"The effectiveness of the status strategy is increased by this analytical and operational nihilism."
Nietzsche saw this, way back when. It seems to me this is the ultimate endpoint of the Enlightenment - its own self destruction via nihilism. The question is what to salvage, what to junk and what to move onto next. The temptation is going to be to fall back on what worked before - but that won't do, as we are here because of what came before; and we are falling because of how it failed in the face of deep human behavior. The one bit of optimism I can muster is that the Romans didn't have the benefit of the template they are for us.
The importance of the coherent social pattern disrupted by the Great Society can't be overstated. Removal of real estate segregation allowed economically successful blacks to move to what had been lily white realms (which reinforced the economical segregation of poor whites). Now that mobility and social interaction was good, no question, but there was a cost. It left the abandoned black inner city with no informal social control or behavior modeling for success. Even progressives can't not-notice that, so they have to create ever more elaborate theory as to why that exists rather than to accept it as a consequence of what was more generally a good thing.
"the ultimate endpoint of the Enlightenment - its own self destruction via nihilism." Interesting that I had never really considered that the Enlightenment would or should have an endpoint. Certainly for the Scottish Enlightenment, we would have hoped an emphasis on pursing truth would never die out or be corrupted. For the French version, Denis Diderot's dictum to "strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest" has not yet come to pass (whether a wise aim or not). The American contribution via our Constitution and "explicitly designed government" has worked very well in a big picture, long term view, but of course we are now struggling with some of the social poisons and foibles of human nature that our Founders understood and that Lorenzo addresses so well. Plus, of course our Founders were well versed in the template of the failed Roman republic. If nihilism is our endpoint, why do I still so naively remain optimistic?
Not sure I've ever dropped this Franklin quote here, but I think it most applicable.
"I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well-administred; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
It is of course that last dozen or so words that are crucial.
I was generally aware of Franklin's remark at the Convention, but did not recall the more negative aspects at the end. Clearly, we recognize that the Founder/Framers were deep students of human nature. Which is why I am somewhat surprised they did not explicitly provide for fiscal responsibility via some balanced budget criterion. Much of our problem seems to arise from the promise of something for nothing. Even those of us who know better will tend to fall for it (before we stop ourselves?).
It is fairly clear that Madison studied the Serene Republic of Venice pretty closely, it being the longest lasting Republic. It also, along with Genoa, invented the public bond, so functional deficit financing. The Dutch Republic and Great Britain built themselves as imperial Great Powers with deficit financing. Parliamentary states seemed to be able to manage deficit financing, mainly because the bondholders were, essentially, the Parliamentary class. Autocracies, not so much.
Thanks for mentioning Venice republic, an area of history where I have large gaps. So, yes, RESPONSIBLE deficit spending allows an economy to grow as large and as fast as the corresponding supporting wealth can be created. When things are going well (1600's explorations, 1990's internet boom?) this is great. But the Austrian school says things will always overheat, and then collapse. Plus we now know better than ever before that the appraisal of that wealth value still remains a largely subjective and fluid assessment, not so hard and fast as we are often led to believe.
On the parliamentary class as the more "responsible" bondholders, that triggered the following thoughts:
1) perhaps bond ownership should be limited to "qualified investors", which I understand are those with $100K or mor available, supposedly a more knowledgeable or experienced level of investor. [This may be the practical case already?]
2) maybe we should make 50% of our Congressmen's [and Parliament's?] pay in bonds, so they would remain closely interested in the country's investment quality. [Per recent news article, the Congress, President, VP, & SCOTUS (plus maybe all confirmed "officers of the US"?) still get paid during govt. shutdowns since they are identified in the Constitution [not sure about Senate confirmed military officers - they may not legally be "officers of the US" even if of the military?].
3) all govt. DEFICIT spending should be done via private sector banks/ resources. Possibly with well defined leverage limits? Capital created out of thin air, but not the Treasury printing money. If the deficit amount is not available from the private banks, it does not get spent.
4) this still does not explain why Madison, et al., did not provide for more stringent financial guidance or controls -- were their potential fears assuaged with the example of GB?
5) (related to #4): is there an aspect of scale here, where the larger nations are more subject to taking excessive risks since it seems the tax payer base is still "so large" that errors can still be covered? I am reminded about a comment you made some time back (around the 2008 Great Recession?) on your Oz blog, that the Australian central bank had done the best job of responding responsibly, followed by Canada, (and maybe GB?), but much superior to US Fed.
Austrian economists are notorious for over-predicting hyperinflation. While I like their historical approach, they tend to be too in love with their framings. In particular, they under-estimate compensating mechanisms. Von Mises and Hayek were correct in their economic calculation point, but wildly incorrect in the rate of consequences thereof precisely because, however dysfunctionally, the command economies came up with compensating mechanisms.
Diderot's presumption (and error) was that kings and priests don't resurrect under new guises. This is the point Lorenzo is laboring to make us see - it is deep, non-rational, social dynamics and it isn't necessarily about what is top-down, but emergent from us, collectively. Leaders can proclaim themselves as leaders - but absent followers, they are nothing.
Nietzsche toyed with the concept of the eternal recurrence. Huxley put it as "[s]o long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable". I've really come to seeing Huxley as being more on point about us today than Orwell was.
Then via the law of averages, we ought to also periodically see the rise of Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Churchills, but they seem few on the ground. Do Reagan and Thatcher qualify? Queen Elizabeth?
A parallel thought is why is this desire for such leaders so close to the surface? Some deep need for "father figures"? It would appear that a perception of least "relative" poverty or oppression is also involved. If most folks have some level of a decent (independent) income compared to their peers, they might still feel jealous or slightly aggrieved, but not enough to revolt (the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer concept?) But even such a farmer was not as divorced from the need for government as Jefferson hoped.
The exceptional doesn't arise out of the average (that's a definite causation error), and the exceptions over time will regress to the mean.
Socially, we are far more aware of how we stack up against peers (or even more so those ranked above us), then how much better off we are than we used to be (individually). The real measure of our wealth isn't relative, but all of our social status is relative. Wealth itself isn't zero-sum, status is. Western philosophy has been trying for over 2000 years to teach us to not focus our self esteem in others' views of us. It doesn't seem to be going so well.
Initially your 2nd paragraph struck me as "right on!" Solidly true. Concise and well stated. But after a little additional thought, I see some nuances might apply. There is still an absolute level of wealth (and income) that is needed before we can be sufficiently independent to tell the despot and the bureaucrat to get lost. But once those levels of reasonable self sufficiency are reached, I accept your point that it is the relative status levels where the Progressives/Leftists are trying to gain leverage, convincing people they are "oppressed" because they only have a 32" TV and not a 64" one, etc.
We surmise that the common animal between apes and hominids existed about 7 million years ago. They probably had status contests similar to what we see in ourselves and the apes today.
The despot and bureaucrat thrive on prosperity, not on poverty - the pickings are too slim in the latter. Nope, you need a nice fatted calf to properly sustain a priestly [read: parasitic] class.
And the crux of our dilemma is just why that is! As you are exploring with these essays. If we have a relatively common* genetic contribution to our moral views, then culture, religion, and successful economics for the wider populace all appear to play some role in influencing the different final levels of morality, virtue, character, etc.
Bringing us right back to your capacity vs. character discussion. :-)
*But perhaps this genetic element is also not as common in its nature as we might suppose. The success of evolution depends on having a variety of possible configurations among which to select for eventual survival. Why do we continue to exist as a species with about 4% psychopaths?
Father figures is one way to put it, another way to put it is that we need some sort of formal Authority. Mainly because the world is so inherently and incredibly complex that without a starting point or beginning frame, it is literally quite impossible to make sense of anything.
Even understanding the tiniest grain of sand at multiple levels of resolution is impossible. Trying to understand even one human being - the most complex thing to ever exist in the universe as far as we can tell - is a monumental task. And yet modern individualistic Enlightenment thinking acts as if people can be trusted to learn about and understand - in less than ~50 years - all of human society, billions of humans acting upon their environment and the environment acting back upon them in a massive feedback loop.
And that's just the human side. Trying to understand the complexity of the physical universe outside of human intervention is even more staggering. All this to say - we need some sort of Authority. The need for 'father figures' is not a shallow or immature urge, it is an absolute necessity.
Agree that we have evolved with fathers, and that those men are essential to protect us and our mothers, plus help guide us to maturity. And that they are assisted in hunter gatherer and larger societies by their fellows in creating a culture that works for most of the group most of the time.
That kind of experience has shown hierarchy seems to work well in organizing and executing many complex activities, from hunting mammoth to hunting the genome.
The core issue for us is whether that authority is granted via consent of the governed or not, thereby presumably achieving some level of accountability for results. Many have observed that even tyrants cannot survive if they "lose the mandate of heaven", a la Ceausescu or Julius Caesar. On the cultural generation of consent in selecting leaders, the earliest example I read of was the monastics selecting their abbot during the "Dark Ages", but I suspect there are many earlier examples.
What we are facing now (at least in the US) is the fear that the election/ selection process has been corrupted (mostly via mail in ballots and the counting thereof) and that our desired accountability has been or will be lost. Congress delegating rule making to the admin state has further eroded keeping authority accountable.
The problem is exactly what you point out - the social dynamics of 10,000+ years ago are not scalable to our social existence today. It isn't a question of reverting back - we haven't escaped that gravitational well and we must, unless we are to regress.
The flaw in the Enlightenment is the presumption that rationality reigns supreme (with or without God), rather than being a limited tool for a random species of hairless ape in a chaotic universe.
I'm not suggesting we revert back, but I don't think we can get around the idea of having an ultimate Authority giving us a ground truth to operate off of. How else would we make sense of anything?
Agreed that the flaw in the enlightenment is essentially the worship of intellect or rationality.
What would you propose as a way to move forward? Are you saying we jettison old belief systems?
I'm generally more in favor of trying to reinterpret or re-examine them to see their wisdom and virtues through a modern lens.
"... the coherent social pattern disrupted by the Great Society can't be overstated.... Even progressives can't not-notice that, so they have to create ever more elaborate theory as to why that exists..."
I would be far from the first person to suggest Leftist Progressivism is a religion; and the history of religion abrogating rational analyses and responses is legion. Based on Larry Arnhart identifying his 20th Darwinian evolved human nature desires as "a desire for transcendence", I posit our evolved minds contain both rational/analytical and transcendental seeking elements. These appear to battle each other for dominance on a given issue. It has been a life long mystery to me why the rational element (of so very many people) does not dominant in more situations than it does.
Yes, as either predator or prey, the fight or flight response was a short circuiting of excessive time needed for closer observation and rational analysis to stay alive. But as we became the apex predator [microbes, and ourselves, now being our most dangerous enemies] our environment also changed from 3 mph locomotion, transport, and communication; max 150 person social interactions; biological readiness to be adults and parents at age 14; verbal and written ways to convey knowledge and wisdom across generations; vastly expanded realms of trust, trade, and specialization; etc. These now all mandate increased reliance on rationality over emotion. But the pull of emotion (and transcendence?) remain strong.
And if emotional responses now work against our continued species survival, we probably won't know this for sure for 100,000 years [or maybe just the next 50?? :-0 ].
I recently watched a 15 minute YT video about the issues of cosmology awaiting more data from the James Webb satellite and the problems with current theories concerning the size and expansion rate of the universe: search for Dr. Becky Smethurst and "New study just made the "crisis in cosmology" WORSE". At about the 7:30 minute point is a depiction of the Lanaikea super super galaxy cluster. This is one of a few such super clusters being observed and measured. Apparently they tend to "wrap around" each other and partially block seeing portions of their "neighboring" peers. But these are galaxies, not discrete star systems! The Milky Way galaxy is in the Virgo cluster (mid upper right in the display) of several thousand galaxies, itself a subset of the Virgo Super Cluster, in turn a smallish subset of the Lanaikea designation.
[This video is now 9 days old, and I see she has a new one 2 days old that may include results from the JWST!]
Just re-read the paragraph I quoted the sentence from and realized I missed commenting on this...
"The worship of the splendour in their heads becomes more unconstrained and better able to evolve for maximum operational effectiveness as its fundamentally pathological nature leads to institutional decay."
That captures the terrible consequences of the Platonic ideal better than anything else you've written Lorenzo. It also marries to Sowell's vision of the annointed. It is about the worst combination of Platonism and religious zealotry imaginable. The only thing really lacking, as of now, is the determination to enforce it by exterminating the non-conforming. And I would fear the only way of heading that off is not going to be by peaceful debate. Once ensconced in power in the institutions, power will not be given up willingly.
Can't help thinking - as I enjoy this wonderful, informed and erudite thesis - that it is totally wasted on those who would most benefit: the blinkered, 'progressive' wokerati whose ability to follow a logical train of thought is apparently disabled
There are of course those who are completely intellectually blind, and they will not be reached. There are also those who's intellectual conscience can be summoned up, and you can recognize them by the venomous reaction of those who see them as traitors - such as Matt Taibbi's treatment by Democrats and establishment journalists (i.e. partisan hacks). Freddie deBoer is walking but not quite crossing that line.
It is also important for those on the right to understand this, as they often are tempted to use the tactics of the left, having seen them be successful. Consider the whinging by conservatives about how they are treated by the media - aping the victimization strategy.
"Consider the whinging by conservatives about how they are treated by the media..."
I struggle to understand why there isn't some conservatively (or even generally neutrally) oriented media option available at the mass media level. Given the (still) 50+% audience that is out there thirsting for real "fair and balanced" news and commentary, it has to be seen as a major money making opportunity for / by someone.
While Elon Musk and "X" are promising, I fear neither he nor "they" are as conservatively oriented as many of us might like. Plus ego! Or he has still not found a suitable management team to run it? (Compared to Space X and Tesla). National Review is apparently subsidized by Oldsmar; Epoch Times, The Federalist, Bari Weiss, Michael Shallenberger, and City Journal are growing but not recognized market leaders in any sense.
In the past we might spend (say) $150/year for print newspapers and believed we were getting a reasonable exposure to reality, or understood that the bias was mostly on the op-ed page, not in every news article. Now I spend about $500/year for a complement of Substack and other web based sources with which I feel comfortable, but I also recognize their media reach is limited to (maybe) 10 million people max and that I am now marinated in an info bubble of my own preferences. From this perspective most of the lying I see in the MSM is lying by omission of coverage, as much as purposeful false reporting by commission. But that is all they need to succeed.
Plus, to access my bubble I pay $600/year for internet connections and $600+/year for my intentionally limited cable equivalent input streams. Not sure just how much a subscription for a decent balanced media source would be worth to me, but maybe $200/year? But I am a cheapskate compared to those who pay $5 for a latte. What am I missing??
(1) Collapsing business model. The old-style media business model is collapsing because of the collapse of advertising streams.
(2) Network inertia in a localised media market. US media markets tended to favour just one local newspaper, which were subject to opinion shifts among their feed-in graduates. The UK had much more of a national media market, so has done much better at having a more politically diverse range of newspapers.
(3) Resistance. The “quality” papers captured elite networking and the clickbait dynamics of online media encourages media siloing. Makes it hard for new players to break in.
I'm surprised you didn't mention massive competition, as well. We're in a period where legacy media is being competed out of nonexistence. I expect in another 10-20 years if current trends continue we will see more conservative, larger media groups coalesce. Perhaps out of groups of substacks like yourself, N.S. Lyons, and others.
Justice is giving to each what he has earned. Social justice is giving to each what another has earned. Social justice, then, is institutionalized injustice.
Depends on if you are taking lead and gold literally. Try thinking of it as turning trauma into mental and spiritual strength, risk into reward, fear into joy etc.
Metaphor is the stuff of poetry. Taking everything literally as truth is the stuff of scientists, and anyone is free to see the damage "science" has done, compared to poetry.
The world isn't a systemically toxic place because of poetry, or any god...but those who believe in scientific materialism have a blind spot miles wide.
I went to William's Substack rather earlier today to understand what he meant by "turning fear into joy". Spent time reading a couple of his essays, with some extended thread commentary back and forth over several topics.
I think he and I are in close synchrony on most things and will agree to disagree on a few others that require deeper exploration than can be done easily in such comment threads.
I suggest some here may find merit in exploring his Substack as well. He is currently not requiring any payment for subscribers.
Another fine essay. I am always amazed at your marvelous hard hitting, on target, and zinger phrasings.
I have not yet gone back and read the whole set of essays in this series, so I may be speaking out of turn. But I respectfully wanted to raise a concern that if the eventual intent is to convert these essays into chapters in a book, then you and your "editorial team" should look closely for excessive repetition. There was a fair amount of that in this essay, and that works well for an essay that comes out about once a week, offering selective reinforcement of what has been said before. However, if or when incorporated into a book format, I fear seeing so many references to (say) the "transformational future" (or similar language about arc of history, disfunction, etc.) from the past chapter I read a half hour ago also emphasized again in the chapter I am currently reading. Certainly if you are building on a theme, some repetition to keep orienting the current discussion to that on-going and developing position is valid. Again, just a caution, or hopefully a constructive criticism. :-)
We all want your project to succeed, and it will be criticized by "the other side" no matter how tightly the language is presented. But there is no point in also providing ammunition for them, or even for the more sympathetic reviewers who still don't really "know what time it is!".
Each essay has only had a single editorial pass, and once the series is complete on here, I will have to do another (significant) edit to turn what is an old-style serialisation into a book proposal for both my agent and publisher. It will not go to anyone in its current form, mainly because both of us are still learning as we go.
One upside: between us, this is our fifth book. We have done this before!
Yes, fair comment, ta. I am conscious that there is a fair bit of repetition, in part because one cannot assume readers have read previous essays. The next essay, for instance, goes over much of what is in this essay, but from a different angle: the emotional logic of the politics of the transformational future.
The plan is not to just publish the essays unchanged, but to edit so the narrative is more seamless. Also, the process of writing and wrestling with the material, and the comments received, have meant that the analysis has continued to evolve. A trivial example: what was called ‘vanguard capital’ early has become ‘dominion capital’.
Kudos. Thanks. In 2020 the Democrats had three years to organize the Iowa caucuses (6 electoral votes.) To borrow your phrasing, they turned even that into crap.
Reading this excellent essay as an American makes me want to don my digital hair shirt and apologize to all humanity for letting this academic virus escape our lab and infect the rest of the world.
Could there be anything more AMERICAN than the "transformational future" and its political and moral air castles? I used to think Social Justice was part Marxist and part Protestant (I still do) but I completely forgot to add Walt Disney and the American fantasy factory as an ideological godparent to the fever dream that's captured the Western world and addled its brains.
Really how far is it from “If You Can Dream It, You Can Do It” or "If You Wish Upon a Star..." to "I dream of a world where no one gets their feelings hurt and everyone's self-esteem is backed by the full force of the government"?
Social Justice is like spending a day at Disney World, coming out humming "It's a Small World After All" only to be locked inside Epcot Center and enforced to endure a Struggle Session conducted by angry clowns who sing songs about love and tolerance while zapping you with a cattle prod.
But Americans are like the world's richest teenagers who construct a fantasy world with Daddy's credit card, who imagine themselves moral paragons because they make sure to tip the gardener and valet parker, who really believe life should be nothing but joy and self-affirmation, and if it's not, there must be some malevolent entity that's conspiring against them (of course this malevolent entity is called "Reality" by the rest of us)—and like all rich grandiose teenagers, their fabulous fantasy life will only come to an end when the money runs out.
Great analysis. Thanks. As an Englishwoman (albeit an itinerant one), I could feel this virus starting to spread out from America. I instinctively resisted it, but felt guilty doing doing so because I'd liked all the Americans I'd ever met.
It's not all your fault. The virus would not have spread had the terrain not been susceptible in the first place.
America may have nursed it, but a large part of this traces directly to Europe - Foucault, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci. It was the New Left in the 60s that resurrected the moribund American progressive tradition (LBJ being the death rattle of the New Deal).
Even more quietly imported was the bureaucratic marriage of state and corporate interests - from the Axis countries. [Something, something about choosing your enemies carefully something]. Most may have forgotten the once vaunted post-war consensus - that partisanship ended at our shores and there was virtually no criticism of our part in the Cold War, at least until Viet Nam broke that.
There's no doubt the Parisian Post-Maoists belong in the rogues gallery here of academic onanists and radical posers who just wanted to watch the world burn—as long as they still got tenure and book deals!
America's adversary intellectuals and their French older siblings seem to have the same angry teenager's conception of freedom, where it's a simple step on a continuum from "I won't make my bed, Mom!" to "Down with the Fascist state!"
I think this also points to one of the main advantages Western post-60s Leftists have over their opponents: they have always just wanted to tear down all they could get their hands on (as their Papa Karl described it, "the ruthless criticism of all that exists"), and have no ability to create or maintain anything except word games crafted from stale jargon.
I could destroy my house right now in a few hours with a sledgehammer, but I couldn't build it if my life depended on it.
And yes, as you say, the New Left and neoliberalism are a match made in heaven, destined for the altar: they are both founded on the Holy Self and its needs and desires being the only sacred and the only reality.
Neoliberalism is more rescuable, because it is mainly the application of mainstream economics to public policy. If economics is re-configured so as to fully face that everything social is emergent from the biological — including that we are much more successful than Pan troglodytes because they ARE Homo economicus and we are not — much of the problematic aspects of neoliberalism fall away. For instance, that in biology efficiency serves resilience and the same should be true in public policy.
To make an extremely unfashionable point, the US in the early to mid C20th accepted in way too many of the wrong sort of Jewish intellectuals: the folk who are in love with a system that makes them SO IMPORTANT: Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse …
The US is both very much a child of Europe and very not-European at the same time. Like the rest of the Anglosphere, there is almost no local tradition of anti-Semitism: the classic example is Judah Benjamin being a Confederate Cabinet member. The American South was particularly sympathetic to the British cause in WWII prior to Pearl Harbor.
And yet continental origin (“race”) has had a salience in the US it never really had in Europe, for obvious demographic and historical reasons. Folk from one continent invading, settling and dispossessing the continental locals, creating a political order part of which used slaves from a third continent and being dubious about migrants from a fourth. With complexities that are often overlooked: such as what became “Jim Crow” was originally developed to repress the “poor white trash” “masterless men” in the Antebellum South.
Anti-Catholicism was the American answer to antisemitism, at least for many years. The non-European aspect is probably because the Europeans that came were fed up with Europe as it was at the time. It was really the Irish that came that longed for the country they left.
But you are partially missing the point about the left obsession with Palestine/Israel over other conflict as does the left. The important point is that various jewish lobbies are constantly interfering and with total success with the governments (American, British, French, probably many others) and democratic processes. This is especially choking concerning the Palestine/Israel conflict even if pushing special interests have far more important effects on our daily life in occident, except rare terrorist events, and short of a nuclear conflict. In France the assembly deputy Meyer Habib a close friend of Netanyahu, claims that Israel (really a terrorist state without even a constitution) is the only democratic country in the region and that its army is the most moral in the world and rudely shut up anyone who says otherwise. That does not happen so often because critics of Israel hardly have access to the French mass media. Except the very woke Melenchon. Also, about Meyer Habib, I think that a representative should not have a double nationality as he has.
Also in France, there is a constant chase of souverainists, labeled as far-right, but the Likud is hardly criticised which Meyer Habib defends. An idealist, Etienne Chouard, was diffamed and cancelled, because he wanted to discuss his pet project, citizen referendum, and not the jewish genocide in WII. He honestly said, he was not competent on the subject and did not come to discuss an about 80 years old genocide. He was immediately called and negationnist. Being defended by the Soral polemist was the next mark of infamy for him.
Israel does not have a written Constitution. Neither does the United Kingdom or New Zealand. Does not make them not-democratic.
Cannot comment on public discourse in France, but criticising Israel is very easy in the Anglosphere, lots of folk do. But the Anglosphere has a much, much thinner tradition of anti-Semitism than France or Germany or … so the historical sensitivities are different.
I have criticised the Jewish lobby, but the most striking feature about it in the Anglosphere is how counter-productive it has been.
As for Israel-Palestine, the median Jewish (all 17m of them around the world) position is the the two-state solution. The median Arab (all 400m of them in Arab League countries) position is that Israel be abolished. That is why there has never been full peace, and the October 7 body-cam pogrom is why a country of refugees with nowhere else to go cannot abandon the IDF.
The PLO was founded on the model of the FLN, whose “solution” to French settlers in Algeria was to threaten genocide (La valise ou le cercueil). Hamas has the slaughter or expulsion of Israeli Jews, and the reduction of any remnant to subordinated dhimmis as its declared aim. That is the context that gets ludicrously simplified into comments such as “Israel is a terroristic state”.
There's an apposite line in the Le Figaro newspaper this morning, here in France...
'Since the 19th century, the people have been seen as immature, violent, unpredictable and dangerous, which is why they first had to be "civilized", then educated and now re-educated.'
"The effectiveness of the status strategy is increased by this analytical and operational nihilism."
Nietzsche saw this, way back when. It seems to me this is the ultimate endpoint of the Enlightenment - its own self destruction via nihilism. The question is what to salvage, what to junk and what to move onto next. The temptation is going to be to fall back on what worked before - but that won't do, as we are here because of what came before; and we are falling because of how it failed in the face of deep human behavior. The one bit of optimism I can muster is that the Romans didn't have the benefit of the template they are for us.
The importance of the coherent social pattern disrupted by the Great Society can't be overstated. Removal of real estate segregation allowed economically successful blacks to move to what had been lily white realms (which reinforced the economical segregation of poor whites). Now that mobility and social interaction was good, no question, but there was a cost. It left the abandoned black inner city with no informal social control or behavior modeling for success. Even progressives can't not-notice that, so they have to create ever more elaborate theory as to why that exists rather than to accept it as a consequence of what was more generally a good thing.
Another meaty comment. :-)
"the ultimate endpoint of the Enlightenment - its own self destruction via nihilism." Interesting that I had never really considered that the Enlightenment would or should have an endpoint. Certainly for the Scottish Enlightenment, we would have hoped an emphasis on pursing truth would never die out or be corrupted. For the French version, Denis Diderot's dictum to "strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest" has not yet come to pass (whether a wise aim or not). The American contribution via our Constitution and "explicitly designed government" has worked very well in a big picture, long term view, but of course we are now struggling with some of the social poisons and foibles of human nature that our Founders understood and that Lorenzo addresses so well. Plus, of course our Founders were well versed in the template of the failed Roman republic. If nihilism is our endpoint, why do I still so naively remain optimistic?
Not sure I've ever dropped this Franklin quote here, but I think it most applicable.
"I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well-administred; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
It is of course that last dozen or so words that are crucial.
I was generally aware of Franklin's remark at the Convention, but did not recall the more negative aspects at the end. Clearly, we recognize that the Founder/Framers were deep students of human nature. Which is why I am somewhat surprised they did not explicitly provide for fiscal responsibility via some balanced budget criterion. Much of our problem seems to arise from the promise of something for nothing. Even those of us who know better will tend to fall for it (before we stop ourselves?).
It is fairly clear that Madison studied the Serene Republic of Venice pretty closely, it being the longest lasting Republic. It also, along with Genoa, invented the public bond, so functional deficit financing. The Dutch Republic and Great Britain built themselves as imperial Great Powers with deficit financing. Parliamentary states seemed to be able to manage deficit financing, mainly because the bondholders were, essentially, the Parliamentary class. Autocracies, not so much.
Thanks for mentioning Venice republic, an area of history where I have large gaps. So, yes, RESPONSIBLE deficit spending allows an economy to grow as large and as fast as the corresponding supporting wealth can be created. When things are going well (1600's explorations, 1990's internet boom?) this is great. But the Austrian school says things will always overheat, and then collapse. Plus we now know better than ever before that the appraisal of that wealth value still remains a largely subjective and fluid assessment, not so hard and fast as we are often led to believe.
On the parliamentary class as the more "responsible" bondholders, that triggered the following thoughts:
1) perhaps bond ownership should be limited to "qualified investors", which I understand are those with $100K or mor available, supposedly a more knowledgeable or experienced level of investor. [This may be the practical case already?]
2) maybe we should make 50% of our Congressmen's [and Parliament's?] pay in bonds, so they would remain closely interested in the country's investment quality. [Per recent news article, the Congress, President, VP, & SCOTUS (plus maybe all confirmed "officers of the US"?) still get paid during govt. shutdowns since they are identified in the Constitution [not sure about Senate confirmed military officers - they may not legally be "officers of the US" even if of the military?].
[see below]
3) all govt. DEFICIT spending should be done via private sector banks/ resources. Possibly with well defined leverage limits? Capital created out of thin air, but not the Treasury printing money. If the deficit amount is not available from the private banks, it does not get spent.
4) this still does not explain why Madison, et al., did not provide for more stringent financial guidance or controls -- were their potential fears assuaged with the example of GB?
5) (related to #4): is there an aspect of scale here, where the larger nations are more subject to taking excessive risks since it seems the tax payer base is still "so large" that errors can still be covered? I am reminded about a comment you made some time back (around the 2008 Great Recession?) on your Oz blog, that the Australian central bank had done the best job of responding responsibly, followed by Canada, (and maybe GB?), but much superior to US Fed.
Austrian economists are notorious for over-predicting hyperinflation. While I like their historical approach, they tend to be too in love with their framings. In particular, they under-estimate compensating mechanisms. Von Mises and Hayek were correct in their economic calculation point, but wildly incorrect in the rate of consequences thereof precisely because, however dysfunctionally, the command economies came up with compensating mechanisms.
Diderot's presumption (and error) was that kings and priests don't resurrect under new guises. This is the point Lorenzo is laboring to make us see - it is deep, non-rational, social dynamics and it isn't necessarily about what is top-down, but emergent from us, collectively. Leaders can proclaim themselves as leaders - but absent followers, they are nothing.
Nietzsche toyed with the concept of the eternal recurrence. Huxley put it as "[s]o long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable". I've really come to seeing Huxley as being more on point about us today than Orwell was.
Then via the law of averages, we ought to also periodically see the rise of Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Churchills, but they seem few on the ground. Do Reagan and Thatcher qualify? Queen Elizabeth?
A parallel thought is why is this desire for such leaders so close to the surface? Some deep need for "father figures"? It would appear that a perception of least "relative" poverty or oppression is also involved. If most folks have some level of a decent (independent) income compared to their peers, they might still feel jealous or slightly aggrieved, but not enough to revolt (the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer concept?) But even such a farmer was not as divorced from the need for government as Jefferson hoped.
The exceptional doesn't arise out of the average (that's a definite causation error), and the exceptions over time will regress to the mean.
Socially, we are far more aware of how we stack up against peers (or even more so those ranked above us), then how much better off we are than we used to be (individually). The real measure of our wealth isn't relative, but all of our social status is relative. Wealth itself isn't zero-sum, status is. Western philosophy has been trying for over 2000 years to teach us to not focus our self esteem in others' views of us. It doesn't seem to be going so well.
Initially your 2nd paragraph struck me as "right on!" Solidly true. Concise and well stated. But after a little additional thought, I see some nuances might apply. There is still an absolute level of wealth (and income) that is needed before we can be sufficiently independent to tell the despot and the bureaucrat to get lost. But once those levels of reasonable self sufficiency are reached, I accept your point that it is the relative status levels where the Progressives/Leftists are trying to gain leverage, convincing people they are "oppressed" because they only have a 32" TV and not a 64" one, etc.
We surmise that the common animal between apes and hominids existed about 7 million years ago. They probably had status contests similar to what we see in ourselves and the apes today.
The despot and bureaucrat thrive on prosperity, not on poverty - the pickings are too slim in the latter. Nope, you need a nice fatted calf to properly sustain a priestly [read: parasitic] class.
The quality of elites generated at different times and places clearly varies enormously. Contrast Anglo-America with Latin America, for instance.
And the crux of our dilemma is just why that is! As you are exploring with these essays. If we have a relatively common* genetic contribution to our moral views, then culture, religion, and successful economics for the wider populace all appear to play some role in influencing the different final levels of morality, virtue, character, etc.
Bringing us right back to your capacity vs. character discussion. :-)
*But perhaps this genetic element is also not as common in its nature as we might suppose. The success of evolution depends on having a variety of possible configurations among which to select for eventual survival. Why do we continue to exist as a species with about 4% psychopaths?
Father figures is one way to put it, another way to put it is that we need some sort of formal Authority. Mainly because the world is so inherently and incredibly complex that without a starting point or beginning frame, it is literally quite impossible to make sense of anything.
Even understanding the tiniest grain of sand at multiple levels of resolution is impossible. Trying to understand even one human being - the most complex thing to ever exist in the universe as far as we can tell - is a monumental task. And yet modern individualistic Enlightenment thinking acts as if people can be trusted to learn about and understand - in less than ~50 years - all of human society, billions of humans acting upon their environment and the environment acting back upon them in a massive feedback loop.
And that's just the human side. Trying to understand the complexity of the physical universe outside of human intervention is even more staggering. All this to say - we need some sort of Authority. The need for 'father figures' is not a shallow or immature urge, it is an absolute necessity.
Agree that we have evolved with fathers, and that those men are essential to protect us and our mothers, plus help guide us to maturity. And that they are assisted in hunter gatherer and larger societies by their fellows in creating a culture that works for most of the group most of the time.
That kind of experience has shown hierarchy seems to work well in organizing and executing many complex activities, from hunting mammoth to hunting the genome.
The core issue for us is whether that authority is granted via consent of the governed or not, thereby presumably achieving some level of accountability for results. Many have observed that even tyrants cannot survive if they "lose the mandate of heaven", a la Ceausescu or Julius Caesar. On the cultural generation of consent in selecting leaders, the earliest example I read of was the monastics selecting their abbot during the "Dark Ages", but I suspect there are many earlier examples.
What we are facing now (at least in the US) is the fear that the election/ selection process has been corrupted (mostly via mail in ballots and the counting thereof) and that our desired accountability has been or will be lost. Congress delegating rule making to the admin state has further eroded keeping authority accountable.
The problem is exactly what you point out - the social dynamics of 10,000+ years ago are not scalable to our social existence today. It isn't a question of reverting back - we haven't escaped that gravitational well and we must, unless we are to regress.
The flaw in the Enlightenment is the presumption that rationality reigns supreme (with or without God), rather than being a limited tool for a random species of hairless ape in a chaotic universe.
I'm not suggesting we revert back, but I don't think we can get around the idea of having an ultimate Authority giving us a ground truth to operate off of. How else would we make sense of anything?
Agreed that the flaw in the enlightenment is essentially the worship of intellect or rationality.
What would you propose as a way to move forward? Are you saying we jettison old belief systems?
I'm generally more in favor of trying to reinterpret or re-examine them to see their wisdom and virtues through a modern lens.
"... the coherent social pattern disrupted by the Great Society can't be overstated.... Even progressives can't not-notice that, so they have to create ever more elaborate theory as to why that exists..."
I would be far from the first person to suggest Leftist Progressivism is a religion; and the history of religion abrogating rational analyses and responses is legion. Based on Larry Arnhart identifying his 20th Darwinian evolved human nature desires as "a desire for transcendence", I posit our evolved minds contain both rational/analytical and transcendental seeking elements. These appear to battle each other for dominance on a given issue. It has been a life long mystery to me why the rational element (of so very many people) does not dominant in more situations than it does.
Hume’s “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions” has a lot to be said for it. The emotions evolved first, for reasons.
Yes, as either predator or prey, the fight or flight response was a short circuiting of excessive time needed for closer observation and rational analysis to stay alive. But as we became the apex predator [microbes, and ourselves, now being our most dangerous enemies] our environment also changed from 3 mph locomotion, transport, and communication; max 150 person social interactions; biological readiness to be adults and parents at age 14; verbal and written ways to convey knowledge and wisdom across generations; vastly expanded realms of trust, trade, and specialization; etc. These now all mandate increased reliance on rationality over emotion. But the pull of emotion (and transcendence?) remain strong.
And if emotional responses now work against our continued species survival, we probably won't know this for sure for 100,000 years [or maybe just the next 50?? :-0 ].
Somewhat OT, but speaking of transcendence:
I recently watched a 15 minute YT video about the issues of cosmology awaiting more data from the James Webb satellite and the problems with current theories concerning the size and expansion rate of the universe: search for Dr. Becky Smethurst and "New study just made the "crisis in cosmology" WORSE". At about the 7:30 minute point is a depiction of the Lanaikea super super galaxy cluster. This is one of a few such super clusters being observed and measured. Apparently they tend to "wrap around" each other and partially block seeing portions of their "neighboring" peers. But these are galaxies, not discrete star systems! The Milky Way galaxy is in the Virgo cluster (mid upper right in the display) of several thousand galaxies, itself a subset of the Virgo Super Cluster, in turn a smallish subset of the Lanaikea designation.
[This video is now 9 days old, and I see she has a new one 2 days old that may include results from the JWST!]
Just re-read the paragraph I quoted the sentence from and realized I missed commenting on this...
"The worship of the splendour in their heads becomes more unconstrained and better able to evolve for maximum operational effectiveness as its fundamentally pathological nature leads to institutional decay."
That captures the terrible consequences of the Platonic ideal better than anything else you've written Lorenzo. It also marries to Sowell's vision of the annointed. It is about the worst combination of Platonism and religious zealotry imaginable. The only thing really lacking, as of now, is the determination to enforce it by exterminating the non-conforming. And I would fear the only way of heading that off is not going to be by peaceful debate. Once ensconced in power in the institutions, power will not be given up willingly.
Can't help thinking - as I enjoy this wonderful, informed and erudite thesis - that it is totally wasted on those who would most benefit: the blinkered, 'progressive' wokerati whose ability to follow a logical train of thought is apparently disabled
There are of course those who are completely intellectually blind, and they will not be reached. There are also those who's intellectual conscience can be summoned up, and you can recognize them by the venomous reaction of those who see them as traitors - such as Matt Taibbi's treatment by Democrats and establishment journalists (i.e. partisan hacks). Freddie deBoer is walking but not quite crossing that line.
It is also important for those on the right to understand this, as they often are tempted to use the tactics of the left, having seen them be successful. Consider the whinging by conservatives about how they are treated by the media - aping the victimization strategy.
"Consider the whinging by conservatives about how they are treated by the media..."
I struggle to understand why there isn't some conservatively (or even generally neutrally) oriented media option available at the mass media level. Given the (still) 50+% audience that is out there thirsting for real "fair and balanced" news and commentary, it has to be seen as a major money making opportunity for / by someone.
While Elon Musk and "X" are promising, I fear neither he nor "they" are as conservatively oriented as many of us might like. Plus ego! Or he has still not found a suitable management team to run it? (Compared to Space X and Tesla). National Review is apparently subsidized by Oldsmar; Epoch Times, The Federalist, Bari Weiss, Michael Shallenberger, and City Journal are growing but not recognized market leaders in any sense.
In the past we might spend (say) $150/year for print newspapers and believed we were getting a reasonable exposure to reality, or understood that the bias was mostly on the op-ed page, not in every news article. Now I spend about $500/year for a complement of Substack and other web based sources with which I feel comfortable, but I also recognize their media reach is limited to (maybe) 10 million people max and that I am now marinated in an info bubble of my own preferences. From this perspective most of the lying I see in the MSM is lying by omission of coverage, as much as purposeful false reporting by commission. But that is all they need to succeed.
Plus, to access my bubble I pay $600/year for internet connections and $600+/year for my intentionally limited cable equivalent input streams. Not sure just how much a subscription for a decent balanced media source would be worth to me, but maybe $200/year? But I am a cheapskate compared to those who pay $5 for a latte. What am I missing??
(1) Collapsing business model. The old-style media business model is collapsing because of the collapse of advertising streams.
(2) Network inertia in a localised media market. US media markets tended to favour just one local newspaper, which were subject to opinion shifts among their feed-in graduates. The UK had much more of a national media market, so has done much better at having a more politically diverse range of newspapers.
(3) Resistance. The “quality” papers captured elite networking and the clickbait dynamics of online media encourages media siloing. Makes it hard for new players to break in.
I'm surprised you didn't mention massive competition, as well. We're in a period where legacy media is being competed out of nonexistence. I expect in another 10-20 years if current trends continue we will see more conservative, larger media groups coalesce. Perhaps out of groups of substacks like yourself, N.S. Lyons, and others.
True, but the question was why new players have not replaced failing media behemoths.
Justice is giving to each what he has earned. Social justice is giving to each what another has earned. Social justice, then, is institutionalized injustice.
I restocked this post, a great breakdown of progressive policy.
I quibble a bit with this though: As James Lindsay regularly points out, the process is literally alchemical.
Alchemy turns "lead" into "gold". Progressivism as you point out, turns "gold" into shit.
Depends on if you are taking lead and gold literally. Try thinking of it as turning trauma into mental and spiritual strength, risk into reward, fear into joy etc.
Almost anything can be turned into truth if interpreted metaphorically.
Metaphor is the stuff of poetry. Taking everything literally as truth is the stuff of scientists, and anyone is free to see the damage "science" has done, compared to poetry.
The world isn't a systemically toxic place because of poetry, or any god...but those who believe in scientific materialism have a blind spot miles wide.
Alchemy purports to turn lead to gold. In reality, it does no such thing.
Everybody be so literal! See my response to Ron.
Fair enough, I myself get annoyed by excessive literalism. But my comment wasn't a criticism so much as an observation.
Same as mine. I just in fact posted a piece on turning fear into joy.
I went to William's Substack rather earlier today to understand what he meant by "turning fear into joy". Spent time reading a couple of his essays, with some extended thread commentary back and forth over several topics.
I think he and I are in close synchrony on most things and will agree to disagree on a few others that require deeper exploration than can be done easily in such comment threads.
I suggest some here may find merit in exploring his Substack as well. He is currently not requiring any payment for subscribers.
Another fine essay. I am always amazed at your marvelous hard hitting, on target, and zinger phrasings.
I have not yet gone back and read the whole set of essays in this series, so I may be speaking out of turn. But I respectfully wanted to raise a concern that if the eventual intent is to convert these essays into chapters in a book, then you and your "editorial team" should look closely for excessive repetition. There was a fair amount of that in this essay, and that works well for an essay that comes out about once a week, offering selective reinforcement of what has been said before. However, if or when incorporated into a book format, I fear seeing so many references to (say) the "transformational future" (or similar language about arc of history, disfunction, etc.) from the past chapter I read a half hour ago also emphasized again in the chapter I am currently reading. Certainly if you are building on a theme, some repetition to keep orienting the current discussion to that on-going and developing position is valid. Again, just a caution, or hopefully a constructive criticism. :-)
We all want your project to succeed, and it will be criticized by "the other side" no matter how tightly the language is presented. But there is no point in also providing ammunition for them, or even for the more sympathetic reviewers who still don't really "know what time it is!".
Each essay has only had a single editorial pass, and once the series is complete on here, I will have to do another (significant) edit to turn what is an old-style serialisation into a book proposal for both my agent and publisher. It will not go to anyone in its current form, mainly because both of us are still learning as we go.
One upside: between us, this is our fifth book. We have done this before!
I will eagerly and happily buy this book when it's published.
What are your other four joint authorship books?
And you are only just mentioning them now?? :-)
That will teach me to dash off a quick remark!
Yes, fair comment, ta. I am conscious that there is a fair bit of repetition, in part because one cannot assume readers have read previous essays. The next essay, for instance, goes over much of what is in this essay, but from a different angle: the emotional logic of the politics of the transformational future.
The plan is not to just publish the essays unchanged, but to edit so the narrative is more seamless. Also, the process of writing and wrestling with the material, and the comments received, have meant that the analysis has continued to evolve. A trivial example: what was called ‘vanguard capital’ early has become ‘dominion capital’.
So, thank you again for your thoughtful feedback.
Great stuff as ever. Thanks.
But Pooh the Story is just so, nothing less and nothing more.
The problem is people notice things they’re not supposed to, those things are disinformation.
Kudos. Thanks. In 2020 the Democrats had three years to organize the Iowa caucuses (6 electoral votes.) To borrow your phrasing, they turned even that into crap.
Reading this excellent essay as an American makes me want to don my digital hair shirt and apologize to all humanity for letting this academic virus escape our lab and infect the rest of the world.
Could there be anything more AMERICAN than the "transformational future" and its political and moral air castles? I used to think Social Justice was part Marxist and part Protestant (I still do) but I completely forgot to add Walt Disney and the American fantasy factory as an ideological godparent to the fever dream that's captured the Western world and addled its brains.
Really how far is it from “If You Can Dream It, You Can Do It” or "If You Wish Upon a Star..." to "I dream of a world where no one gets their feelings hurt and everyone's self-esteem is backed by the full force of the government"?
Social Justice is like spending a day at Disney World, coming out humming "It's a Small World After All" only to be locked inside Epcot Center and enforced to endure a Struggle Session conducted by angry clowns who sing songs about love and tolerance while zapping you with a cattle prod.
But Americans are like the world's richest teenagers who construct a fantasy world with Daddy's credit card, who imagine themselves moral paragons because they make sure to tip the gardener and valet parker, who really believe life should be nothing but joy and self-affirmation, and if it's not, there must be some malevolent entity that's conspiring against them (of course this malevolent entity is called "Reality" by the rest of us)—and like all rich grandiose teenagers, their fabulous fantasy life will only come to an end when the money runs out.
Very well put!
Thanks!
Not just me, is it - haha!
Great analysis. Thanks. As an Englishwoman (albeit an itinerant one), I could feel this virus starting to spread out from America. I instinctively resisted it, but felt guilty doing doing so because I'd liked all the Americans I'd ever met.
It's not all your fault. The virus would not have spread had the terrain not been susceptible in the first place.
America may have nursed it, but a large part of this traces directly to Europe - Foucault, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci. It was the New Left in the 60s that resurrected the moribund American progressive tradition (LBJ being the death rattle of the New Deal).
Even more quietly imported was the bureaucratic marriage of state and corporate interests - from the Axis countries. [Something, something about choosing your enemies carefully something]. Most may have forgotten the once vaunted post-war consensus - that partisanship ended at our shores and there was virtually no criticism of our part in the Cold War, at least until Viet Nam broke that.
There's no doubt the Parisian Post-Maoists belong in the rogues gallery here of academic onanists and radical posers who just wanted to watch the world burn—as long as they still got tenure and book deals!
America's adversary intellectuals and their French older siblings seem to have the same angry teenager's conception of freedom, where it's a simple step on a continuum from "I won't make my bed, Mom!" to "Down with the Fascist state!"
I think this also points to one of the main advantages Western post-60s Leftists have over their opponents: they have always just wanted to tear down all they could get their hands on (as their Papa Karl described it, "the ruthless criticism of all that exists"), and have no ability to create or maintain anything except word games crafted from stale jargon.
I could destroy my house right now in a few hours with a sledgehammer, but I couldn't build it if my life depended on it.
And yes, as you say, the New Left and neoliberalism are a match made in heaven, destined for the altar: they are both founded on the Holy Self and its needs and desires being the only sacred and the only reality.
Neoliberalism is more rescuable, because it is mainly the application of mainstream economics to public policy. If economics is re-configured so as to fully face that everything social is emergent from the biological — including that we are much more successful than Pan troglodytes because they ARE Homo economicus and we are not — much of the problematic aspects of neoliberalism fall away. For instance, that in biology efficiency serves resilience and the same should be true in public policy.
To make an extremely unfashionable point, the US in the early to mid C20th accepted in way too many of the wrong sort of Jewish intellectuals: the folk who are in love with a system that makes them SO IMPORTANT: Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse …
The US is both very much a child of Europe and very not-European at the same time. Like the rest of the Anglosphere, there is almost no local tradition of anti-Semitism: the classic example is Judah Benjamin being a Confederate Cabinet member. The American South was particularly sympathetic to the British cause in WWII prior to Pearl Harbor.
And yet continental origin (“race”) has had a salience in the US it never really had in Europe, for obvious demographic and historical reasons. Folk from one continent invading, settling and dispossessing the continental locals, creating a political order part of which used slaves from a third continent and being dubious about migrants from a fourth. With complexities that are often overlooked: such as what became “Jim Crow” was originally developed to repress the “poor white trash” “masterless men” in the Antebellum South.
Anti-Catholicism was the American answer to antisemitism, at least for many years. The non-European aspect is probably because the Europeans that came were fed up with Europe as it was at the time. It was really the Irish that came that longed for the country they left.
Great post as always.
But you are partially missing the point about the left obsession with Palestine/Israel over other conflict as does the left. The important point is that various jewish lobbies are constantly interfering and with total success with the governments (American, British, French, probably many others) and democratic processes. This is especially choking concerning the Palestine/Israel conflict even if pushing special interests have far more important effects on our daily life in occident, except rare terrorist events, and short of a nuclear conflict. In France the assembly deputy Meyer Habib a close friend of Netanyahu, claims that Israel (really a terrorist state without even a constitution) is the only democratic country in the region and that its army is the most moral in the world and rudely shut up anyone who says otherwise. That does not happen so often because critics of Israel hardly have access to the French mass media. Except the very woke Melenchon. Also, about Meyer Habib, I think that a representative should not have a double nationality as he has.
Also in France, there is a constant chase of souverainists, labeled as far-right, but the Likud is hardly criticised which Meyer Habib defends. An idealist, Etienne Chouard, was diffamed and cancelled, because he wanted to discuss his pet project, citizen referendum, and not the jewish genocide in WII. He honestly said, he was not competent on the subject and did not come to discuss an about 80 years old genocide. He was immediately called and negationnist. Being defended by the Soral polemist was the next mark of infamy for him.
Israel does not have a written Constitution. Neither does the United Kingdom or New Zealand. Does not make them not-democratic.
Cannot comment on public discourse in France, but criticising Israel is very easy in the Anglosphere, lots of folk do. But the Anglosphere has a much, much thinner tradition of anti-Semitism than France or Germany or … so the historical sensitivities are different.
I have criticised the Jewish lobby, but the most striking feature about it in the Anglosphere is how counter-productive it has been.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/jews-cant-afford-the-jewish-lobby
As for Israel-Palestine, the median Jewish (all 17m of them around the world) position is the the two-state solution. The median Arab (all 400m of them in Arab League countries) position is that Israel be abolished. That is why there has never been full peace, and the October 7 body-cam pogrom is why a country of refugees with nowhere else to go cannot abandon the IDF.
The PLO was founded on the model of the FLN, whose “solution” to French settlers in Algeria was to threaten genocide (La valise ou le cercueil). Hamas has the slaughter or expulsion of Israeli Jews, and the reduction of any remnant to subordinated dhimmis as its declared aim. That is the context that gets ludicrously simplified into comments such as “Israel is a terroristic state”.
There's an apposite line in the Le Figaro newspaper this morning, here in France...
'Since the 19th century, the people have been seen as immature, violent, unpredictable and dangerous, which is why they first had to be "civilized", then educated and now re-educated.'
I get Lorenzo Warby and Warby Parker mixed up
The bureaucracy that has 2 people and 3 bots call and text me for one appointment is SUCCEEDING not Failing.
See it’s a Check $$