I've lost about a day of my life trying to decide how to view this article. You're intelligent, and I respect intelligence; you're scholarly and hardworking, and I actually learn from your essays. But I cannot abide your contempt for "populism", from either wing, especially since you go on and on about how democracy is so important.
Also, I don't want to hate you, not if I can avoid it, but that means I have to understand you. For example, you appear to think that immigration and cost of living aren't inherently issues of actual political consequence, that any deviation from centrist technocracy requires a psychoanalytic explanation.
Let me say that I do not believe in the economic necessity of mass immigration. In particular, I do not believe that countries which once conquered half the world, now cannot change their grandparents' bedpans without foreign help. The most I can say in its favor is that in the global village created by modern communication and transportation, it is easier than ever for people to look over borders and to cross them. This naturally encourages an identity that is not as tied to just one nation, compared to the past.
However, I do not believe that elites choose to encourage mass immigration out of sentimental one-worldism (even if that's why some of their voters support it), and I find it hard to believe that they do so for the sake of the national interest (though of course there are plenty of economists anxious to tell us why it's good for the economy). Class interests and political interests I believe are a factor, and also, if history is any guide, empires just set themselves up for this kind of fate.
Anyway, my point is, that for a politically experienced person such as yourself to just dismiss the concerns of the right about immigration, there has to be a reason, but I'm not sure what it is. Are you a spook myrmidon for the American empire, tasked with hosing down any fissiparous tendencies towards nationalist autarky in American allies? Even if that was true, I could never know it. But in any case I'm sure there's some explanation fit for public consumption, of how you ended up a "cosmopolitan globalist", when so many of your peers in the West are not.
I could ask a similar question about how you can dismiss cost of living as a political issue, but I don't think I need to be so long-winded about this one, as it is already apparent that the West is economically stratified, and the "lived experience" of the upper classes is very very different from that of ordinary people. However, if you do want to say anything about your economic philosophy, that you would think would be enlightening for me, please feel free to do so.
I'm wondering how you define the word "populism." I should probably know how you understand the word before replying at length. I've written many essays about populism here, in which I've made it very clear why I think it's a dangerous thing. But you may mean something different by the word than I do.
It's not that I think immigration and cost of living immigration are inherently of *no* political importance to people. But I've observed that voters are easily persuaded to support politicians and parties that do not in any way provide, or have no credible plan to provide, what voters say they want, be it a lower cost of living or less immigration. Given this, we have to conclude that voters are motivated by something beyond the desiderata they list when they're polled.
As for the economic necessity of immigration, unless the total fertility rate is 2.1 or above--the so-called "replacement rate"--you must either have immigration or there will be no one to
change the bedpans. It's just math. It has nothing to do with whether you have the wherewithal to conquer the world. There's no advanced, urbanized, industrialized society in which the birthrate is high enough to allow that country to continue enjoy the standard of living it does now without immigration. Aging, as everyone but Joe Biden appears to grasp, is an aspect of reality. If there aren't enough young people to care for the old, the bedpans go unchanged.
I don't dismiss concerns about immigration. But if you regularly see someone saying he wants one thing but behaving as if he wants something else, what do you conclude? For example, suppose a woman keeps telling you she really wants to meet a nice guy, settle down, and have a family, but she keeps dating married men, ex-cons, and addicts. Would you conclude it's just bum luck? Or would you conclude she has an unconscious psychological agenda, one that despite what she *says* she wants is actually running the show? I wouldn't deny that she does indeed want to meet a nice guy, settle down, and have a family: that's very real, and I'm sure she feels it acutely. But clearly, she *also* feels something else--probably something of which she's only dimly aware.
When voters say they want X, but reliably vote for politicians whose promises to give them X are obvious, laughable lies, I draw the same conclusion: Yes, they want X, but they want something else even more.
There's much more that I should reply to, but I will say right away that immigration is a Ponzi "solution" to low fertility. What about the next generation? And the one after that? A nation can't live indefinitely on the excess fertility of other peoples.
Sure it can. What do you think the United States is? What percentage of Americans, do you think, can trace all of their ancestors back to the time of the founding? Few, I reckon.
Maybe it's logically possible, but what kind of a plan for the world is that? You'll have poor countries with too many kids, and rich countries with not enough kids, forever? And then what happens when the poor countries aren't poor any more? Then all populations dwindle, except for those who relapse into barbarism and fecundity?
If the plan is for nations of the world to survive in prosperity, then someone somewhere has to square this circle without relying on immigration.
I think it's sufficiently difficult to predict the future beyond one or two generations that there's no point in trying. Within a generation or two human life is apt to be unrecognizable to us owing to the advent of AI. This could provide such a huge boost in productivity that it completely changes everything we think about economics. Perhaps, coupled with robotics, it makes human labor obsolete. Or perhaps the doomers are right and it will have killed us all. One thing is clear: We've passed a threshold such that none of us have any idea what this future will look like, and the odds that it will resemble the past seem to me very slim--for that to happen, we'd either need a complete pause on AI research, immediately, or the research would have to suddenly stall out (for reasons we don't yet know--maybe there's an inherent upper boundary on intelligence, a law of nature we haven't yet discovered). We can make good predictions quite far into the future about certain things--planetary motion, say. But when human beings are involved, it's much harder. When we've just introduced the most significant human invention since fire and we (literally) have no idea how much smarter we can make it, or what it will do, all bets are off. I have trouble imagining what the world will look like in ten years, if AI breakthroughs keep happening at the rate they've been in the past three years. I'd guess they'll continue at that rate. There's a real chance the advances will be exponential, not linear. So I'm not making long-term "plans for the world."
"Even before Macron called for early elections, Standard and Poor’s downgraded French government bonds from AA to AA-. The ratings firm was concerned that France’s public debt was on an unsustainable path and that there appeared to be little political will to restore fiscal sustainability. With a budget deficit of 5.5% of gross domestic product at a time of relative economic cyclical strength and with a public debt to GDP ratio near a record 110%, there seemed to be little prospect that France would be able to grow itself out of its public debt problem." (Lachman.)
Thankyou Claire, I very much enjoyed this! (Would probably have enjoyed it even more and replied sooner if it were shorter and tauter?)
Lots to agree with - Leader Wierdness is a thing - just try any Corbyn True Believer (but he's my lovely long-lost Uncle! He'd *never* hang out with Bad People like that if he knew! How dare you!! He loves the NHS!)
And Brexit really has been a shitstorm of lies, wilful ignorance and self-amputation (though my OECD stats tell me Germany is the sick man of post-Covid Europe and G7 - we're 6th! Thanks, VVP!)
But this paragraph strikes me as quite wrong, in ways that matter:
>The British voted for Leave because they didn’t care to think about basic economics, didn’t understand what the EU was, and didn’t care to learn. They were suckered by Nigel Farage, and in a moment of foolish impetuousness—out of the resentful impulse to punish the elites—they overnight turned Britain into an isolated and dreary island with a crummy economy and no influence.
The biggest problem is "overnight". The real story is so much longer and more painful.
The whole parliament who voted to approve the referendum bill in 2015 (Tories, Labour and Lib Dems) are idiots for not understanding that a simple "in/out" referendum is horribly vague and asymmetrical. There's only one way to stay in, but a million ways to leave.
Cue a rash of contradictory and confusing campaigns for everything from Singapore-on-Trent to 1940s autarky with nobody identifiably on the hook to deliver on Leave if it won (and Dan Hannan espousing most conceivable positions). Farage wasn't the dominant voice; he took the xenophobic flank, while Dom Cummings and Boris covered the sovereignty angles (with Gove adding some tartan slime).
So the narrow but definite result provided the government - or any government - No Workable Mandate. Not even close. You have to leave, to respect the referendum - but how do you make the real tradeoffs between access and control? Is it Norway, Switzerland, Canada, or Customs Union --?
At this point, it didn't have to be hard Brexit; but up popped Theresa May (on whom history has not been nearly hard enough) with an unparalleled lack of political imagination and strategic nous. Her "Brexit means Brexit" mantra and refusal to enter any serious discussion on which to build a solid mandate - because we need freedom to negotiate!! - just prolonged the problem, and created a vacuum that the nutty ERG fringe were only too ready to fill with ridiculous cake-and-eat-it propositions.
Once she'd called and fought the worst election campaign since 1974 (just now topped/bottomed by Sunak), the game really was up. She had to throw in the towel; Boris came back talking sh*t and it was only a matter of time before the opposition blinked and a "Get Brexit Done" election could be called. But *even then*, if Corbyn's Labour hadn't been so unpopular, the Tories could easily have lost (Boris was never very popular with the electorate or his colleagues; only the Tory party at large).
Why does this matter? Simply; ask anyone who can actually remember voting leave in 2016, and I doubt they will say they were voting for anything like the Brexit they got; nor was it generally considered inevitable at the time that this would be the outcome. Sure, the risks were obvious; the safe choice was remain; but on the key issue of trade & the economy, a lot of leavers had good reason to think they were choosing something very different - not fantastical, just a different trade-off. Then from 2016-19 positions hardened; there did seem to be a real (foolish) sense that we had to follow through and get this done, even when it had become clear that the kind of deal coming was way harder (and frankly worse) than that envisaged by Vote Leave at the start.
I don't think they/we were impetuous Farage-suckers. More like, fed up with Cameroonian arrogance and fake "all in it together" austerity, seduced by Cummings' artful "control" myth, then serially let down by politicians who just hadn't thought it through and were outflanked by those who didn't care.
(The elite punishment bit is 100% correct though. And I'm all for that, just not by cutting off my own arm.)
Following from that, there are very obvious reasons why Brexit was invisible in the election just called. Everyone is sore; voters don't want to be reminded how they were taken in; the Tories don't want to remind them it was *their* idea, and Labour knows that many of its supporters (even way out on the left) were leavers; their own 2019 manifesto included it. Although there's plenty of regret, there isn't any enthusiasm to rejoin (which would be a fantastically complicated process in any case, with far less favourable terms and a requirement to take the Euro most likely).
So there's really nothing to be gained by either main party mentioning it. Best to focus on rebuilding some kind of trust with the electorate and with European partners, then put it on the list for a second term. Weird but rational?
Real lesson: don't call referenda in a parliamentary democracy. And if you have to, make them as detailed as possible, with clear symmetry between the options (Scottish devolution worked much better because of this).
Oh come on Claire. Memories of the 2010 Eurozone financial crisis were still fresh in 2016. It wasn't clear (and still isnt) that the EU will survive over the long or even medium term.
People forget that Germany pursued such punitive policies towards southern Europe they got rebuked by the IMF. The EU did not exactly look like a functional or pleasant organization in 2016.
This is a stunning piece, Claire, even by your consistently high standards. I found myself repeatedly opening a file where I keep the best quotes I come across.
I believe this one, in particular, is the most profound:
"Politics, in a democracy, is about giving voters what the deep, unacknowledged part of them longs while simultaneously providing them with a political language they can use to justify that choice."
It explains so much of the disconnect between the candidates' rhetoric, the polls, and the eventual election results that has been bothering me since I was old enough to vote!
And every candidate whose natural inclination is to recite statistics and numbered action plans should tattoo this on his left arm:
"Voters may not care about policy, but they care very much how a candidate makes them feel."
I do think you are being a bit unfair here:
"The text is immigration and the cost of living, but the subtext is impulsiveness, resentment, envy, and the sincere desire to be told lies."
Besides a natural resentment on the part of an in-group toward an out-group, there are legitimate concerns about crime, lack of assimilation, job competition, and losing national identity. Candidates who ignore or disparage those concerns certainly don't make the populace *feel* like they're being heard.
I strongly agree that most developed nations desperately need immigrants. Why the candidates cannot explain that simple fact is, also, beyond me. I've long advocated a simple policy (keeping in mind your quote from another essay, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong"): "We will accept every person with no criminal background or communicable disease and provide them no public assistance beyond life-and-death situations for a period of X years." (X, in my mind, being around 5 years.) I believe that was American immigration policy from its founding until the decade that started paving the road with good intentions, and it worked very well. (I stand ready to be corrected on both counts :-))
Thank you, Dr. Berlinski, for another fine article. I found it simultaneously engaging, enraging, entertaining, hilarious, depressing, and enlightening. I was not familiar with the Shawn Rosenberg theory, and what he said as reported in today's CG reflected so much of my own observation of current events that I also dug into your 13 Sep 19 article, which I found even more prescient and depressing. I have for some time thought that the stresses of modern life were driving people into a retreat from modernity. We have so many choices and need to make so many decisions about even the simplest aspects of modern existence that we just want to kick back and throw up our hands. You and Mr. Rosenberg show this desire to retreat into simplicity to be more a flight from reality, as your title accurately reflects. An educated populace is necessary for a democracy to function effectively. Time was, not all that long ago, when there were filters in place (elites, if you will) that helped us to evaluate the information we received every day. Now the authority of those filters has declined precipitously (some deservedly so) to the point where an insufficiently educated populace cannot evaluate their vastly expanded sources of information critically. This is happening at the same time as education systems in the U.S. are focusing more on skills training and test-taking than on any effort to develop students' curiosity about why things are the way they are, that might impel them toward a lifetime of learning. We need to reclaim and refurbish the term "elite" from the vocabulary of epithets. One should strive to become elite in as many areas of human endeavor that our individual talents make possible, without practicing elitism. Life teaches most of us the humility and, hopefully, compassion that help us to overcome any tendency to elitism, but it takes a long, long time.
But I babble. Thanks again for filling my Sunday with provocative material for contemplation.
Thank you--it means a lot to me to hear this from readers (probably an unseemly amount), and I'm always grateful when a reader takes the time to say he or she found something I wrote useful.
I am also interested to hear Claire's thoughts on this. In the US it seems like the Far Right and the Far Left are dominating the conversation and the centers are being crushed in the process. I texted with a French friend this morning and while they were relieved to have voice Le Pen they weren't exactly thrilled with the Far Left either.
“Not to be outdone, the left-wing coalition plans to raise the minimum wage, fix the price of household goods, fix the price of energy, make school free, spend more on low-cost housing, lower the retirement age, repeal Macron’s immigration reform, invite “climate refugees” to France, and raise the deficit by €179 per year.”
If we vote for whoever makes us feel good about ourselves why have these people been able to make good decisions in the past but are unable to do so now? Has what makes us feel good about ourselves changed, and if so how and why?
Did you click on the link to the article I wrote about Shawn Rosenberg's theory? His answer to exactly this question is interesting, and I fear it's also persuasive. Or at least, the best arguments I could come up to counter it weren't really all that good. (You'll see what I mean if you read it.)
Here’s a possible reason people feel significantly less good now than they once did. A fair dose of cultural homogeneity is the foundation of high trust societies. Citizens are happier in high trust societies.
Increasing doses of cultural heterogeneity leads to low trust societies. Citizens feel alienated in low trust societies.
Earlier in this century Europe and the United States allowed reasonable amounts of immigration. That immigration was healthy because immigrants brought talent, enthusiasm and sometime capital to their new homes. In the last decade, the number of immigrants moving to the United States and several European nations skyrocketed.
In the United States, the vast number of immigrants desired to assimilate. They mostly came from nations that shared a cultural heritage with the United States. In Europe, many new immigrants came from nations very culturally dissimilar to the prevailing culture in their new homes.
When cultural heterogeneity reaches a tipping point, as it has in places like the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Holland and elsewhere, high trust societies morph into low trust societies. The end result is profound alienation which results in political extremism.
A most precise and well-constructed comment. Accurately captures quotidian experience, too. So thank you. But... isn't it also kinda racist to talk like this? You know: "Ya imports the third world, ya becomes the third world." Completely agreeing with what you say -- but how would you respond to a racism charge here?
One obvious answer in the United States, at least, is that a significant number of the immigrants who entered the country illegally are Hispanic in origin yet a significant number of Hispanic American citizens are angry about illegal immigration. If polls are to be believed, Donald Trump has a slight lead over Biden with Hispanic voters. Trump’s position on immigration is one of the reasons for this. It’s incongruous to suggest that Hispanics feel racial animus against other Hispanics.
Polls also document that African Americans are increasingly angry about massive waves of immigration. We see evidence of this in many urban centers, especially New York and Chicago. Anyone throwing around accusations of racism (as progressive Democrats sometimes do) needs to explain why “people of color” have racial animus against other “people of color.”
The reality is that concerns about illegal immigration have little to do with race and everything to do about class. Urban elites may find some aspects of illegal immigration a bit annoying and other aspects beneficial like cheap labor cutting their lawns. It’s working class voters who suffer when illegal immigrants compete with them for lesser-skilled jobs and for benefits from government sponsored social programs.
When my parents went to London in 1948 it WAS a high trust society. People didn’t lock their doors. But a lot of that was from surviving the Blitz together. Before that they had starve outs, who froze in the snow like the little match girl. Deciding that it’s diversity rather than poverty seems like projecting today’s issues onto the past to get an answer that suits (your) today’s concerns.
If you step away from politics some of the most radical social movements (the Bolsheviks, the Cultural Revolution) happened in ethnically homogenous societies. Tl:Dr: I’m sceptical .
The Russian Empire of 1917 doesn’t seem to have been ethnically homogeneous. Besides a good-sized populations of Ukrainians, Poles, and Belorussians, there were quite a few small ethnic groups that added up to a substantial portion of the whole.
Fair, but what about the Cultural Revolution in China? I think there’s more to contentment than ethnic homogeneity and also to discontent than ethnic heterogeneity. Basically there is no ONE thing that’s a silver bullet.
So much good sense packed into one article! Thanks very much for this. It's damned depressing, but if enough people read and understood it, this would be the solution to the problems it describes. May such thinking soon bring people back to their senses.
The first part first as seen through the lens of John O'Sullivan, referencing the august, John Gray. "In terms of stable policies, however, the election will represent an extraordinary continuity. As many commentators have observed in recent years, British politics is in the middle of a vast realignment in which political parties change their class composition with middle-class elites moving left and blue- and white-collar workers going in the opposite direction. ( I discuss this in a recent Claremont Review article on Matthew Goodwin’s book Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics.) This analysis is not confined to the Right but spreading across the spectrum. In a recent New Statesman article, John Gray, once a regular National Review contributor and now an independent-minded post-liberal thinker whom many Brits regard as another Orwell, defined the election as one in which the fundamental choice at issue — namely, national democracy versus global technocracy — wasn’t really being discussed at all.
Indeed, Gray was understating his case. That choice is not a topic of debate because all the parties except for Reform are on the side of global technocracy without ever saying so explicitly. The Tories have been split on this choice since the Brexit referendum, and the return of David Cameron symbolizes the party’s decision to remain ambivalent on it for the time being. They are facing oblivion in deference to that unadmitted orthodoxy on issues like net zero and migration. But all the other parties that might serve in government – Labour, Lib-Dems, Scot-Nats, the Greens — are more completely submissive to the same set of orthodoxies. Voters will throw out the Tories, as Peter Hitchens points out, in order to get more and worse of the same.
It is not hard to predict a bad result from that “change.” As Gray, who understands that our new masters are not how they present themselves, points out:
Rule by technocrats means bypassing politics by outsourcing key decisions to professional bodies that claim expert knowledge. Their superior sapience is often ideology clothed in pseudo-science they picked up at university a generation ago, and their recommendations a radical political programme disguised as pragmatic policymaking. Technocracy represents itself as delivering what everyone wants, but at bottom it is the imposition of values much of the population does not share. A backlash was inevitable.
And a backlash will be inevitable under Labour in due course. But they will stick with the policies much longer because they really believe in the orthodoxies — including the delusion that they are experts. They would benefit greatly if they were to seek advice from the sadder but wiser Grays and Portillos who have been there before and know how this movie turns out. Alas, they won’t."
"Huge day in France where elites are working overtime to block Le Pen. My take? She will only get stronger & stronger until those same elites address people's concerns over mass immigration..."
Elite Epitomecrat Macron literally *called an election to give voters the choice*. Some kinda block? And then, working well within the constitutional 2-round system that institutionalises tactical voting, they got their tactics in order. And as Claire already pointed out, the same Macron government already enacted historically strict immigration controls.
I mean, yes, it's a take. But a monumentally silly one. How dare Elites conspire to offer people a real choice, and how dare they take the "wrong" one!
Sorry, this is sounding pretty Parklife to me. Mention of Matt Goodwin not a good sign. But to the heart of the matter: "global technocracy". I'm happy with Gray's basic definition of technocracy; I'm not sure what the global adds (are we delegating to offshore, global bodies of experts? Would that include, say, NATO?) In any case, how are the key Reform policies materially less globally technocratic than the other parties you mention? Summary here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqll1edxgw4o
I can see that for example, new right populists don't like Net Zero; and you can definitely argue that, say, Paris alignment is a global standard for decarbonisation. But when a democratic party says: we think it's important to hit that standard, so we're going to invest in X and regulate Y, they are emphatically *not* "outsourcing key decisions" to experts. The standard was created by experts, sure, but they are asking the electorate to make a choice to adopt it. If the electorate votes for them, it was a democraic choice; and they can throw it out next time round.
It's very different from eg. central bank independence, where politicians do delegate key decisions (interest rate setting etc) to panels of experts. Reform UK could have proposed to end that; they do mention Bank of England reserves policy in their manifesto (sorry, "Contract") but nothing about independence.
I've lost about a day of my life trying to decide how to view this article. You're intelligent, and I respect intelligence; you're scholarly and hardworking, and I actually learn from your essays. But I cannot abide your contempt for "populism", from either wing, especially since you go on and on about how democracy is so important.
Also, I don't want to hate you, not if I can avoid it, but that means I have to understand you. For example, you appear to think that immigration and cost of living aren't inherently issues of actual political consequence, that any deviation from centrist technocracy requires a psychoanalytic explanation.
Let me say that I do not believe in the economic necessity of mass immigration. In particular, I do not believe that countries which once conquered half the world, now cannot change their grandparents' bedpans without foreign help. The most I can say in its favor is that in the global village created by modern communication and transportation, it is easier than ever for people to look over borders and to cross them. This naturally encourages an identity that is not as tied to just one nation, compared to the past.
However, I do not believe that elites choose to encourage mass immigration out of sentimental one-worldism (even if that's why some of their voters support it), and I find it hard to believe that they do so for the sake of the national interest (though of course there are plenty of economists anxious to tell us why it's good for the economy). Class interests and political interests I believe are a factor, and also, if history is any guide, empires just set themselves up for this kind of fate.
Anyway, my point is, that for a politically experienced person such as yourself to just dismiss the concerns of the right about immigration, there has to be a reason, but I'm not sure what it is. Are you a spook myrmidon for the American empire, tasked with hosing down any fissiparous tendencies towards nationalist autarky in American allies? Even if that was true, I could never know it. But in any case I'm sure there's some explanation fit for public consumption, of how you ended up a "cosmopolitan globalist", when so many of your peers in the West are not.
I could ask a similar question about how you can dismiss cost of living as a political issue, but I don't think I need to be so long-winded about this one, as it is already apparent that the West is economically stratified, and the "lived experience" of the upper classes is very very different from that of ordinary people. However, if you do want to say anything about your economic philosophy, that you would think would be enlightening for me, please feel free to do so.
Hi Mitchell,
I'm wondering how you define the word "populism." I should probably know how you understand the word before replying at length. I've written many essays about populism here, in which I've made it very clear why I think it's a dangerous thing. But you may mean something different by the word than I do.
It's not that I think immigration and cost of living immigration are inherently of *no* political importance to people. But I've observed that voters are easily persuaded to support politicians and parties that do not in any way provide, or have no credible plan to provide, what voters say they want, be it a lower cost of living or less immigration. Given this, we have to conclude that voters are motivated by something beyond the desiderata they list when they're polled.
As for the economic necessity of immigration, unless the total fertility rate is 2.1 or above--the so-called "replacement rate"--you must either have immigration or there will be no one to
change the bedpans. It's just math. It has nothing to do with whether you have the wherewithal to conquer the world. There's no advanced, urbanized, industrialized society in which the birthrate is high enough to allow that country to continue enjoy the standard of living it does now without immigration. Aging, as everyone but Joe Biden appears to grasp, is an aspect of reality. If there aren't enough young people to care for the old, the bedpans go unchanged.
I don't dismiss concerns about immigration. But if you regularly see someone saying he wants one thing but behaving as if he wants something else, what do you conclude? For example, suppose a woman keeps telling you she really wants to meet a nice guy, settle down, and have a family, but she keeps dating married men, ex-cons, and addicts. Would you conclude it's just bum luck? Or would you conclude she has an unconscious psychological agenda, one that despite what she *says* she wants is actually running the show? I wouldn't deny that she does indeed want to meet a nice guy, settle down, and have a family: that's very real, and I'm sure she feels it acutely. But clearly, she *also* feels something else--probably something of which she's only dimly aware.
When voters say they want X, but reliably vote for politicians whose promises to give them X are obvious, laughable lies, I draw the same conclusion: Yes, they want X, but they want something else even more.
There's much more that I should reply to, but I will say right away that immigration is a Ponzi "solution" to low fertility. What about the next generation? And the one after that? A nation can't live indefinitely on the excess fertility of other peoples.
Sure it can. What do you think the United States is? What percentage of Americans, do you think, can trace all of their ancestors back to the time of the founding? Few, I reckon.
Maybe it's logically possible, but what kind of a plan for the world is that? You'll have poor countries with too many kids, and rich countries with not enough kids, forever? And then what happens when the poor countries aren't poor any more? Then all populations dwindle, except for those who relapse into barbarism and fecundity?
If the plan is for nations of the world to survive in prosperity, then someone somewhere has to square this circle without relying on immigration.
I think it's sufficiently difficult to predict the future beyond one or two generations that there's no point in trying. Within a generation or two human life is apt to be unrecognizable to us owing to the advent of AI. This could provide such a huge boost in productivity that it completely changes everything we think about economics. Perhaps, coupled with robotics, it makes human labor obsolete. Or perhaps the doomers are right and it will have killed us all. One thing is clear: We've passed a threshold such that none of us have any idea what this future will look like, and the odds that it will resemble the past seem to me very slim--for that to happen, we'd either need a complete pause on AI research, immediately, or the research would have to suddenly stall out (for reasons we don't yet know--maybe there's an inherent upper boundary on intelligence, a law of nature we haven't yet discovered). We can make good predictions quite far into the future about certain things--planetary motion, say. But when human beings are involved, it's much harder. When we've just introduced the most significant human invention since fire and we (literally) have no idea how much smarter we can make it, or what it will do, all bets are off. I have trouble imagining what the world will look like in ten years, if AI breakthroughs keep happening at the rate they've been in the past three years. I'd guess they'll continue at that rate. There's a real chance the advances will be exponential, not linear. So I'm not making long-term "plans for the world."
I agree with all that, but then doesn't that undermine the argument which says immigration is necessary for continued prosperity?
Doesn't that rather depend on your definition of "nation" or "people". If immigrants become part of the nation, the mathematics is different.
In any case, it's irrelevant to the economic problem of the bedpans as Claire posed it.
"Even before Macron called for early elections, Standard and Poor’s downgraded French government bonds from AA to AA-. The ratings firm was concerned that France’s public debt was on an unsustainable path and that there appeared to be little political will to restore fiscal sustainability. With a budget deficit of 5.5% of gross domestic product at a time of relative economic cyclical strength and with a public debt to GDP ratio near a record 110%, there seemed to be little prospect that France would be able to grow itself out of its public debt problem." (Lachman.)
https://disclosure.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/view/type/HTML/id/3189662
In the meantime, in the light of the most recent developments.......https://www.barrons.com/articles/french-elections-left-bonds-economy-macron-debt-ff651d44?mod=djem_b_Weekly%20Barrons%20feed%20for%20last%2024%20hours
Thankyou Claire, I very much enjoyed this! (Would probably have enjoyed it even more and replied sooner if it were shorter and tauter?)
Lots to agree with - Leader Wierdness is a thing - just try any Corbyn True Believer (but he's my lovely long-lost Uncle! He'd *never* hang out with Bad People like that if he knew! How dare you!! He loves the NHS!)
And Brexit really has been a shitstorm of lies, wilful ignorance and self-amputation (though my OECD stats tell me Germany is the sick man of post-Covid Europe and G7 - we're 6th! Thanks, VVP!)
But this paragraph strikes me as quite wrong, in ways that matter:
>The British voted for Leave because they didn’t care to think about basic economics, didn’t understand what the EU was, and didn’t care to learn. They were suckered by Nigel Farage, and in a moment of foolish impetuousness—out of the resentful impulse to punish the elites—they overnight turned Britain into an isolated and dreary island with a crummy economy and no influence.
The biggest problem is "overnight". The real story is so much longer and more painful.
The whole parliament who voted to approve the referendum bill in 2015 (Tories, Labour and Lib Dems) are idiots for not understanding that a simple "in/out" referendum is horribly vague and asymmetrical. There's only one way to stay in, but a million ways to leave.
Cue a rash of contradictory and confusing campaigns for everything from Singapore-on-Trent to 1940s autarky with nobody identifiably on the hook to deliver on Leave if it won (and Dan Hannan espousing most conceivable positions). Farage wasn't the dominant voice; he took the xenophobic flank, while Dom Cummings and Boris covered the sovereignty angles (with Gove adding some tartan slime).
So the narrow but definite result provided the government - or any government - No Workable Mandate. Not even close. You have to leave, to respect the referendum - but how do you make the real tradeoffs between access and control? Is it Norway, Switzerland, Canada, or Customs Union --?
At this point, it didn't have to be hard Brexit; but up popped Theresa May (on whom history has not been nearly hard enough) with an unparalleled lack of political imagination and strategic nous. Her "Brexit means Brexit" mantra and refusal to enter any serious discussion on which to build a solid mandate - because we need freedom to negotiate!! - just prolonged the problem, and created a vacuum that the nutty ERG fringe were only too ready to fill with ridiculous cake-and-eat-it propositions.
Once she'd called and fought the worst election campaign since 1974 (just now topped/bottomed by Sunak), the game really was up. She had to throw in the towel; Boris came back talking sh*t and it was only a matter of time before the opposition blinked and a "Get Brexit Done" election could be called. But *even then*, if Corbyn's Labour hadn't been so unpopular, the Tories could easily have lost (Boris was never very popular with the electorate or his colleagues; only the Tory party at large).
Why does this matter? Simply; ask anyone who can actually remember voting leave in 2016, and I doubt they will say they were voting for anything like the Brexit they got; nor was it generally considered inevitable at the time that this would be the outcome. Sure, the risks were obvious; the safe choice was remain; but on the key issue of trade & the economy, a lot of leavers had good reason to think they were choosing something very different - not fantastical, just a different trade-off. Then from 2016-19 positions hardened; there did seem to be a real (foolish) sense that we had to follow through and get this done, even when it had become clear that the kind of deal coming was way harder (and frankly worse) than that envisaged by Vote Leave at the start.
I don't think they/we were impetuous Farage-suckers. More like, fed up with Cameroonian arrogance and fake "all in it together" austerity, seduced by Cummings' artful "control" myth, then serially let down by politicians who just hadn't thought it through and were outflanked by those who didn't care.
(The elite punishment bit is 100% correct though. And I'm all for that, just not by cutting off my own arm.)
...
Following from that, there are very obvious reasons why Brexit was invisible in the election just called. Everyone is sore; voters don't want to be reminded how they were taken in; the Tories don't want to remind them it was *their* idea, and Labour knows that many of its supporters (even way out on the left) were leavers; their own 2019 manifesto included it. Although there's plenty of regret, there isn't any enthusiasm to rejoin (which would be a fantastically complicated process in any case, with far less favourable terms and a requirement to take the Euro most likely).
So there's really nothing to be gained by either main party mentioning it. Best to focus on rebuilding some kind of trust with the electorate and with European partners, then put it on the list for a second term. Weird but rational?
Real lesson: don't call referenda in a parliamentary democracy. And if you have to, make them as detailed as possible, with clear symmetry between the options (Scottish devolution worked much better because of this).
Oh come on Claire. Memories of the 2010 Eurozone financial crisis were still fresh in 2016. It wasn't clear (and still isnt) that the EU will survive over the long or even medium term.
People forget that Germany pursued such punitive policies towards southern Europe they got rebuked by the IMF. The EU did not exactly look like a functional or pleasant organization in 2016.
This is a stunning piece, Claire, even by your consistently high standards. I found myself repeatedly opening a file where I keep the best quotes I come across.
I believe this one, in particular, is the most profound:
"Politics, in a democracy, is about giving voters what the deep, unacknowledged part of them longs while simultaneously providing them with a political language they can use to justify that choice."
It explains so much of the disconnect between the candidates' rhetoric, the polls, and the eventual election results that has been bothering me since I was old enough to vote!
And every candidate whose natural inclination is to recite statistics and numbered action plans should tattoo this on his left arm:
"Voters may not care about policy, but they care very much how a candidate makes them feel."
I do think you are being a bit unfair here:
"The text is immigration and the cost of living, but the subtext is impulsiveness, resentment, envy, and the sincere desire to be told lies."
Besides a natural resentment on the part of an in-group toward an out-group, there are legitimate concerns about crime, lack of assimilation, job competition, and losing national identity. Candidates who ignore or disparage those concerns certainly don't make the populace *feel* like they're being heard.
I strongly agree that most developed nations desperately need immigrants. Why the candidates cannot explain that simple fact is, also, beyond me. I've long advocated a simple policy (keeping in mind your quote from another essay, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong"): "We will accept every person with no criminal background or communicable disease and provide them no public assistance beyond life-and-death situations for a period of X years." (X, in my mind, being around 5 years.) I believe that was American immigration policy from its founding until the decade that started paving the road with good intentions, and it worked very well. (I stand ready to be corrected on both counts :-))
Thank you, Jonathan.
Maalasef çok durdu on my phone. I’ll try on desktop app.
Thank you, Dr. Berlinski, for another fine article. I found it simultaneously engaging, enraging, entertaining, hilarious, depressing, and enlightening. I was not familiar with the Shawn Rosenberg theory, and what he said as reported in today's CG reflected so much of my own observation of current events that I also dug into your 13 Sep 19 article, which I found even more prescient and depressing. I have for some time thought that the stresses of modern life were driving people into a retreat from modernity. We have so many choices and need to make so many decisions about even the simplest aspects of modern existence that we just want to kick back and throw up our hands. You and Mr. Rosenberg show this desire to retreat into simplicity to be more a flight from reality, as your title accurately reflects. An educated populace is necessary for a democracy to function effectively. Time was, not all that long ago, when there were filters in place (elites, if you will) that helped us to evaluate the information we received every day. Now the authority of those filters has declined precipitously (some deservedly so) to the point where an insufficiently educated populace cannot evaluate their vastly expanded sources of information critically. This is happening at the same time as education systems in the U.S. are focusing more on skills training and test-taking than on any effort to develop students' curiosity about why things are the way they are, that might impel them toward a lifetime of learning. We need to reclaim and refurbish the term "elite" from the vocabulary of epithets. One should strive to become elite in as many areas of human endeavor that our individual talents make possible, without practicing elitism. Life teaches most of us the humility and, hopefully, compassion that help us to overcome any tendency to elitism, but it takes a long, long time.
But I babble. Thanks again for filling my Sunday with provocative material for contemplation.
Nicely said, Mr. Coyle.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. Great piece. Loved it.
Thank you--it means a lot to me to hear this from readers (probably an unseemly amount), and I'm always grateful when a reader takes the time to say he or she found something I wrote useful.
This is great and truly depressing stuff Claire. Looking forward to your take now that it seems the extreme left (not the far right) has won in France
I am also interested to hear Claire's thoughts on this. In the US it seems like the Far Right and the Far Left are dominating the conversation and the centers are being crushed in the process. I texted with a French friend this morning and while they were relieved to have voice Le Pen they weren't exactly thrilled with the Far Left either.
You'll get that later today.
Btw, I assume you mean 179 million or billion euros per year? Not 179 Euros?
Where?
“Not to be outdone, the left-wing coalition plans to raise the minimum wage, fix the price of household goods, fix the price of energy, make school free, spend more on low-cost housing, lower the retirement age, repeal Macron’s immigration reform, invite “climate refugees” to France, and raise the deficit by €179 per year.”
Ah! Right you are. I shall fix it.
If we vote for whoever makes us feel good about ourselves why have these people been able to make good decisions in the past but are unable to do so now? Has what makes us feel good about ourselves changed, and if so how and why?
Did you click on the link to the article I wrote about Shawn Rosenberg's theory? His answer to exactly this question is interesting, and I fear it's also persuasive. Or at least, the best arguments I could come up to counter it weren't really all that good. (You'll see what I mean if you read it.)
Here’s a possible reason people feel significantly less good now than they once did. A fair dose of cultural homogeneity is the foundation of high trust societies. Citizens are happier in high trust societies.
Increasing doses of cultural heterogeneity leads to low trust societies. Citizens feel alienated in low trust societies.
Earlier in this century Europe and the United States allowed reasonable amounts of immigration. That immigration was healthy because immigrants brought talent, enthusiasm and sometime capital to their new homes. In the last decade, the number of immigrants moving to the United States and several European nations skyrocketed.
In the United States, the vast number of immigrants desired to assimilate. They mostly came from nations that shared a cultural heritage with the United States. In Europe, many new immigrants came from nations very culturally dissimilar to the prevailing culture in their new homes.
When cultural heterogeneity reaches a tipping point, as it has in places like the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Holland and elsewhere, high trust societies morph into low trust societies. The end result is profound alienation which results in political extremism.
A most precise and well-constructed comment. Accurately captures quotidian experience, too. So thank you. But... isn't it also kinda racist to talk like this? You know: "Ya imports the third world, ya becomes the third world." Completely agreeing with what you say -- but how would you respond to a racism charge here?
One obvious answer in the United States, at least, is that a significant number of the immigrants who entered the country illegally are Hispanic in origin yet a significant number of Hispanic American citizens are angry about illegal immigration. If polls are to be believed, Donald Trump has a slight lead over Biden with Hispanic voters. Trump’s position on immigration is one of the reasons for this. It’s incongruous to suggest that Hispanics feel racial animus against other Hispanics.
Polls also document that African Americans are increasingly angry about massive waves of immigration. We see evidence of this in many urban centers, especially New York and Chicago. Anyone throwing around accusations of racism (as progressive Democrats sometimes do) needs to explain why “people of color” have racial animus against other “people of color.”
The reality is that concerns about illegal immigration have little to do with race and everything to do about class. Urban elites may find some aspects of illegal immigration a bit annoying and other aspects beneficial like cheap labor cutting their lawns. It’s working class voters who suffer when illegal immigrants compete with them for lesser-skilled jobs and for benefits from government sponsored social programs.
So how come the Germans elected the Nazis?
One reason cited by historians is massive poverty caused by the Treaty of Versailles.
When my parents went to London in 1948 it WAS a high trust society. People didn’t lock their doors. But a lot of that was from surviving the Blitz together. Before that they had starve outs, who froze in the snow like the little match girl. Deciding that it’s diversity rather than poverty seems like projecting today’s issues onto the past to get an answer that suits (your) today’s concerns.
If you step away from politics some of the most radical social movements (the Bolsheviks, the Cultural Revolution) happened in ethnically homogenous societies. Tl:Dr: I’m sceptical .
The Russian Empire of 1917 doesn’t seem to have been ethnically homogeneous. Besides a good-sized populations of Ukrainians, Poles, and Belorussians, there were quite a few small ethnic groups that added up to a substantial portion of the whole.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire_census
Fair, but what about the Cultural Revolution in China? I think there’s more to contentment than ethnic homogeneity and also to discontent than ethnic heterogeneity. Basically there is no ONE thing that’s a silver bullet.
So much good sense packed into one article! Thanks very much for this. It's damned depressing, but if enough people read and understood it, this would be the solution to the problems it describes. May such thinking soon bring people back to their senses.
The first part first as seen through the lens of John O'Sullivan, referencing the august, John Gray. "In terms of stable policies, however, the election will represent an extraordinary continuity. As many commentators have observed in recent years, British politics is in the middle of a vast realignment in which political parties change their class composition with middle-class elites moving left and blue- and white-collar workers going in the opposite direction. ( I discuss this in a recent Claremont Review article on Matthew Goodwin’s book Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics.) This analysis is not confined to the Right but spreading across the spectrum. In a recent New Statesman article, John Gray, once a regular National Review contributor and now an independent-minded post-liberal thinker whom many Brits regard as another Orwell, defined the election as one in which the fundamental choice at issue — namely, national democracy versus global technocracy — wasn’t really being discussed at all.
Indeed, Gray was understating his case. That choice is not a topic of debate because all the parties except for Reform are on the side of global technocracy without ever saying so explicitly. The Tories have been split on this choice since the Brexit referendum, and the return of David Cameron symbolizes the party’s decision to remain ambivalent on it for the time being. They are facing oblivion in deference to that unadmitted orthodoxy on issues like net zero and migration. But all the other parties that might serve in government – Labour, Lib-Dems, Scot-Nats, the Greens — are more completely submissive to the same set of orthodoxies. Voters will throw out the Tories, as Peter Hitchens points out, in order to get more and worse of the same.
It is not hard to predict a bad result from that “change.” As Gray, who understands that our new masters are not how they present themselves, points out:
Rule by technocrats means bypassing politics by outsourcing key decisions to professional bodies that claim expert knowledge. Their superior sapience is often ideology clothed in pseudo-science they picked up at university a generation ago, and their recommendations a radical political programme disguised as pragmatic policymaking. Technocracy represents itself as delivering what everyone wants, but at bottom it is the imposition of values much of the population does not share. A backlash was inevitable.
And a backlash will be inevitable under Labour in due course. But they will stick with the policies much longer because they really believe in the orthodoxies — including the delusion that they are experts. They would benefit greatly if they were to seek advice from the sadder but wiser Grays and Portillos who have been there before and know how this movie turns out. Alas, they won’t."
Here's a good reason not to take Goodwin too seriously (Gray is a much more weighty & interesting contributor): https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1809975751350866201
"Huge day in France where elites are working overtime to block Le Pen. My take? She will only get stronger & stronger until those same elites address people's concerns over mass immigration..."
Elite Epitomecrat Macron literally *called an election to give voters the choice*. Some kinda block? And then, working well within the constitutional 2-round system that institutionalises tactical voting, they got their tactics in order. And as Claire already pointed out, the same Macron government already enacted historically strict immigration controls.
I mean, yes, it's a take. But a monumentally silly one. How dare Elites conspire to offer people a real choice, and how dare they take the "wrong" one!
To be continued........
Sorry, this is sounding pretty Parklife to me. Mention of Matt Goodwin not a good sign. But to the heart of the matter: "global technocracy". I'm happy with Gray's basic definition of technocracy; I'm not sure what the global adds (are we delegating to offshore, global bodies of experts? Would that include, say, NATO?) In any case, how are the key Reform policies materially less globally technocratic than the other parties you mention? Summary here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqll1edxgw4o
I can see that for example, new right populists don't like Net Zero; and you can definitely argue that, say, Paris alignment is a global standard for decarbonisation. But when a democratic party says: we think it's important to hit that standard, so we're going to invest in X and regulate Y, they are emphatically *not* "outsourcing key decisions" to experts. The standard was created by experts, sure, but they are asking the electorate to make a choice to adopt it. If the electorate votes for them, it was a democraic choice; and they can throw it out next time round.
It's very different from eg. central bank independence, where politicians do delegate key decisions (interest rate setting etc) to panels of experts. Reform UK could have proposed to end that; they do mention Bank of England reserves policy in their manifesto (sorry, "Contract") but nothing about independence.
So... show me the technocracy?
Damn! Had no idea I'd just sacrificed my "Brexit Pubs Guarantee!"
Guess it's all pilsner now?
Great work, Claire! I didn't have to wait a week for this one.