Topic: Brexit Vote: 51.9% leave, 48.1% stay

[Chris Pook]

A penny drops:

“The way to combat populism is to be popular, be popular and you can solve issues.”

Pierre Moscovici, Socialist of France – EU Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs

http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/756284/EU-economy-worse-great-depression-Joseph-Stiglitz-Davos

[Chris Pook]

“Not all those who vote for populist ideas are the bad guys.

“In most cases they are good guys, they are fellow citizens and they have real concerns about the future of their children, jobs opportunity, concerns about security.”

Pier Carlo Padoan - Italy’s finance minister speaking at Davos

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/756534/davos-world-economic-forum-brexit-italy-pier-carlo-padoan-trump

[Chris Pook]

"Events, dear boy, events."

What does President Trump do to Brexit?
James Forsyth
 
21 January 2017
10:32 AM

With Theresa May expected to head to Washington next week to see President Trump, I have a look at what the Trump presidency might mean for Brexit in my Sun column this morning. Despite his protectionist rhetoric, on full show again yesterday, Donald Trump is keen on a US / UK trade agreement. He has told people that he would like to get personally involved in negotiating the deal. I understand that his transition team has done more work on it than they have for any other agreement.

Squaring the circle between Trump’s protectionist rhetoric and his enthusiasm for a US / UK deal isn’t as hard as it first looks. The UK is not one of the low wage economies that Trump rails against the US doing deals with. It is hard to imagine that a trade deal with the UK would be seen to threaten job losses in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin—the states that delivered Trump the presidency. So, a US/UK trade deal during the Trump presidency does look possible.

One consequence of Trump’s election is that Britain is more important to Europe’s security than it has been for sixty odd years. His alarmingly ambivalent attitude to Nato and his desire for better relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia despite its actions, means that democratic European countries can be less sure of America’s protection than at any time since the founding of Nato.

The new president has also reversed US policy towards the EU. For sixty years, Washington has—often unthinkingly—supported European integration. But Trump has changed that; he and his team prefer strong nation states to big, supranational organisations. He talks about how other countries will follow the UK out of the EU and is planning to appoint a Brexit backer to be the US’s ambassador to the EU.

Trump’s hostility has rattled EU leaders. I understand that when Theresa May spoke to Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk after her Brexit speech on Tuesday, they both brought up Trump’s comments about other countries leaving the EU. They both stressed how pleased they were that May had made clear that she wanted the EU to succeed.

This has been a major factor in the constructive EU reaction to May’s speech; Tusk compared it to Churchill’s vision of Britain and Europe. It opens-up the possibility of a sensible Brexit deal. This would see Britain outside the EU but bolstering it on security as it tries to deal with the Islamist terrorist threat and Russian aggression. The relationship would be underpinned by continued, close trading links between the UK and the EU.

If Britain can secure free trade deals with both the US and the EU, then this country would have a real chance to secure a more prosperous future for itself.

From today's Spectator.

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/president-trump-brexit/

Trump has just strengthened May's hand immeasurably.   Europe needs an interlocutor and it needs a defender.  May is quite willing to be both......from outside of the EU.

Loose ends need to be tidied up quickly.

[Chris Pook]

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/dominic-cummings-brexit-referendum-won/

From the "Mastermind" of the Vote Leave campaign - In sum: history as bunch of small things and random chance.  Best of luck!

I am not clever, I have a hopeless memory, and have almost no proper ‘circle of competence’. I made lots of mistakes in the campaign. I have had success in building and managing teams. This success has not relied on a single original insight of any kind. It comes from applying what Charlie Munger calls unrecognised simplicities of effective action that one can see implemented by successful people/organisations.

Effective because they work reliably, simple enough that even I could implement them, and ‘unrecognised’ because they are hiding in plain sight but are rarely stolen and used. I found 10-15 highly motivated people who knew what they were doing and largely left them to get on with it while stopping people who did not know what they were doing interfering with them, we worked out a psychologically compelling simple story, and we applied some simple management principles that I will write about another time. It is hard to overstate the relative importance in campaigns of message over resources. Our success is an extreme example given the huge imbalance in forces on either side. In many ways Trump’s victory has little resemblance to what we did but in this respect he is another example.

We also got lucky.

In January 2014 I left the Department for Education and spent the next 18 months away from politics. A few days after the 2015 election I wrote a blog about Michael Gove’s new job touching on the referendum. When I wrote it I assumed I would carry on studying and would not be involved in it. About ten days later I was asked by an assortment of MPs, rich businessmen, and campaigners including Matthew Elliott to help put together an organisation that could fight the referendum. I was very reluctant and prevaricated but ended up agreeing. I left my happy life away from SW1 and spent eight weeks biking around London persuading people to take what was likely to be a car crash career decision – to quit their jobs and join a low probability proposition: hacking the political system to win a referendum against almost every force with power and money in politics. In September we had an office, in October ‘Vote Leave’ went public, in April we were designated the official campaign, 10 weeks later we won.

I’ve learned over the years that ‘rational discussion’ accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average. Most educated people are not set up to listen or change their minds about politics, however sensible they are in other fields. But I have also learned that when you say or write something, although it has roughly zero effect on powerful/prestigious people or the immediate course of any ‘debate’, you are throwing seeds into a wind and are often happily surprised. A few years ago I wrote something that was almost entirely ignored in SW1 but someone at Harvard I’d never met read it. This ended up having a decisive effect on the referendum.

A warning. Politics is not a field which meets the two basic criteria for true expertise (see below). An effect of this is that arguments made by people who win are taken too seriously. People in my position often see victory as confirmation of ideas they had before victory but people often win for reasons they never understand or even despite their own efforts. Cameron’s win in 2015 was like this – he fooled himself about some of the reasons why he’d won and this error contributed to his errors on the referendum. Maybe Leave won regardless of or even despite my ideas. Maybe I’m fooling myself like  Cameron. Some of my arguments below have as good an empirical support as is possible in politics (i.e. not very good objectively) but most of them do not even have that. Also, it is clear that almost nobody agrees with me about some of my general ideas. It is more likely that I am wrong than 99% of people who work in this field professionally. Still, cognitive diversity is inherently good for political analysis so I’ll say what I think and others will judge if there’s anything to learn.

Discussions about things like ‘why did X win/lose?’ are structured to be misleading and I could not face trying to untangle everything. There are strong psychological pressures that lead people to create post facto stories that seem to add up to ‘I always said X and X happened.’ Even if people do not think this at the start they rapidly construct psychologically appealing stories that overwrite memories. Many involved with this extraordinary episode feel the need to justify themselves and this means a lot of rewriting of history. I also kept no diary so I have no clear source for what I really thought other than some notes here and there. I already know from talking to people that my lousy memory has conflated episodes, tried to impose patterns that did not actually exist and so on – all the usual psychological issues. To counter all this in detail would require going through big databases of emails, printouts of appointment diaries, notebooks and so on, and even then I would rarely be able to reconstruct reliably what I thought. Life’s too short.

It is hard to explain the depth of TV derangement that gobbles up SW1 souls. Much of politics involves very similar tragi-comic scenes re-created by some of the basic atoms of human nature – fear, self-interest and vanity. The years, characters, and contexts change, the atoms shuffle, but the stories are the same year after year, century after century. Delusions and vanity dominate ‘rationality’ and ‘public service’. Progress, when it comes, is driven by the error-correcting institutions of science and markets when political institutions limit the damage done by decision makers at the apex of centralised hierarchies. It rarely comes from those people, and, when it does, it is usually accidental or incidental to their motives.

Reality has branching histories, not ‘a big why’

Much political analysis revolves around competing simple stories based on one big factor such that, in retrospect, ‘it was always clear that immigration would trump economic interest / Cameron’s negotiation was never going to be enough / there is an unstoppable populist tide’, and so on. Alternatives are quickly thought to have been impossible (even if X argued the exact opposite repeatedly). The big event must have had an equally big single cause. Confirmation bias kicks in and evidence seeming to suggest that what actually happened would happen looms larger. People who are quite wrong quickly persuade themselves they were ‘mostly right’ and ‘had a strong feeling’ unlike, of course, the blind fools around them. Soon our actual history seems like the only way things could have played out. Brexit had to happen. Trump had to win.

You see these dynamics all the time in historical accounts. History tends to present the 1866 war between Prussia and Austria as almost inevitable but historians spend much less time on why Bismarck pulled back from war in 1865 and how he might have done the same in 1866 (actually he prepared the ground so he could do this and he kept the option open until the last minute). The same is true about 1870. When some generals tried to bounce him into a quick preventive war against Russia in the late 1880s he squashed them flat warning against tying the probability of a Great Power war to ‘the passions of sheep stealers’ in the Balkans (a lesson even more important today than then). If he had wanted a war, students would now be writing essays on why the Russo-German War of 1888 was ‘inevitable’. Many portray the war that broke out in August 1914 as ‘inevitable’ but many decisions in the preceding month could have derailed it, just as decisions derailed general war in previous Balkan crises. Few realise how lucky we were to avoid nuclear war during the Cuban Missile crisis (cf. Vasili Arkhipov) and other terrifying near-miss nuclear wars. The whole 20th Century history of two world wars and a nuclear Cold War might have been avoided if one of the assassination attempts on Bismarck had succeeded. If Cohen-Blind’s aim had been very slightly different in May 1866 when he fired five bullets at Bismarck, then the German states would certainly have evolved in a different way and it is quite plausible that there would have been no unified German army with its fearsome General Staff, no World War I, no Lenin and Hitler, and so on. The branching histories are forgotten and the actual branch taken, often because of some relatively trivial event casting a huge shadow (perhaps as small as a half-second delay by Cohen-Blind), seems overwhelmingly probable. This ought to, but does not, make us apply extreme intelligent focus to those areas that can go catastrophically wrong, like accidental nuclear war, to try to narrow the range of possible histories but instead most people in politics spend almost all their time on trivia.

We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful. On one hand the work of Kahneman et al on ‘irrationality’ has given an exaggerated impression. The fact that we did not evolve to think as natural Bayesians does not make us as ‘irrational’ as some argue. We evolved to avoid disasters where the probability of disaster X happening was unknowable but the outcome was fatal. Rationality is more than ‘Bayesian updating’. On the other hand our stories do often obscure the branching histories of reality and they remain the primary way in which history is told. The mathematical models that illuminate complex reality in the physical sciences do not help us much with history yet. Only recently has reliable data science begun to play an important role in politics.

Andrew Marr wrote recently about the referendum with a classic post facto ‘big event must be caused by one big factor’ story:

‘Connected to this is the big “why?”. I don’t think we voted to leave the EU because of clever tacticians or not-quite-clever-enough pollsters, or even because Johnson decided that one of his columns was better than another. I think we voted to leave because so many British people had been left behind economically and culturally for so long, and were furious about it; and because, from the 2008 financial crisis onwards, they had accumulated so much contempt for the political elites. In these circumstances any referendum narrows down to a single question: “Are you happy with the way things are?” The answer was “no”.’ Andrew Marr, October 2016.

‘The big why?’ is psychologically appealing but it is a mistake. In general terms it is the wrong way to look at history and it is specifically wrong about the referendum. If it were accurate we would have won by much more than we did given millions who were not ‘happy with the way things are’ and would like to be out of the EU reluctantly voted IN out of fear. Such stories oversimplify and limit thinking about the much richer reality of branching histories.

Much more at the link - as the author said: he would have made it shorter but he didn't have the time.

[dapaterson]

Boris Johnson may succeed where Gerry Adams never did: Northern Ireland is talking reunification.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/brexit-northern-ireland-don-duncan-1.4045368

Northern Ireland, the other region of the U.K. that voted overwhelmingly against leaving, has a failed economy and is unable to survive on its own. It currently receives annual funding from London to the tune of $16.5 billion Cdn — so a Scottish-style bid for independence isn't viable. Yet there are mounting calls for Northern Ireland to leave the U.K. and reunite, after 96 years of partition, with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member.

[Chris Pook]

I'll believe that the day that I see the last protestant church in Belfast close. 

[Thucydides]

Since BREXIT is perhaps the second most public display of the breakdown of the "old order" (President Donald Trump being the first), this article is probably best here. IT speaks to an idea that I have floated in the past; current institutions, social structures and so on are no longer suitable for the current environment of demographic, technological, economic and social changes.

We have no idea what is next (although there are plenty of groups out there who believe their program will fill the gaps), but voters are rea acting angrily with their votes, their wallets and bypassing the gatekeepers in media, academia and the bureaucracy wherever and whenever they can. The collapse of political parties is one sign of the process (the parties no longer have relevant answers to the questions of the day) and on a larger scale, mass movements and even revolutions and wars are part of the process (Occupy, the rise of nationalist parties in Europe, the Arab Spring and the Shiite/Sunni civil war in the Middle East, not to mention increasing Russian and Chinese adventurism). The next decades will be "interesting" in the Chinese sense:

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2017/03/30/perhaps-before-we-know-it/

Perhaps Before We Know It
BY RICHARD FERNANDEZ MARCH 30, 2017

What do strategists do when they can't predict the future? Eleanor Roy of the Palm Beach Daily News summarized a talk by former NSA director Michael Hayden warning of a growing level of uncertainty in the world. The old international system is failing from multiple causes, he said, and no one is sure what comes next.

“The system that the world has relied on for self-governance for the last three-quarters of a century is pretty much at the end of its fiscal life,” ... He predicted that not long from now, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Lybia will not exist in the form we know now.

“Frankly, they don’t exist now,” Hayden said. “The only organized military force in Iraq today fighting on behalf of what you and I think of as Iraq are the 5,100 Americans. No one else in that country under arms is fighting for Iraq; they’re fighting for Sunni Iraq, Shia Iraq, Kurdish Iraq, Turkmen Iraq.”

He called the process a natural erosion that can’t be contributed to one factor.

“We’re not just [faced] with fixing the problem of the current system. I’m telling you the current system is going under and cannot survive. It is a macro-tectonic issue here,” Hayden said.

He described Russian President Vladimir Putin as not having “more than a pair of 7s in his hand,” and predicted that Russia soon will be forced to reconcile with its nation’s problem of low life expectancy.

In the face of such warnings naturally we have to do something.  The instinctive reaction of politicians when visibility is poor is to repeat the actions which stabilized things in the past. To bar the same doors.  To brick up the same windows.  Toot the same horn.  Thus they do things like reinforcing NATO defenses on Russia's western border; watch North Korea and China. They try to get a grip on the amorphous problem in the Middle East.

Such steps may help, but none of these precautions are necessarily sufficient when the nature of impending dangers is still unknown. Some experts believe the biggest challenge in any future war is to recognize it has started. "The first day of the next major conflict shouldn’t look like war at all according to William Roper, who runs the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, or SCO. Instead, imagine a sort of digital collection blitzkrieg, with data-gathering software and sensors setting of alarms left and right as they vacuum up info for a massive AI. Whoever collects the most data on Day One just might win the war before a single shot is fired."

“My prediction for the future is that when we go out to fly planes on the first day of battle, whether they are manned or unmanned, that the purpose of the first day or the second day will not be to go out and destroy enemy aircraft or other systems. It’s to go out, collect data, do data reconnaissance, so that our learning system gets smarter than [the enemy’s],” Roper said Tuesday at an Air Force Association event on Tuesday. “Every day you fly, you get that exponential increase in sophistication.”

Not being able to recognize a threat may seem puzzling at first.  But Bruce Schneier warns that the next attack might come from your refrigerator. "Last year, on October 21, your digital video recorder — or at least a DVR like yours — knocked Twitter off the internet. Someone used your DVR, along with millions of insecure webcams, routers, and other connected devices, to launch an attack that started a chain reaction, resulting in Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, and many sites going off the internet. You probably didn’t realize that your DVR had that kind of power. But it does."

We no longer have things with computers embedded in them. We have computers with things attached to them.
Your modern refrigerator is a computer that keeps things cold. Your oven, similarly, is a computer that makes things hot. An ATM is a computer with money inside. Your car is no longer a mechanical device with some computers inside; it’s a computer with four wheels and an engine. Actually, it’s a distributed system of over 100 computers with four wheels and an engine. And, of course, your phones became full-power general-purpose computers in 2007, when the iPhone was introduced.

We wear computers: fitness trackers and computer-enabled medical devices — and, of course, we carry our smartphones everywhere. ...

This is the classic definition of a robot. We’re building a world-size robot, and we don’t even realize it.

And we don't even realize our cars can turn on us.  Schneier's warning sounds quite ominous, but should we relax because the William Roper plans another world-sized robot to find out what is attacking us on the day?  It's all contingent on our finding out in time.  Thus Michael Hayden's observation that the current world is eroding proves less helpful than it seems is because no one can quite say what is approaching behind the fog of future developments.

Perhaps one reason for the current revolt against giant institutions like the EU, the UN and the Federal government  is a subconscious realization among Western voters that technological and social change has gotten inside the loop of bureaucratic response; that whatever is pounding on the door will prove too fast for the sclerotic central planning bureaucracies to handle.  There is no longer much confidence in the capacity of legacy institutions to identify problems at long range and to intercept them before it's too late.  Perhaps the most frightening thing about the Obama years was how he laughed at "Governor Romney" for warning Russia might be a problem.

They couldn't see it coming.  They couldn't seem to see anything coming.  Consequently the voters have decided to downsize, not necessarily in the interests of quality leadership but to optimize for reaction time; to appoint someone who will actually act -- even in error -- before it is too late.

The public may not know precisely what the weathers of the world bring but they misgive the wind they are feeling on their faces. Of course the future may simply bring a gentle breeze, but then you never know.

[Chris Pook]

Jeremy Warner has it almost right - He is a Remainer now determined to make the best of what he saw as a bad situation.  But the alternative to Globalism is not Isolationism.   That is no more true than asserting that all Liberal voters voted for deficit financing.

The alternative to Globalism is not Isolationism any more than the alternative to Communism is Fascism. 

You can still be a nationalist and believe in free trade and allowing folks into your country for a look around and a pint of beer, and maybe a chat about the next big idea.

The problem arises when those that don't like negotiating with the people they are negotiating with try to undercut the negotiator by going directly to his clients. And thus the value of the Canada Pension Plan and the Baby Bonus and why Quebec insisted on being unique.

Global Britain or isolationist island? Brexit has set us up for a monumental clash of ideas
JEREMY WARNER
Jeremy Warner 6 APRIL 2017 • 8:46PM

There have always been two types of globalisation – one driven by integrationist intent and the other by the holy grail of free trade. The first is best represented by the European Union, essentially a form of top-down suppression of national sovereignty in pursuit of the supposed nirvana of a world without borders.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that nobody much likes this kind of globalisation, with the exception, that is, of the international elites that preside over it.

In this sense, the votes for Brexit and Trump have much in common. Both represent a rejection of an imagined utopia of economic integration, policed by global government. The idea is well intentioned, even admirable in some respects, but many Westerners have come to believe they are being made to pay far too high a price for its supposed benefits.
 
In his inauguration speech, Donald Trump promised: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first”. Theresa May tiptoed around much the same narrative in her party conference speech last October. Britain would take back control over its own destiny, she said, and then, more pointedly, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.”

I was in Washington at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund when Mrs May made her remarks. They could have been directed specifically at this gathering of global policy elites. Many imagined they were. The reaction was one of horror; their world, seventy years of post-war liberalisation in the making, appeared to be crumbling before their eyes. As the economist Stephen King puts it in a compellingly argued new book on the retreat from globalisation – Grave New World; the End of Globalisation and the Return of History –  “Isolationism is, once again, becoming a credible political alternative. Without it, there would have been no Brexit and no Trump.”

Yet for those who listened beyond the nativist soundbites of Mrs May’s speech, there was also an entirely different message. We were leaving the EU, she said, in order to more effectively pursue the goal of a “global Britain”, one of sovereign nations trading freely with one another for mutual benefit.

It is not isolationism, but this second, more market driven vision of globalisation that the UK Government pretends to champion. And to give them their due, ministers are setting about it with gusto; an exhausting programme of international travel has been put in train. For Philip Hammond, it was Germany last week and India this. Despots or democrats, it matters not; for Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary, it was off to Manila to talk about “shared values” with the self-confessed killer, President Duterte. And for Mrs May, it was a whistle stop tour of the Middle East, ending with the golden goose of Saudi Arabia.

Singapore; for some Brexiteers, Singapore is an economic model Britain should aspire to post Brexit, but this is not what many people thought they were voting for

This is a very different form of globalisation to the creeping subjugation of the nation state represented by the EU. Even so it is almost bound to be in conflict with the isolationist instincts of many of those who voted for Brexit. Like all successful political movements, Brexit was a grand coalition of forces, in this case between the overtly populist, anti-immigrant and protectionist at one extreme and of libertarian idealism at the other. As a pragmatist, and during the referendum campaign, reluctant Remainer, Mrs May appreciates only too well the challenges of squaring the circle. There was and remains a monumental clash of ideas at the centre of the case for Brexit.

All free trade negotiations with India, for instance, start with a demand from India for a lot more work permits. That’s not going to sit happily with many of those who voted for Brexit. It is, moreover, a very odd champion of global free trade that starts by repudiating it with its near neighbours, as inevitably will be the case if we end up with the threatened “no deal” with the EU.

Perhaps the closest thing to the completely open, global facing economy the Government aspires to is Singapore. We can applaud the low tax, small state model Singaporeans have carved out for themselves over the past fifty years, but I doubt the discipline and self-reliance of their approach holds many attractions for large parts of the UK electorate. In achieving its growth, Singapore has seen levels of immigration which make Britain’s seem trivial; nearly a third of the population is foreign.

International trade is in the long run always good for the economy; it’s a great engine of change and progress. But inevitably, there are casualties; many workers will find themselves displaced by the low cost foreign competition it gives rise to.

The row over Gibraltar is fortuitous for the Government in some respects. It frames the EU as the enemy, and therefore helps mobilise patriotic support against the Brussels machine. But underlying contradictions at the heart of the Brexit bandwagon cannot for ever be swept under the carpet. Sooner or later, they will have to be confronted. The real tests of Mrs May’s leadership still lie ahead.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/04/06/global-britain-isolationist-island-brexit-has-set-us-monumental/

[Thucydides]

While this is about the 2018 election, the sort of insular thinking displayed by not only Hillary but the entire campaign apparatus seems to be in effect on a global scale. If the political, bureaucratic, academic and media classes cannot even define who they are or why they are doing what they do, then it is more than just that the People find spokesmen and leaders who do know what they want to do and why:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-on-the-new-book-that-brutalizes-the-clinton-campaign-w477978

Yikes! New Behind-the-Scenes Book Brutalizes the Clinton Campaign
'Shattered,' a campaign tell-all fueled by anonymous sources, outlines a generational political disaster
By  Matt Taibbi

There is a critical scene in Shattered, the new behind-the-scenes campaign diary by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, in which staffers in the Hillary Clinton campaign begin to bicker with one another.

At the end of Chapter One, which is entirely about that campaign's exhausting and fruitless search for a plausible explanation for why Hillary was running, writers Allen and Parnes talk about the infighting problem.

"All of the jockeying might have been all right, but for a root problem that confounded everyone on the campaign and outside it," they wrote. "Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn't really have a rationale."

Allen and Parnes here quoted a Clinton aide who jokingly summed up Clinton's real motivation:

"I would have had a reason for running," one of her top aides said, "or I wouldn't have run."

The beleaguered Clinton staff spent the better part of two years trying to roll this insane tautology – "I have a reason for running because no one runs without a reason" – into the White House. It was a Beltway take on the classic Descartes formulation: "I seek re-election, therefore I am... seeking re-election."

Shattered is sourced almost entirely to figures inside the Clinton campaign who were and are deeply loyal to Clinton. Yet those sources tell of a campaign that spent nearly two years paralyzed by simple existential questions: Why are we running? What do we stand for?

If you're wondering what might be the point of rehashing this now, the responsibility for opposing Donald Trump going forward still rests with the (mostly anonymous) voices described in this book.

What Allen and Parnes captured in Shattered was a far more revealing portrait of the Democratic Party intelligentsia than, say, the WikiLeaks dumps. And while the book is profoundly unflattering to Hillary Clinton, the problem it describes really has nothing to do with Secretary Clinton.

The real protagonist of this book is a Washington political establishment that has lost the ability to explain itself or its motives to people outside the Beltway.

In fact, it shines through in the book that the voters' need to understand why this or that person is running for office is viewed in Washington as little more than an annoying problem.

In the Clinton run, that problem became such a millstone around the neck of the campaign that staffers began to flirt with the idea of sharing the uninspiring truth with voters. Stumped for months by how to explain why their candidate wanted to be president, Clinton staffers began toying with the idea of seeing how "Because it's her turn" might fly as a public rallying cry.

This passage describes the mood inside the campaign early in the Iowa race (emphasis mine):

"There wasn't a real clear sense of why she was in it. Minus that, people want to assign their own motivations – at the very best, a politician who thinks it's her turn," one campaign staffer said. "It was true and earnest, but also received well. We were talking to Democrats, who largely didn't think she was evil."

Our own voters "largely" don't think your real reason for running for president is evil qualified as good news in this book. The book is filled with similar scenes of brutal unintentional comedy.

In May of 2015, as Hillary was planning her first major TV interview – an address the campaign hoped would put to rest criticism Hillary was avoiding the press over the burgeoning email scandal – communications chief Jennifer Palmieri asked Huma Abedin to ask Hillary who she wanted to conduct the interview. (There are a lot of these games of "telephone" in the book, as only a tiny group of people had access to the increasingly secretive candidate.)

The answer that came back was that Hillary wanted to do the interview with "Brianna." Palmieri took this to mean CNN's Brianna Keilar, and worked to set up the interview, which aired on July 7th of that year.

Unfortunately, Keilar was not particularly gentle in her conduct of the interview. Among other things, she asked Hillary questions like, "Would you vote for someone you didn't trust?" An aide describes Hillary as "staring daggers" at Keilar. Internally, the interview was viewed as a disaster.

It turns out now it was all a mistake. Hillary had not wanted Brianna Keilar as an interviewer, but Bianna Golodryga of Yahoo! News, an excellent interviewer in her own right, but also one who happens to be the spouse of longtime Clinton administration aide Peter Orszag.

This "I said lunch, not launch!" slapstick mishap underscored for the Clinton campaign the hazards of venturing one millimeter outside the circle of trust. In one early conference call with speechwriters, Clinton sounded reserved:

"Though she was speaking with a small group made up mostly of intimates, she sounded like she was addressing a roomful of supporters – inhibited by the concern that whatever she said might be leaked to the press."

This traced back to 2008, a failed run that the Clintons had concluded was due to the disloyalty and treachery of staff and other Democrats. After that race, Hillary had aides create "loyalty scores" (from one for most loyal, to seven for most treacherous) for members of Congress. Bill Clinton since 2008 had "campaigned against some of the sevens" to "help knock them out of office," apparently to purify the Dem ranks heading into 2016.

Beyond that, Hillary after 2008 conducted a unique autopsy of her failed campaign. This reportedly included personally going back and reading through the email messages of her staffers:

"She instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign's server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers. … She believed her campaign had failed her – not the other way around – and she wanted 'to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who,' said a source familiar with the operation."

Some will say this Nixonesque prying into her staff's communications will make complaints about leaked emails ring a little hollow.

Who knows about that. Reading your employees' emails isn't nearly the same as having an outsider leak them all over the world. Still, such a criticism would miss the point, which is that Hillary was looking in the wrong place for a reason for her 2008 loss. That she was convinced her staff was at fault makes sense, as Washington politicians tend to view everything through an insider lens.

Most don't see elections as organic movements within populations of millions, but as dueling contests of "whip-smart" organizers who know how to get the cattle to vote the right way. If someone wins an election, the inevitable Beltway conclusion is that the winner had better puppeteers.

The Clinton campaign in 2016, for instance, never saw the Bernie Sanders campaign as being driven by millions of people who over the course of decades had become dissatisfied with the party. They instead saw one cheap stunt pulled by an illegitimate back-bencher, foolishness that would be ended if Sanders himself could somehow be removed.

"Bill and Hillary had wanted to put [Sanders] down like a junkyard dog early on," Allen and Parnes wrote. The only reason they didn't, they explained, was an irritating chance problem: Sanders "was liked," which meant going negative would backfire.

Hillary had had the same problem with Barack Obama, with whom she and her husband had elected to go heavily negative in 2008, only to see that strategy go very wrong. "It boomeranged," as it's put in Shattered.

The Clinton campaign was convinced that Obama won in 2008 not because he was a better candidate, or buoyed by an electorate that was disgusted with the Iraq War. Obama won, they believed, because he had a better campaign operation – i.e., better Washingtonian puppeteers. In The Right Stuff terms, Obama's Germans were better than Hillary's Germans.

They were determined not to make the same mistake in 2016. Here, the thought process of campaign chief Robby Mook is described:

"Mook knew that Hillary viewed almost every early decision through a 2008 lens: she thought almost everything her own campaign had done was flawed and everything Obama's had done was pristine."

Since Obama had spent efficiently and Hillary in 2008 had not, this led to spending cutbacks in the 2016 race in crucial areas, including the hiring of outreach staff in states like Michigan. This led to a string of similarly insane self-defeating decisions. As the book puts it, the "obsession with efficiency had come at the cost of broad voter contact in states that would become important battlegrounds."

If the ending to this story were anything other than Donald Trump being elected president, Shattered would be an awesome comedy, like a Kafka novel – a lunatic bureaucracy devouring itself. But since the ending is the opposite of funny, it will likely be consumed as a cautionary tale.

Shattered is what happens when political parties become too disconnected from their voters. Even if you think the election was stolen, any Democrat who reads this book will come away believing he or she belongs to a party stuck in a profound identity crisis. Trump or no Trump, the Democrats need therapy – and soon.

[Fishbone Jones]

Isn't the thread about Brexit and not the Clinton failures?

I was getting ready to move it when I realised I can't 

[Thucydides]

The reason for the Clinton failure seems tied to the larger failures which lead to the BREXIT, the growth of alternative, nationalistic parities across Europe and other issues which the various political, bureaucratic, media and academic classes seem unable to dampen down, explain or understand.

Thinking about voters as "cattle" to be prodded into the correct direction, being unable to come up with a coherent core idea to explain why people should bother to support you, or being unable to recognize that politicians and political movements are being buoyed up by millions of dissatisfied voters and taxpayers speaks to a very profound dysfunction of the various groups of people who presume to rule us or tell us what to do, how to think and act and so on.

We have seen glimmerings of this in Canada as well, from the Reform Party (probably 10 years too early) to the Ford brothers to current CPC leadership contender Kevin O'Leary posturing as a Canadian Donald Trump, so I would not be too quick to dismiss this as not being applicable to Canada, nor be too smug in assuming it can't happen here......

[E.R. Campbell]

The reason for the Clinton failure seems tied to the larger failures which lead to the BREXIT, the growth of alternative, nationalistic parities across Europe and other issues which the various political, bureaucratic, media and academic classes seem unable to dampen down, explain or understand.

Thinking about voters as "cattle" to be prodded into the correct direction, being unable to come up with a coherent core idea to explain why people should bother to support you, or being unable to recognize that politicians and political movements are being buoyed up by millions of dissatisfied voters and taxpayers speaks to a very profound dysfunction of the various groups of people who presume to rule us or tell us what to do, how to think and act and so on.

We have seen glimmerings of this in Canada as well, from the Reform Party (probably 10 years too early) to the Ford brothers to current CPC leadership contender Kevin O'Leary posturing as a Canadian Donald Trump, so I would not be too quick to dismiss this as not being applicable to Canada, nor be too smug in assuming it can't happen here......

I see where Thucydides is heading, and I agree that it and Brexit and Marine LePen are all part of a bigger "problem:" misunderstanding populism.

I am the first to admit that I have, seriously, misjudged populism, in its various forms. I expected the Albertans to elect Jim Prentice, backed as he was by Danielle Smith ~ I really didn't see why anyone would vote for an untested NDP in uncertain times; boy was I wrong. I expected the Canadian general election to be a hard fought race between Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair ~ once again I was seriously wrong; I totally misread the mood of the electorate and I'm still puzzled about why anyone would ever vote for Justin Trudeau to be anything more than 2nd vice president of the senior class. I argued that, however narrowly, the Brits would vote with their heads, not their hearts and remain in the EU ~ wrong again. Although I could not see why anyone would vote for Hillary Clinton I was flummoxed when enough people actually voted for Donald Trump: the world (America and Britain and Canada, anyway) had, it seemed to me, taken leave of its senses. I still have trouble reconciling what happened with what I regard as rationality.

The fact appears to be that the second decade of this century is characterized by the rise of populism or, at least, the (temporary?) demise of "machine politics." Those of us who are interested in history and politics need to take note.


Edit: (3) typos

[Brad Sallows]

Another take on the roots of Brexit / Trump / intermediate French election result.

One of its themes: populism is on the rise because people who have convinced themselves they have earned (deserve) their positions in the protected class - rather than having been gifted [them] on the foundations of being born with aptitude and some social capital from their parents' achievements - have lost touch with (in some cases outright despise) their fellow citizens.

One "tell": when they congratulate themselves for their open-mindedness, is it because they extend their hands to "different" people in their own social/economic class, or across classes?

[Good2Golf]

Another take on the roots of Brexit / Trump / intermediate French election result.

One of its themes: populism is on the rise because people who have convinced themselves they have earned (deserve) their positions in the protected class - rather than having been gifted [them] on the foundations of being born with aptitude and some social capital from their parents' achievements - have lost touch with (in some cases outright despise) their fellow citizens.

One "tell": when they congratulate themselves for their open-mindedness, is it because they extend their hands to "different" people in their own social/economic class, or across classes?

A good read; thanks Brad.

It would seem Canada too, has its share of "Bobos."

Regards
G2G

[Chris Pook]

Juliet Samuel, in today's Telegraph, has it about right.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/24/theresa-may-showing-eu-defeating-populism-requires-listening/

Theresa May is showing the EU that defeating populism requires listening to voters
JULIET SAMUEL
Juliet Samuel 24 APRIL 2017 • 6:01AM


Theresa May's success on a mainstream platform marks her out in Europe

Recently, EU president Jean-Claude Juncker made an odd and revealing remark. Addressing the European Parliament on the topic of Brexit, he declared: “The choice of the British people, however respectable it may be, does not fit into the march of history, not European history and not global history.”

Even now, as Britain prepares to leave and France is dangerously closer to electing an anti-EU, populist firebrand, true Brussels believers cling to a central article of faith: whatever happens, history is on our side. If something should derail the EU project, it is not part of history, but an aberration from its natural order. This mind-set goes a long way towards explaining why the EU is in such a dysfunctional mess.

It is also Britain’s rejection of this doctrine that explains why, in six weeks’ time, a British prime minister is likely to become one of the only leaders in Europe currently able to increase the majority of her mainstream political party, rather than ceding ground to extremists. The key difference is that, for Britain and its political leaders, populist backlashes aren’t “aberrations” of history that need to be kept tightly under control until they blow over. They are symptoms of something that has gone wrong. The British solution to populism is not to dig in, but to listen.
 
This is quite difficult to do if, in your oddly abstract world view, those who object to the pace of change around them are actually outside history. If, from the narrow windows of your airy palace in the clouds, you see history as a metaphysical and perfectible concept, rather than as the result of millions of accumulated actions and reactions performed by real human beings, then it is very hard indeed to accept that something as grubby and stupid as democratic populism should be allowed to alter its course.

Mr Juncker’s assessment of European history, however, is not unusual. It is, in fact, an integral part of EU doctrine. Every step of its development has been couched in terms of a dialectic – thesis and antithesis resulting in a new synthesis.

One of the EU’s founding fathers, Jean Monnet, believed that the EU would be “forged in crises”, each one triggering chain reactions of greater demand for integration. And every project the EU has embarked upon, from enlargement to the euro and free movement, is couched as an irreversible step on the way to full union. Every regulation introduced justifies itself on the principle of “harmonisation”, as if the creation of a single legal edifice is bringing Europe’s nations into tune with nature.

Believing history is on your side is a powerful boost. But it also leads to misjudgments. The dialectic, for example, doesn’t seem to be working the way Monnet predicted. According to one analysis of polling data, called “Monnet’s Error?”, each step forwards in integration actually triggers a drop in support for the EU. This doesn’t “fit”, as Mr Juncker might say.

The logical conclusion one might draw is that the EU theory of history is wrong. And if it is, then popular dissent against it cannot be dismissed as the dying throes of a retrograde faction. Instead, leaders must engage with it, make their case and, if they want to restore support for the EU, give some ground.

This is exactly what Theresa May has done in response to Brexit, even though she didn’t support it. She understood that Brexit voters are not to be insulted, pitied or ignored. Their view on the country’s direction is not an inconvenience or aberration; it is actually the stuff that makes a democracy.

Reading the will of an electorate isn’t always easy. Mrs May has, though, drawn the right conclusions. Voters are not happy with the pace of change and they are concerned not just with hard, economic matters, as a Marxist would suppose, but also with the dramatic cultural shifts they see around them. And because Mrs May was so ready and clear about her acceptance of that message, she will now be able to make the case for some compromises when it comes to striking a deal with Brussels. Rather than leading us off into a crazed populist mania, as many EU types claimed she was doing in her first months, she has created space for moderation.

What Mrs May understood is that listening to voters isn’t conditional upon their agreement with a particular agenda. Of course, nor does it mean pandering to the mob’s every whim or indulging racist demands made by a hard core of populist loudmouths. Too many liberals are determined to conflate the views of such extremists with the broader discontent expressed by the mass of voters. But assuming that all populist voters are morally beyond the pale is just another way of excluding them from the debate. They are seen to be “on the wrong side of history”, and therefore irrelevant.

For the EU, this approach has been a political disaster. It has relied on the apparently self-evident excellence of its project to propel it forwards. But that isn’t working. The share of the vote being picked up by Europe’s centrist, pro-EU parties is in decline. That is why they often have to govern by grand coalitions of the main centre-Right and centre-Left parties, creating the sense that mainstream politics only permits stiflingly narrow debates.

A month after Britain voted for Brexit, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy spoke at an event in London. Knowing him to be staunchly pro-EU, I expected a tirade against Britain’s folly. Instead, he was full of sorrow for the EU. “Europe without the UK might be an impossible situation,” he declared, “[suffering] a loss of spirit and life that might be fatal.”

The spirit he meant was Britain’s ability to translate popular feeling into democratic politics. Not the rule of the mob or governance by constant referendum, as Brussels’ leaders fear, but the wisdom of leaders to read the public mood and respond, knowing how to execute that peculiar mix of leading and following required of politicians. The EU’s leaders have been relying instead on a philosophical fantasy. What they will see, when Britain votes in a strengthened Tory government, is that a good leader knows when to fight and when to retreat and, in doing so, slays the populist dragon.

In an article, also in the Telegraph but a couple of days ago, Harry de Quetteville, the Telegraph's principal French correspondent noted this about France

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/22/france-revolutionary-mood-weekends-election-will-bring-turmoil/

there is no doubt that France today does feel critically unsettled, and that a sense of crisis appears to be overwhelming the fiercely unyielding, centralised state which is so crucial to dictating both national security and the very essence of what it means to be French. As France goes to the polls, both those pillars of government authority appear to be crumbling.

To start with, France’s intelligence agencies seem incapable of guaranteeing the safety of the people. This is no criticism. Clearly they are faced by an immense challenge, and do not share the obvious security advantage that we in Britain enjoy by being an island.

But France is now a country where presidential candidates are instructed to wear bullet-proof vests to rallies, where the Champs-Elysees is struck days before a crucial poll, and where security advice to citizens can sometimes simply amount to a vague “stay off the streets”.

Some 239 people have been killed by terrorism in France since the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015. If the first duty of the state is to protect its citizens then, when it cannot, voters are of course tempted to reach for alternative remedies at the ballot box, no matter how unpalatable.

The second aspect is yet more fundamental. De Gaulle – him again – may have famously trumpeted dazzling regional variety in France when he asked: “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” But the truth is that the French state, since the Revolution, has tried to impose a coherent, unique French identity across the country, rolling it out from a central administration in Paris. On language, culture, and religion France has been intolerant of deviation from the secular, Academie Francaise-imposed norm. And proudly so.

That “our way or the highway” attitude is admirable in many respects. But it does mean that French identity has been far less elastic than British. Arguably, the upshot is that the state has no idea what to do if large numbers of its citizens – especially second and third-generation North and West African Muslim immigrants – reject the classic model of French identity.

Not that any country has the definitive answer to this. But France’s difficulties, because of its history, geography and deeply-ingrained bureaucratic understanding of how to foster national unity, are particularly acute.

Again I reiterate that the issue is one of rule of experts enforcing a Justinian Code built on Platonic Ideal versus the messy business of accommodating your neighbour in parliament so as to avoid coming to blows.

Europe has sorted itself geographically over the millennia into regions of accommodation and regions where the Platonic Ideal is demanded.  Curiously, in my opinion, those Platonic regions are also the regions where the locals are most likely to ignore the experts as they argue and create evermore rules and regulations, and just get on with their lives.

[Chris Pook]

Related.

'POWER GRABBING' May SCOLDED by EU bureaucrat who claims election 'WILL NOT help Brexit'

THE EU’S Brexit coordinator Guy Verhofstadt has condemned Theresa May as a “power-grabbing opportunist” and claimed the election result will not help Brexit talks.

By VINCENT WOOD
PUBLISHED: 00:06, Sun, Apr 23, 2017 | UPDATED: 01:08, Sun, Apr 23, 2017
   
The Europhile said Britain’s political climate had descended into “surrealism” after Theresa May’s decision to ask “the British people how they would like their full English Brexit served”.

But he claimed the results of the June 8 snap election has nothing to do with Brexit.

He said: “It appears this election is being driven by the opportunism of the party in government, rather than by the people they represent.

He claimed the results of the June 8 snap election will make no impact on Brexit

“We can safely presume that by calling this election, Theresa May does not wish to throw into doubt the result of the referendum, but to solidify her support.”

Verhofstadt, who said earlier this month the relationship between Britain and the bloc was “never a love affair”, claimed the election was just an extension of the “Tory cat fight” which led to the EU referendum.

Writing in the Observer he added: “As with the referendum, which many European leaders saw as a Tory cat fight that got out of control, I have little doubt many on the continent see this election as again motivated by the internal machinations of the Tory party.

“What has been billed as a ‘Brexit election’ is an attempted power grab by the Tories, who wish to take advantage of a Labour party in seeming disarray to secure another five years of power before the reality of Brexit bites.

“Will the election of more Tory MPs give May a greater chance of securing a better Brexit deal? For those sitting around the table in Brussels, this is an irrelevance.

“British officials will represent the people of the UK in the negotiations, regardless of the number of Tory MPs.”

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/795276/General-Election-2017-Theresa-May-Guy-Verhofstadt-Brexit-news-EU-European-Union

Sorry for the usual Daily Express hyperbole but the final, highlighted paragraph, in my mind, says it all.  In keeping with both Samuels and deQuetteville's opinion above, here we have a strong supporter of the EU, and a member of the European Parliament, explicitly stating that parliament doesn't matter because the bureaucrats will be making the deal.

And in that lies a gap wider than the Channel and probably wider than the Atlantic.  But, unfortunately for Canada, is a gap that we find in Ottawa and that exists between Calgary and Montreal.

[daftandbarmy]

The French economy is a mess... no wonder they're looking for change.

But, I wonder, what would they be willing to give up to get it? I don't see them kicking the 'soft life' into touch anytime soon....

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39656069

[Chris Pook]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/23/french-presidential-election-polls-finally-got-right-calling/

There is a fascinating map there that suggests that LePen may do better in round 2 and, that her party may do well in June.  It is fascinating because of how the lines seem to mirror all sorts of ancient cleavages in France

Les Bleus

Franks
Merovingians
Carolingians
Capetians
Burgundians
Cistercians
Gallicans

Les Rouges

Gauls
Visgoths
Angevins
Cluniacs
Cathars
Huguenots

With Paris as a Movable Feast, well worth a mass.

Edit: Forgot one.  The Gauls.  Add them to Les Rouges

[Chris Pook]

Same map, again apologies for the spamming, but this map also provides insight into the EU, the Brexit Negotiations, potential trade agreements, and the value of the Brits to the EU and vice versa.



Britain is a big country.

Western Europe and Eastern Europe are different countries

Japan is also a big country.

China is biggish but there are a lot of people wanting to share the pie.

Canada, India and Australia are not so big.

British money, Canadian and Australian resources, Indian labour.

[tomahawk6]

Election night chaos with the possibility of a hung Parliament.Tories may have lost their majority.If this happens maybe no Brexit.

[jollyjacktar]

Looks like they're going to be in the hurt locker.  No doubt she feels like Harper felt on election night.

[Retired AF Guy]

Election night chaos with the possibility of a hung Parliament.Tories may have lost their majority.If this happens maybe no Brexit.

Still a lot of confusion because the predictions are based on exit polls which could be wrong. As for Brexit, I think that horse has already bolted the barn - there is no going back.

[milnews.ca]

Latest from BBC attached - 641/650 seats reporting with Team Blue:  UK in a minority (source).

If the Tories couldn't make all the changes they wanted under their majority, wonder how easy it'll be if it ends up a minority again?

[milnews.ca]

And the latest (source) ...

[Chris Pook]

Meh....

Democracy.