Modern Europe’s political structure is based on the supposition that capitalism and democracy can be compatible – so the most urgent challenge of our times is reconciling the two.In short, economic liberalism and political liberal generate paradoxes that require a comprehensive worldview (systematic set of presumptions) that balances social, economic and political liberalism for Western liberalism to survive.
Contemporary liberals are temperamentally conservative — and what they want to conserve is a morally bankrupt political order.,,,A characteristic of neoliberalism?
Maybe I was predisposed to democratic socialism; I always considered myself to be “on the Left,” even as a teenager. In any case, it’s become clear in retrospect that watching the liberal class respond to events over the past decade has been a powerful stimulus in my politicization.
Which is to say, I didn’t acquire radical politics simply through reading Marx in college (though it certainly aided the process). Nor did I become irredeemably frustrated with liberalism merely by absorbing some abstract argument about its flaws. I didn’t have a Road to Damascus revelation while thumbing through some volume by Chomsky or David Harvey. And while I would certainly count them as formative to my political evolution, it wasn’t the likes of Ralph Miliband and Tony Benn — let alone Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn — who ultimately imbued me with a burning hatred for anything and everything that calls itself “moderate” or “centrist.”
No, that instinct owes much more to watching Barack Obama summon forth a tidal wave of popular goodwill, then proceed to invite the same old cadre of apparatchiks and financiers back into the White House to carry on business as usual despite the most punishing economic crisis since the Great Depression; to seeing the “war on terror” become a permanent fixture of the global landscape long after its original architects had been booted from the halls of power, courtesy of supposedly enlightened humanitarians; to witnessing a potentially monumental hunger for change be sacrificed on the altar of managerialism and technocratic respectability. It comes from watching a smiling Nick Clegg stand next to David Cameron in the Rose Garden at Number 10 Downing Street before rubber-stamping a series of lacerating cuts to Britain’s welfare state and betraying a generation of students in the process; to seeing the dexterity by which Canada’s liberals gesture to the left then govern from the right; and from seeing the radical demands of global anti-austerity movements endlessly whittled down and regurgitated as neoliberal slam poetry to be recited at Davos by the hip young innovators du jour.
These triangulations, and many others like them, helped me realize that the malaise was the product of a congenital trait rather than a temporary blip. The problem, in other words, wasn’t that contemporary liberalism was failing to live up to its ideals, but that it was living up to them all too well....Bourgeois liberalism.
In theory, modern liberalism is a set of ideas about human freedom, markets, and representative government. In practice, or so it now seems to me, it has largely become a political affect, and a quintessentially conservative one at that: a set of reflexes common to those with a Panglossian faith in capitalist markets and the institutions that attempt to sustain them amid our flailing global order. In theory, it is an ideology of progress. In practice, it has become the secular theology of the status quo; the mechanism through which the gilded buccaneers of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and multinational capital rationalize hierarchy and exploitation while fostering resignation and polite deference among those they seek to rule....Jacobin
In France, however, there is no centrist opposition or alternative left. Macron won by ingesting and replacing the decayed remnants of all the parties of the centre left and centre right, and even so he only won 24 percent of the vote in the first round of last year’s presidential elections. For liberals, he is literally the only game left in town. If he is defeated in the next presidential elections in 2022, then as things stand today, the overwhelming probability is that the next French president will be Marine le Pen of the National Front (or “National Rally” as it now calls itself).
With this, conservative nationalism would move into the very heart of European politics, and the European Union in anything like its existing form would cease to exist. Moreover, at this point, the main French opposition would become the Marxist (but equally anti-EU) left-wing movement of Jean-Luc Melenchon’s “Unbowed France” (La France Insoumise). If this becomes the only real choice left to French voters, then liberal democracy will be dead and democracy of any kind may not survive for much longer.Well, maybe not neoliberal "democracy" of bourgeois liberalism. That is a far cry from democracy of any kind.
Experts versus populists, bureaucracy versus democracy: Paul Tucker, former deputy governor of the Bank of England and a fellow at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government, chooses books that wrestle with the central dilemmas of today's liberal political order….Important with respect to the paradoxes of liberalism that are are now coming to a head in the conflict between politics as usual and populism. Steven Bannon's chief target was the administrative state, which is bound up in the meaning of "draining the swamp." This post is a good summary of the issues involved and the major positions concerning them.
Everything comes back to the elected legislature, because our system of government ultimately depends upon the legislature drawing lines between the pursuit of efficiency and of equity, reconciling our disagreements on various fronts for the time being. Legislation itself is a commitment device. You can’t flick a switch and it’s no longer law; you have to go through a process to change it, and it’s done in more or less bright sunlight. We debate legislative change, which is terrific. My book is trying to draw on both our liberal traditions and our republican traditions. The problem with the liberal tradition, as Lowi saw, is that it too easily ends up saying that vague delegations are inevitable, and therefore we must have these technocrats overseen by the courts and we must make it easy to challenge their rules and decisions via the courts.
I don’t want to argue against those processes, but they can’t suffice because they amount to no more than one group of unelected officials (judges) overseeing another group of unelected technocrats (central bankers and regulators). So, if we have legislatures that just pass vague statutes—in effect handing over their power and responsibility to set high policy—and then say that judges will see it’s all okay, then something has gone deeply wrong.…These issues are directly related to economic policy, most obviously monetary policy set by a politically independent central bank. They also concern governance and policy in general in a democratic republic as the contemporary state becomes less democratic and more technocratic.
In an effort to “balance” freedom of expression with other needs, the European Union on Monday launched its "High-Level Expert Group” to tackle fake news.Washington Examiner — Opinion
The House of Representatives voted Thursday to disregard the constitutional rights of Americans and extend the powers of intelligence agencies.
As relations worsen, US must realize Russia will not soon, if ever, become a liberal democracy.…
Carried away by ahistorical reasoning, the U.S. believed its victory in the Cold War meant that Russia, like all other countries, had little choice but to adopt the liberal democratic free-market order that had brought prosperity and peace to the West....
The EUAS officially branded researchers and journalists as fraudulent, unpatriotic and dishonest without any notification. There is a small disclaimer on the list that states that ”disinformation review cannot be considered an official EU position”. Yet it was created by the European Council, is part of the ”diplomatic service” of the EU, hence funded by it, uses its symbols and institutional addresses. So, it is part of the EU and yet does not represent its official position? The statement seems to have been made for the express purpose of dishonestly dismissing concerns raised by citizens.…
Back to the list. There are three regular contributors. East Stratcom Network, part of EUAS, the already mentioned Kremlin Watch and finally a Ukrainian website called “StopFake“, supported again, it’s unclear how, by Open Society Foundations.7)
The reports normally focus on the Russian media like TASS, Sputnik, RT. The same issue no. 52 also lists Zero Hedge for reblogging Ron Paul’s criticism of the “fake news” crusade, and Paul Craig Roberts’s one. In the Soros version of European values, criticism and democratic debate are fake news! Past issues include the conservative outlet Breitbart, 8)and even The Guardian. 9)
It’s also rather interesting to note how Mr. Soros interprets European “liberal values”. Free press is normally listed as a key one, and yet Soros wants proscription lists of anyone who disagrees, something for instance adopted by Turkish President Erdoğan following the last year’s failed coup and widely criticized by the EU itself. Another key liberal value is fair trial. Yet Soros’ own Kremlin Watch is judge, jury and executioner in one. Who does the EU belong to and serve, anyway? Its people or its financial oligarch? Perhaps Israel and Hungary are right: Mr. Soros is a threat to democracy.10)Another instance of liberal paradoxes.
The issue of “tolerance” can be complicated, even paradoxical, such as extending tolerance to intolerance with the possibility that the intolerance will ultimately eliminate tolerance, explains Lawrence Davidson.Consortium News
Trump’s foreign policy team is filled with hawks on Iran, but Tillerson is the first administration official to advocate for regime change in his official capacity.
The Iranian government was quick to condemn Tillerson’s remarks. On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi calledTillerson’s comments “interventionist, in gross violation of the compelling rules of international law, unacceptable and strongly condemned.”
“Since the 1950s, the United States tried to meddle in Iranian affairs by different strategies such as coup d’état, regime change, and military intervention.” Qassemi said, referring to U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup in Iran, dubbed Operation AJAX by the CIA.What is liberal about this?
...it must be reiterated that regime change without any official direction from the U.N. is completely illegal.The US only cites international law in its own advantage and does not regard itself boundary either international law or treaty when it suits US interests. That is the definition of a rogue state.
Iran just elected a reformist for the second time (with a higher voter turnout than the U.S. elections in 2016). This reformist, Hassan Rouhani, is more than capable of cutting deals with the U.S and its allies. According to Tillerson himself, as explained above, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is clearly workingeffectively, further reducing any concerns regarding Iran’s capacity to pose a nuclear threat to anyone.
Why seek to topple a government elected by its own people? For “democracy” and “freedom?” Or because Iran sells its oil in Yuan, a direct attack on America’s control over the financial markets?....
The theorem shows -- in a highly abstract model -- that producers and consumers can match their desires perfectly, given a particular set of prices....
... it worked only in a perfect world, far removed from the one humans actually inhabit....
This perversion isn’t Arrow’s fault. He merely helped to prove a mathematical theorem, and was no blind advocate for markets. Indeed, he actually thought the theorem illustrated the limitations of capitalism, and he was prescient in understanding how economic inequality might come to impair the workings of democratic government.
Perhaps it would be best to use his own words: “In a system where virtually all resources are available for a price, economic power can be translated into political power by channels too obvious for mention. In a capitalist society, economic power is very unequally distributed, and hence democratic government is inevitably something of a sham.”As I have been saying, capitalism (economic liberalism) is antithetical to democracy (political liberalism).
Although we don’t talk about it much, capitalism is fundamentally about power and who should wield it. The general idea is that it should be diffused among all the average folks in society. We don’t want particular firms or individuals accumulating power because then the economy is run for them and not us. Implicit in all this is the idea that the average person is important and has rights. That probably sounds familiar and, indeed, there is a reason why the language is so similar in the Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). All were a product of the political, social, and intellectual revolution wherein the focal point became the individual. Individuals should be allowed to make their own choices and shape their own future.
Whether or not capitalism is really capable of this is a point of controversy. Regardless, there is no question that it is philosophically committed to breaking power into tiny packets and preventing elites from taking over. If the latter does occur, then the positive outcomes we associate with capitalism are no longer guaranteed. They become increasingly unlikely because we can’t trust that those elites will really act in our best interest. With respect to businesses, for example, Adam Smith wrote,People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
What I am getting at here is that rejuvenating the middle class is not just about jobs. It’s also part of a larger project aimed at wresting power away from economic and political elites and returning it to Americans. The latter appears to be what the President means by “draining the swamp” and I totally agree. This was a key part of both his and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns and it must be a priority lest we lose forever the opportunity to reverse this trend.
With that in mind, I have reviewed a number of President Trump’s policies asking generally, “Does this drain the swamp by empowering the average American?”
A simple answer to a complex moral question.
In comments published last week by Car and Driver, Mercedes-Benz executive Christoph von Hugo said that the carmaker’s future autonomous cars will save the car’s driver and passengers, even if that means sacrificing the lives of pedestrians, in a situation where those are the only two options.
“If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one,” von Hugo said at the Paris Motor Show. “Save the one in the car. If all you know for sure is that one death can be prevented, then that’s your first priority.”
