Democracy is Chaotic - when it is done right.

[Brad Sallows]

What do you make of this one Brad?

That it touches on several things, each worth understanding. Four that have recently been in the back of my mind for one reason or another:

• that inflation benefits debtors, including governments deeply indebted, and harms savers
• that effective confiscation-by-inflation or outright confiscation is a one-time opportunity, after which if fiscal balance is not restored the same trick can not be tried again, but the number of impoverished people making demands will have increased
• that the run-up of residential real estate prices draws a lot of available money into something that increases neither innovation nor productivity, reducing what goes into other kinds of investments (including the kind that produce innovation and productivity improvements)
• that the "right to property" is best understood as "the power to decide how the property is used", so: no property, no power

 

[Kirkhill]

That it touches on several things, each worth understanding. Four that have recently been in the back of my mind for one reason or another:

• that inflation benefits debtors, including governments deeply indebted, and harms savers
• that effective confiscation-by-inflation or outright confiscation is a one-time opportunity, after which if fiscal balance is not restored the same trick can not be tried again, but the number of impoverished people making demands will have increased
• that the run-up of residential real estate prices draws a lot of available money into something that increases neither innovation nor productivity, reducing what goes into other kinds of investments (including the kind that produce innovation and productivity improvements)
• that the "right to property" is best understood as "the power to decide how the property is used", so: no property, no power

I think I would go the extra step and say property is freedom. It is the antidote to the top down, authoritarian and corporatist agenda.

 

[Brad Sallows]

To exercise power is more than freedom; it implies there is someone who submits to that exercise.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

 

[Kirkhill]

Another U-turn.

Note that the author, although British, is not white.

• Rakib Ehsan

The (British) Queen of woke just exposed the hypocrisy of the virtue-signalling Left​

Once a fierce advocate of identity politics, Ash Sarkar now seems to be repudiating the dogma

In what can only be described as a quite spectacular Damascene conversion, Ash Sarkar of Novara Media has rejected identity politics and the competing grievances it has given rise to.

In an interview with Lewis Goodall of The News Agents, Sarkar argued what many have been saying for years – that much of the America-brained British Left is destroying itself by embracing the politics of racial victimhood.

This includes adopting divisive theories of so-called “white privilege”, with such toxic ideas spreading through the public, private, and third sectors, fuelled in part by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Much of this proved to be a complete distraction in one of the most racially fair societies on Earth, deflecting attention away from much stronger determinants of life chances such as modern Britain – such as family structure, community norms, and young people’s accessibility to civic assets.

The Queen of woke just exposed the hypocrisy of the virtue-signalling Left

Once a fierce advocate of identity politics, Ash Sarkar now seems to be repudiating the dogma

www.telegraph.co.uk

 

[Kirkhill]

This article is worth reading in its entirety, even if it means getting a subscription

The eminent historian who believes ‘centrists’ are extremists

Jonathan Clark, a professor in British and American history, has become an unlikely champion in the fight against politics-as-usual

www.telegraph.co.uk

Some highlights

The immoderate moderates

Clark has coined the term “far-Centre” to characterise those in every party who “depict themselves as balanced moderates, as experienced technocrats, as the only sensible adults in the room,” he wrote in The Telegraph in January. These extreme centrists are more radical for being unable to recognise their own positions. “The most intolerant people of all are those who insist most loudly on their moderation.”

Rather than believing in traditional ideologies, he says, these Centrists cling to shibboleths about climate change and human rights, protected by lawyers rather than voters. “All parties are saying ‘Our opponents are extremists, they are far-something’” Clark says, over tea and cake at his home in Northumberland. “But according to what scale? What do [far-Centrists] believe? They don’t believe very much coherently. There is no grand ideology.”

The dearth of ideas was brought home to him when he did what he had never done before and read the party manifestos. “They are, intellectually, remarkably shallow and astonishingly lightweight,” he says. “The Lib Dem manifesto doesn’t express liberalism. The Labour manifesto doesn’t express socialism. The Conservative manifesto makes no mention of conservatism. They’re a collection of ideas scrambled together at the last moment. What draws them together? Nothing. They are not eternal truths. They are ideologies which have all hit the ground.”

....

The Enlightenment and illiberal liberals

Clark argues that although the Enlightenment has come to look like a single neatly defined idea, it was in fact composed of many different strands of thought developed at many different times. During the 18th century, Clark says, while “enlightenment with a small e was everywhere, the Enlightenment was nowhere.” But in the 20th century, particularly after the Second World War, the Enlightenment was enshrined as a single concept, a period of secular and scientific liberalisation across Europe, from which many modern beliefs can be traced.

My own take, previously expressed, is that pre-WW2 the Continent (Europe as it is now known) was still a feudal society managed from the top down with the aid of the Church (Roman or National). When the countries that fancied themselves as "liberal democracies" overran the existing structure their new clients wanted to know what they had to do to become good "liberal democrats" while maintaining both their societies and their positions in society. The "liberal democrats" then responded they needed to be tolerant.

But does that include being tolerant of the the intolerant?

My sense is that Clark's view of the period known as the Enlightenment as a period where a lot of enlightenment was happening and ideas were being played with, where dissent was tolerated, and where nothing was settled, is a lot closer to my notion of an enlightened society. If you are a stickler for rules, are you liberal? Are you enlightened?

....

“I do enjoy argument very much,” says Prof Jonathan Clark. “When my wife wants to be mean to me, she says ‘You would have made a good lawyer.’ Somebody once said [the same] to Samuel Johnson. Johnson got angry and replied ‘Why do you say that to me now, when it’s too late?’”

At 74, it is possible Clark has left it too late for a law conversion course. As a provocative historian of 17th and 18th British and American history, however, he has had his share of contentious debates. He helped to coin the term “long 18th century” to describe the elongated period between the beginning of the Nine Years War in 1688 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Now his latest book takes on his biggest challenge yet: the entire notion of the Enlightenment.
...


Clark has seen first-hand the effect of wokery on university life, where it has perhaps been most pronounced. He was born in 1951 and grew up in Surrey. His father was an electrical engineer and his mother was a housewife. After grammar school he went on to study history at Downing College, Cambridge. He briefly worked at the London Stock Exchange before he returned to academia, via teaching posts at Cambridge and All Souls, Oxford.

 

[Kirkhill]

Further to....

“The Enlightenment is an ideology, a doctrine and therefore it shares the experience of all the great ideologies, from conceptualisation through development, popularisation, hegemony, decline, to de-conceptualisation,” he says. “I think of myself as a de-conceptualiser.”

Although the Enlightenment was coined in the 19th century as the German Aufklärung, Clark argues it was not until after the Second World War that it started to gain real traction in European thought. Whatever Nazism had been, the Enlightenment was its opposite. Over the following decades it became inseparable from liberalism and social reform. As Clark puts it, the Enlightenment was “the abstract programme which makes possible modernity”, and became “a shorthand for all those people who have adopted causes of social reform, whether it’s education or state schools or the health service or the quality of daily life.”

He sees the exhaustion of political thought everywhere around him. “At the last general Election I realised all the great ideologies have run out of steam. Liberalism was famously defeated by socialism; socialism ran out of steam and Tony Blair abandoned it. Conservativism was abandoned by Margaret Thatcher, who turned it into [Friedrich] Hayekian radical individualism. It was a great symbolic moment in the Conservative party when they threw Roger Scruton under the bus.”

 

[Kirkhill]

Related

Labour and the Tories still don’t understand the appeal of Reform

Nigel Farage’s party gives a voice to people frustrated by the political establishment

www.telegraph.co.uk

This is not how politics is supposed to work. Voters are not meant to support divided parties. That has become a reliable touchstone in the science of psephology, and it has been confirmed numerous times by – to name but two examples – the experience of Labour in the early 1980s and the Conservatives in the mid-1990s.

Yet in the case of Reform, the party sails happily forwards. The laws of political gravity seem to have been suspended for now.

We should be wary of drawing too many parallels from the United States, but with the appropriate amount of caution, the triumph of Donald Trump can be an informative one. The Democrats became complacent about their own prospects because they simply couldn’t bring themselves to believe that a man who had been indicted on so many criminal charges, and who had been impeached for his role in encouraging the storming of the Capitol on January 6 2021, could ever win again. The traditional rules of politics made such a thing impossible.

And then the voters had their say, and the Democrats still haven’t even begun to understand why their suppositions proved so calamitously wrong. You can see much of the same arrogant assumptions being made here about Farage and Reform. “He’s a racist, he’s thick, he’s a populist, he has no policies, he’s inconsistent… There’s no way people will vote for him or his party.”

And yet…We are drawn to the conclusion that those voters now considering voting for Reform – and they come from Labour as much as from the Conservatives – are flirting with Farage’s party not necessarily because they have a great deal of faith in his ability to govern. They support Reform because it is a disruptor.

Is Canada in the mood for disruption?

...

And why is the UK still inclined towards disruption?

Reform would win local elections – but Angela Rayner cancelled them

Poll findings likely to spark demands for votes in all areas to go ahead without delays announced by Deputy PM

www.telegraph.co.uk

 

[Kirkhill]

One man's Progress is another man's Reform.

We have 500 years of Reform generated Progress arising from Protest.

And today I saw this:

Is there, after all, a more Protestant idea than “your truth”?

In a flash I was Enlightened.

It came from an Irish writer writing in the English Telegraph, complaining about wokeism.

Take Ireland. Once defined by Catholicism and national struggle, the country now draws its moral cues not from Rome, but from San Francisco. The tricolour still flies over the Dáil, but it is increasingly outnumbered by rainbow flags in government buildings and shop windows.

This is a country where a man may become a woman with the stroke of a pen – and to question it, to utter a biological fact, is to risk social or professional exile. Last month, the UK Supreme Court ruled that trans women are not women under the legal meaning of the Equality Act. In Ireland, the response was a polite shrug. Norma Foley, the equality minister, said the ruling had no relevance here and reaffirmed Ireland’s commitment to protecting trans identities. RTÉ, ever deferential, noted that a transgender advocacy group was “encouraged” that the British heresy hadn’t crossed the water.

But where did this doctrine come from, if not from Britain? If not from America? It didn’t rise from the peat bog. It was not whispered by ghosts in Glendalough. This new creed – that identity outranks biology, that feeling cancels fact – was imported, like oat milk and mindfulness, and embraced with evangelical zeal by a political class desperate to seem more enlightened than their forebears. Is there, after all, a more Protestant idea than “your truth”?

Woke is sinking fast. Ireland’s elites want to go down with the ship

The liberal establishment is unwilling to admit the foreign origins of the dogmas they now cling to

www.telegraph.co.uk

And there you have it.

The rise of socialism, progressivism, wokeism - all tied to the rise, and fall, of protestantism.

Protestantism started as a protest against the strictures of authority, in particular the authority of The Church and its Priests.

Protestantism argued that there was no need for Priests. That every man, woman and child, had the innate ability to appeal to their own conscience, to communicate directly with their own god, and draw their own conclusions.

Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone),
Sola Fide (faith alone),
Sola Gratia (grace alone),
Solus Christus (Christ alone),
Soli Deo Gloria (glory to God alone).

That recipe resulted in not One Truth, the Truth as arbitrated by the Church, but many truths. The arbitrage of those many truths so as to prevent civil strife between people who believed different things became the project of centuries. That project eventually saw the rise of democratic decision making through Calvin, who exchanged Rome's absolute Truth for the absolute Truths of Geneva and Edinburgh and Amsterdam. That effort did nothing to prevent the centuries of Wars of Religion. Those Wars were only settled by a combination of old-fashioned force and modern, enlightened, toleration. People had to be trained to tolerate the other.

Protestant churches lost their congregations because protestantism encourages each individual to think for themselves. There was less cohesion. Over time the Church split on national lines, then by regional synods, by local presbyteries, by congregations, by individuals. Ultimately there was no authority. Jack's as good as his master.

Which leads us to the present day. Everybody convinced they are right. Everybody seeking authority. Everybody sure of their own truth.

But nobody sure how to tolerate.

...

Pragmatism and compromise are the greatest virtues.

 

[Kirkhill]

The remainder of the article for consideration.

Ireland has since adopted nearly every progressive orthodoxy drifting in from abroad. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – the corporate euphemism for race and gender quotas – has, for all practical purposes, replaced the Holy Trinity as the nation’s guiding ethic. When the Trump administration sent letters urging multinationals in Ireland to abandon race-based hiring targets for US operations, the response was predictably dismissive.

Simon Harris, the foreign minister, declared that Ireland must “remain true to our European values”, by which he presumably meant America’s old ones. Trinity College Dublin advised staff not to respond to American inquiries about DEI-linked research. The Irish Times condemned Washington’s letters as “unwanted foreign interference” – without quite explaining why DEI, itself an American import, was welcome interference.

Such questions are rarely asked, largely because these ideas were never really debated. That, too, is a measure of American soft power: its values stream in through Netflix, filter down through HR departments, and echo through NGOs – not as ideology, but as moral instinct.

Consider the Gender Recognition Act of 2015. It allows a person to change legal sex by obtaining a certificate, and it passed with barely a whisper of dissent. When RTÉ in 2022 briefly gave airtime to gender-critical women, activists threatened to uninvite them from Pride events. Micheál Martin, now Taoiseach, dismissed the segment as “toxic” and added: “We don’t need that kind of debate in Ireland.”

If that sounds patronising, it’s because it is. Martin, like many of his colleagues – including Norma Foley – is a former teacher. And it shows. They speak in the platitudinous simplicities of the classroom: this is kind, that is not. The possibility that a complex issue might involve competing, even irreconcilable rights is quietly set aside.

But outside the classroom, the tune is changing. Corporate America is starting to backtrack. In 2023, references to “diversity” and “DEI” in Fortune 100 company filings dropped by 22 per cent. Even BlackRock – once the $11.5 trillion engine room of woke capitalism — has scaled back its language, just three years after CEO Larry Fink declared the firm must “embed DEI into everything we do.”

Ireland may soon find itself pulled in two directions: between its economic lifeline – US multinationals – and the values of its progressive elite. It remains to be seen whether it will toe the new line coming from Washington, or remain a stubborn holdout for wokeism: a relic of a cargo cult of bad ideas already tapering out elsewhere.

But if Irish leaders choose that hill to die on, they should not delude themselves. It is not native ground.