (a closed mind fears no new idea because a closed mind ignores discordant ideas.)  Those are excuses advanced to camouflage the aim to scrub away everything which does not serve sanctioned narratives.  They are no different than religious or political fanatics of any era who divide the universe of ideas into permitted and forbidden.  They are the antithesis of what they claim to be.  Few things are as absurd as a modern politically correct academic or secular progressive zealot criticizing a person for religious beliefs.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Tony Wilson explains why he voted to defend liberalism, by deciding to allow Trinity Western University's law school graduates to article and practice in BC despite that school's abhorrently conservative religious code, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/i-voted-for-trinity-western-because-of-the-rule-of-law/article18319508/#dashboard/follows/?click=drive

I voted for Trinity Western U because of the rule of law

TONY WILSON
Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Apr. 29 2014

Tony Wilson is a Vancouver lawyer, a bencher of the Law Society of British Columbia and a regular business columnist with The Globe and Mail. His opinions do not reflect those of the Law Society or any other organization.

I am a bencher of the Law Society of British Columbia and one of 20 out of 26 benchers who voted in favor recognizing law degrees from a proposed law school at Trinity Western University despite a covenant that bars sexual intimacy other than within a marriage between a man and a woman.

One media report wondered how could “so many intelligent and articulate people clearly see and abhor discrimination yet are unwilling to do anything about it.” Another said that our decision was “misguided and cowardly because it hides behind a 13-year-old split ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada.”

A petition circulating among lawyers in British Columbia has received a sufficient number of votes to require the B.C. benchers to hold a special general meeting to consider a reversal of our decision. And despite our 20-6 vote to approve a law School at TWU, the benchers of the Law Society of Upper Canada declined the accreditation of TWU’s Law School on April 24. The next day, Nova Scotia’s law society conditionally approved accreditation, provided that TWU drops the policy prohibiting same-sex intimacy.

Alberta, Saskatchewan and other provincial law societies have effectively adopted the position of B.C. and the Federation of Law Societies, making Ontario and Nova Scotia outliers on this issue.

But this makes a complicated situation all the more complicated because of a mobility agreement among all law societies that permits graduates from an institution in one province to article and subsequently practice in another.

My decision to approve TWU wasn’t misguided or cowardly, nor was the decision of the 19 other benchers who voted the way I did. I did not “hide behind” a 13-year-old split ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada. An 8 to 1 decision is by no means “split”, and a 13-year-old decision is hardly old enough for the Supreme Court of Canada to reverse itself.

Despite being an atheist with “no horse in this race,” I voted the way I did because of something called the rule of law, which among other things, dictates that courts and administrative bodies like ours shouldn’t cherry pick the laws we like from the ones we don’t. I don’t believe we can choose to disregard the leading case on this issue just because we don’t like the case or we don’t like the covenant. From what I saw, I don’t think anyone liked the covenant.

In addition to more than 800 pages of submissions from Canadians who were invited to comment on TWU’s application, I read a number of legal opinions from some of Canada’s leading lawyers, who advised us that the Trinity Western University v. B.C. College of Teachers case was still the law of Canada. That 2001 case, from the Supreme Court of Canada, determined that the B.C. College of Teachers could not deny accreditation of TWU’s teaching degree (and those who graduated from such program) because TWU insisted upon a similar covenant from its students. “For better or for worse” the Court said, “tolerance of divergent beliefs is a hallmark of a democratic society.”

I believe that the benchers must follow the decisions of higher courts, particularly the Supreme Court of Canada. That’s the way our justice system works. Otherwise the law is nothing more than the political, ethical and unpredictable partialities of one judge, and laws developed in this fashion are neither fair, consistent nor predictable. That’s one reason why we have the Supreme Court: To tell lower courts, and other judicial and quasi-judicial bodies what the law is, and how it should be interpreted and applied.

One of the most persuasive submissions was from the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, (an organization not known to shy away from protecting the rights of the LGBTQ community). The BCCLA took the position that its commitment to a society in which LGBTQ people are free from unlawful discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation did not give anyone licence to discriminate against others on the basis of their conscientiously held religious beliefs, nor to deny them their fundamental freedoms. “For the Law Society to deny TWU’s application for accreditation” they said “would itself be contrary to law, as established by the Supreme Court of Canada, and would result in unlawful discrimination against and infringement of the fundamental freedoms of those who seek only to be able to study law and be allowed entry to the legal profession without discrimination based on their religious beliefs.”

Unfortunately, critics of the B.C. benchers seem to be overlooking the position of the BCCLA on the issue of religious freedom in Canada. It would appear that the majority of the benchers of the Law Society of Upper Canada and Nova Scotia didn’t think it was important either. To me, it was definitive.

Some critics have argued that a law school at TWU may, by virtue of its Christian orthodoxy, create intolerant lawyers who would discriminate against gays and lesbians despite the fact that no teachers who have ever graduated from TWU’s teaching program have been cited or disciplined for such conduct.

Others critics have suggested that one can’t satisfactorily teach ethics at a faith-based institution that does not recognize gay marriage (opening up the question as to whether lawyers of faith can teach ethics at Canada’s existing law schools). I told my colleagues at bencher table that these arguments were absurd.

If the TWU application had been rejected by the B.C. benchers, would our law society be obliged to reject applicants who received their law degrees from other faith-based law schools in the United States and who may have actually practiced in the U.S.? And should we go further down the rabbit hole and reject students who attended TWU as undergraduates, but who received their law degrees at Osgoode Hall or U of T?

Some have suggested that the law has changed since that TWU 2001 B.C. teachers’ ruling and that it might be decided differently today, especially in the light of the Civil Marriage Act, which legalized gay marriage. The many legal opinions our law society obtained on this matter indicated the Supreme Court would not reverse itself on that issue today.

However, if the Supreme Court of Canada somehow looks at this issue again and reverses itself, I’m fine with that.

Why? Because I believe in the rule of law, and the rule of law must be paramount in a free and democratic society.

The law societies of Ontario and Nova Scotia, having caved to public opinion, are acting in an illiberal manner - shame on them.

 

[Edward Campbell]

The Guardian has an interesting article and interactive infographic on the topic of gay rights. The headline say: More than 2.7 billion people live in countries where being gay is a crime.

I don't know if being gay is natural, inherently part of a person's basic makeup, or a 'lifestyle choice.' Further, I don't care. It seems to me that ones sexuality is, broadly and generally, protected by two of the four rights* which I hold to be fundamental: liberty and privacy.

There's one thing slightly wrong with the infographic. The countries in grey are defined as where homosexuality is either "illegal or the law is unclear." In some cases, however, we know that the law is, simply, silent, but, where it applies, the common law ends up extending de facto protection. In other countries where the law is equally silent we know that religious courts make it a crime. They ought not to be lumped together.

Are gay rights something for which we should be willing to send our sons and daughters into battle? Or should we promote gay rights by imposing economic sanctions on counries that deny them? I don't know ...

____
* They are, I repeat: Life, Liberty and Property, roughly as defined by John Locke in 17th century England, and Privacy, as defined by Brandeis and Warren in 19th century America.

 

[curriculumvitae]

With due respect, General _____ . I misrepresent myself as 'gay' to be able to seduce a bisexual Caucasian Chinese spy named Michael Roche or Roach. But you know who makes fun of me, bully me and threaten me? Liberals in the workplace. I give you a name. Theodore Butler of CityFinancial. You cannot sacrifice a healthy economy just for one isolated case of discrimination based on sexual orientation. We are a country of laws. We do not adhere to Sharia law's "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." Do you hear of Harper ever mention a slur on gays?

 

[Edward Campbell]

Caution: <rant>

One of the rubbish rights (see the bottom half of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights for a wonderful example of rubbish rights) that many people believe they have but which is, in fact, not worth anything at all, ever, is the right to not be offended. This rubbish right is now being advanced and even strengthned by requesting that universities require professors to offer trigger warning when something in a curriculum - the novel Things Fall Apart is used as an example - might trigger some sort of trauma in people who have experienced "racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”

See the article, from the New York Times, here.

If anyone is likely to suffer trauma from reading a novel, even one with very graphic content, or discussing, say, the holocaust of the Jews in the 1940s, or, perhaps, the Rape of Nanjing, then they are too intellectually weak to be in a university. Let's face it, boys and girls, some of you are not worth being educated much above elementary level - some algebra, geometry, physics and chemistry, a bit of Shakespeare (but not Titus Andronicus!) and Milton and some basic history (memorizing dates and stuff about dead white men) and geography - you belong behind a cash register, or maybe, for you smarter than average people, a bank counter or on an assembly line or construction site (but not as a plumber or electrician). You do not belong in a university wasting the time of people who have IQs with three digits in them.

</rant>

 

[a_majoor]

A long article from the American Interest which suggests one of the causes of the dysfunction that i have alluded to in other threads: that technology, demographics and economics are changing in ways which current institutions and political parties are unable to deal with. In this case the article focuses on the negatives (crime and disinterested or anti-civic actions by the wealthy), which are as valid as demographics and technology in understanding change. This is also somewhat related to Niall Ferguson's thesis in "The Great Degeneration".

Unless and until *we* take action (organizing new social and political structures to deal with these issues, and creating and empowering social, political and legal institutions that can deal with these issues), things can only get worse:
Part 1

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/

POLITICAL ECONOMY & THE STATE
The Twin Insurgency
NILS GILMAN
The postmodern state is under siege from plutocrats and criminals who unknowingly compound each other’s insidiousness.

Published on June 15, 2014
States within the global political economy today face a twin insurgency, one from below, another from above. From below comes a series of interconnected criminal insurgencies in which the global disenfranchised resist, coopt, and route around states as they seek ways to empower and enrich themselves in the shadows of the global economy. Drug cartels, human traffickers, computer hackers, counterfeiters, arms dealers, and others exploit the loopholes, exceptions, and failures of governance institutions to build global commercial empires. These empires then deploy their resources to corrupt, coopt, or challenge incumbent political actors.

From above comes the plutocratic insurgency, in which globalized elites seek to disengage from traditional national obligations and responsibilities. From libertarian activists to tax-haven lawyers to currency speculators to mineral-extraction magnates, the new global super-rich and their hired help are waging a broad-based campaign to limit the reach and capacity of government tax-collectors and regulators, or to manipulate these functions as a tool in their own cut-throat business competition.

Unlike classic 20th-century insurgents, who sought control over the state apparatus in order to implement social reforms, criminal and plutocratic insurgents do not seek to take over the state. Nor do they wish to destroy the state, since they rely parasitically on it to provide the legacy goods of social welfare: health, education, infrastructure, and so on. Rather, their aim is simpler: to carve out de facto zones of autonomy for themselves by crippling the state’s ability to constrain their freedom of (economic) action.

THE FAILURES OF SOCIAL MODERNISM

Understanding how these twin insurgencies gathered momentum requires a brief look at the past. During the social modernist era (1945–71), virtually all states—whether capitalist or communist, industrialized or developmental, great power or post-colonial—aimed to legitimate themselves by serving the interests of middle classes whose size they sought to expand. Both capitalist and communist accumulation strategies were based on the nurturing of industrial laborers, who were expected to work for a living and who in turn were told that the state not only would steadily improve their standard of living but also cushion them from misfortunes through various forms of social security.


These were “welfare states” in the sense that they sought to promote the general welfare rather than lift up the poor or defend the prerogatives of the rich. In the non-communist world, the wealthy were taxed not out of class hostility but in order to finance benefits for society as a whole. Health care, pensions, schools, and so on were represented less as individual “entitlements” than as collectively enjoyed public goods. While there were many different kinds of social contracts during this period, in virtually every country elites felt some duty to underwrite the well-being of the middle class.

Partly as a result of these welfare goods, inequality within most countries steadily decreased. For Western elites in particular, the fact that the Cold War made radical alternatives to capitalism thinkable no doubt helped concentrate a certain commitment to larger moral, social, and political purposes.1 Postwar social solidarity and Cold War national security concerns also generated greater reserves of social capital, bolstering trust in government and making it politically possible to pursue such ends. This was especially true in the United States.

During this period, the ideal of the modernist welfare state may have been honored mainly in the breach, but it was honored. And it was honored despite competition from leftists who sought a more explicit policy of class leveling, and from rightists who sought to uphold or enforce various forms of racial, national, or class-based exclusions. The liberal welfare state remained firmly ensconced as the hegemonic model—that is, as the baseline against which other political discourses and proposed political-economic models had to define themselves.

By the 1970s, however, it was becoming clear that the social modernist states were increasingly failing to deliver on their promises. In the West, inflation eroded the technical foundations of the Bretton Woods financial order, and economic stagnation undermined the technocratic consensus in favor of Keynesian demand management and the political consensus in favor of sharing productivity gains between labor and capital. In the East, centrally planned economies were revealing themselves not only as politically repressive but also as economically inefficient and environmentally catastrophic. In the “Global South”, the commodity boom of the 1970s led to a golden age for some primary producers, but industrialization by means of import substitution failed to sustain growth, and the debt crisis of the early 1980s put to rest any dreams of a new international economic order.

By 1980, the reaction against the social modernist state had set in. Levels of economic inequality began to grow again, eventually reaching heights not seen since the 1920s—prompting one financier to celebrate the emergent economic order as a “plutonomy”, that is, an economy geared to the interests of plutocrats.2 When Communism collapsed in 1989, what died was thus not just the collectivist economic system and authoritarian politics of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Cremated along with the corpse of Communism was the civic-minded conception of development as the central responsibility of the state and allied elites—a conception shared by communists and liberals alike during the Cold War. It wasn’t just that the state “retreated” from the “commanding heights” of the economy, to use Daniel Yergin’s terms, but also that the very ambition of the state receded. Many states stopped even pretending they wanted to create a more egalitarian society and instead sought to legitimate themselves by claiming they were maximizing individual opportunity. For proponents of this perspective, the rise of new plutocrats counted not as a defeat, but as a success for the new model of governance. The best face that the World Bank could put on the new order was to say, in 1997, that henceforth the role of the state would be to “steer” rather than to “row.” By the turn of the millennium, even elements of the Left had come to doubt whether states could be relied on to effectively and disinterestedly promote the public interest.

Two texts published the year the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” and John Williamson’s “The Washington Consensus”, made the nature of the new order explicit. Fukuyama proposed that big-H History (in the Hegelian sense of the ideological contest over the proper relationship between state and civil society) had come to an end with a universal agreement that liberal, democratic capitalism was not just the best but the only reasonable form of socio-political-economic organization. By doing so, Fukuyama did not advocate weak states, and indeed later he argued that state executive capacities were widely undervalued as preconditions for development and sound governance, even in affluent societies. He suggested rather that the command-economy model had been deposited in Trotsky’s dustbin of history. Williamson’s text was more pragmatic than metaphysical, filling in the details of this “post-historical” policy consensus with specific imperatives around fiscal discipline, the redirection of public spending away from subsidies, the rollback of progressive tax codes, the floating of currencies, the liberalization of trade and cross-border investment, the privatization of state enterprises and deregulation of private ones, and above all the sanctification of private property rights.

The Washington Consensus, in particular, promoted not just a dethroning of the state, but a wholesale challenge to the idea that technocratic leadership constituted the primary way to ensure collective social well-being. Pioneered as domestic policy in Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain and Ronald Reagan’s United States, but continued thereafter in administrations controlled by their respective political opposites, the programs associated with the Washington Consensus—above all, the privatization of national industrial assets (especially of state-owned firms and utilities) and deregulation (especially of financial firms)—soon became the model London and Washington sought to export to the Global South and the post-Communist world under the rubric of “structural adjustment” and “shock therapy.” As Dani Rodrik concluded, “‘Stabilize, privatize, and liberalize’ became the mantra of a generation of technocrats who cut their teeth in the developing world and of the political leaders they counseled.”3

This transformation of the role of the state in the wake of the Cold War has dramatically increased the precariousness of the lives of the middle classes within most societies. On a material level, it has generated unprecedented new forms of insecurity. From above, middle classes find themselves threatened by a global financial elite, in league with ultra-wealthy compradors, both of whom seek to cut social services and the taxes that pay for them—taxes that these elites depict as a form of illegitimate expropriation. From below, the middle classes find themselves exposed to a new resurgence of criminality, which has discovered in their plight a business opportunity.

At the same time, on an ideological level, the crisis of the labor-centric, social welfare-providing nationalist state has undermined the ability of the middle classes to organize themselves collectively in the face of these new threats. The post-1970s loss of faith in the state as a disinterested welfare provider goes a long way toward explaining why the “Occupy” movements of 2008–09 failed to generate any significant political traction.

 

[a_majoor]

Part 2:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/

PLUTOCRATIC INSURGENCY

The ideological retreat of the social modernist state thus represents the central enabler of plutocratic insurgency. During the 1990s, a new class of globetrotting economic elites emerged, enriched by the opportunities created by globalizing industrial firms, deregulated financial services, and new technology platforms. This new class is an order of magnitude richer in absolute terms than previous generations of the ultra-wealthy. As Thomas Piketty has recently demonstrated, the rise of the new plutocrats since the 1970s reflects an historic shift in the structure of capital accumulation. The accumulation regime that predominated during the heyday of social modernism depended on a new class of workers who could afford the goods they were producing. The great fortunes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were built on the backs of worker-consumers in primarily inward-looking national contexts. By contrast, today’s plutocrats thrive by selling their goods and services globally; their success is dramatically less connected to the fortunes of their fellow national citizens than was that of previous generations.

Moreover, the two signature types of massive wealth accumulation in the early 21st century have been high technology and financial services. Neither of these industries relies on masses of laborers, so their productivity is detached from the health of any particular national middle class. The result has been a dramatic rise in inequality within countries, even as wealth inequality transnationally has narrowed.

The plutocrats have also developed novel ideological self-conceptions. Many see themselves as “the deserving winners of a tough worldwide competition” and regard efforts to make them to pay for public goods as little more than organized theft.4 Whereas during the Cold War the apparent availability of a socialist alternative pressured the ultra-rich to temper their maximalist ambitions, the collapse of communism removed that constraint, enabling a shift in how many of the new ultra-wealthy conceived their relationship with society. While some continued to see themselves as owing a debt of obligation to the societies in which they enriched themselves, a significant subset, particularly among financial elites, began to see their personal achievements as being detached from the success of the national societies in which they reside. Instead of seeing themselves as the ultimate winners of the systems in which they work, they characterized themselves as the noble rebels who made it on their own despite the drag caused by incumbents, loafers, and parasites in government and society. The growing popularity of the pseudo-philosophical novels of Ayn Rand, whose ideas George Monbiot refers to as “the Marxism of the new right”, represented the most visible manifestation of an ideology that depicts the rich as “makers” and the masses as shiftless “takers.”5 From Washington to London, plutocrat-funded think tanks devoted themselves to creating a body of usable ideas and policy proposals aimed at dismantling what is left of social modernity. This ideological shift heralded the arrival of the plutocratic insurgency.6

The defining feature of the plutocratic insurgency is its goal: to defund or de-provision public goods in order to defang a state that its adherents see as a threat to their prerogatives. (Note that, conceptually, plutocratic insurgencies differ from kleptocracies; the latter use the institutions of state to loot the population, whereas the former wish to neutralize those institutions in order to facilitate private-sector looting. In practice, these may overlap or co-mingle.) Practically speaking, plutocratic insurgency takes the form of efforts to lower taxes, which necessitates cutting spending on public goods; reducing regulations that restrict corporate action or protect workers; and defunding or privatizing public institutions such as schools, health care, infrastructure, and social space.

The political strategy associated with the plutocratic insurgency is to use austerity in the face of economic shocks to rewrite social contracts on the basis of a much narrower set of mutual social obligations, the ultimate effect being to de-collectivize social risks. As a palliative for the loss of public goods and state-backed programs to improve public welfare, plutocratic insurgents typically promote philanthropy (directed toward ends defined not democratically but, naturally, by themselves alone). “There’s no such thing as society”, Margaret Thatcher famously declared, issuing the cri de cœur of insurgent plutocrats everywhere. If there’s no such thing as society, then the very idea of social services collapses, along with any responsibility on the part of the rich to contribute to them. From this perspective, plutocratic insurgency signifies the reimportation of the aforementioned “structural adjustment” policies (originally designed to discipline poor states) back into the rich, industrialized core.

For plutocratic insurgents, this strategy is dictated at bottom by a raw cost-benefit analysis: The price the social modernist state asks them to pay in taxes and regulatory burdens outweighs the benefits they believe they receive from living in such a state. Plutocratic insurgents believe they can afford (and therefore everyone should be required) to buy for themselves the sorts of goods that the state was once expected to provide. They live in gated communities, travel via personal jets and private bus fleets, and send their children to exclusive schools. While each of these decisions may be motivated by lifestyle choices or a desire for social differentiation, the result is a progressive moral disinvestment and civic disengagement from the quality of these traditionally public services, especially as the habit of opting out of public services trickles down from the oligarchs to the upper middle classes.

Leaving aside the undemocratic nature of such private services, or the adverse selection problems that arise from partial privatizations, the hallmark of the arrival of plutocratic insurgency is when the rich begin to revolt against paying taxes for public services they never plan to use. As these public services deteriorate in quality, the result is a self-reinforcing cycle whereby plutocratic insurgents increasingly see no reason to contribute anything to their host societies and, indeed, actively contest the idea that citizenship comes with economic responsibilities.

 

[a_majoor]

Part 3

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/

CRIMINAL INSURGENCY

Many of same processes that are driving the plutocratic insurgency also underpin the process of criminal insurgency: the globalization of economic flows, growing wealth inequality, and a collapse of state provisioning of public goods and services. That is partly why these are twin insurgencies, plutocratic and criminal, for they have both thrived on the basis of the same shifting preconditions. The other reason for the twinning is that they abet one another.

From Latin America to Africa to the former Eastern bloc, the 1980s and 1990s structural adjustment and shock therapy programs led to the hollowing out of the state: the physical buildings and institutions of “adjusted” states may have remained in place, but their ambitions and capacities shriveled. The states in these countries dramatically decreased spending on social services—ranging from subsidies for food and fuel to broader social services like public health and pensions. State-owned industries were either shut down or privatized, with wages and employment slashed. The state, in other words, further shed its capacity to deliver a decent life to its citizens, leading to a collapse in the popular expectation that it should serve as a guarantor of progress.

At the same time, the economies of these countries opened rapidly to cross-border financial and trade flows. The combination created both the opportunity for enterprising individuals to make money in new ways and, for many, an imperative to do so as a matter of survival. These effects were not merely a byproduct but in fact the explicit objective of the structural adjustment and shock therapy programs: rolling back the dirigiste state and opening up the economy was meant to unleash entrepreneurial energy, and indeed it did.

Alas, shock-therapy-driven globalization of the formerly closed economies of the Eastern bloc and the Global South turned out to have an unfortunate bug. While the mainstream globalization celebrated by the likes of Thomas Friedman grabbed the headlines, the parallel development of a “deviant” globalization in industries like narcotics, immigration, wildlife harvesting, and antiquities smuggling remained long enough in the shadows for it to set deep roots. Though the weakness of the post-communist and post-developmental state represented a dire problem for mainstream businesses and for imploding middle classes in these countries, it offered comparative advantages for illicit commerce. While plutocrats sewed up the licit opportunities afforded by the integration of the global economy, they mostly avoided dealing in goods and services that were banned for moral or prudential reasons. By contrast, deviant entrepreneurs realized that arbitraging the moral and regulatory differences that existed in different jurisdictions worldwide presented fantastic business opportunities—with opportunities continuously emerging as the capacities of different states contracted at differing rates. The unsung globalizers of the 1990s and 2000s, therefore, were the criminals who rapidly scaled up their local mom-and-pop graft organizations to become globe-spanning deviant commercial empires.

These avatars of deviant globalization constitute the leaders of today’s criminal insurgency. While they often emerge from the excluded and subaltern classes within their societies, what distinguishes them from classic social revolutionaries is that rather than seeking to build or capture institutionalized state power, they wish merely to protect their rents in the various (usually deviant) markets they control. Organizations such as the First Command of the Capital in Brazil, the ’Ndrangheta in Italy, or the Zetas in Mexico have no interest in taking over the states in which they operate. Instead, like plutocratic insurgents, they seek to selectively cripple the state so as to establish a private zone of economic autonomy, while continuing to rely on the state to supply vestigial social services. These actors thrive in (and indeed try to foster) weak-state environments, and their activities reinforce the conditions of this weakness.

This observation enables us to understand the error of the liberal enthusiasts of globalization who assert that poverty, insecurity, and state fragility are the result of “disconnectedness” from the world economy. In fact, even paradigmatically “failed” states—such as Congo, Somalia, and Afghanistan—are deeply connected to the global economy; instead of being connected to the formal and legal parts of it, however, their primary ties are through illicit trade in minerals, through piracy, through the global drug trade, and so on. The crucial issue is thus not connectedness or disconnectedness, but rather what kind of connectedness.

As deviant globalization takes root in a particular locale, it soon begins to generate a positive feedback loop, in much the same way that many successful animal and plant species, as they invade a natural ecosystem, reshape their ecosystem in ways that improve their ability to exclude competitors. Forms of state weakness that at first are merely permissive enabling conditions for their businesses soon become assets that the now-empowered criminal insurgents try to perpetuate and expand. They siphon off money, political loyalty, and sometimes territory; they increase corruption; and they undermine the rule of law (think Mexican drug organizations or Sahelian smuggling operations, among dozens of examples). They also force well-functioning states in the global system to spend an inordinate amount of time, energy, and attention trying to control what comes in and out of their borders.

In building their business empires, deviant globalizers inevitably come into conflict with host states in three distinct ways that render them de facto political actors. First, they control huge, growing swathes of the global economy, operating most prominently in places where the state is hollowed or hollowing out. Corruption fueled by drug money on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border exemplifies this point.

Second, many deviant entrepreneurs control and deploy significant quanta of violence—an occupational hazard for people working in extra-legal industries, who cannot count on the state to adjudicate their contractual disputes. This use of violence brings deviant entrepreneurs into primal conflict with one of the state’s central sources of legitimacy, namely its monopoly (in principle) over the socially sanctioned use of force, transforming them from merely deviant businessmen into criminal insurgents.

Third, these criminal insurgents in some cases have begun to emerge as private providers of justice, health care, and infrastructure—that is, precisely the kind of goods that functional states were once supposed to provide to their citizens. (However, since they are provided privately, the deviant entrepreneurs’ personal constituents see them not as “public goods” because they are goods not equally accessible to all citizens.) Prison-based drug syndicates in Brazil, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, and many more—all are criminal insurgents who not only have demonstrated the will and capacity to shut down areas of their host states’ basic functions, thereby upsetting global markets half a world away, but who also provide social services to local constituencies.

Criminal insurgency is thus the form that deviant globalization takes as it scales up and reaches political self-consciousness. On the one hand, the more deviant industries grow, the more damage they do to the political legitimacy of the states in which they operate, thus undermining the capacity of the state to provide the infrastructure and services that the criminal insurgents want to free ride on. On the other hand, the people living in the semi-autonomous zones controlled by criminal insurgents increasingly recognize the insurgents rather than the hollowed out state as the real source of local power and authority.

Of course, even when deviant providers of alternative governance functions end up seeming “legitimate” in the eyes of local stakeholders, this type of governance is usually poorly institutionalized and nontransparent about both ends and means. Nonetheless, as these groups take over functions once expected of the state, their stakeholders increasingly lose interest in the now hollowed-out formal state institutions. Thus, even though criminal insurgents have no desire to kill their host state, they may end up precipitating a process whereby the state implodes catastrophically.