The Problem With Politics

I just had to post this tweet storm by Charlotte Alter @CharlotteAlter because it is about the most astute political commentary I've seen lately.

I have spent the last three days speaking to almost every person I've seen on the streets in Kenosha and Racine and folks... I hate to break it to you... but nobody gives a shit about any of the scandals you're tweeting about
It is IMPOSSIBLE for me to describe how much they don't give a shit. It's like they give NEGATIVE shits.

There's this mentality on Twitter that's like "THIS one huge scandal will sink Trump with THIS group of voters" and I can conclusively report that this is bullshit

Here's why:

Many of the people who ~tweet about politics~ assume that voters behave according to a particular logic 

Like: Trump insults women, therefore women will dislike Trump
or
Trump breaks the law, therefore "law and order" R[epublican]s will break from him

YOU THINK voter logic is like: 

A > B > C >D 

IN ACTUALITY, voter logic is more like:

A > Purple > Banana > 18

(this is true on both sides by the way, not just MAGA folks)

Also: the most pervasive bias in political coverage is not left vs. right it's "follows politics" vs. "doesn't follow politics"

By default, nearly everyone who covers politics falls into the "follows politics" category, which makes it really hard to understand people who don't

Also: the most pervasive bias in political coverage is not left vs. right it's "follows politics" vs. "doesn't follow politics"

By default, nearly everyone who covers politics falls into the "follows politics" category, which makes it really hard to understand people who don't

Or politics people will be like "according to polls and modeling, if X% swing in Y direction then Z will happen" and normal people are like... whut

It's worth noting that man-on-the-street reporting is highly anecdotal! This is by no means a comprehensive analysis because it totally depends on who decides to talk to me.

But taken alongside polls and other data, it can be a helpful way to learn what's landing and what's not

One more point, re: EQ

A side effect of the data-fication of political expertise is that the people who can read polls are perceived to be smarter than the people who can read people.

So you have all these guys crunching numbers who aren't actually LISTENING to normal ppl

LISTENING means hearing what people are not saying as well as what they're saying.

LISTENING also means not ambushing voters like "but aren't you upset about X or Y?" or bullying them

LISTENING means making sure they feel like they're being heard and not judged

just saying there are a lot of politics dudes who love to talk and hate to listen

Post-Capitalism

Stock markets are going up in the UK and US. But we are in a recession. Yanis Varoufakis says that this means that the value of companies is no longer correlated with profits and that this is unprecedented.

The price of shares is now being driven by speculators more than by results. We used to think of stocks as an investment. You put your money into a company to help capitalise it and that company pays you an annual dividend based on profits. This is how capitalism works (in this view labour is simply an overhead and does not have anything to do with making a profit).

Speculators are not investors. They are gamblers. They think in the short term. Aided by computers, the short-term can mean milliseconds as algorithms buy and sell shares 1000 times a second accumulating thousands of tiny short term gains to make huge profits over the long term.

This is not investment because the profit is not in the dividends, it is in the second to second fluctuations in price. Speculators can bet that the price with go up, which is a straight profit, but they can also bet that the price will go down (called "shorting") and still make a profit when the price of shares falls.

This speculation is now the dominant force in our stock markets and most of the money involved is, in fact, not doing any work at all in our economy. Rather it sits outside the economy not contributing anything except when the super-rich buy yachts and such.

And the speculators are mainly banks. Banks using the money that governments have been giving them ostensibly to invest in commerce. Here's how it works:

Every time the Fed or the European Central Bank or the Bank of England pumped more money into the commercial banks, in the hope that these monies would be lent to companies which would in turn create new jobs and product lines, the birth of the strange world we now live in came a little closer. How? As an example, consider the following chain reaction: The European Central Bank extended new liquidity to Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank could only profit from it if it found someone to borrow this money. Dedicated to the banker’s mantra “never lend to someone who needs the money”, Deutsche Bank would never lend it to the “little people”, whose circumstances were increasingly diminished (along with their ability to repay any substantial loans), it preferred to lend it to, say, Volkswagen. But, in turn, Volkswagen executives looked at the “little people” out there and thought to themselves: “Their circumstances are diminishing, they won’t be able to afford new, high quality electric cars.” And so Volkswagen postponed crucial investments in new technologies and in new high quality jobs. But, Volkswagen executives would have been remiss not to take the dirt-cheap loans offered by Deutsche Bank. So, they took it. And what did they do with the freshly minted ECB-monies? They used it to buy Volkswagen shares in the stock exchange. The more of those shares they bought the higher Volkswagen’s share value. And since the Volkswagen executives’ salary bonuses were linked to the company’s share value, they profited personally – while, at once, the ECB’s firepower was well and truly wasted from society’s, and indeed from industrial capitalism’s, point of view.

Thus post-capitalism is not a good thing.

"My difference with fellow lefties is that I do not believe there is any guarantee that what follows capitalism – let’s call it, for want of a better term, postcapitalism – will be better. It may well be utterly dystopic, judging by present phenomena." Yanis Varoufakis

Conservatives, Neoliberals, Liberals, and Trump.

This question appeared on Quora

Why don't conservatives do more to reach out and support the cities like zoning reform (housing), transit projects (transportation), economic revitalization (jobs) like urban conservatism? Why serve suburbs and rural areas but leave cities behind?

Here is my response.

It’s not so much to do with conservatism as with liberalism. Liberalism proper is the philosophy of the liberty of the individuals. Liberalism argues that individuals are radically free and thus the circumstances of their lives are the result of their own choices, regardless of the start they got.
We are currently on liberalism 3.0.

Liberalism 1.0 was classical or economic liberalism which emphasised individualism and the private sector. Liberalism 2.0 arose as a response to the failures of 1.0. The distinction is nicely summed up in Isaiah Berlin’s ideas of negative liberty and positive liberty. Liberalism 1.0 emphasised what Berlin called negative liberty, that is the removal of constraints on liberty. In particular the first liberals (an offshoot of Whiggism) argued the government should not interfere in commerce.

This led to poverty, corruption, and instability (aka The Great Depression) so social liberals (2.0) began to argue that positive liberty was also required. They wanted to removed barriers to economic participation such as lack of access to education, health care, or job opportunities. They argued that if the private sector was unable to or unwilling to undertake the kinds of activities you highlight, then government should step in.

Liberalism 3.0 or Neo-liberalism arose as a reaction against Liberalism 2.0. Neoliberalism argues that all commercial activities—such as house building, infrastructure, and investment—must be carried out by the private sector in response to demand. Their ideology is that only the pure logic of supply and demand will ensure a fair distribution of wealth in society.

Unfortunately Liberalism 3.0 still has Liberalism 1.0 as part of it’s kernel and so we are once again seeing poverty, corruption, and economic instability (e.g. the global financial crisis). Worse, Neoliberals openly attack and smear Liberalism 2.0 as the source of all our problems, conflating it with “communism” and extremism. In this view there is no role for positive liberty or for government in society.

The reason we associate these ideas with conservatism is an historical accident. Because these economic ideas are quite unpopular with the majority, the right-wing parties that first adopted them and opted for the more ideologically pure implementation struggled to win power. They were mainly socially conservative but had not connected with other conservative groups. In order to get Reagan elected in the US, Republicans made common cause with the previously politically inactive conservative Christians. They began to emphasise social conservative ideas like “family values” and frame their extreme right-wing economics in terms of “tax relief”.

On the other side Liberalism 2.0 became conflated with socially progressive approaches. Liberalism 1.0 had also been progressive in its time. Then it became mainstream and the norm. Liberalism 2.0 adopted a progressive attitude because their goal of equal economic participation lay in the future. But 2.0 liberals are not left-wing. Especially in the US they are centre-right, i.e. liberals interested in positive liberty.

Weirdly the most extreme right-wing economic policies come from the Republicans nowadays (and their counterparts abroad).

But here’s the thing. Most people vote on social issues rather than economic issues. So they vote conservative even though they don’t like neoliberal economic policies. And neoliberalism, liberalism 3.0, has become entrenched. At the same time a deliberate coup d’etat in universities in the 1970s ensured that only right-wing economics are taught to most students. Left-wing economists were elbowed out and struggled to get published or promoted. So now two generations of economists, think tanks and lobbyists, politicians and journalists have all been indoctrinate with the view that the only valid economics are right-wing. Even Democrat Presidents pursue right-wing economics while trying to implement socially responsible (and extremely popular) policies like universal healthcare.

And here’s the other weird thing. The neoliberals have developed an economic narrative that has social overtones, which is that the 2.0 Liberals cannot be trusted with the nations finances; they don’t understand economic realities (that is to say the ideology of neoliberalism); and any deviation from neoliberal orthodoxy is communism (re-activating the long held fear of the left). This makes economics a social issue.

And so even though neoliberalism the world over is bad for workers, bad for all but the growing number of billionaires, people keep voting for conservatives with a neoliberal agenda that they disagree with.

And the fact that a progressive black man got elected was too much for conservatives and neoliberals. Their fears all seemed to come true at once and created the backlash that Trump rode to power. The Trump-led republican party has zero interest in public works. And we see this in their response to the coronavirus. Govt’s role in their view is to facilitate businessmen making money. Mitch McConnell has become a multimillion since entering the Senate. Trump sees the Presidency as a personal business opportunity and is too busy trying to enrich himself to do anything for Americans. And the extreme conservatives and the extreme neoliberals are only too happy to go along with Trump.

Why Do a Left Leaning Populace Vote Right?

My original title for this was Why Americans Don't Understand Politics. It covers both areas and I wanted to include some ideas about UK. I will be using the Political Compass two-dimensional analysis in this post: economic left = socialism and economic right = liberalism. This is contrasted with authoritarian (maximal) governance and libertarian (minimal) governance. But I will add to this a third dimension of social conservatism and social progressivism. Hence we have three pairs of terms representing extremes of a spectrum.

left ↔ right

authoritarian ↔ libertarian      

conservative ↔ progressive    

In my view it is possible to select a position on the spectrum independently from economic, governance, and social attitudes. And it is a mistake to conflate terms such as left and progressive. Or right and authoritarian. Fascists have little in common with laissez faire libertarians but both are referred to "right wing". If we could sought out these distinctions we might have a more intelligent political discourse. Most importantly the philosophy of liberalism was coincident with the formation of right wing economic policies. The socially progressive New Liberals grew out of the devastation— inequality, corruption, and instability—that classical liberal caused. So we now often take "liberal" to mean left wing because socially progressive right wing people have a social conscience that is mistaken for socialism.

I suspect that the confusion is deliberate and aimed that making public discourse on politics ineffective, but I don't want to give in to conspiracy theories. 

That America politics are almost entirely fought on the right of centre is amply depicted by the Political Compass analysis of the candidates in the US 2020 election.

Note that Biden is well over the centre lined of the right side. 

That something entirely different is going on in the UK is reflected in this graph from Flip Chart Fairy Tales. Though note here that this graph mistakes authoritarian and liberal as social values. Authoritarian is paired with libertarianism (or anarchism) as a mode of governance. They are trying to conflate conservatives and authoritarians, and  progressives and libertarians. Thus the confusion of terminology is perpetuated. In any case we can get some kind of insight from this. In fact this next graph exists at right angles to the Political Compass models.

In Britain, and I think in American too, the voters are in favour of more left wing economic policies, though by "left wing" in America they really mean centrist. Liberals are concerned with helping people to help themselves and thus welfare in a liberal regime like the US is aimed at helping each individual to be an economically productive member of society. These days this primarily means being a consumer rather than a worker. In fact the laissez faire economics of Neoconservative and Neoliberal elected officials are unpopular amongst voters even those who vote for the Tories and the Republicans.

And in Britain and America voters are in favour of conservative social values. And in this case the attitudes are reversed. Voters are far more conservative than politicians of either the left or the right.

 One of the reasons we're seeing a culture war at the moment is because those on the right (Republicans and Tories) know that their economic policies are relatively unpopular with voters compared with the opposition (Democrats and Labour). But their social policies are more popular. Hence by using the culture war to draw attention to social policies they win votes. Of course the right also keep up a barrage of lies about the catastrophic impact of left policies in order to try to capitalise.

So the success of the culture war strategy combined with the economic propaganda sees voters leaning right.

At the moment many young Americans seem to believe that there is an imminent communist revolution in the USA. They believe the media, the multi-billion dollar enterprise run by only about six companies—including Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox (previously News Corp)—has been taken over by "the Left". They believe that Black Lives Matters was organised by Marxists. They believe that Academic is overrun with Marxists. Resentment against so-called "liberals" (i.e. people who are socially progressive is at an all time high.

Part of the problem is that America had a progressive black president for eight years at the same time as a Republican Senate that could block almost all of his initiatives. Obama achieved a fraction of what he might have. But in a nation mainly white, mainly socially conservative people this was too much to bear. And a campaign began that did not end with the election of Trump though it seems to have peaked for now. Key republicans who were vehemently against Trump have now switched their allegiance. There is an ongoing a wave of grievance and resentment amongst socially conservative people.

Fortunately the staggering incompetence of Trump in dealing with Covid19 will probably be the end of him. But expect him to stoke up the culture war, stoke up fear and hatred of people of colour, of experts and scientists, and of progressives. And expect this strategy to be ongoing amongst Republicans because it works. The next republican president will have even more extreme views than Trump, but he'll probably be competent.

Fortunately for America Biden is a right wing, conservative, authoritarian - a good choice for republicans who want to flip. We had the opposite here with Johnson vs Corbyn. No one who thought about flipping from Tory to Labour was ever going to vote for Corbyn, the relentless campaign of lies and slurs notwithstanding. I suspect many Labour voters voted against Corbyn.

Unfortunately for the world, the case for tackling the environment is being made as a socially progressive message, not an economic message, so most people are opposed to the scale of change required. To many even something like the Green New Deal looks too authoritarian, it hands governments sweeping powers to change course in pursuit of a progressive and even radical social agenda.

The Problem with the Right-Wing

If you want to identify some classic right-wing policies, then look no further than the EU's triad of the free movement of capital, goods, and people. Removing barriers to economic activity was the fundamental idea behind Adam Smith's economic philosophy and is the one idea that drives many right-wing politicians. This is liberalism applied to economics - one should be free to pursue business opportunities with minimal interference from government. Let markets set prices and act like karma in linking consequences to actions.

Of the three, the free movement of capital has been the most damaging - causing a number of continent spanning economic crises in Africa, South America, South East Asia, and lastly a global crisis in 2008. It's why billionaires pay no tax and why young people cannot afford to buy houses any more.

Economic liberalism is a disaster because markets never operate in the abstract/free way that karma is supposed to. People and governments always interfere. Always. The wealthy always tip the scales in their favour, it's how they get and sustain wealth.

Removing barriers to monopoly power has led to a sharp uptick in wealth inequality. Someone once asked me what I thought a socialist version of the board game Monopoly would would like. I said, "Dude, Monopoly is essentially a socialist game." It is set up to mimic the unlimited power that accrues to the wealthy under classical liberalism. At the end of the game one player owns all the property and has all the wealth and the other players have nothing. That is precisely the socialist view of what unfettered capitalism does to a society.

And notably this is the situation we increasingly see in the world. A few billionaires who own everything and the rest of us who have next to nothing. Bernie Sanders make this point repeatedly.

The top 1% own more than twice as much wealth as the rest of humanity combined.

We live in a world where a handful of billionaires have extraordinary control over the economic and political life of the global community.

I don't think that's the world we should be living in.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 21, 2020

Ironically, Adam Smith's argument against protectionism and nationalism was that it turned trade into a zero sum game. In the early modern world, the era of massive European Empires spanning the globe, commerce was carried out on a winner take all basis. Colonised countries were mercilessly asset stripped. Piracy was not only rife, but state sanctioned. Smith argued that by dropping barriers to trade, commerce would become a win-win situation - the exchange of goods and services between countries benefits both sides. And to some extent he was right. Trade does tend to raise the standard of living for everyone.

People often cite Singapore as a shining example of unfettered capitalism. But 85% of housing is owned by the government - which is the only reason most Singaporeans are not all homeless right now. Also 22% of GDP comes from state-owned enterprises. Yes, Singapore dropped most barriers to commerce, but they did not throw the baby out with the bath water the way many Western countries did. They carried out the principle role of government in liberal political theory and protected their people from exploitation - ensuring that the cost of housing remains in a sane relation to wages.

Government's role, in liberal political philosophy is to protect citizens from exploitation. This does mean fewer millionaires and no billionaires in order to both ensure competition and to ensure that wealth is distributed fairly amongst citizens. And it does involve some government interventions. Providing free education is universally acknowledged as a public good although this does not stop governments skimping on it and exacerbating inequality. Healthcare is widely acknowledged to be a societal benefit as well (except in the USA).

Capitalism is really the only viable way to run a national economy. But laissez faire capitalism doesn't create a fair or equitable division of wealth. It concentrates wealth, it transfers wealth to the wealthy. It creates a torrent of wealth upwards, not a trickle down effect. Govt has to prevent monopolies. And having just four companies dominating the globe in any given sector is effectively a monopoly. Allowing the largest companies to merge and swallow up competitors reduces competition and removes the incentives that make capitalism work.

The trillion dollar companies used their monopoly positions to squash competitors and prevent new players from entering the market. Having companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook dominate the world is killing innovation and siphoning wealth out of the real economy.

I don't see any future for communism or socialism as systems. However, more worker ownership of businesses would be a good thing. And some state-owned enterprises clearly provide benefits: housing, healthcare, infrastructure such as roads, bridges.

The other clear role for government is in dealing with systemic problems. Acute problems like the coronavirus outbreak in China can only be dealt with by national and international agencies with real power to enforce measures. And chronic problems like climate change require governments to nudge and shove business to change their behaviour. Government is the only check on industries that appear to behave as a psychotic person with no concern for consequences, no empathy for victims, and a single-minded exploitation and manipulation of everyone and everything for their own benefit.

I think the anti-capitalist movement is silly. And I've had to cut my ties with organisations like Extinction Rebellion because it is largely populated with people who have utopian ideas replacing capitalism. I agree that we have to pressure governments to address climate change, but government led capitalism is the only chance we have of bringing about the necessary change at the necessary speed. Socialist utopias are a fantasy and we need to abandon the fantasy that humanity is all going to get along and have their needs provided for free.