A Hail of Dead Cats

In which your intrepid explorer goes among the ARC-ers and returns with an ethnographic survey of sorts

Last week, I was dispatched to cover the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London. From the outset, I viewed the who’s who of both speakers and attendees present as an obvious counter-elite in the Peter Turchin sense. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Iain Murray has an amusing term: “Counter-Elite International” with a nod to various historical attempts to internationalise socialism. Fellow Law & Liberty writer Samuel Gregg calls the ARC event itself the “Counter-Davos”. Both have a point.

To that end, I’d like to draw your attention to this piece of mine (published yesterday) in Law & Liberty. So that the (very Australian) political joke in the headline makes sense, here is an extract:

There’s a concept in Australian political analysis—which several people brought up at ARC in conversation with me—I think more enlightening than Bannon’s phrase. It goes by the name “dead cat strategy” or “throwing a dead cat on the table.” Traditionally, it’s used as a distraction if your side is in a bit of political bother. In 2013, Boris Johnson described how “they will be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

However, a dead cat strategy can be even more effective when what you’re doing is popular—as many of Trump’s executive orders currently are—and the dead cats themselves are more than mere diversions. There are errors great and small in Musk’s claims (here is a detailed analysis of his Social Security comments from a Trump voter who happens also to be a mathematician), but because Trump keeps throwing a dead cat on the USA’s dining-room table just at the point his opposition have removed the previous one, these criticisms seldom make their way to the wider public. The whole exercise is a hail of dead cats.

Read the whole thing.

A Hail of Dead Rats