Yesterday was a pivotal moment in American politics. Having won control of the House of Representatives, the post-Trump GOP struggled — three times — to elect a Speaker. The last time such a vote had to go multiple rounds? Over a century ago.
Meanwhile, in Britain, an eerily similar scenario was unfolding. The nation in dire, profound crisis — and the government, nowhere to be found, facing literally scorn and condemnation from everyone to its medical establishment to its scientists to its journalists to plenty of average people.
What’s going on here? This story is about many things, but it’s not just about Kevin McCarthy, America, Trump, or even the GOP. It’s about something that I can’t say until the very end, because, well, these days, when people hear simple truths like the one I’m about to reveal — which you should already well know — they react in a kind of near-comical rage and denial. So let’s cover the bases first.
What’s going on here is that America and Britain appear to have become ungovernable. They are fallen democracies who appear now not to be capable of that most simple and fundamental of democratic tasks — self-governance.
It’s easy enough to say something like “the GOP’s Trumpist wing is holding it hostage!! They won’t let a Speaker be chosen!”... But the story’s much deeper than that, and it’s about time that we all learned the lesson in it, instead of — as we’ve been doing for over a decade — dancing uncomfortably around the gigantic vampiric reptile beast in the room.
Why is it that America’s GOP and Britain’s Tories have made their societies ungovernable? Why are they so incompetent at the very task they put themselves forward for, governance? Why…put yourself forward to…govern…a society…if you can’t even begin to take the very first steps towards doing it?
Don’t take it from me. Just today, Britain is in pretty much the exact same position as America, only worse. How so? Prime Minister Rishi “Ebenezer” Sunak gave an hour-long speech, about fixing the incredible array of problems facing his nation, stemming from the self-inflicted disaster of Brexit. His answers amount to…nothing. As in, literally, do nothing. The response? Here’s what one of Britain’s top journalists, Beth Rigby, incredulous, had to say:
In the real world, you can’t get a train, you can’t get a doctor’s appointment, nurses are going to food banks, and when you do dial 999 you can’t be sure than an ambulance is going to get there in time to save your loved one. That’s the reality of Britain in 2023.
And now you’re here giving people more promises about how you might change the country that they’ve heard many times before during 13 years of Conservative rule.
...And there, in America, is the GOP reducing democracy itself to a shambles, acting like spoiled children, unable to agree on who should be the Speaker of the House they just won.
What’s behind all this?
There’s a very simple answer to that question, and it goes like this.
Most modern political parties are interested in governance because they believe there should be something to govern. What is government? It’s the administration of public goods. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. Let’s go through a few, to make the point. Justice Departments administer the public good of…justice. Health Departments and systems like the NHS administer the public good of…public health... s.
Governments exist to administer public goods. Now, some people know that, and most people who’ve been to grad school can say it, but few people really understand it well. To say that simple enough phrase also carries with it a certain pretty basic implication: that people who form parties that vie for power in government believe in public goods.
Because if you don’t, well, then…what is there to govern? If you don’t believe in public goods, you are basically saying that the there is no job of governance to be done....
Maybe you’re seeing where I’m going with this. Perhaps you see my point already, because it’s hardly rocket science.
Neither the GOP nor the Tories believe in public goods. Not believing in public goods, they can’t do the job of governance. Because of course, to them, the task they’ve set out to accomplish isn’t governance at all.
It’s the destruction of public goods. But that’s not governance, especially not in a modern democracy. What is it? Well, it’s a lot of things: ignorance, folly, hate, bigotry, rage, stupidity, and self-destruction, to name just a few.
That’s not just me calling names. It’s me trying to point out empirical facts. What do we know about human society at this juncture? About the project of civilization itself? Well, perhaps the most crucial lesson we learned, ever, period, full stop, is the one that Europe taught. Europe was nothing just one short human lifetime ago. I mean that literally. It was ashes. It’s great cities were destroyed, it’s societies were bankrupt by war, it’s governments and democracies had been shattered by the iron fist of fascism.
And in one human lifetime, Europe rose to enjoy not just the world’s highest living standards, but history’s. Think about that. Because we don’t. Not enough. I don’t just mean you and I, I mean my peers in the world of economics. There are just a handful of economists who really grasp that lesson, and teach it, and they’re the best in the world — Piketty, Stiglitz, and so forth — but they are ostracized by media entirely, so the average person never learns this lesson, and hence, ironically, foolishly, even Europe is troubled today, precisely by underinvestment in the public goods that lifted it to the highest living standards in human history.
How did the European Miracle happen? Why was it that Europeans ended up living the world’s longest, happiest, most stable lives? Public goods. After the war, Europe did something radical, heretofore unseen in human history — all of it. It rewrote constitutions to make everything from healthcare to housing to transportation to education right down to, in some cases, abstractions like dignity, universal human rights. ...
Let me put that more simply. Europe’s living standards rose to the highest levels in human history because Europeans enjoyed the greatest public goods in history: from public health, to education, to transport, and so forth. There is absolutely no debate on this score. It’s not my “opinion.” It is a fact, buttressed by volumes of evidence. This is the great lesson of the 20th century, one of the most crucial in history, and now I can restate it in a simpler, more powerful form.
We know the key to human prosperity. It’s called investment in public goods. They a) lift living standards while b) keeping societies equal and c) sharing wealth broadly, thus d) creating a relatively stable middle class that e) is the key for democracy to endure.
...
But America and Britain are a different story. They have been overrun by parties which genuinely don’t believe public goods should exist.
Hence, America and Britain are in ultra-severe crisis. In them, living standards are plummeting, not rising. Everything from life expectancy to real income just goes on falling, and trust in institutions and systems goes with it — and as that goes, so average people begin to turn to parties who don’t believe in public goods to express their bitterness and rage. A vicious circle thus kicks in. That is how the GOP took the house and the Tories have managed to stay in power for twelve years.
Think back to what Beth Rigby had to say. She was incredulous that the Prime Minister’s plan for dealing with…people dying because you can’t get an ambulance…people shivering in the cold…nurses going to for banks…was…doing nothing. So, too, American journalists are incredulous that the GOP can’t choose a Speaker. But this is where it ends.
What, precisely? Now we can put it all much more concisely.
The politics of nihilism.
That is what not “believing in” public goods really is. Public goods aren’t like, say, God. There’s no evidence that God exists, but you can believe in him anyways, and I don’t say that unkindly, I mean it expansively. But “not believing” in public goods isn’t like that: it’s like denying climate change, or saying the earth is flat, because, like I said, the great lesson of the 20th century is that public goods are the key. To what? To everything. From prosperity, to the democracy it hold together, to having a middle class, to people trusting systems and institutions enough to believe in a thing called civilization. All of it hinges on public goods. You can “not believe in them,” therefore, but that’s just another way of revealing your mind-shattering ignorance.
Which is where the GOP and Tories are. What they embody and enact before us every single day.
Let me sum all that up now. If you don’t believe in public goods, well…what is there to govern? Hence, parties like the GOP and the Tories are incapable of governance. ...
Hence, Rishi Sunak’s got this wierd grin plastered on his face…while he literally touts doing nothing…to save the NHS…which is dying…leaving kids to literally die because they can’t get to the hospital in less than a full day…because that’s where this begins, which is also where it ends. If you don’t “believe in” public goods, hey, what is there to be upset about when they collapse around you, in smoldering ashes, billowing flames?
But you know what the most fundamental public good of all itself is? Governance.
We could put it another way. Cooperation. There are levels of public goods ...
But the Big One, underlying them all? Is governance itself. The idea that we can govern ourselves, for the common good.
These parties also have distinctly authoritarian bents because they don’t believe in this primary public good at all. They don’t think of governance as a public good, ie, something “we” do, for the common good. They think of that form of governance as something to be destroyed — usually to enact the hierarchies and class distinctions of a distant past. You’re the peasant, I’m the lord, you’re the nobody, I’m the “real” citizen, you’re the underman, I’m the uberman. See the link here?
... [ T]he modern day GOP and the Tories [are] parties who don’t believe in modern social contracts, are completely incompetent at the very jobs they put themselves forward to do, running modern societies, because modern societies are about administering public goods, the foremost one of those being democracy itself, and then come things like healthcare, education, transport, and so on.
These parties — and the figures in them — don’t care about any of that. That stuff is just an impediment. To what? To supremacist fantasies of nostalgic, delusional utopias that never existed, basically. The GOP is only interested in what it can take away from Americans — books, words, rights, contraceptives. The Tories built their magical fantasyland — it was called Brexit, and the only problem was that it shattered the country, decimated the economy, caused a tsunami of human and financial capital flight, and destroyed Britain’s future. But they don’t care, because, hey, at least it purified the nation, and those dirty foreigners are gone. But then what? Then we have a bonfire.
You know the phrase “bonfire of the vanities”? What this is about is a bonfire of the modernities. These parties — the GOP, the Tories, those who follow in their footsteps, like the European hard right — don’t have any plan, vision, agenda, in the modern sense whatsoever — to construct new public goods we desperately need, like, say, clean manufacturing, or new hospitals and schools, or even renew old ones, like, for example, the Colorado River not drying up. They don’t care about that. They don’t “believe in” it. Their only agenda is destructive.
Hence, on both sides of the Atlantic, there’s now a bonfire of the modernities....
The bonfire of the modernities is about setting fire to all that [= public goods].
It’s the only thing that these parties believe in. But what are they? Now I can say the thing I said I couldn’t say before. This is what modern conservatism has devolved to. It’s nihilism — moral, ontological, economic, social. It’s in proud, violent denial of the most crucial lessons of history, because saying “I don’t believe in public goods” is, LOL, the 21st century socioeconomic equivalent of wagging a finger and shouting “the earth is flat!”
This is where it ends, friends. In the bonfire of the modernities. America and Britain will be grappling with this problem — a political of nihilism that wants to burn it all down, which also means that it can’t, by definition, govern anything, especially not a functioning modern society, because it’s too busy trying to get the rest of us to believe the Big Lie that public goods are the Devil, and only an exorcism by way of the ritual purification of hate and ignorance is what can cure us. Hence, the bonfire of the modernities — the one that’s burning down America and Britain, while the rest of the world watches, shocked and bewildered.
No comments:
Post a Comment