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