Fireside this week! Next week we’re going to launch into our next big series on the structure of the Roman Republic, a companion to How to Polis, 101, but because of what is going on with the book project (a topic on which Patrons get monthly updates!) I wanted a lighter week before we dived into that big topic.
For this week’s musing, I wanted to talk a bit about some of the questions that came up around last week’s Status Quo Coalition and also talk a bit on some of the things that just ended up not quite fitting into that post.
The first thing I want to speak to is the notion that I ought to be thinking in a more historically materialist lens. I got this both as a criticism for the Status Quo Coalition and also for a comment made on Twitter that if people really want the ‘crimes of Communism’ taught, they should just hire more historians from those places (in response to complaints on the right that the crimes of right-leaning authoritarian regimes are somehow over-taught and left-leaning authoritarian regimes are under-taught). On the latter point, I should note that I took my Russian and Chinese history courses at the University of Massachusetts located in the beautiful People’s Republic of Amherst; a conservative campus or department it was not. And yet the ruthlessness of Lenin, the brutality of Stalin and the callousness of Mao were all well discussed; even ‘leftist’ professors these days do not generally feel the need to carry water for those regimes and in any case the historical record on the failure of those regimes is really clear. Never in a history department have I met a teacher who was not quite frank about the horrifying aspects of the regimes in question; I’m sure such historians must exist somewhere, but they must also be very rare birds indeed.
But back to ‘historical materialism.’ Now that’s a slippery phrasing which can mean two things. One the one hand, it can be an argument that the issue looks differently from a materialist lens of analysis – that is, if you considered the concrete material conditions (income, living standards, food security, nutrition, life expectancy, infrastructure, gross production, etc.) rather than cultural, intellectual or religious conditions, you might see something different. A claim of ‘what you see depends on where you look,’ which is a fair point to make assuming the initial analytical lens was not already a materialist one. On the other hand, because ‘historical materialism‘ is what Marxists – and not many others, because it is relatively rare (in my experience, at least) to hear historians use that phrasing1 – call doctrinaire Marxist historical theory, it can also mean, “if you adopted a historical school that presupposes my conclusions, you too would have to presuppose my conclusions.” Which is true in so far as it goes, which is not very far. But it can be hard in many cases to immediately tell the difference between these two statements.
In the latter case, while almost all historians use tools out of the toolbox that is Marxist historiography – we talked, for instance, about the Annales approach, which is one such tool; critical theory is another – very few historians adopt a doctrinaire Marxist interpretation of history anymore. The reason ought to be fairly obvious: Marxist ‘historical materialism’ asserted a series of stages of economic development which, because neither Marx nor Engels were particularly gifted historians and were working with very incomplete information about the economy of the past to boot, turn out to map very poorly to both the way that economic systems developed before the 1800s and to how they came to develop after the 1800s, which is a problem for a historical theory which argues that most important historical developments are predicated on economic systems.2 Consequently, portions of Marxist historiography have been largely abandoned (in most cases for many decades) because it became clear that the actual historical record could not support them, while other portions have become standard tools used widely by historians with non-Marxist viewpoints. In a sense, historians have looted Marxist historical theory, plucking from it the still use concepts but leaving much of the less useful dogmatism behind. Those useful concepts, in turn, are so pervasive that I must imagine no historian could get a PhD without being made to learn them and demonstrate that they can understand and deploy them. Indeed, I do that here sometimes, though I tend not to use the jargon, because I dislike jargon.
That leaves the critique that a more materialist approach more broadly understood (without any particular reference to Marxist historiography) is necessary, to which I can only respond…that’s the kind of history I do? Why do you think we spend so much time on agriculture and iron production and the structures of labor in the countryside and how patterns of warfare impact the peasantry? And when it comes to the argument about the status quo coalition, I have material interests front and center. To simplify the argument down to its essentials, I am arguing that the industrial revolution fundamentally changed the economic interests of a lot of people because it changed the methods of production which – once they figured that out, which took some time – caused substantial changes in behavior. There is a political component to this, a necessary mechanism whereby the change in the interests of the people can be translated into policy, which of course is democracy. But the underlying shift in interests is a materialist one. Steven Pinker thinks people stopped fighting so many wars because they became more enlightened (I am grossly simplifying his argument); I think people stopped fighting so many wars because they realized it was a bad business to be in.3
This is a material analysis! For both Roman senators and Roman farmers, Rome going to war was generally good on an economic basis (because Rome mostly won). Consequently, Rome went to war a lot, because doing so made the people who made the decisions (as we’ll see soon, a mix of Rome’s elite and the middlingly-well-to-do farmers) benefited economically from doing so.4 It is not hard to see the same train of interests play out in democratic Athens in the fifth century. And of course polities with smaller ruling classes might go to war even when that was bad for the peasantry, but good for the elite, simply because the peasantry had no say in the matter. But the folk history that assumes war was always bad for the common folk is actually often wrong: successful warfare was, even for the commonfolk, often the fastest route to greater wealth and material prosperity in the pre-industrial world (albeit this is, of course, a negative-sum game where all of the gain in material conditions and then some comes out of the losing side).
But when the economic systems change, the balance of incentives change, the material impacts of actions change and so behavior – slowly, at a lag, because learning is a process – changes. The analysis here is already materialist. Which is why one tends to suspect either that it has been perhaps misunderstood, or ‘historical materialism’ here is meant in its second meaning, which I do not find persuasive.
The other quibble I saw was with my use of Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index. The GFI tends to invite two sorts of complaints. The first is that the (center-)left ideological bent of the organization tends to mean that conservative-but-classically-liberal governments are made to pay a penalty in their GFI score for being on the wrong political ‘side’ of what are essentially debates within the liberal tradition. I haven’t made a systematic study on this point, but if there is such a slant (and there may well be) it is slight enough not to matter in the sort of broad-brush way we were using the score. Such penalty may be the difference between an 80 and a 75, but not between a 95 and a 50. Given that our broad sweep of the GFI (using the 70+ ‘Free’ category) did, in fact, pick up pretty much all of the members of the status quo coalition, it seems clear that we were not operating at a level of granularity where any ‘conservative penalty’ in the GFI (again, which I had not seen rigorously demonstrated, or rigorously disproved) would actually matter.
And just to stop a second and make sure we’re really clear on something, because I’m going to have to use the word ‘liberal’ a lot here: again when I use that word I do not mean ‘of the American Democratic Party’ or ‘of the Left’ but ‘coming out of the liberty-focused intellectual tradition called liberalism.’ I try never to use the word ‘liberal’ to mean ‘the political left’ anymore, in part because some leftists are not liberals in this sense (and some of them will angrily insist on this point) and because not all liberals are leftists. So when I say ‘liberal’ think, ‘likes democracy, follows the precepts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’
The other criticism is that Freedom House is ideological in that it adopts a liberal worldview, which is unfair to countries outside of that tradition. That is, it defines freedom as consisting of things like free speech, free elections, freedom of conscience and religion, free movement of people and so on. To which I have a few, overlapping responses. First, that this is perfect because that’s exactly how the Status Quo Coalition defines the question, making the GFI score ideal for detecting SQC members, which is what I was using it for. Second, it’s not clear to me that this is at all unfair to some of the illiberal countries which score low on these measures; many of them are quite open about not considering these values important. Viktor Orbán went so far as to describe Hungary as an ‘illiberal state’ and gave Singapore, Russia, Turkey and China as examples of other, successful illiberal states. Likewise the late Lee Kuan Yew, leader of Singapore from 1959 to 1990, was repeatedly explicit that he thought democracy and freedom were frankly bad ideas, at least for his country. Who is Freedom House being unfair to here? And must I play pretend that the conditions of political liberty today in, say, Iran or China are different from what they are? Am I required to pretend that there is some alternate definition of freedom which, like some kind of exotic mineral, only materializes in authoritarian police states and which can only be recognized with the special tool that is their propaganda?
And of course the third point is just to note that I am not particularly subtle in sharing a basic affinity for liberalism as a political philosophy, which means I think these basic freedoms are, in fact, a valid way to judge the performance of governments.5 I don’t usually talk too much here about my political views (though they doubtless sometimes come through to at least some degree – though folks ranting about them in the comments have a 0% success rate at guessing my political ‘tribe’), but I am politically a liberal – that is, again, committed to a liberal democratic order based on freedoms, liberties and rights – before all of my other political commitments, because I do not think that any of the other things opposing political systems promise (and rarely deliver), like prosperity or equality or the ‘common good,’ can actually be durably, reliably delivered over the long term by any other sort of system. Consequently my opinion on marginal tax rates, trade policy, industrial regulation all take a back seat to the necessary first condition that all of those choices must be made within the liberal system – those self-evident truths and unalienable rights – as a precondition. I will insist on your freedoms first, before I will discuss the policy differences we may have (so long as you are not trying to upend the system itself with violence).
For what it is worth, this is a historically informed worldview. Liberalism did not spring out of nowhere. It was a solution to a problem, the problem in general being how to organize a large, diverse society and the problem in particular being ‘How to Not Have a Thirty Years War.’ That’s what freedom of religion, for instance, is the very first part of the very first amendment in the US Bill of Rights – it is a ‘don’t have a Thirty Years War’ clause. The rights of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not there randomly, but instead they are specific solutions to particular problems of allowing large, complex human societies (like basically all countries are) to function without violence. Understanding the history of those problems leads me to appreciate the effectiveness and elegance of the liberal solution of structuring society through liberty. For a fun historical exercise, take each of the protections of the US Bill of Rights or the UDHR and go figure out exactly what historical problem that particular protection is intended to solve.
In any case, the “Status Quo Coalition” post was meant to argue for the existence of the coalition, not for its normative goodness. That said, it is hard for me not to conclude that the coalition’s stewardship of the global order is, on the one hand, deeply imperfect with much room for improvement and on the other hand, better for the standard of living of people both inside and outside the coalition than either any historical hegemon or any current proposed alternative hegemon. That does not mean no better order is possible, merely that I have yet to see one convincingly and practically proposed. This is not because we have a different human nature from our ancestors but again due to interests: it is for the most part in the interests of the members of the status quo coalition that the rest of the world be richer, more free and more stable, and that is new (though, again, no one has any good idea of how to reliably make that change happen on purpose). States and coalitions of states are mostly big, dumb, clueless things, so those interests are implemented only imperfectly and frequently diverted into cruel directions by the personal venal interests of powerful figures within them, but it sure beats states engaged in active campaigns of imperialism and economic sabotage against developing economies.6
On to the recommendations:
Over on Twitter, I wrote a thread (which I cross-posted to bluesky; it’s also on ThreadReader for those without access to Twitter) on the pectoral, an Italic armor that Polybius reports poorer Romans wore. In particular I vented my frustration at the depiction of this armor as a simple bronze plate, when the archaeological exemplars we have that are most likely to be the direct predecessors of the armor Polybius is seeing are a lot more complex, making it – to my mind, at least – far more likely that Polybius is giving a very minimalist description or a more complex armor. I think at some point in the future, I’ll probably do a post on the history of the Italic pectoral (8th cent. to 2nd cent. BC), how it changed and evolved, but when I held a vote on Twitter, there was a lot more appetite to get on with the Roman Republic series, so we’ll do that first.
Meanwhile, for just a few more days days Ben Pohl’s new book, Publishing in a Medieval Monestery is available for free download. I confess I have not read through it yet, but I have every reason to think it is a capable coverage of the topic and it’s free. Go get it (find the ‘save PDF’ button and click that).
In podcasts, perennial ACOUP favorite The Partial Historians just got to their recap of the 420s BC in the history of the Roman Republic. Those recaps can be really handy if you are looking to dive into their podcast and the nitty-gritty of the early Republic, to bring you up to speed. As I’ve noted before, the whole project, which is a year-by-year walkthrough of our sources for Roman history, beginning with the initial legends of the regal period and now having worked (over almost a decade) into 400s, is a great way to get a sense both for early Roman history, but also for how historians do this sort of history. The podcast isn’t just a narrative of events we think happened, but a look at the sources for those events, so it is a really fantastic look at how we know what we know ‘close to the metal‘ as it were.
And for this week’s book recommendation, given where we are heading in discussing the structure of the Roman Republic, I am going to recommend H.I. Flower, Roman Republics (2010). While what we’re going to do with ‘How to Roman Republic, 101,’ is present a ‘snapshot’ of how the Roman Republic functioned (focused on how it worked during the Middle Republic c. 264-133 BC or so), Flower instead focuses on change in the nature of the res publica over time. In particular she argues for a series of Roman systems, including six distinctive republics.
In particular, Flower lays out transitional pre-republican period (509-494) and then a proto-republic (494-451) before the beginning of the first republic (450-367) characterized by experimentation with the structure of power, like military tribunes with consular powers and negotiation on the role of patricians and plebians in the state. This is then followed by a second republic (366-300) shared patricians and plebians who continue to represent distinct interests groups in its structure. As those differences fall away the republic comes to be run by a new political class, the nobiles (some patricians, some plebians) whose governance typifies republics 3, 4 and 5 (300-88); that republic is functionally shattered by opening of Rome’s civil wars. Flower argues the system that follows Sulla’s victory is not a return to the old system of the nobiles, but in fact very much a new system with new rules (a sixth republic, 81-60) which rapidly fails, having effectively collapsed into the first triumvirate by 60 BC.
This book when it came out was effectively an ‘instant classic’ among scholars of the Roman Republic, but I think it also has a lot to offer almost any kind of reader. It is written accessibly (with some handy timelines in the back to help you keep track of the chronology) and is a great companion to a schematic description of the republic which must, by the nature of the exercise, be a snapshot. But of course the Roman res publica was not static; it changed substantially over time, and Flower’s book provides an excellent introduction to the nature and timing of those changes.
- In no small part because of the obviously confusing and intentionally question-begging framing whereby it assumes that a doctrinaire Marxist reading of history is the only possible materialist reading of history. Rather, I tend to hear ‘Marxist historiography’ to refer to the body of scholarship that attempted, mostly without success, to substantiate Marx and Engel’s historical theory in the evidence. I want to note here (and I’ll do it again) not everything to come out of Marxist historiography is useless; by no means. But the effort to actually establish the core through-line of the theory, the progressions of particular ‘modes of production‘ leading eventually and inevitably to the ‘communist mode of production’ has been effectively abandoned by trained historians because it doesn’t fit the evidence. Consequently you have a lot of historians who use theoretical tools and frames that come out of Marxist historiography, but very few historians who would call themselves a “Marxist historian” today.
- Somewhat ironically, for the study of the ancient world, it was committed Marxist Moses Finley who, in sketching out the ancient economy better than anyone had yet done, began the process of abandoning a doctrinaire Marxist model, because it simply didn’t fit. The irony is that his effort was, in part, to try to salvage what of the Marxist model he could for the ancient world and to fend back explicitly capitalist/Whiggish readings (e.g. the work of Tenney Frank and M.I. Rostovtzeff). Subsequent work on the ancient economy (which we’ve briefly discussed) has moved even further away. Likewise, you will have to hunt quite hard to find medieval scholars who think the ‘feudal mode of production’ is a very good description of the structures of production in the European Middle Ages. Again, this is not to say nothing good ever came out of Marxist historiography – lots of useful tools did – but the grand narrative is largely abandoned because it doesn’t conform to the evidence.
- Drawing heavily on the work of Azar Gat, who put forward this materialist argument before Pinker made his cultural one.
- This is, by the by, a really old, well-settled argument about incentives in the Roman political system, most notably laid out by W.V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome (1979). On the author, please note.
- A standard by which I make no claim that my own government has an unblemished record.
- This was, arguably, for instance, the Roman policy on the Rhine-Danube frontier: wars of state-deconsolidation designed to smash up potential competitors on the frontier.
> I’m sure such historians must exist somewhere, but they must also be very rare birds indeed.
Something to consider, insights from academia* take roughly 20 years** to reach an industry. If you take high school teaching*** as the industry**** for history, the average person knowledge, and opinions on history based on that knowledge, may be 40 years out of date from your point of view.
You live in the future from my point of view 🙂
So thank you for your series, especially the one on clothing which corrected a lot of misconceptions I held.
*including computer science
**rules of thumb, not a formal measurement, in part due to the time before those with the knowledge reach a position of power, in part due to the time needed to develop new technology based on that knowledge
***not all high school history teachers try to stay up to date, so I met some of those rare birds, as did my late father to give you an idea of the sometimes glacial pace of knowledge transfer
****museum are sometimes very political, with funny statements like native people were holding the major religion values before the major religion existed
For what it’s worth, having grown up in Italy, which is a country with a much stronger communist tradition than the US (having pretty much always straddled the line between NATO and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, with a powerful Communist Party that was always right behind the main centre-right one in the elections and possibly one or two occasions in which less-than-clean means were used to keep the country this side of the Iron Curtain), I did have a high school history and philosophy teacher who was fairly openly apologetic about the USSR, though not fully sympathetic; he in fact had been (openly, no secrets there) a member of a radical group with loose connections to leftist terrorism back in his youth, in the 70s. Actually overall a really chill and fun dude in his old age, but I can’t say he wasn’t probably a *bit* biased in how he taught his subjects.
These things definitely IMO depend a lot also on the country’s history. The US had their anti-socialist scare due to cold war jingoism. Italy had more beef with fascism for obvious reason, and no direct experience of socialism. But I remember once talking with an Albanian guy who had immigrated to Italy, and he found our local tolerance and even affectionate, nostalgic treatment of communist symbols like the hammer and sickle disgusting, because to him they called to the memory far less pleasant experiences. This seems a constant for a lot of eastern European citizens, for obvious reasons – though in some cases that might then end up on the other extreme with the downplaying of fascism and Nazism because those are further away in the past.
It also depends A LOT on the specific country, generation, and social class. For some people in some places, socialism / communism improved things quite a bit, especially compared to what was before, and in some cases also to what came after. I have all sorts of stories in my own family, from people who were beaten to people who later enjoyed free education, to know that things are far from black and white. Although it is worth mentioning that Yugoslavian flavor of communism was comparably benign.
At Essex University in England I had a history lecturer who was Russian and openly denied that there had ever been gulags or repression in the USSR. When pressed she would admit that there might have been some but then argued that the McCarthy trials had imprisoned more people than the gulags. So these guys are out there, although she was extreme even for a university that used to be called ‘Red Essex’.
“Although it is worth mentioning that Yugoslavian flavor of communism was comparably benign.”
“Comparatively” is doing a lot of work there. The postwar Yugoslav government murdered over a hundred thousand of its own people (from various hated ethnic minorities) in three years and expelled rather more, out of a total population of 15m.
That’s not communism, that’s the Balkans.
Communism purports to be better than imperialism; so when it engages in ethnic cleansing just like any other empire it loses credibility.
You weren’t going to get any kind of revolution, either communist or nationalist (and in a many countries the revolutions were both), in the three years right after WWII *without* some executions and expulsions of minorities.
Your point?
You keep on arguing from the position that state control of the economy and revolution are good in themselves to people who do not share your premise. Perhaps you should stop taking it as a premise.
“Although it is worth mentioning that Yugoslavian flavor of communism was comparably benign.”
I think most of the Eastern European communist states were fairly benign, at least after 1956 and compared to the Soviet Union. But, I definitely agree that Yugoslavia was in some ways the best. Tito is a personal hero of mine, definitely one of the greatest leaders of the last century.
It’s worth noting that the former Yugoslavia isn’t the only place where people tend to say, in public opinion polls, that their country was better off under communism. You tend to see the same results in Hungaria and Slovakia, and depending on how you ask the question in some other countries as well. Pew asked this question in 2009 and found *really high* levels of communist nostalgia, but that’s probably unfair since 2009 was right during the Great Recession.
Even more recent polls in Hungary and a couple of other countries though, have found similar results.
nostalgia is quite common for all sorts of things. if it’s an argument for communism, it’s an argument against it, too, because many can’t be obtained at the same time.
The anti-socialist scare in the USA actually long predated the Cold War, in the First Red Scare. It arguably began as far back as the 1880s when for example Presser v. Illinois addressed that state’s efforts to suppress what the state saw as potential revolutionary militias. And culminated in the post-WW1 era with the Palmer Raids.
I don’t think there are, or have been, a lot of high school history teachers trying to convince their students that Stalin and Mao were good people who are unfairly maligned by capitalist history books, though, either.
I’m not saying you can’t find one; there are literally hundreds of thousands of high school history teachers and you can probably find at least one who unironically believes that the Declaration of Independence was written by wax-aliens from the planet Xffto. But I’ve never gotten the sense that they were thick on the ground.
Did you put a new style option in or get a WordPress update recently? I suddenly have a floating button thing for switching the text/background colors of the blog…
New plugin-widget I installed, because some folks requested a way to have a light/dark mode toggle.
Yes. I am very grateful. Light on dark text does something weir to my eyes that is very tiring.
This is great! Thanks!
“…but I am politically a liberal – that is, again, committed to a liberal democratic order based on freedoms, liberties and rights – before all of my other political commitments.”
Correction: this is what you publicly declare yourself to be.
Except that, when the issue is raised, you claim that it is not “realistic” for Palestinians to demand freedom and rights from their Israeli oppressors. Instead, Palestinians must learn to accept what is “possible” and not ask for what is “impossible”. A sovereign state free from Israeli domination? Equal rights in a single state? Impossible, I’m afraid.
On the other hand, when Ukraine/Russia is brought up, you switch gears at the drop of a hat to making maximalist demands. No concerns here about what is realistic or possible, no no. Only an abject Russian surrender of Crimea will do for you, nuclear war be damned.
It seems that “liberalism”, like “possible/impossible”, are merely words you use whenever convenient to push the conclusion you want. The only consistency in your various positions is an overwhelming tendency to align with the interests of the US State Department. Combined with your July 4 posts ruminating about how special the US is, this behavior sheds more light on what your political positions really are than the things you solemnly declare yourself to be.
When has dr. deveraux opined on Palestine and Israel?
In the comments to his blog post about protracted warfare.
You seem to be parsing his descriptive comments about how the Palestinians are in a bad situation and their past efforts have failed as normative comments about the morality of the situation.
For reference, those comments are (in answer to why the Intifadas failed):
And later:
No, I am pointing out the fact that Bret switches between a “descriptive” view and a normative one whenever it suits him to push the conclusion he wants to get. And calling it “descriptive” here is very generous, given that he is just parroting Israeli talking points (“unrealistic”) as if they were self-evident truths.
There is no consistency in his attempts to play descriptive when downplaying actions by Israel and then acting normative when discussing actions by Russia.
Au contraire, he is very clear about which of his statements are descriptive and which are normative. He stated normatively that a State of Palestine and a territorially complete Ukraine would be good. He just descriptively thinks one of those things is more likely to happen and that one group’s leadership has been better at achieving its goals.
You don’t have to be optimistic about the things you want in order to legitimately want them.
I mean I’ll say Israel has never given a serious peace offer, no not the 2000 one either, to the palestinians and it never will.
The end of that conflict will be a genocide. Of the palestinians. By the Israelis.
@DanGer I don’t know, the quote above seems to me to draw quite a big practical difference between Ukrainians and Palestinians:
Ukrainians have a stronger position and a honest chance at achieving their relatively more conservative goals. Palestinians are deeply disadvantaged and don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell to achieve goals that are often even more ambitious to begin with.
I think with Ukraine, the moral and realistic position can align; as things are now, Russia is essentially losing, and the pundits claiming that its victory is inevitable seem to only be trying to drum it up. Sure, it DID have a huge material and personnel advantage, but by now it has all but squandered it with sheer incompetence. Meanwhile, if there’s something Israel doesn’t lack, it’s military competence. The comparison would be fair if Ukraine had been blitzed, Zelensky deposed, Kiev taken, and the defenders shattered, all within the first week of the conflict, and Bret still advocated for a hopeless resistance that was clearly only costing lives needlessly with no particular benefit to expect. As things are now, “fight if you are right and have a shot at victory, find a way to capitulate gracefully and cut your losses if you are right but are also vastly outmatched” isn’t necessarily a contradictory viewpoint.
It seems to me that he takes a descriptivist view in both cases. Palestine is losing their conflict with Israel. Ukraine is winning their conflict with Russia. I don’t see a contradiction, those things can both be true.
(To fully reveal my own biases, I personally consider both Palestine and Ukraine to be the good guys in their respective conflicts)
Here, I do think that he showed some strong biases when he said things like “refusal to accept the deal offered by Israel in 2000 (or make literally any counter-offer at all)”.
The details of the negotiations were not well-known at the time due to their being no paper trail (outside of the Trilateral statement) requiring a gradual revelation over the years of what actually took place based on interviews with those that were present.
Books have been written about this (& they do not go with the simplistic argument that Palestinians didn’t bother to negotiate). To simplify the negotiations with words like “(or make literally any counter-offer at all)”, I think, betrays heavy biases.
Perhaps you could say they failed to make an offer that appealed to Israel but the same could be said for the Israeli offer to the Palestinians in which case it would be more accurate to say that neither side made any real offers.
Perhaps you could say that Arafat hadn’t prepared the populace for the level of concessions that were demanded like Israel having the right to send the army back into Palestine in an emergency (with an ambiguous definition of emergency) which I think would have been impossible to accept.
This perspective is very harmful & is used to justify the argument that peace is impossible &, therefore, the current status-quo should be accepted as necessary.
If you want a book suggestion, The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process, I think, provides a compelling case that the peace process was doomed by political blunders from both Arafat, Barak & Clinton with the principle blame lying in the Clinton Administration’s failure to act as a neutral arbiter.
I don’t get the point of this post. Is the accusation here that Bret is a State department official posing as a professor, or being secretely paid by the State department?
I think he’s only saying the Brett has strong biases that align quite strongly with the national interests of the US government. I say this as someone that enjoys his articles on history & modern warfare, tbc.
Personally, I found the article about American Exceptionalism quite strange. I understand it was a national holiday but no one has ever disputed that the US is the most powerful country in the world. This isn’t what American Exceptionalism is about. It’s about things like holding themselves above international law. Something I don’t feel like he made a good case for in his critique of those that criticize American Exceptionalism (It’s been a while since I read it & I hope I haven’t misremembered it).
In fact, I think he’s a good way to better learn about the tensions & differences of opinions in the American political establishment like with his articles on Afghanistan in Foreign policy. This despite him not being a politician or a bureaucrat, giving the “elite perspective” one could say (despite the hardships of being an adjunct).
Oh, hey, it’s you again.
I can’t comment about Israel-Palestine due to lack of knowledge, so I’ll just question you about the War in Ukraine:
Are you sure there’s a contradiction here? I don’t see why Ukraine shouldn’t reach for maximalist demands if it is capable of winning the war hard enough to do so. I’ll also note that, at first, our host was very skeptical about Ukraine’s ability to actually win the war in such a way as to achieve its maximalist aims (as was practically every other political and military commentator at that point, to be fair). I am pretty sure he would be understanding if Ukraine and the West decided to reach for a ceasefire with Russia if the war wasn’t going very well for them.
If anything, it’s the shifting realities on the ground that make the discussion of reaching maximalist aims possible – and if you believe that it’s somehow morally or politically preferable that Ukraine doesn’t go for all of its victory conditions, even when it appears that there is a real possibility of them actually becoming achievable, feel free to posit that stance. Or feel free to argue, with hard facts, that the situation for Ukraine is actually much more tenuous than it might first appear – until you do so, though, it seems that comparing Ukraine’s position to Palestine may just very well be misleading.
Putin has failed to establish a credible threat of nuclear war over Ukraine’s liberation of Crimea. Meanwhile, I believe the West seems very credible in its willingness to punish Russia hard (which, due to the possibility of runaway nuclear escalation, may just as well be equated with total nuclear destruction of Russia) for its use of nuclear weaponry. Unless Putin is actually mad and suicidal (in which case, there is no guarantee that appeasing him would, in any way, actually lower the threat of nuclear war), the posturing of nuclear deterrence is stacked against him. The West refused to implement a no-fly zone in Ukraine, and refused to send troops directly into Ukraine, due to being afraid to cross Russia’s red lines that they believe to be legitimate – that doesn’t hold for Crimea, which nobody believes to be genuine and de jure territory of the Russian Federation.
Not really. In one of the previous firesides, our host stated that, according to his opinion, the second invasion of Iraq was a mistake and failure of US foreign policy. Are you saying that deposing Saddam Hussein is not or was not in the interests of the US State Department?
The original comment was about neither Israel/Palestine nor Russia/Ukraine. It was about Bret proclaiming himself to be something and then casually setting it aside whenever it impedes his desired conclusions.
Last I checked, the US State Dept did in fact conclude that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and a failure of US foreign policy. So no contradiction there.
You haven’t particularly provided evidence for your claims about Devereaux. I think some solid citations of things he’s written to support your claim would be useful, and gievn what kind of blog this is and that Devereaux himself liberally sprinkles his posts with citations, people would take your claim more seriously if you could back it up.
Re last you checked, have you a link? Any documentation that is now the position of USSD?
“Last I checked, the US State Dept did in fact conclude that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and a failure of US foreign policy.”
[citation needed]
As long as Palestinian children attend schools where the maps on the wall show the entirety of Israel labeled “Occupied Palestine” Israel would be foolish not to take the Palestinians at their word- which has been that any unilateral concessions by Israel with regard to territory will be exploited to attempt to forcibly seize more. If you’re taking the position (that admittedly many do) that the very existence of Israel as an ethnic Jewish homeland is an oppression against the pre-Mandate for Palestine population, then of course everything Israel does to preserve its existence is ipso facto wrong. But otherwise, Israel is faced with an asymmetrical opposition that deliberately uses the tactic of committing provocations in order to try to goad atrocities in response, both to galvanize the resistance and to discredit the “oppressor”. Which Israel has taken considerable measures to try to avoid. Meanwhile the very struggle has become institutionalized on the Palestinian side- less about any actual hope of gaining a free Palestinian homeland and more about upholding the political factions that depend on the perpetual struggle for their legitimacy.
Maps in German Schools in the 60s showed the pre-WW2 eastern territories of Germany as part of Germany “currently under Polish/Soviet administration”. That didn’t stop German government in the 70s from officially accepting these territories going to Poland and the USSR (which did cause some public protest, but never an attempt to politically reverse it). These maps in Palestinian schools could be easily replaced if an agreement between Israel and Palestine about borders was reached. There are reasonable (or at least understandable) arguments against unilateral concessions of territorial control, chief among these that Israel doesn’t think the Palestinian government would be capable (or even willing) to stop more radical groups from using these territories as base for attacks on Israel. But the map thing isn’t one of the of reasonable arguments.
In the 1960s Germany was divided into East and West Germany; whose schools were you talking about? Since the territories in question were under the absolute control (directly or indirectly) of the USSR, in the case of West Germany it was acknowledging the partition of the country into Communist and non-Communist blocs; and in East Germany it was soft-pedaling that the East German government’s masters had forcibly removed the territory.
As far as I can tell the maps I have seen are from West Germany, given that East Germany recognized the new borders 1950. Here a link to one of the maps. There are no distinct markers to divide between communism and non-communism, so my impression is that the map conveys: “All this is legitimate German territory, (temporarily) divided due to political circumstances.”
Yes, and West Germany’s inability to accept the Oder-Neisse line until the Kniefall was a huge drag on its soft power and thus on NATO’s. The US was begging Adenauer to accept the line in order to show Germany’s goodwill to Poland during the early Gomułka era. It’s a good example of constructivism vs. realism – a realist FRG would have aligned with the wishes of all of its treaty allies and accepted the line, but because of the domestic political power of Germans who’d been expelled from east of the line, none of the parties accepted the line then, and even in 1970 the Kniefall was controversial.
Israel labels the west bank as Judea & Samaria while actively running a colonial campaign where they restrict the Palestinians ability to build in 2/3rd of their own land as they claim as much territory for themselves (& expel residents where applicable). This also undermines the authority of the palestinian authority who is supposed to be their negotiation peace partner. The fact that these are not considered acts of provocation is ridiculous.
“deliberately uses the tactic of committing provocations in order to try to goad atrocities”
No, your sources simply don’t care about all the provocations Israel does to the Palestinians. It’s a story that always starts at act 2. Rockets are acts of provocations to goad Israel. But expulsions & destruction of homes is business as usual.
By what line of reasoning does “committed to a liberal democratic order based on freedoms, liberties and rights” mean “it is realistic for Palestinians to demand freedom and rights from their Israeli oppressors”?
It seems to me that those are sentences with quite different meanings, and someone could logically believe either, without believing the other.
Ah yes, this is what this comment section sorely needed, an argument about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For what it is worth, this is a historically informed worldview. Liberalism did not spring out of nowhere. It was a solution to a problem, the problem in general being how to organize a large, diverse society and the problem in particular being ‘How to Not Have a Thirty Years War.’ That’s what freedom of religion, for instance, is the very first part of the very first amendment in the US Bill of Rights – it is a ‘don’t have a Thirty Years War’ clause.
People say this as if managing diversity was some kind of new problem in the 17th century. It wasn’t. Every empire in history had had to deal with a diverse population, and none of them had done so using liberalism. Even restricting ourselves to Europe, plenty of kingdoms had included minority populations, heretics, pagans, Muslims, and Jews, and of course the Spanish in particular had recently become rulers of millions of people in the New World. These countries adopted various methods for dealing with their minority subjects, but none of them adopted liberalism. In more modern times, we have Singapore as an example of a diverse, successful non-liberal society, whilst attempts to impose liberalism in Iraq and Afghanistan caused far more bloodshed than the previous, non-liberal, regimes had witnessed. “We need liberalism to organise a large, diverse society” is not a “historically informed worldview”, it’s a shallow misreading of history on a level with “The world is inevitably tending towards a communist mode of production”.
Singapore is not a particularly large society, however diverse. Dr. D. has already expressed his opinions on empires’ strength from managing diversity, though I’m too lazy to dig up the post where he does so. Attempts to impose liberalism on Iraq and Afghanistan failed for a variety of reasons, one of them being that you can’t impose a whole mentality and way of life on people by force (which is not inconsistent with liberal tenets) and expect them to manufacture a modern democratic society’s values and supporting institutions instantly at gunpoint.
And the imperial Spanish model for managing its own minorities and American Empire … well, I wouldn’t consider that a good one to follow. If nothing else, Spain itself tended to suffer a certain amount of neglect from its rulers trying to preserve possessions elsewhere. Also, prodigious amounts of slavery and slaughter in the New World, which from a certain slanted POV could be considered bad.
As others have noted, the US did succeed in imposing at gunpoint a liberal democratic mentality on Germany and Japan (and the Russians imposed, though somewhat less successfully in the long run) a Communist mentality on East Germany), so the question is more complicated than you make out.
I personally would say that tribal social structures are incompatible with industrial capitalism, and that liberal democracy can only exist in an industrial capitalist economy, but I could be wrong. Maybe Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy, what do I know?
Japan at least had a fairly substantial democratic tradition before the decline into fascism, while Germany had made some attempt at democratic government and was, at the very least, a thoroughly Western country steeped in the same ideas. Both had just had utterly disastrous experiments with right-wing authoritarianism. Neither were like Iraq or Afghanistan. And yes, this is simplified too.
German experience with democracy was far more than just Weimar, the German Empire was a authoritarian democratic hybrid state and wasn’t ruled by the diktat of the Kaisers.
In both Germany and Japan, what the Americans really did was turn back the clock to the 20s and put the democratic losers of the power struggle with authoritarians in charge. The rest the defeated countries did basically themselves, it was a success because it was largely self driven, not American forced.
In both Germany and Japan, what the Americans really did was turn back the clock to the 20s and put the democratic losers of the power struggle with authoritarians in charge.
I think the situation in East Germany was similar (substituting “right vs. left” for “authoritarian vs. democratic”). Germany had a very large and significant (and old) Communist Party all of its own, and the Soviets didn’t have to invent one. My understanding is that at least after 1950, the Soviets intervened fairly little in the economic and cultural life of East Germany (as long as they stayed politically loyal) because they wanted the country to be a showcase of the best that communism could possibly get. A guy I know who has forgotten more about history than most of us will ever learn, likes to say that the East Germans spent the Cold War trying to atone for Nazism by being the best communists they could possibly be (just like West Germans tried to excel at liberalism).
“the US did succeed in imposing at gunpoint a liberal democratic mentality on Germany and Japan ”
The fact that it couldn’t do this in Iraq or Afghanistan makes me wonder if it was the decisive influence in Germany and Japan. It occurs to me that American influence must have been more prevalent in Latin America than in Spain or Portugal, yet liberal democracy hardly seems better entrenched there.
I might also point to the experience of America’s more southerly states in the 1940s as suggesting the United States government had only the most limited ability to impose a liberal democratic mentality within the United States itself, let alone in foreign countries at the opposite side of two rather large oceans.
Perhaps a simpler way to view the postwar axis powers is that illiberal authoritarianism had been tried and failed, leaving it with little support at a time when those countries needed support from liberal democracies.
“It occurs to me that American influence must have been more prevalent in Latin America than in Spain or Portugal, yet liberal democracy hardly seems better entrenched there.”
But it is. Iberian democracy only began in the XX century and was quickly cut short by coups and of course by the Civil War. It only solidified by the Monarchical Restoration in Spain and the Carnation Revolution in Portugal.
I seriously don’t know where this insane take spawned from Latin America has been Republican and Democratic for twice a long as most of Europe since the early XIX century. Of course Liberal Democracy is far more entrenched. Where does this come from?
Latin america has been republican since the 19th century. Democratic? That’s a lot more complicated. (the same, of course, goes for Portugal and Spain; Both of which had both democratic-ish and authoritarian periods throughout the 19th century, the difference largely being that the monarchy kept hanging around in the background and sometimes foreground like a bad hangover)
SnappyCommenter, I seem to have expressed myself inadequately. When I said liberal democracy was not “better entrenched” in Latin America than Iberia, I did not mean that it was older in Iberia than in Latin America.
I meant that right now Iberian countries generally score better in rankings of freedom, quality of democracy and so on than Latin American ones.
Age is less a guarantee of quality than you might think.
I wouldn’t say that Singapore is particularly hostile towards liberalism either, especially after Lee Kuan Yew left politics. Restrictions on speech and political participation have, in practice, steadily reduced over the years. Singapore of the 2020s is not Singapore of the 2000s where Lee Kuan Yew’s presence and ideas still weighed heavily, which was again not Singapore of the 1980s when he was prime minister.
Under Brett’s argument, Singapore of the 1980s or 2000s should have failed to keep the peace in its diverse society, which clearly isn’t the case.
I didn’t understand his claim as “liberalism is the only way to keep peace in a diverse society”, only that it is a way to do so. So for Singapore the claim would be that Singapore could also have kept the peace by being liberal. A claim Lee Kuan Yew would no doubt disagree with.
“I am politically a liberal – that is, again, committed to a liberal democratic order based on freedoms, liberties and rights – before all of my other political commitments, because I do not think that any of the other things opposing political systems promise (and rarely deliver), like prosperity or equality or the ‘common good,’ can actually be durably, reliably delivered over the long term by any other sort of system.”
Singapore had been independant for only 60 years, and it has been clearly trending towards liberalism for the past 30 or so of them.
I don’t think that’s long enough to count as the ‘long term’ in the eyes of an ancient historian.
Singapore, being a tiny city-state perched on one of the world’s biggest trade routes, is the kind of place that turns out to be the exception to a lot of general rules that are nonetheless very good rules.
Dubai isn’t a model the whole world could confidently expect to emulate with good results either.
Singapore was a super liberal society by Asian standards for its entire existence.
The default state of a “British trading port city” is “super liberal” relative to the rest of Asia around it.
Singapore also isn’t that diverse. It is 78% Chinese Singaporean. That is less diverse than Estonia which is only 68% Estonian.
The government in Singapore is also very explicit about maintaining and mandating diversity at its current level.
When Bismarck instituted Social Security, he didn’t make a “Welfare State”… But you would say that this was a significant step towards the model.
Similarly, Singapore has free multi party elections and they always have… but they gerrymander in such a way that the PAP wins more than their actual majority would allow.
Additionally, the right of the press to question leaders is very restricted. Take, for example, the recent discovery of cocaine in the White House. In the US, there was breathless speculation and insinuation in the press about who it belongs to, where did it come from, and why it means that the Biden White House in corrupt.
In Singapore, that kind of reporting is illegal. They would be allowed to write, “On XXX day, the Secret Service reported that a small quantity of cocaine had been found in the White House. The office of XXX has opened an investigation. There has been no immediate comment from the president.”
Excluding immigrants without green cards, yes. The CIMO model (Chinese, Indians, Malays, Others) only really applies to the 73% of the country who are citizens or have permanent residency, locally referred to as “Singapore residents.” The other 27% – generally migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia – are outside this model. So Chinese-Singaporeans are 76% of 73%.
@Alon Levy
You are being too cute by half.
In 2021, there were 5.45 million people in Singapore. (See here: https://www.population.gov.sg/files/media-centre/publications/Population-in-brief-2021.pdf)
3.5 million are citizens. Another half million are PRS. (PRs match the ethnic breakdown of the country)
1.5 million are just residents there.
BUUUUTTTT….
That 1.5 million isn’t all or even mostly the migrant workers from Bangladesh or South India.
11% are E-pass holders. These are white collar professionals. They tend to skew European/North American.
11% are S-pass holders. These are less white collar workers and cover everything from accountants to waiters. They tend to be from Singapore’s Asian neighbors like Malaysia and Indonesia.
18% are dependents of work pass holders.
4% are students.
19% are work permit holders not working construction or shipping.
20% are work permit holders who are working construction or shipping. (Usually south Asian)
16% are work permit holders doing domestic work. (Usually, Philippines, Indonesia, and Myanmar)
The 1.5 million doesn’t mess up the demographics that much because it is itself pretty evenly ethnically mixed. Not to the 78/13/7/2 CMIO ratio, but enough.
Yeah, the 27% are very ethnically mixed, but also very few of them are Chinese.
Are you basing this take on knowledge of the country (or on what human rights advocates there say), or are you assuming that access to Sex and the City and to chewing gum = opening up?
Lived experience. In the 80s you had Lee Kuan Yew castigating anyone who dared to criticise ruling party policies demanding that they run for office or shut up, and where private discussion of politics in public spaces was conducted in hushed tones out of concern for being picked up by internal security for questioning. That’s what I characterise as “hostile towards liberalism”, and it doesn’t happen anymore. After the 2020 general election, the ruling party formally recognised the leader of the largest opposition party as the Leader of the Opposition and catered public funds and staff to support his role. Singaporeans openly discuss politics and criticise the ruling party on social media under their real names like everyone else, there is no Great Firewall or mass internet censorship involved.
Is it in line with the general level of freedoms in the West? No, of course not. But I never claimed that it was a liberal democracy.
“Singapore, being a tiny city-state perched on one of the world’s biggest trade routes, is the kind of place that turns out to be the exception to a lot of general rules that are nonetheless very good rules.”
yes, i’m very much opposed to liberalism, but I don’t think that Singapore is a very generalizable example for, well, anything.
Now I’m no historian but looking at the failure of many for the sake of the point traditional empires such as the Qing or the Ottoman, there could be an argument here that illiberal empires were outcompeted by either liberal or nation-building approaches (most of europe)
All states fail eventually, although the Ottoman Empire’s 623 years (1299-1922) is several centuries longer than any liberal regime has managed.
Well, the Ottomans were in the first century or so of becoming an empire, if not liberal per se, at least tolerant, religiously speaking. There were a variety of methods for managing a vast territory of a variety of religions, in which that of Islam was the minority. The sultans had strong interest in being so, as their hegemony was threatened by so many powers coming out of the east.
Over the course of time, Islam became strongly the religion of the majority, which meant it became less tolerant, in terms of freedoms and privileges of taxation, land holding, administration to non-Muslims.
An exception to the latter, once Mehmed II held Constantinople, was the welcoming of Jews after the expulsion out of Iberia, to the point that Salamis, for instance, became majority Jewish population.
Iceland is arguably coming up on twice that, and liberalism more broadly is at a disadvantage due to having been mostly invented less than six hundred years ago.
Perhaps it would be more useful to examine the matter statistically: check the historical record to see how many industrialized liberal democracies collapse and are replaced with some less-liberal form of government in an average year, divide by the number of such polities extant to figure individual attrition rate, then fiddle with exponents to determine a future point at which it’s more likely than not for the oldest one to have collapsed.
For example, if the status quo coalition had ten members, and one of them failed in an average year, that would mean a 10% failure rate per state per year, or equivalently, a 90% survival chance. Since 0.9 raised to the power of 6.6 approximately equals 0.5, the half-life of such states would be about six years and eight months, so it’d be a surprise for any of the original ten to still be around much more than twenty years later.
Not very precise, of course, since allied states don’t thrive or implode each by their own independent roll of the dice like unstable isotopes, but hopefully better than a blind gut-reaction guess at least. However, those example numbers were completely made up, for convenience of illustration rather than fidelity to the historical record.
How many core members of the “status quo coalition,” or equivalent states with similar risk factors, would you say have been conquered, torn apart by civil war, or otherwise had their system of government replaced with something drastically less liberal in, say, the past fifty years? Or maybe the past two hundred, since hopefully that would be enough to spot a trend-line if the rate is changing over time.
Iceland is arguably coming up on twice that,
Arguably, although note that it spent several centuries under the control of Norway, explicitly because its original constitution wasn’t working out.
and liberalism more broadly is at a disadvantage due to having been mostly invented less than six hundred years ago.
True, although looking at the state of liberalism today, I’d be surprised if any of the current liberal regimes reach that milestone.
How many core members of the “status quo coalition,” or equivalent states with similar risk factors, would you say have been conquered, torn apart by civil war, or otherwise had their system of government replaced with something drastically less liberal in, say, the past fifty years? Or maybe the past two hundred, since hopefully that would be enough to spot a trend-line if the rate is changing over time.
Looking at Western Europe, since that’s the part of the world I know most about:
– The UK: Has been a stable liberal (by the standards of the day) democracy (again, by the standards of the day) for centuries.
– Ireland: Has only been independent since the 1920s, but has been pretty stable over that period. Mind you, given the role the Catholic Church played in Irish society and culture, its liberalism is open to question for the first few decades of the Republic’s history.
– France: Currently on its fifth republic, and its first attempt to set up a liberal government led to 35,000 people being executed in under a year. Not really very stable.
– Spain: Had a short-lived republic proclaimed in 1873, then went back to a monarchy, then another republic, which lost a civil war and was replaced by Franco’s dictatorship until the 1970s. Not very stable.
– Portugal: Declared a republic in 1910, underwent a period of instability (45 governments in 15 years), ended up being couped in 1926 and spent the next 48 years as a dictatorship. Not very stable.
– Germany: A liberal democratic government set up after the First World War, which lasted for a grand total of 15 years before the Nazis took power, then spent most of the second half of the 20th century split in two and occupied by foreign powers.
– Switzerland: Conquered by France in 1798, although given the size of the two countries I think that would have happened regardless of its political system. Had a brief civil war in 1847 which lasted less than a month and saw less than a hundred people killed, other than that very stable.
– Italy: Became a fascist republic in 1922, post-Mussolini has been infamous for the instability of its governments.
So, of the eight countries, two (Britain and Switzerland) have been both stable and liberal for most of the past two centuries, one (Ireland) has been stable but (for a good part of its history) not very liberal, and the rest have been quite instable. Obviously it’s impossible to know exactly how they’d have done without liberalism, but the historical evidence doesn’t suggest that liberal government is a reliable guarantee of stability.
I think a distinction must be made for countries with parliamentary systems where the failure of the current coalition to pass a vote of confidence prompts the formation of a “new” government. That’s really not in the same ballpark as what we in the USA would call a constitutional crisis, where the fundamental structure of the government is de jure or de facto abolished. Any more than the replacement of a Republican president with a Democratic president or vice-versa would be called a coup d’état. FWIW the Union victory in the American Civil War came darn close to amounting to a new government.
I think a distinction must be made for countries with parliamentary systems where the failure of the current coalition to pass a vote of confidence prompts the formation of a “new” government. That’s really not in the same ballpark as what we in the USA would call a constitutional crisis, where the fundamental structure of the government is de jure or de facto abolished. Any more than the replacement of a Republican president with a Democratic president or vice-versa would be called a coup d’état. FWIW the Union victory in the American Civil War came darn close to amounting to a new government.
It’s not necessarily a constitutional crisis per se, but having governments continually replaced doesn’t exactly make for stability and good government.
Yet effectively that’s what the United States does every time one party loses and the other wins the Presidency or a voting majority of the Congress.
Yet effectively that’s what the United States does every time one party loses and the other wins the Presidency or a voting majority of the Congress.
What exactly is your point?
The point is that one cannot claim that the government of e.g. Italy is so unstable as to scarcely count as a dependable liberal democracy without explaining why that argument doesn’t apply to the switchover from Obama to Trump to Biden.
The point is that one cannot claim that the government of e.g. Italy is so unstable as to scarcely count as a dependable liberal democracy without explaining why that argument doesn’t apply to the switchover from Obama to Trump to Biden.
It’s a matter of degree. When most of your Prime Ministers hold office for less than a year or two, it’s difficult to have coherent long-term policies for the country.
Okay, I concede that’s a pretty unstable time frame.
In the First Italian Republic, the prime ministers rotated very quickly, but the cabinets were fairly stable. The same party always won, and the ministers were rotating between positions. Japan was pretty similar in both ways (short-service prime ministers, party-level stability), it just doesn’t have the reputation for chaos that Italy has despite having a lot of chaos in its history. In both countries this interacted well with a strong civil service: ministers come and go, but the engineers who build infrastructure stay, and they do it well.
The identification of the entire state with the person or party in charge of it is what leads to really bad governance. Leaders like this tend to have an après moi le déluge mentality, and when a new leader or party takes office they bring an entire slate of cronies who understand little of how to run the ministries they’re put in charge of; Greece is a good example of this, with levels of clientelism that don’t exist anywhere else in Western Europe.
In short, the democracy is a veneer. It’s actually a bureaucracy filled with unelected and unaccountable rulers
“Yes, Minister”. 🙂
Yeah, it’s all fun and games until one of them imposes a stupid regulation that ruins your livelihood and drives to local extinction the endangered plant that was its justification.
As an exercise, I can easily imagine a state where elected governance is unstable and bureaucracy is stable, but where the bureaucracy’s “unaccountability” isn’t a problem because if they ever actually force a scandal, they get hit by the elected government which has the de jure power to rein them in.
Effectively, the election process would be acting like a recall mechanism on the bureaucracy. There are probably worse ways to run things (i.e. an extremely corrupt state, or a state where the bureaucracy is entirely in the hands of people elected by a party whose voters are driven by propaganda they made up themselves, and so are under no obligation to adhere to reality).
I can imagine any number of impossible Utopias.
That one is clearly non-existent on Earth.
No, democracy is not at all a veneer. Those bureaucratic states all have large left-right policy distance, which we see in the Second Italian Republic now with Meloni, or with big changes in the Swedish welfare state after the 1990s Alliance governments.
The difference is that a Swedish or Italian politician has very little petty power. The American politician force a commuter railway to set a low speed limit at a particular level crossing just because someone with connections complained. In Europe, this kind of micromanagement is unthinkable; civil servants do that and politicians set broad policy.
And as for Yes Minister: the British civil service is run by generalists, not specialists. Someone like Sir Humphrey would have bounced between different departments, forming a political identity of “civil service overclass.” Most of Continental Europe doesn’t work this way – the entire chain of civil servants in transport would have come up from the department itself and is specialized to what it does. There’s a reason the UK’s budget for High Speed 2 is about the same as the cost of all high-speed rail lines built to date in France and Germany, combined.
That… would explain a lot.
The culture of “all managers are interchangeable, and do not need comprehension or experience in the specific field of work that they manage” is destructive in American business culture, and I imagine that it does no favors to the British civil service.
@Mary
Personally, I agree that highly unstable elected governments (say, collapsing and reforming every year) aren’t the best way to make sure the citizenry has a check on the bureaucracy. On the other hand, you don’t want the elected government to be too stable either, so it’s sort of a bell curve. Having to reform the government (in the parliamentary democracy) sense and hold parliamentary elections every 2-3 years is not a bad thing. Having to do it every 6-12 months probably is, but so is having to wait 7-10 years.
Holding 17th century Europe out as an example of successfully managing diverse societies is … a take. You do know that the early and middle 17th century was the height of an era known as “The Wars of Religion”, right? Literally every European power either had a major civil war over religion or was drawn into fighting in a neighbor’s civil war over religion.
Liberalism was formed in direct response to this era, because the failures to manage religious diversity of this era resulted in the deaths of millions. That doesn’t mean that liberalism is the only possible answer to these questions, but the reason liberalism exists is because previous solutions kept failing in profoundly catastrophic ways.
Holding 17th century Europe out as an example of successfully managing diverse societies is … a take.
Good job I didn’t do that, then.
Liberalism was formed in direct response to this era, because the failures to manage religious diversity of this era resulted in the deaths of millions. That doesn’t mean that liberalism is the only possible answer to these questions, but the reason liberalism exists is because previous solutions kept failing in profoundly catastrophic ways.
“We need liberalism because Thirty Years’ War” only makes sense if liberalism is the only, or at least the best, way to deal with diverse populations. But the former claim is provably false, and the latter requires much more defence than vaguely gesturing at the TYW.
““We need liberalism because Thirty Years’ War” only makes sense if liberalism is the only, or at least the best, way to deal with diverse populations.”
Not true. All that’s necessary is that liberalism (or specific parts) were what they used to address those problems at that time, and no other system replaced it. Gould called it “historical contingency” (he was discussing anatomical evolution, but the fundamental concept is applicable here). To put this in more modern evolutionary terms: You’re arguing that for an institution to endure, it must be at a global fitness maxima. What we find in biological systems (and humans are biological) is that global fitness maxima are meaningless; only local fitness maxima matter. That something better may exist doesn’t matter if the cost of moving from a local fitness maxima to a higher fitness maxima is too great. (Note that this view of things also explains why non-liberal countries continue to exist–they have reached other local fitness maxima.)
All that’s really necessary for an institution to endure is for it to 1) be developed, and 2) be such that the cost of removing it is perceived as higher than the cost of perpetuating it.
You see this all the time in corporate America. A solution to a problem is developed, it becomes SOP, the problem goes away but the SOP remains. Often the SOP causes problems, but the cost of revising the SOPs is considered higher than the cost incurred by the SOP, so it sticks around.
Not true. All that’s necessary is that liberalism (or specific parts) were what they used to address those problems at that time, and no other system replaced it.
Brett brought up the Thirty Years’ War, and more generally the problem of organising diverse societies, as a reason why he was liberal. If liberalism isn’t the best solution for this problem, then the existence of the problem gives us no reason to favour liberalism.
To put this in more modern evolutionary terms: You’re arguing that for an institution to endure, it must be at a global fitness maxima.
No, I’m arguing that Problem A only justifies choosing Answer X instead of Answer Y if X is a better solution than Y is. If it isn’t, then we should prefer Y.
While optimization is a fetish of modern culture, it’s not how complex systems work. EVERY change in a complex system necessarily includes tradeoffs, which your argument blithely ignores. If you understand fitness space, that’s what “local fitness maxima” means: the best option given the necessary trade-offs involved. Quite often one part of a system may seem like it can obviously be improved, but when you look at the broader tradeoffs it becomes clear that any improvement will have far-reaching and often negative consequences.
In other words: The idea that something must be “the best” (a term which you’ve never defined) to justify its existence is a non-starter. “Good enough” is the most common justification in complex systems, for reasons that are well-established and well-documented, in systems ranging from ecology to industrial manufacturing to safety systems to humans societies at all scales.
@ Dinwar:
You’re inventing your own argument for liberalism, which is different to the one Brett made, and then complaining that I’ve responded to Brett’s argument rather than yours.
No, that’s what YOU are doing. The author is making a very common historical argument, as I have demonstrated via multiple examples. You’re the one who demanded optimization be accepted as the only justifiable criteria for evaluating a solution.
No, that’s what YOU are doing. The author is making a very common historical argument, as I have demonstrated via multiple examples. You’re the one who demanded optimization be accepted as the only justifiable criteria for evaluating a solution.
If Brett’s argument is simply “Liberalism is what we’ve got, so we might as well stick with it,” then it doesn’t actually matter how liberalism first arose, and talking about the Thirty Years’ War is a red herring.
There’s a difference between saying “liberalism evolved under X circumstances to solve Y problems and tends to outperform systems that are unable to solve Y problems” and saying “liberalism is the only mechanism that exists to solve Y problems.”
It is a bad idea to berate an argument that seeks to establish the first, for failing to establish the second.
Meanwhile, liberalism does still continue to compete with other political systems that in turn struggle with basic challenges liberalism can meet. Systems like kleptocracy and crude military dictatorship continue to exist. Countries that pillage their own economy until innovation and growth become impossible still exist. Liberalism does not have to outrun everything in the world in order to be a successful world system whose practitioners are happy with what they have; it just has to outrun everything that’s practiced on a large enough scale to be a threat to the hegemon.
China might be big enough for that, so if the PRC has a way of doing things that objectively outperforms liberalism, expect that to become relevant. Singapore isn’t that big, so don’t expect the same, even if they do have such a way.
There’s a difference between saying “liberalism evolved under X circumstances to solve Y problems and tends to outperform systems that are unable to solve Y problems” and saying “liberalism is the only mechanism that exists to solve Y problems.”
“I do not think that any of the other things opposing political systems promise… can actually be durably, reliably delivered over the long term by any other sort of system” naturally reads as the latter sort of claim rather than the former.
It is a bad idea to berate an argument that seeks to establish the first, for failing to establish the second.
And it’s an even worse idea to pretend than an argument for the second is actually an argument for the first.
“Every empire in history had had to deal with a diverse population, and none of them had done so using liberalism.”
The USA isn’t an empire, though. Empires tended to deal with diversity by pushing it down the org chart–the Roman emperor and senate didn’t care what race, religion, or whatever you were as long as you paid your taxes. Local authority, on the other hand, often had to deal with issues on that front. The whole point of empires is to extract resources from the colonies and hinterlands for the benefit of the ruling group, after all, and religious warfare reduces the amount of loot you can extract. (Yes, I’m aware that I’m oversimplifying).
The USA is big enough and rich enough in resources that we don’t NEED extra territory. Our territories are often net drains on our resources (see Puerto Rico). Those resources we don’t have (or that we don’t want to extract ourselves) (lithium, rare earth metals, oil, etc) are owned by countries that understand that these resources are valuable and that war would be bad for everyone involved, so they trade instead of fighting. (Again, I’m aware that I’m oversimplifying–the USA has imperial tendencies as well–but it’s not a main part of our international relations.)
As for how other countries dealt with diversity, look at the literature about the literature about the American frontier (no, that’s not a typo). Or look at Oklahoma’s history. Most of the time diversity has been dealt with by “Screw you, I’m making my own city!” Which works fine–liberal democracies allow for communes of various kinds. (Oklahoma shows what happens when liberal ideals are abandoned, and should serve as a cautionary tale.) The loss of the ability to do this, via the loss of essentially all frontiers, is something that we still haven’t figured out how to deal with. I think that’s one reason for the current space race–the desire to establish a new frontier, to re-introduce an element to civilization that was present for the vast majority of civilization but which we’ve lost.
“…whilst attempts to impose liberalism in Iraq and Afghanistan caused far more bloodshed than the previous, non-liberal, regimes had witnessed.”
Yeah…the issue with liberal democracy is that it has to be built from the ground up. The word “democracy” is sort of a hint. The idea of imposing liberalism is an inherent contradiction. I think it stems from the idea that liberalism=good, and everything else=bad–in other words, a moralistic way of looking at governments. THAT is ahistorical. It’s pretty obvious that other forms of government work. King Arthur would have been considered an authoritarian dictator by today’s standards, yet he is also held as one of the paragons of virtue in European and North American literature, for example. It may be distasteful, but we need to accept that self-government means that other nations are free to set up whatever government suits them best. Liberalism is a hard political philosophy to really embrace; it necessarily means that you will routinely experience things you find distasteful, vile, even evil. And to maintain a liberal society, you need to not merely accept that as a necessary part of society, but embrace that as evidence that society is functioning as intended. This is true in international relations as much as in relations between neighbors. I’ve met very few people who are willing to accept this rather obvious truth, however; most of the time what you get is “Liberalism for me, but you had better toe the line if you know what’s good for you” (with a lot of useless and misunderstood statistics acting as justifications for such nonsense).
Yeah…the issue with liberal democracy is that it has to be built from the ground up. The word “democracy” is sort of a hint. The idea of imposing liberalism is an inherent contradiction.
Liberalism is based on purportedly universally valid claims about human nature and the nature of society which everybody is meant to be able to accept — hence why, for example, the Declaration of Independence tries to justify itself with “self-evident” claims applicable to “all men”. If liberalism is true, we can and (arguably) should try and impose it wherever we can — which, indeed, liberals have been doing since the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_republic
How does one go about imposing liberty? How does one force people to be free?
And just because something’s universally true and self-evident doesn’t mean that everyone is going to accept it. I’ve met honest flat-earthers, and had my share of debates with Young Earth Creationists (occupational hazard). This is as true of cultures as it is individuals. And liberalism, because of its emphasis on individual liberty, demands we accept that.
How does one go about imposing liberty? How does one force people to be free?
In the same way that one imposes any social change.
And just because something’s universally true and self-evident doesn’t mean that everyone is going to accept it.
A political system based on universal truths about humans should work with any humans.
And what is this way of imposing any social change?
And what are these universal truths?
Plus given those universal truths, how do you base a political system on them?
And what is this way of imposing any social change?
If you’re imposing it on a foreign country: take control of the country’s government by force, and pass laws which will reshape society in your preferred direction. (Or, if you don’t want to be so open about it/don’t want the hassle of a full-scale war, fund proxy groups inside the country which are already pushing for the sort of change you want to see.)
If you’re imposing it on your own country: Convince whichever branch of government is most suitable for your purposes to pass your proposed policies into law.
For an example of the first kind, cf. the American occupations of Germany and Japan (both of which were successful) or of Afghanistan and Iraq (which weren’t). For an example of the second, cf. most famous SCOTUS decisions over the past sixty years or so.
And what are these universal truths?
In the case of liberalism, the most important are the social contract theory, and the belief that a good life is one which maximises someone’s ability to fulfil their desires.
Plus given those universal truths, how do you base a political system on them?
Locke, Mill, and Rawls all go into this at some length.
And what laws, specifically, will force people to be free?
How does one go about imposing liberty? How does one force people to be free?
I should have spotted this confusion earlier. “Liberty” and “liberalism” are not the same things. In fact, liberalism tends to make people slaves of their own desires and render them powerless in the face of the state. So whilst one cannot impose “liberty”, this isn’t really germane to the question of how one might impose liberalism.
“In the same way that one imposes any social change.”
I cannot take someone seriously who fails to understand that “I will shoot you if you do not embrace freedom” is an idiotic and self-defeating contradiction.
I cannot take someone seriously who fails to understand that “I will shoot you if you do not embrace freedom” is an idiotic and self-defeating contradiction.
Tell that to the US Founding Fathers, or the French Revolutionaries, or the British imperialists in Africa, or the Allies in Germany and Japan, or the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Spreading liberalism at the point of a gun has been done ever since liberal governments first arose, so either actually-existing liberal countries have consistently misunderstood their own animating philosophy, or you’ve misunderstood it.
The Founding Fathers shot people who would not respect their freedom, which is the precise opposite of what you claim.
Or perhaps this is a “real communism has never been tried” type situation.
The Founding Fathers shot people who would not respect their freedom, which is the precise opposite of what you claim.
The Founding Fathers led a violent revolution to establish a new government based on their preferred ideology, the sort of thing which is supposedly an “idiotic and self-defeating contradiction”.
The American Revolution produced more refugees than the French Revolution, which contradicts your claim.
The American Revolution produced more refugees than the French Revolution, which contradicts your claim.
I don’t see how. The Founding Fathers led a violent revolution to establish a new government based on their preferred ideology, and everyone else was forced to either accept it or flee.
If you can flee, you can not be forced.
If you can flee, you can not be forced.
First of all, not everybody could flee, so you’d still have a large number of people who were forced.
Secondly, we talk about people being “forced” to do something even then they could technically do something else. E.g., if I pull a knife on you and order you to hand over your wallet, most people would say that I’m forcing you, even if you could theoretically try fighting me off or calling for help instead. Or again, we talk of people being forced to leave their homes by war, even thought they are physically capable of remaining and just trying to survive as best they can in an active warzone. Similarly, if your government is taken over by revolutionaries who then implement their ideology, I think it’s reasonable to talk of you being forced to accept this, even if you could theoretically leave the land of your birth and become a stateless exile instead.
And you call that freedom. . . .
“The USA isn’t an empire, though.”
Depends what you mean by an empire. It contains people from various different ethnic groups, and was created by a bunch of people conquering their neighbours. Most natural resources owned by the United States government were taken by it from their prior possessors by force of arms. That is a bit like an empire, surely?
So there should be some points of comparison.
“Most natural resources owned by the United States government were taken by it from their prior possessors by force of arms.”
Name a nation where that’s not the case. Most of the time it’s further in the past, but this description is true of pretty much every civilization after Ur (and I’m not sure it doesn’t hold true for them). Well, maybe that island in the Pacific that no one’s allowed to visit would count as well.
To be clear: I’m not saying that the USA is innocent. What I am saying is that if you think wars of conquest make one an empire, there are very, very few non-imperial nations, and none of the exceptions are even bit players in global politics.
For my part, I’m using the definition of “empire” that Brett uses on this blog. There’s a whole essay on this blog about the USA, and one of the points is that it’s not an empire. The USA is…..weird, historically speaking. It’s its own thing.
“Name a nation where that’s not the case.”
It’s actually a lot more common than you seem to think. Most states are fairly recent after all and were formed out of collapsing empires.
“Most states are fairly recent after all and were formed out of collapsing empires.”
Empires which took their territory and resources from their prior possessors by force of arms. And quite often removing one’s self from an empire was not a polite and courteous activity, to say the least. See the USA, Ireland, Poland, Finland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, etc.
Basically, your argument collapses into an assertion that there’s some cut-off date, prior to which such force of arms is irrelevant to the discussion. In other words: If your father fought to obtain the land and loot, you’re an empire; if your great-grandfather did, you’re not. I suppose you could accept this and argue that those not engaging in such looting aren’t empires anymore, but what’s your cutoff point?
And again, it’s worth noting that the USA really isn’t invading countries for resources. We spent $2 TRILLION in Iraq. We did not extract that much from them. The people who profited from these wars profited, not at the expense of the hinterlands, but from taxes extracted from the citizens of the country, which is the opposite of how empires work.
It’s more that the difference is if you were invading people for resources or if people invaded *you* for resources.
It’s also how empires work. For some modern examples:
1. The Soviet Empire extracted untold wealth from its hinterland – but it hardly got wealthy from it, leading to its downfall.
2. The British Empire extracted resources from India to make some private Britons rich and to engage in bullshit colonial wars in Africa, but overall, the UK didn’t really get rich from it. It’s telling that in 1945-65, British economic growth per capita was higher than in any 20-year period before WW2, on Maddison numbers. The colonial empires of Europe delayed the political transition to match the 20th-century reality of trade as described in New Trade Theory. The toffs didn’t even get rich from this at the end – they just got a temporary sense of superiority to others.
“It’s also how empires work.”
A fair criticism. Allow me to clarify: Such profiteering can occur within an empire, but it can also occur within any other organizational system (thus making it non-diagnostic). And while such profiteering may be an essentially universal aspect of empires, the population being targeted is the issue. In both cases you mention the ruling population extracts resources from other people; in the USA, the resources that the war profiteers are extracting come from the ruling population (the taxpayers). The British Empire didn’t tax its own people in order to make the Jamaicans or Mauritians more wealthy; the USA does tax its people to make the Puerto Ricans and Iraqis more wealthy (with, it must be admitted, a rather low success rate).
As for the British Empire, they may not have gotten richer, but they certainly maintained power. They were about at the limit of what you could do with pre-industrial or super-early-still-brewing-the-coffee-industrial civilizations, so growth wasn’t really an option. And a LOT of their wealth was spent maintaining their empire–as was the case for every other empire. It was a Red Queen situation once the easily-colonized areas were colonized. Rome didn’t grow in wealth in the later empire either, but it still maintained its wealth via extracting resources from its hinterlands.
The British Empire didn’t tax its own people in order to make the Jamaicans or Mauritians more wealthy; the USA does tax its people to make the Puerto Ricans and Iraqis more wealthy (with, it must be admitted, a rather low success rate).
A considerable number of colonies were net drains for the exchequer.
One interesting question to explore here is whether a province is a net drain on the treasury or on the national economy. For example, we can easily imagine a situation where the (for example) British government loses money enforcing British rule in (for example) India, but where British corporations profit greatly from access to cheap natural resources and a captive market for manufactured goods.
We’d expect to see times and places where a government is doing seemingly unprofitable things, in order to promote the well-being of groups that aren’t part of the government.
If the government accepts “the business of government is business” and that raw economic output, rather than maximization of the size of the treasury, is the priority of a state’s economic policy.
Yes, but British corporations weren’t, as a whole, getting rich from it. Some individuals were, mainly the East India Company – but the EIC was hideously unpopular, and the British state replaced it with direct rule as soon as the mutiny gave it political cover to do so. It’s striking how states that are governed by thugs – like every premodern absolutist regime, or Europe in its imperialism abroad – don’t get wealthy from it. (France’s massive ethnic cleansing, e.g. Fontainebleau, made the states the Huguenots fled to rich; it didn’t make France rich, and set the Bourbon dynasty on a course that led to its extinction, much like the Hellenistic states’ constant games of thrones.)
The US *is* an empire, though arguably it has become less imperialistic as time goes on, but you don’t go from 13 colonies on the eastern fringe of the continent to from sea to shining sea without a whole ot imperialism, something americans historically have been pretty okay with. (even when americans in the early 20th century started turning their attention outside of the mainland, it was often justified as merely continuting what they had already been doing)
Any claims of “The US isn’t an empire” kinda implicitly ignores native americans, who were clearly treated as imperial subjects (in the best case, analogous to the client kingdoms of the romans, in the worst case… well…)
That depends on your definition of Empire. If one uses Brett’s definition of ’empire’, then the United States was an empire that colonised its way out of imperial status.
If you are a expansionist, ethno-centric power, this is one of the advantages of settler-colonialism: you can effectively warp local demographics to the point where they are no longer dominated by indigenous groups. This is one big reason why some countries today continue to practice and encourage settler-colonialism.
Areas that have been demographically warped cease being hinterlands and become core holdings, and the imperial power ceases to be, in the present, an empire.
This is, it goes without saying, a truly terrible thing for the indigenous populations, and deserves moral condemnation.
Brett gave a very specific definition of “empire”:
https://acoup.blog/2019/11/22/collections-why-are-there-no-empires-in-age-of-empires/
“…an empire is a state where the core ruling population exercises control and extracts resources from a periphery which is composed of people other than the core group (linguistically/culturally/ethnically/religiously distinct)”
If you want to call the USA an empire, you need to 1) define the core group, 2) define who we’re extracting resources from, and 3) identify those resources.
If you want use a different definition of empire, that’s fine–but you’ll need to provide a firm definition. This has not been done. Basically all anyone’s done is to say “The USA has done bad things, ergo it’s an empire.” I do not agree that empires are the only form of government capable of atrocities (a necessary assumption for this argument to be coherent). It’s emotive reasoning, which is always dangerous.
As for the native groups in the Americas, we didn’t extract resources from them. We attempted to eliminate them, and when that failed to isolate them. The idea wasn’t that we’d get rich by their labors; it was for them to go away. Genocide is not imperialism. For my part, I think arguing that the USA treated them like imperial subjects downplays what we did to them, and serves to mask the horrors. Remember, the 13 colonies WERE imperial subjects. We did not treat the natives of this continent with anything like the dignity the colonists were treated with.
“As for the native groups in the Americas, we didn’t extract resources from them. ”
Land usable for farming was a resource, generally considered to be the most important one in the world, and the whole point of eliminating native groups was to extract that resource from their control.
I feel like the word “extraction” here is alternately being used to mean “exploitation” and “appropriation”, which are rather different things.
There is a rather significant difference between “Manage a territory to extract resources from an existing population” and “Remove the existing population so our citizens can take over”. Empires do the former. Almost every country in history, including the USA, has done the latter. (To be clear, I AM NOT defending the action. I am showing why this isn’t a useful criteria for defining “empire”. There’s a difference, and I think that difference is often being ignored in this discussion.)
The issue is, what are you trying to accomplish with your definition? Are you trying to accurately describe a nation, or are you simply trying to insult it? Using Brett’s definition allows us to compare and contrast various nations throughout history, to see similar patterns and important differences. The way many people are using the term “empire” is nothing more than a slur. If you want to call the USA evil, there are plenty of ways to do that without diluting a term that’s already a bit tricky to use.
“self-government means that other nations are free to set up whatever government suits them best.”
Except of course, any nondemocratic (in the specific sense of the word) government is by definition not self-governing: (which yes, is an entire paradox on it’s own)
That’s not a feature of empires, but rather of polities with low state penetration (Cf. the Soviet empire, which did care, or the Qing empire, which also did.) The Republic and the Principate were pretty minimalistic states except for the military. The Dominate was a lot more top-down bureaucratic, and also enforced religious uniformity from the moment it came to be, first with a ban on Christianity and an attempt to grow the cult of Sol, and eventually with a ban on religions other than Christianity.
Part of it boils down to changes in terminology depending on how modern the polity is. For example, in the history of the Jews, the standard expression for premodern laws removing Jews from a country is “expulsion,” but in a modern state the exact same thing is called “ethnic cleansing.” For the same reason, the Edict of Fontainebleau is not called ethnic cleansing even though it exactly was that. Same thing with the concept of apartheid: by any kind of modern understanding of Greek-Egyptian relations in the Ptolemaic Empire, it was an apartheid state. So this gives the impression that premodern empires didn’t engage in genocide and other such crimes.
(For this reason, you should also not take seriously Young Earth Creationists or Sahra “we did fine without minority rights for centuries” Wagenknecht. In Wagenknecht’s case it’s more brazenly red-brown because the Holocaust falls under modern understanding of genocide, but this happened before 1900 too.)
I think a factor here might be the interplay of society with technology. Consider for example how the printing press was a key factor in sparking the sort of wide religious conflicts that then plagued Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries; the potential for discontent was probably there, but it never had a chance to materialise until a better communication technology allowed people to organize.
Of course this might as well turn the other way too: one could argue that total surveillance and control enabled by natural language AI might be the end point of our current trajectory, and in such a world, totalitarian pre-emptive repression becomes again fully viable, helped along by the now almost unsurmountable gap in power between the civilian masses and the military professionals (and the automated drones, riot control bots, and such). It’s not the only possible future, hopefully, but it certainly is ONE possible future.
If you want to make that thought even scarier imagine a society far far ahead of us in terms of knowledge relating to psychology and genetics as well. If I may give a quote from a really good sci fi game(props if anyone gets the reference)
“My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack’s muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?“
Alpha Centauri is hardly an obscure game.
Depends how old you are.
The military professionals don’t seem to have done so well in Afghanistan and a few other places I could name.
The military professionals from a country several thousand miles away, whose people have little personal stake in the conflict, and whose government’s day-to-day concerns revolve more around “how can I funnel these billions of dollars spent on the conflict into my defense contractor friends’ pockets” than “how do we turn this into a win state fifty years from now” will tend to perform poorly.
The Taliban’s military professionals, and given the length of time for which they have waged war one cannot lightly call them unprofessional, seem to be doing just fine.
I believe it was Aesop who said “the fox is running for his dinner; the rabbit is running for his life!”
I suspect that a large enough group of American political extremists, if so disposed, could match the “professionalism” of the Taliban.
Honestly, I’m not sure. The Taliban as it exists now (or even as it existed in 2001) was built around a solid core of men who had a lot of collective experience in fighting guerilla wars and finding ways to hold together robust alliances within their own society, including the ability to command the loyalty of military age males. Some of them were literally the same people who had hung on long enough to force the Soviets to retreat from Afghanistan less than fifteen years earlier, and the rest were their understudies.
American political extremists come in two varieties: right-wing and left-wing.
The American left, when you go far enough left that people are seriously contemplating open revolt, are fragmented. And quite a few of them are too busy indulging in circular firing squads to be very reliable for purposes of reaching out and recruiting a revolutionary movement. There aren’t enough of them and they don’t have a propaganda machine worth talking about.
The American right is far better prepared to begin an insurrection, as demonstrated by the fairly prominent numbers of individuals on the far right who will openly hint at their desire for one on national media platforms. However, unlike the Taliban, they do not have the applicable experience. The American far right has not been treated as a primary threat by American domestic security institutions, not proportionate to its impact on overall levels of political violence in the US.
Much of their internal discussion of the possibility of insurrection seems to revolve around the idea that the organs of the state will essentially stand aside and let them win, because surely anyone who carries a gun for the government must be a fan of QAnon. While this mentality occasionally aligns with reality (e.g. the 1/6 rioters being let into the Capitol), it very often does not (e.g. literally everything that happened to the rioters after that point).
Moreover, the far right’s recruitment strategy has relied heavily on recruiting demographics that vote reliably (e.g. people over fifty) sometimes at the expense of demographics that fight well (e.g. people under thirty). This would be something of a handicap if they wished to transition to insurrectionism. Especially if they couldn’t rely on the police and military to simply walk out of the way and let them take over in a putsch (see above).
I do not think American political extremists on either the right or left could perform at the level of the Taliban in terms of being an effective domestic insurrection against a motivated US military-security complex. The right isn’t hard enough; willingness to dish it out doesn’t translate into the resilience and structural durability that lets a faction take it. And whether the left is ‘hard enough’ or not, it hardly matters because even if they are, they’re a tiny mass of fragmented gravel without the bulk and cohesion to matter.
“Every empire in history had had to deal with a diverse population, and none of them had done so using liberalism.”
That depends what you mean by liberalism. Dividing lines within a society are probably going to cause trouble. If you are worried about that it would seem that you can either:
1) Try to eliminate the dividing lines.
2) Try to stop people from paying too much attention to them.
Option 1) has you concentrating on things that divide your subjects (and which must therefore divide at least some of them from you), option 2) on things that unite them (with you, of course). And option 2 almost certainly leads you in a direction of greater tolerance and (classical) liberalism.
And option 2 almost certainly leads you in a direction of greater tolerance and (classical) liberalism.
Then why did liberalism (classical or otherwise) not emerge until the end of the 17th century? People had been forming empires for some four thousand years by that point.
Because you are defining “liberal” in a very exclusionary way. If something isn’t a sufficiently close match to the Prototype Liberal it is Not a Liberal. Demand a sufficiently close match to the Prototype Liberal of today and most people of today, and almost everyone in the past, will be excluded. After all, the past was less like today than today is. It can’t possibly be as good a match.
By the same logic the past can be shown to be devoid of Communists, Capitalists, Islamists, Feminists and so on.
By the same logic the past can be shown to be devoid of Communists, Capitalists, Islamists, Feminists and so on.
Yes.
GJ, are you disagreeing with me in some way when you say “yes”?
GJ, are you disagreeing with me in some way when you say “yes”?
I’m saying that the past is indeed devoid of Communists, Capitalists, etc. (Well, obviously *modern* history isn’t, but before that, it certainly is. It makes no sense to talk of Communists or Capitalists in ancient Greece, for example.)
Then you shouldn’t really be surprised it didn’t have any liberal democrats either. And yet you seemed to think that fact required some explaining.
Then you shouldn’t really be surprised it didn’t have any liberal democrats either. And yet you seemed to think that fact required some explaining.
If one believes, as you do, that trying to stop people paying too much attention to dividing lines in society “almost certainly leads you in a direction of greater tolerance and (classical) liberalism”, then it does require some explaining. I on the other hand reject the premise, and so don’t need to explain the lack of pre-modern liberal states.
If something causes me head eastwards for a bit, I don’t necessarily end up in the Far East. If supporting Queen Elizabeths right to rule England made a 16th century Englishman a bit more feminist that otherwise, that didn’t make him a feminist, at least not by modern definitions.
And supporting the legalisation of Judaism in England might have made Oliver Cromwell more liberal, but it didn’t make him a liberal by modern definitions.
Indeed, you could probably agree with every word that John Stuart Mill ever wrote, and not be considered a classical liberal today. He worked for the East India Company, after all.
Many empires had some proto-liberal elements. The Mongols and Romans didn’t care much about your religion, for example; freedom of religion being a conscious part of liberalism is a reaction to the violent intolerance common in Christianity, and simply much less of an issue elsewhere. Don’t need to solve the problem of a Thirty Years War if no one has ever _had_ a Thirty Years War.
Mixed bag here. The Romans did in fact expect nominal obeisance to their official gods and were vexed by Jews and Christians who refused. And violent sectarianism is a very early feature of Islam; wars among Christian denominations are now (largely?) over but sectarian conflict among Muslims persists. I am unable to say what the current Mongol attitude towards religious tolerance might be.
I have heard it suggested that the current period of Islamic radicalism is analogous to the more extreme early Protestant sects such as the Calvinists or the Puritans. Any thoughts on this?
Many empires had some proto-liberal elements.
That implies a Whiggish teleological view of history which pretty much every trained historian would reject. Better to say that freedom of religion is not an exclusively liberal trait.
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” The pre-Christian Roman rulers did indeed care about subjects’ religion, and certainly attempted to suppress by force religions they didn’t like, most notably Christianity. It’s just that they failed.
@Michael Alan Hutson
“I have heard it suggested that the current period of Islamic radicalism is analogous to the more extreme early Protestant sects such as the Calvinists or the Puritans. Any thoughts on this?”
Not really, this is a claim made by people who have very little knowledge of Islamic history. Radical Islamic sectarianism has been a feature from the early days of the religion. Look up sects like Kharjites and Qarmatians.
Most empires, before liberalism, dealt with diversity in one of two ways: (1) signifigant amounts of autonomity by community, geography, ethnography, or religion; or (2) massive and sustained violence. Sometimes, as with the Mongol Empire, you had the exercise of both solutions simultanesoulsy.
A specific example cited in your comment, the Spanish Monarchy delt with diversity through a policy of massive and sustained violence. They ethnically cleansed the Moores and Jews. They enslaved much of the New World. Even when operating in Europe, they were casually violent as policy when allowed to govern over Protestant populations, whether in the Netherlands or England.
The joke behind “Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!” is that it’s that it’s the English watch word for unaccountable and intrusive state violence. I.e. for cerain generations of English, they always expected the Spanish Inquistion and many Englishmen died to make sure that their brief experience with it under “Bloody” Mary Tudor would never be repeated.
And yet unaccountable and intrusive state violence was somehow a feature of English and British government for centuries thereafter.
“England judicially murdered more Roman Catholics than any other country in Europe, which puts English pride in national tolerance in an interesting perspective” (Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation, p. 361).
I think you have to count the irish in order to claim that. Not that killing Irish were right, but I think it is unclear how much the religion mattered. The Irish would probably have the rebelled even if England had stayed catholic. I think, that if you limit the count to England and Wales, (Bloody) Mary Tudor killed greater number of Protestantsduring her less than 10 years short reign than Elizabeth I did kill Catholics
I think, that if you limit the count to England and Wales, (Bloody) Mary Tudor killed greater number of Protestantsduring her less than 10 years short reign than Elizabeth I did kill Catholics
If you include Henry and Edward, the number of Catholics killed is probably comfortably higher than the number of Protestants. Not that it’s really relevant, because the quote was talking about the number of Catholics murdered by different European countries, not the number of Protestants vs. Catholics killed in England.
This was however an era in which Catholics were literally told by their priests that they would be damned to Hell if they didn’t work to overthrow Protestant monarchs. And there were plenty of foreign nations promising them alliance if they did. Such circumstances would test even the strongest commitment to religious liberty.
This was however an era in which Catholics were literally told by their priests that they would be damned to Hell if they didn’t work to overthrow Protestant monarchs. And there were plenty of foreign nations promising them alliance if they did. Such circumstances would test even the strongest commitment to religious liberty.
That gets the causality backwards. Elizabeth started persecuting Catholics almost immediately; the papal bull excommunicating her was passed later as a response.
Punishment for non compliance with Protestantism was very low the first ten years, mostly a fine representing one day of labor. It wasn’t increased until the excommunication. From Elizabeth I and onwards, England treated non compliance with the official religion as a crime of public order, not of religious faith, so no burning of heretics at the stake, even when they were killed (the same, by the way, for witchcraft).
The one who started killing opponents immediately for religious reasons was Mary Tudor.
The one who started killing opponents immediately for religious reasons was Mary Tudor.
Henry executed both Catholics and Protestants for heresy, depending on what the Church of England’s doctrine was for that week.
Actually Protestants for heresy (burning) and Catholics for treason (beheading or hanging)
The Spanish Inquisition killed maybe 3,000-5,000 people during its 356 years of history; the French Revolution killed 35-40,000 over the course of ten months. Remind me, which system deals with its problems using “massive and sustained violence”?
Well, no, it is a historically informed worldview: it is just not the only possible solution. But it is the one european and american societies adopted. (it should be noted, often unintentionally and in order to solve problems in the short-term)
In addition, when Liberalism came around European rulers had already developed another way of preventing a Thirty-Years War from happening again: Absolutism, with the decision about people’s religion being left to the territorial ruler. That ruler could expell religious minorities if they deemed it necessary, and normally another ruler would take them in. Wars would be fought for territory, but not to intervene in another countries religious affairs.
And that system worked. European wars in the 18th century were a lot less destructive than the European Wars of Religion. Then the Model got thrown away following the French revolution (so either it got thrown away by Liberalism, or by Absolutism in response to Liberalism, there are good arguments for both sides on this issue). The ideological conflicts that followed until Liberalism was firmly established were in total perhaps even more destructive than the Wars of Religion, until Liberalism was firmly established.
Liberalism was always more than just a way to create societal peace. It was the belief that the free exchange of ideas would lead to more knowledge, the free market would lead to more prosperity, and free elections would lead to better leaders. And all of these, I’d say, are largely true. In addition, after Liberalism had won, it proved even more successful at constraining violence than Absolutism had been. But we (or rather our ancestors) paid a heavy price to get there.
(To be clear, I am not blaming Liberalism for these destructive conflicts, at least not exclusively. That would be like blaming only Protestants for the Wars of Religion. The Absolutist and Catholic responese Liberalism and Protestantism respectively was least as responsible for the conflicts that followed.)
The idea that the Spanish empire managed diversity well, or that it was even beneficial for Spain itself in the long run, is itself ridiculous.
The Spanish Empire endured for 484 years. Even if you discount the period after the Latin American wars of independence, that’s still 318 years; for comparison, the US has so far managed 247. No doubt the Spanish could have done some things better, but the idea that an empire of three centuries’ duration wasn’t able to manage diversity is highly implausible.
The spanish empire was *incredibly* bad at managing diversity. That was in fact arguably the main problem for the spanish state, and they were often saved only by the fact that their enemies weren’t much better.
To be fair, the challenges to the spanish empire were great; It was a massive, diverse place, with multiple competing interests that the spanish crown had to keep tabs on…. Which they ultimately failed, or at least, had to make decisions like “chop off one limb to save the other” as in the mid-1600’s.
Please explain how an empire can last for 318 years whilst being “*incredibly* bad at managing diversity”.
By losing all the parts where your imperial subjects have guns to shoot back with (e.g. the Netherlands), and keeping all the parts where your subjects were advanced Neolithic or early Bronze Age city-states before you showed up and were then massively reduced by waves of plagues until your conquerors could move in on the post-apocalyptic survivors with equipment they didn’t have the means to duplicate.
The overseas Spanish colonial empire was overwhelmingly in the New World where keeping a colonial empire was comparatively easy and did not require exceptionally brilliant statecraft. The European Spanish Empire fell apart in comparatively short order.
Yeah, and the Spanish state was enough of a hulk that in the early 18th century, it was the subject of a European proxy war rather than a player in one. It technically was still an empire, but only in the sense that Sparta was technically an independent state in the Hellenistic era.
There’s a deeper question about whether Spain and Portugal’s failure to industrialize out of the resources they got in the 16th century came out of Mokyrian reasons (i.e. absolutist institutions) or Allenian ones (i.e. poor geographic positioning), but it’s telling that historians debate why they fell behind the Netherlands and Britain and not whether they did.
By losing all the parts where your imperial subjects have guns to shoot back with (e.g. the Netherlands),
Half of the Netherlands, really — the southern half, modern Belgium, remained under Spanish control.
And that still leaves the Spanish-controlled territories in Italy and Germany, which weren’t lost to rebellion. (They were lost of other European countries, of course, but that wasn’t really because of their diversity.)
and keeping all the parts where your subjects were advanced Neolithic or early Bronze Age city-states before you showed up and were then massively reduced by waves of plagues until your conquerors could move in on the post-apocalyptic survivors with equipment they didn’t have the means to duplicate.
Ruling over the better part of an entire continent on the other side of the world when the fastest means of transport is a sailing ship is not as trivial as you make out.
Yeah, and the Spanish state was enough of a hulk that in the early 18th century, it was the subject of a European proxy war rather than a player in one. It technically was still an empire, but only in the sense that Sparta was technically an independent state in the Hellenistic era.
Spain was a major player in European history until the Napoleonic Wars.
There’s a deeper question about whether Spain and Portugal’s failure to industrialize out of the resources they got in the 16th century came out of Mokyrian reasons (i.e. absolutist institutions) or Allenian ones (i.e. poor geographic positioning), but it’s telling that historians debate why they fell behind the Netherlands and Britain and not whether they did.
I thought the standard explanation was that economic theory wasn’t very advanced in the 16th century, and so the Spanish government didn’t know how to deal with the influx of wealth in ways that didn’t undermine the economy as a whole.
My take is that the Spanish Hapsburgs were simply too conservative, they were too invested in what had been a winning strategy for them in the latter Fifteenth century: dynastic union and uncompromising religious unity. It was just that the very transoceanic trade system they founded evolved into a mercantilist system that increasingly rewarded finance, trade and innovation; and ala’ James Burke rewarded the liberalism and progressivism associated with that.
In the Napoleonic Wars, Spain was again a theater that other powers fought over; by 1813, even within Spain, the only a third of Allied troops were British. The driving forces of the Sixth Coalition were the UK, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Previously, in the Seven Years’ War, Spain was a minor player and did poorly.
And re economic theory: economic theory remained underdeveloped until the late 18th century, but the Netherlands and then Britain did manage to get rich.
The Mokyrian explanation is institutional: the Spanish absolute monarchy squandered its wealth on repeated wars of conquest, like the Spanish Armada and the Eighty Years’ War; it defaulted on its debt every few years. In Princes and Merchants, DeLong-Shleifer point out how Spain and France spent so much money trying to conquer the Netherlands for its wealth instead of trying to establish rule of law that would enable the merchants of Madrid and Paris to be as successful as those of Amsterdam.
The Allenian one is materialist. Allen himself has gone in a weird direction recently and economic historians are shifting away from him – he argues Northern Europe industrialized first because its cold climate meant the Early Modern subsistence wage was higher due to higher heating needs, so to the capitalist, labor was a higher cost even if living standards for the workers were the same. (That said, Allen also points out living standards were also higher in England than in France in the 18th century – caloric consumption was higher.) But the more common materialist explanation is that Lisbon, at the mouth of the Tagus, was only a gateway to Iberia, which didn’t have that many people, whereas the Northwestern European cities vying for entrepot status in the 16th and 17th centuries had a much larger hinterland, stretching up the Rhine to southern Germany.
GJ: Because it started shedding pieces almost immediately. They lost half the netherlands, they lost Portugal, they almost lost Catalonia, Then in the 1800’s they lost thier american colonies.
And that’s just the bits they actively shed, and not the bits that caused enough trouble to be distracting. The spanish state had major trouble manage the diversity of it’s holdings even compared to other contemporary empires.
@ Alon:
In the Napoleonic Wars, Spain was again a theater that other powers fought over; by 1813, even within Spain, the only a third of Allied troops were British. The driving forces of the Sixth Coalition were the UK, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Previously, in the Seven Years’ War, Spain was a minor player and did poorly.
And in the American Revolutionary War, Spain was one of the major players. Eighteenth-century Spain wasn’t as strong as sixteenth-century Spain, but nor was the period one of continual decline and irrelevance.
And re economic theory: economic theory remained underdeveloped until the late 18th century, but the Netherlands and then Britain did manage to get rich.
Neither the Netherlands nor Britain had access to quite so much precious metal as Spain did. If they had, they’d probably have experienced similar problems.
@ Arilou:
GJ: Because it started shedding pieces almost immediately. They lost half the netherlands, they lost Portugal, they almost lost Catalonia, Then in the 1800’s they lost thier american colonies.
…Over a period of two hundred and forty years. Until the Spanish mainland got absolutely trashed by Napoleon, the country wasn’t shedding territory at a noticeably quick rate. And let’s not forget that Spain’s American Empire lasted longer than Britain’s,* so if we’re taking ability to control overseas territories as our yardstick, it looks like backwards, absolutist Spain was better at managing diversity than liberal, forward-thinking Britain.
* Dating the end of Britain’s empire to the American Revolutionary War and the end of Spain’s to the Latin American Wars of Independence, because, whilst both countries did maintain New World colonies afterwards, these were never as populous, wealthy, or important as the ones they’d lost.
The precious metal inflow did not lead to economic decline, and the idea that it did is not especially colorable in modern economic history; it doesn’t match 16th- and early 17th-century price and wage series as in Allen’s Great Divergence paper. In fact, one of the explanations for why the Netherlands stagnated after the middle of the 17th century is that the flows of metals slowed down, leading to deflation, in contrast with the inflation of the previous 150 years; as the first modern economy in Europe, it was also the first country to experience a modern demand-side recession, without the modern economic tools for fighting it.
“Until the Spanish mainland got absolutely trashed by Napoleon, the country wasn’t shedding territory at a noticeably quick rate.”
The dutch revolted in 1560, and the spanish never retook control. They then lost control of Portugal in the 1640’s, (at which point they almost lost Catalonia too) and that’s glossing over a whole bunch of internal issues (like the repeating ethnic cleansings)
There was some stabilization and recovery in the 1700’s, before they lost most of the rest of the empire in the early 1800’s (with only really Cuba and the Philippines remaining, though I do note that spanish 19th century internal history is not exactly without internal strife; The Carlist wars were to various extent regionalist as well as traditionalist)
The dutch revolted in 1560, and the spanish never retook control. They then lost control of Portugal in the 1640’s, (at which point they almost lost Catalonia too) and that’s glossing over a whole bunch of internal issues (like the repeating ethnic cleansings)
So that’s two territories, separated by eighty years, (and no, “almost” doesn’t count,) and then nothing until the 1800s. Still not seeing how the Spanish Empire was remarkably prone to shedding territories.
One of these two territories was the economic center of Europe and the world, so yeah, it matters that Spain couldn’t keep it or make its own burghers as successful as Amsterdam’s. (Spain got to keep Belgium but only as a hulk – the treaty stipulated that the Scheldt be closed to navigation, making Antwerp useless as a port.)
One of these two territories was the economic center of Europe and the world, so yeah, it matters that Spain couldn’t keep it or make its own burghers as successful as Amsterdam’s. (Spain got to keep Belgium but only as a hulk – the treaty stipulated that the Scheldt be closed to navigation, making Antwerp useless as a port.)
You’re shifting the goalposts now. The question was whether Spain was unusually prone to losing territory, not whether the Netherlands were economically important.
I wouldn’t particularly point to Europe here, but I think that Islamic law in particular represents a very old and thoroughly distinct approach to managing (religious) diversity, that arose long before liberalism was ever thought of.
Correct me if I’m mistaken but I thought Islamic law towards other religions amounted to “We won’t punish you for being wrong, but yes we’re right and you’re wrong, and we’re here to uphold the people who are right”.
Liberalism was 17th century Europe’s answer to a problem that 17th century Europe, specifically, had.
Plenty of empires have managed large ethnically and religiously diverse populations without liberalism. The Persians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Ottomans, the Mughals, and so on, and so on, and so on. But, Western Europe, specifically, had a bit of a problem. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, medieval Europe evolved into a system that was politically fragmented and religiously united. This made it relatively easy to resolve ethnic divisions (since vassals of many ethnicities could serve the same king), and meant that there were effectively no religious divisions relevant to state policy (since everyone who wasn’t non-heretical Catholic was fair game to be converted by the sword).
The Protestant Reformation immediately broke this system down, because suddenly there was something to fight over, and the Protestants spread too fast to be bulldozed and crushed into submission the way previous groups of heretics had been. Meanwhile, states were growing more powerful, often under (would-be) absolute monarchs. They were less tolerant of little side-peninsulas of their realm speaking divergent languages and having different customs than had been accepted in medieval times.
This led to a lot of infighting and war, culminating in, as noted, the Thirty Years’ War.
Dr. Devereaux basically already said this, but to recap: Liberalism isn’t the only solution for how to have an ethnically or religiously diverse state. It’s specifically the solution that Western Europe invented to deal with its struggles to find a way to have diversity without constant warfare. By the 1800s, religious tolerance and semi-secular governance becoming a norm had proven resilient as a way of stopping religious wars, but nationalism created a whole new round of problems and conflicts. And modern liberalism is thus an overlay of rules and customs established both to prevent religious war (in the manner of the Thirty Years’ War) and to prevent ethnic wars and massacres (in the manner of Nazi Germany’s wars).
And, again, neither I nor he is saying this is the only way to avoid these things- but it is a structure of customs and traditions that emerged out of a desire to avoid these things, within the context of pre-existing Western institutions. Outside of the traditions of Western civilization, you can find many other ways of handling similar problems of policy.
And, again, neither I nor he is saying this is the only way to avoid these things-
Actually, he said exactly that:
“I am politically a liberal – that is, again, committed to a liberal democratic order based on freedoms, liberties and rights – before all of my other political commitments, because I do not think that any of the other things opposing political systems promise (and rarely deliver), like prosperity or equality or the ‘common good,’ can actually be durably, reliably delivered over the long term by any other sort of system.”
Prosperity and equality seem to me to be completely unrelated to political stability and lack of religious sectarian violence. And it’s only the minimum standard for what ought to be considered the ‘common good’ – I would still argue that an absolute monarchy or a dictatorship will provide much less of that than an equivalent democracy ceteris paribus.
The quote you just gave seems to be talking about different criteria than the topic at hand.
Prosperity, equality, and the common good (not sure why that last one’s in sneer quotes) are just examples illustrating his broader argument, which is that “I do not think that any of the other things opposing political systems promise… can actually be durably, reliably delivered over the long term by any other sort of system.” Now opposing political systems promise, inter alia, political stability and lack of religious sectarian violence; and indeed, there have been non-liberal regimes which delivered these things over hundreds of years, which surely counts as “the long term” by any reasonable definition. Therefore, the claim is false.
Because they were so in Mr. Devereaux’s original quote.
Ahh, ok, gotcha. Yeah, fair enough, I concede your point. Since we hyperfocus on our host’s use of the word ‘any’, then, logically, we note that his claim is that all promises of authoritarian regimes do not get fulfilled. As soon as you find one counter-example – that of political and military stability – you invalidate this all-encompassing claim, yes. Had Bret said: “because I do not think that all of the other things opposing political systems promise”, or “because I do not think that most of the other things opposing political systems promise”, he would have been much more correct, yes.
Nonetheless, it does not seem contradictory to me that Mr. Devereaux prefers liberalism as an ideology over others due to all of the other benefits it brings on top of political stability. Nor does it seem contradictory to me that, when modern liberalism formed, its main goal would have been to do its best to ensure maximum political stability, even if it wasn’t the only type of governance to propose the claim of actually being able to do so (monarchical absolutism being the main competing ideology at the time in the 17th – 18th centuries). Even if we assume, for the sake of the argument, that liberalism is no better at achieving political stability than other forms of government, all of the other benefits it brings outweigh its perceived value when compared to authoritarianism.
Because they were so in Mr. Devereaux’s original quote.
I know, I was more wondering why he put them in.
Nonetheless, it does not seem contradictory to me that Mr. Devereaux prefers liberalism as an ideology over others due to all of the other benefits it brings on top of political stability. Nor does it seem contradictory to me that, when modern liberalism formed, its main goal would have been to do its best to ensure maximum political stability, even if it wasn’t the only type of governance to propose the claim of actually being able to do so (monarchical absolutism being the main competing ideology at the time in the 17th – 18th centuries). Even if we assume, for the sake of the argument, that liberalism is no better at achieving political stability than other forms of government, all of the other benefits it brings outweigh its perceived value when compared to authoritarianism.
I think claims that liberalism produces stability get the causality wrong. Rather, one of the preconditions for liberalism is having a strong civil society, and having a strong civil society tends to produce stability. Hence why attempts to introduce liberalism in areas without a strong civil society — the Middle East, for example, or post-colonial Africa, or post-Soviet Russia — haven’t generally succeeded in bringing stability, prosperity, or any of the other benefits liberalism is supposed to bring.
A certain amount of wealth also helps if you want to introduce liberalism — it’s much easier to be a liberal individualist if you can earn enough on your own to support yourself; if you need to rely on neighbours or family, this naturally produces a more collectivist social outlook. And of course people who are already comfortably well-off tend not to support destabilisation, since they’ve got more to lose and less to gain.
All of which is to say that, whilst it can be rational for someone living in a wealthy country with a strong civil society to prefer liberalism *for his own country*, the idea that liberalism is the best system *in general* is a dangerous misapprehension, which has already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in this century alone. And — since this is a history blog, after all — it also leads to people undervaluing past generations. A lot of individuals here seem to think that the only thing stopping, say, medieval France from being a liberal paradise was the selfishness and oppression of its elites, when in reality the economic and social conditions for liberalism simply did not exist.
And then of course there’s the third system that the Soviet Union tried: absolute dependence upon the state, imposed by brute force and the murder of anyone who tried to independently support themselves or their immediate neighbors or family.
I’m not sure how well that summarizes the Soviet economy as a whole.
It’s a fairly good summary of Stalinist agricultural policy (the most successful of the medium-sized landholders being classed as “kulaks” and purged, while the smallholding peasant families were forced onto collective farms, where they were indeed very dependent on the state).
But, y’know, the Soviet Union didn’t end in 1950, and the median Soviet citizen of 1970 or 1980 wasn’t a peasant farmer.
It feels more like the kind of summary of how the USSR worked that you get from starting with “this is how I think society should work, and commieland is basically Mordor, so clearly it should be the exact opposite of how I think society should work.”
Or at least that’s the vibe I get.
Mainly it’s that I feel compelled to point out that the sort of society that tribes or small villages have, a “collectivist social outlook” where you “rely on neighbors or family”, does not really work past a Dunbar’s Number of people. Mainly because one does not unreservedly extend charity even to close members of an ingroup but one makes a careful calculation of whether each person is in turn helpful or a selfish taker; almost literally the sort of calculation one makes in deciding how expensive a Christmas present you give a person. We deal with the anonymous mass of people we cannot hope to ever personally know by objectifying our relationship to them: if they obey the common laws, and by expecting an agreed-upon remuneration when we trade with them. A basically individualistic free market in other words.
The enormous fallacy of 20th century communist movements was to claim that a nation of a hundred million or more people could operate on the same principles as a small village, that it would work if everyone gave unselfishly of themselves to the common good. Except that the central control of where work should be directed and where what returns (if any) should be distributed was an utter failure, derailed by bureaucratic ineptitude and elevating political considerations above all others. So it irks me when either deliberately or by presumption the two utterly different situations are lumped together as “collectivist”.
“The enormous fallacy of 20th century communist movements was to claim that a nation of a hundred million or more people could operate on the same principles as a small village, that it would work if everyone gave unselfishly of themselves to the common good.”
Most actual communist societies, in the post-Stalin period, didn’t actually operate this way. They recognized, in general, that *some* balance between rewarding individual productivity and pursuing the common good. was necessary.
I actually do think (and the hard-core communist J. B. S. Haldane agreed as well) that scale matters, part of the problem of the Soviet Union was simply that it was *too large*. (Haldane thought that communism could work at the scale of a size like Belgium or Czechoslovakia, just not at the size of a country like America or the Soviet Union). But, I also think it’s a mistake- and one easily corrected if you actually look at the history of communist societies- to think that most of them weren’t aware of the importance of having *some* level of individual material incentives,
“But, y’know, the Soviet Union didn’t end in 1950, and the median Soviet citizen of 1970 or 1980 wasn’t a peasant farmer.
It feels more like the kind of summary of how the USSR worked that you get from starting with “this is how I think society should work, and commieland is basically Mordor, so clearly it should be the exact opposite of how I think society should work.””
+1000 to this, I can’t second this enough.
“whilst attempts to impose liberalism in Iraq and Afghanistan caused far more bloodshed than the previous, non-liberal, regimes had witnessed.”
This is, of course, a lie, told by someone with a deep emotional attachment to the bizarre and poisonous idea that democracy cannot flourish outside racially pure states, to try to shore up his unfounded beliefs. To shore up an unfounded belief, you have to be prepared to lie, and that is what this person is doing.
The 2001 Afghanistan war was a failure, and a geopolitical, financial and most importantly a human catastrophe. It was also not nearly as bloody as the Soviet-Afghan War, by more or less an order of magnitude – a war fought by an illiberal Afghan government and its illiberal Soviet patron/ally to impose an illiberal order on Afghanistan. (Roughly 200,000 total dead vs between 1.5 and 2.5 million dead.)
The Iraq War was not quite as much of a failure as the Afghanistan war but it was founded on falsehood, planned by incompetents, and executed hopelessly badly. It was a geopolitical, financial and most importantly a human catastrophe.
It was also not nearly as bloody as the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, fought by an illiberal Iraqi government and an illiberal Iranian government in an attempt to impose illiberal orders. (The difference is a factor of 3-6).
This is, of course, a bizarre misreading of my statement, told by someone with a deep emotional attachment to the bizarre and poisonous idea that we can spread our ideology anywhere we want given enough bombs, to try to shore up his unfounded beliefs. What I meant — and what everybody else seems to have understood — is that more people died per year during the US occupations of the two countries than died per year under Saddam and the Taliban, respectively.
It was also not nearly as bloody as the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, fought by an illiberal Iraqi government and an illiberal Iranian government in an attempt to impose illiberal orders. (The difference is a factor of 3-6).
That doesn’t appear to be true, or at least, we can’t say with confidence that it is. Per Wikipedia, the military deaths in the Iran-Iraq War are estimated to have been between 300,000 to 1.1 million for both sides combined, with the civilian deaths being estimated at around 100,000. Meanwhile, the death toll for the Iraq war is estimated to be between 150,000 and 600,000. So whilst the difference *might have been* a factor of 3-6, it might not have been, and the Iraq War might even have caused more casualties.
The 2001 Afghanistan war was a failure, and a geopolitical, financial and most importantly a human catastrophe… The Iraq War was not quite as much of a failure as the Afghanistan war but it was founded on falsehood, planned by incompetents, and executed hopelessly badly. It was a geopolitical, financial and most importantly a human catastrophe.
So basically, you agree with my point that the US’ attempts to impose democracy on these two countries failed and caused massive suffering and destruction, but because the motives you’ve imagined for me aren’t pure enough for your liking, you decided to quibble about exactly how massive the suffering was compared to some other conflicts.
“Ah, but if I change my statement to a completely different one, then there is a possibility that I might be partly right about one country, within the margins of error, while still being completely wrong about the other one, so you can’t definitely say beyond all doubt that I was wrong, and anyway all this is just pointless quibbling”.
Man, I haven’t seen a racial purity obsessive scramble backwards this hard since 1995.
If it will make you happy, I’ll concede that the Second Gulf War probably did cause less death than the Iran-Iraq War.
It’s still true that both the Second Gulf War and the US invasion of Afghanistan were bloody failures, that attempts to impose liberalism were unsuccessful, and that the two countries, and the Middle East more broadly, would almost certainly be better off had America not invaded them.
Man, I haven’t seen a racial purity obsessive scramble backwards this hard since 1995.
Not a racial purity obsessive, just a not causing hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in quixotic ideologically-motivated crusades obsessive.
I wouldn’t particularly point to Spain or medieval Europe in general, but I’d definitely say that Islamic law, in particular, has a centuries-old tradition of seriously considering and negotiating the problem of diversity, in ways that are entirely different from and independent from liberalism. You don’t actually need to be a liberal society to manage (religious, in this case) diversity.
I think you missed a march on the critique of the GFI from a freedom perspective. The critique I’d have is that the theoretical legal right to, say, free speech or free movement doesn’t matter compared to the material reality of the inability for notable percentages of the population to exercise those rights.
Gross economic inequality renders legal freedoms moot. The poorest cannot exercise many of them, and the richest can maliciously violate the rights of others for little consequence. This is a very very relevant reality in America.
Who doesn’t have the right to free movement?
I note the biggest attacks on it stem from claims of global warming.
Moving is hard. Many people simply lack the capacity to pick their lives up. The costs are too high, it would ruin them, so they are stuck where they are, often in very bad situations.
The poorest lack the ability to move at all in any realistic sense because they can’t afford even transportation costs for themselves. They have to move illegally if they move at all.
This is the legal right verse the reality. Anyone can, legally, pick up and move anywhere else. A lot of people simply cannot because of economic conditions.
The criticisms I have read generally revolve around a massive overweighting of ‘business freedom’- how easy is it to start a business, how difficult are the regulations affecting business- and a relative underweighting of police and carceral systems that disproportionately target the poor. The US gets a very high score despite having the largest incarcerated population in the world and the draconian fines regime that caused most incarceration in Ferguson would not even be a blip on the report. Japan gets a high score despite a complete inability for most people to escape pretrial confinement without a confession- Japan has a suspiciously high 99% conviction rate.
My understanding is that Japan’s really high conviction rate is a kind of two-fold thing that interacts with each other.
Namely that lots of cases that aren’t slam-dunks gets dropped in the pretrial phases, ensuring that basically all the cases that reach trial result in a guilty verdict. This in turn has meant that it’s really bad for a japanese prosecutor to lose a case, which in turn means there are often a lot of pressure to ensure that guilty verdict is given, regardless of the facts of the case.
The book Measuring Judicial Independence, by Ramseyer-Rasmusen, explains it in terms of the number of prosecutors. Japan has way fewer prosecutors than the US, not just per capita but also per reported crime (Japan famously having a way lower crime rate per capita). Prosecutors in general try to prosecute the easiest cases first; in the US there are enough resources to prosecute that they go to more difficult cases, whereas in Japan they just go for the slam dunks. The rights of defendants in the two countries are broadly similar.
The thing with carceral systems is that police brutality tends to be worst in anocracies, not autocracies. The highest global death rate from police killings is, by far, Venezuela, followed by, I forget in which order, Brazil and the Philippines. Protesters in Hong Kong had to repeatedly explain to Americans that what they’re fighting is completely different from what BLM is fighting – there’s very little American-style random police brutality under the PRC, but instead there’s way higher-state capacity repression, with targeted arrests, freezing of accounts, and so on. Russia, similarly, has enough state capacity to make sure the people it throws out of windows are actual dissident leaders.
“The poorest lack the ability to move at all in any realistic sense because they can’t afford even transportation costs for themselves. They have to move illegally if they move at all.”
You’re going to have to unpack that a bit more.
Folks can’t afford car insurance or the cost of a driver’s license, so they don’t own either but still drive a car. It’s illegal, but they can’t afford to live legally so they live illegally as quietly as possible and pray not to get caught.
What connection do your two sentences have to each other?
I assume that reply was directed at me, since 60guilders’s post didn’t have two sentences, outside of the quote.
Firstly, do you understand that it’s illegal in much of at least the United States it’s illegal to drive a car without a license? And in many states, it’s illegal to drive a car that is uninsured. Finally, owning and driving a car is a practical necessity in much of the country. Therefore, even if one cannot afford the cost of owning a car legally, one needs it to survive and thus do so illegally.
And you cite this to prove that people can’t move? How?
That’s — safely vague.
Pretty much everyone. Very few countries have open borders.
You don’t have the right to move into my home, either. If your right to move vanishes for that, you have defined it absurdly widely.
Countries aren’t houses.
Arbitrary distinctions do not make a case.
It’s not an arbitrary distinction. A home is a small, personal, intimate, enclosed space. This is why intruding in a home is bad. A country, on the other hand, is a massive shared space. It is ludicrous for someone in New York to claim that a foreigner in Los Angeles is personally affecting them in any way, let alone intruding in their home.
So if I don’t live in my second home for a time, you can move in there?
It’s not an arbitrary distinction. A home is a small, personal, intimate, enclosed space. This is why intruding in a home is bad. A country, on the other hand, is a massive shared space. It is ludicrous for someone in New York to claim that a foreigner in Los Angeles is personally affecting them in any way, let alone intruding in their home.
Not at all ludicrous if we plan on giving the newcomers or their descendants the right to vote at any point.
As for “personally affecting them” — as soon as the frustrated Los Angeles ships them the illegals they ask for by calling themselves a “sanctuary city” they seem to discover it does.
Also, no good person decides whether something is good for the country without considering his fellow citizens and whether they are affected. The elitist arrogance of living somewhere safe and letting the poor suffer the consequences of your decision is going to have to go if this country is to survive.
Re: academia being soft on Marxism, a while back I checked out a book from the library for my kids, a DK books imprint produced in cooperation with the Smithsonian. It was called “Timelines of Everybody,” basically a series of biographical two-page spreads on significant people across history. It had multiple issues, but for the present point: it was comically, ludicrously slanted on the subject of anything related to Communism or Marxism. The bio of Marx said that his ideas of class struggle had inspired millions and opposed capitalism, “which can promote inequality.” No mention of any downsides to Marxism. Mao, Pol Pot, and the Kim family were entirely absent from the whole book. Fidel Castro got bothsidesed in a footnote to the spread on Che Guevara, who was also bothsidesed–and this was the most evenhanded and reasonable coverage of Marxism present.
Lenin and the revolution weren’t significantly covered, but Stalin was, in a set of micro-bios set side-by-side on a two-page spread covering all the leaders of WWII. It said Stalin was the leader of Russia, he took over from Lenin, his name means Man of Steel, that Hitler double-crossed him, and that he was still in charge when WWII ended. That’s it. No mention of show trials, gulags, Lysenko, five-year-plans, Kulaks, the Holodomor, nothing. His bio, as a result, was noticeably shorter than adjacent bios of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, which did mention their crimes.
I don’t know about Dr. Devereaux’s college, but the bloody Smithsonian put their imprint on this garbage, DK is not some small independent press, and I’ve seen other examples though none so blatant. Yes, it is an issue, and people suspicious of academics out to whitewash left-wing authoritarians are not all totally bonkers.
All I can say is that I went to a liberal arts school with a very lefty reputation and took history courses in Russian and Chinese history and the absolute horror of Stalin and Mao as well as the cut-throat and cynical nature of early Soviety factional struggles were extensively covered in the relevant classes.
Karl Marx isn’t Lenin or Pol Pot. He didn’t kill anyone.
Laying the crimes of Stalin at the feet of Karl Marx is silly. Marx would have hated Stalin, and laughed at the idea that Russia could be forged into a communist state.
Stalin committed Stalin’s crimes. Not Karl Marx.
But then we can’t give Marx credit for “inspiring millions,” with the clear implication that this inspiration was beneficial. He inspired monstrous injustices, would be the objective and fair way to describe his influence,
He inspired both, it’s not really complicated (or rather, of course, it is, because history is complicated)
Now, that is a different thing from assigning *moral blame*. I don’t think you can really blame Marx for Stalin in a moral sense (there’s enough in his personal life and dealings that he can be blamed for) anymore than you can blame Darwin for Hitler, or Jesus Christ for Charlemagne’s massacres of the saxons. But in a practical sense? Yes, he inspired both totalitarian regimes and some of the major drivers of democratization in western europe. Those things are not contradictory.
Depends entirely on what you consider justice vs. injustice.
Marx didn’t call for something like Stalin; he merely advocated violent overthrow of existing regimes and appropriation of all wealth by a group of revolutionaries who purported to represent “the people,” and that said revolutionaries in some way divvy up all the property so that it was fair and equitable and there would be no bad feelings and the violence would stop there and there wouldn’t be any bad incentives for the new owners/controllers of property such as he identified in the existing system. Which is to say “Marx didn’t call for that” on purely technical grounds is a pointless thing to say, since what Marx actually called for is absurd on its face. What Marx called for was not much better than “kill the rich and grow all the money we need on money-trees.”
That he failed to predict the future workings of his plan with his inexorable logic of history hokum is not a point in his favor; that the half-baked system he proposed actually broke down into oppression, corruption and abuse is simply an inevitable consequence he didn’t foresee, along with all the others.
At any rate, it’s very hard to argue that Marx didn’t “inspire” Lenin and Stalin, and it didn’t mention their crimes, so my point stands.
marx did explicitly call for the liquidation of bourgeoisie and revolutionary terror on an even greater scale than the french revolution. So even on that technical point, marx is guilty of calling for that.
While I don’t think Marx was a pacifist, he did call for the liquidiation fo the bourgeisie *as a class*, which is a significantly different thing. “Eliminate the nobility” can mean either “kill all the nobles” or “strip them of their titles” after all
While I don’t think Marx was a pacifist, he did call for the liquidiation fo the bourgeisie *as a class*, which is a significantly different thing. “Eliminate the nobility” can mean either “kill all the nobles” or “strip them of their titles” after all
On the one hand, yes.
On the other hand, if you have a slogan which can be interpreted as a call either for social reform or for mass murder, I feel like you have a moral duty to make darn clear that you’re actually calling for social reform, or, better yet, choose a less ambiguous slogan in the first place.
Liquidation of the bourgeoisie as a class (i.e. eliminating a specific class that derives their income and status from control over the means of production) seems like a good idea to me. Good for him.
At least until hard-eyed, unsmiling men with guns show up, determined to order the world to their liking and ready to regard anyone who would obstruct or hinder them as an enemy worthy of death.
It reminds me of Gletkin’s conversation in Darkness at Noon about interrogating the grain farmer. Trying to explain to the farmer why the revolution needed the grain did not work. “His mind was clogged with centuries of stupidity—patriarchal, feudal earwax.” Gletkin resorted to torture to get the information he needed. “In a hundred years we’ll be able to appeal to an inmate’s common sense and communal spirit. Today we have to focus on his constitution and break him morally as well as physically whenever necessary.”
Marx certainly wasn’t opposed to using violence. I don’t know enough about him to conclude whether he sincerely believed that a communist state could rule without resorting to violence or whether this was just a cynical argument to advance his agenda. Either way, communist regimes quickly learned the lesson that violent compulsion was necessary.
>Marx would have hated Stalin, and laughed at the idea that Russia could be forged into a communist state.
Marx explicitly wrote that russia had revolutionary potential because the communal nature of peasant life created class consciousness without a need for capitalism. And he gleefully called for mass murder and revolutionary terror. there is nothing in lenin and stalin that contradicts marx’s vision.
The specific contradiction between Lenin and Stalin on the one hand and Marx on the other is that Marx expected revolutions to be very mass-based affairs. Lenin constructed his own whole system of justifications for why the Russian revolution wasn’t.
In Russia, due to a combination of circumstances, mass left-wing politics had been illegal for most of the Czarist period and the Bolsheviks had a lot of experience being rotated in and out of prisons or into exile, which caused them to harden into a small nucleus organization or “vanguard party,” which told itself that it was preparing the ground for a revolution the masses weren’t ready yet. Indeed, for a group like that, mass recruitment was in some ways a liability as well as an asset; they were operating as something more like a guerilla movement in occupied territory than as a political party.
Notably, when Lenin actually led an avowedly socialist takeover of Russia, he didn’t do it by organizing the peasant communes. He did it by organizing the intelligentsia and urban working class. The peasants were cut out of the loop and then beaten into the ground by Stalin, precisely because whatever Marx predicted, the peasants’ interests were not compatible with the kind of state that the Bolsheviks were trying to build. The peasants wanted autonomy and to not pay backbreaking taxes; the Bolsheviks wanted to coerce the peasants into working long hours on industrialized farms to feed the cities and factories they were trying to build.
Marxism-Leninism represents one distinct branch of Marxism with significant modifications by Lenin, and Stalin and others subsequently took it further. There are other interpretations of Marx, and there are other leftist thinkers with ideas even more divergent from Marxism-Leninism.
The most glaring departure from Marx’s original tenets was that Marx purported to predict how a fully industrialized society would evolve; whereas Lenin and his successors were faced with the question of how to take a country with only the thinnest veneer of industrialization and modernize it. Marxism-Leninism was about creating a socialist alternative to a capitalist development strategy. Indeed post-World War Two the various communist movements in the Third World took it further, categorizing the revolutionary struggle as anti-imperialist, with entire countries taking on the roles of the oppressor and oppressed classes. Various forms of Maoism even dabbled with the idea of rejecting industrialization almost completely, relying on the supposed virtue of an agricultural peasant class collectivized by an enlightened elite.
Precisely.
I think that at least on that narrow question, Lenin was a lot more correct than Marx had been. Revolutions (of any political stripe) are almost never going to be genuinely mass based affairs, and I don’t think that a country *inherently* needs to go through the capitalist stage before they can start on building socialism.
On the face of it, the major effect of Marx on history was to inspire Lenin, Pol Pot etc. If you insist he was not responsible for the people inspired by him, you implicitly insist he was of no consequence. Either he inspired more bloodshed than Genghis Khan, or he was a nonentity.
Either way, Marxism *the movement that explicitly claims to be inspired by Karl Marx* remains responsible for more bloodshed than Genghis Khan.
Eh, not quite. Marx is significantly more important than just the explicit communist regimes, he had a significant impact on western thought and politics as well. (as well as in all sorts of oddball places you wouldn’t expect) and influenced even his opponents.
It’s just one of those cases where a lot of Marx’s contributions has simply been assimilated into “the way things are”, without people reflecting on it.
I agree he had a significant impact on western (and non-western) thought and politics. The Black Book of Communism estimates there are a hundred million bodies to prove it. And plenty of western “thinkers” doing what they could to help the killers.
We could more easily judge his impact on people other than those hundred million, if you told us what you thought his other contributions (or at least the most important ones) were.
The entire social democratic movement was heavily inspired and influenced by Marx. The Second International, basically established by him, included the British Labour Party, the German SPD, and the Swedish Social Democrats.
But given we’re quoting the Black Book of Communism here, I’m dubious that you care.
“But given we’re quoting the Black Book of Communism here, I’m dubious that you care.”
Perhaps you would like to give your own estimates?
“The entire social democratic movement was heavily inspired and influenced by Marx.”
Perhaps, but I notice that the British Factory Acts were passed before anyone heard of Marx, that Bismarck’s social legislation was almost certainly inspired by a desire to please poorer voters rather than to please Karl Marx, and that the British Labour Party grew out of its labour unions. The most obvious effect of Marxists and socialists on this would seem to be the effort to nationalise a lot of manufacturing industries that were subsequently denationalised.
Supposedly, when the first Labour MPs were elected in 1906, they were polled on their favourite authors. Four said Adam Smith, and another four Charles Darwin. None said Marx. (Although, to be fair, another four said Sidney and Beatrice Webb)
https://twitter.com/EnglishRadical/status/1597878553517117447
“More Methodism than Marx,” as someone once said of the British Labour Party.
The early Social democracy was Marxist. However, the difference between social Democrats and doctrinaire communists was the willingness to modify Marxist thought.
Here, two Germans, Kautsky and Bernstein were big names. Bernstein, in particular, continued Marxist analysis of the national economies of Western Great powers and showed, very convincingly, that there was no indication of the weakening of capitalism nor of approaching revolution. If you wanted a better society, you needed to build it peacefully, because there would not be a revolutionary situation that would allow for fast, violent changes. This was the founding facet of Western social democracy: there would be no revolution, but a movement using unions, politics and cooperatives to achieve its goals.
“Here, two Germans, Kautsky and Bernstein were big names. ”
Interesting: I’d never heard of them. TBH, it sounds like their major effect was to water down Marxism enough to get a sizeable number of voters to swallow it.
Lenin spent a lot of his writing arguing against them. It is the reason “revisionist” became a Leninist term of abuse.
Oh no, they weren’t simply soft-pedlling Marxism; they were the original Revisionists, the ones who dared say out loud “Marx’s predictions aren’t coming true”.
Ad9,
The point was much deeper: in the Bernsteinian social democratic ideology, the revolution was not the medium-term goal, and there would not be a need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. You would get a just society without bloodshed, with peaceful and democratic methods. The point is not to get a critical mass of voters for one final election by which you take over the government but to get a consistent, permanent support for your political program which involves distributing the fruits of the constant economic growth to the population in a just manner. Because you don’t really subscribe to the apocalyptic “communism” of Marx as the end goal, you are ready and prepared to make policy as it seems prudent when the economic realities change. This is why Western social democratic parties haven’t really nationalised industries that much. (Attlee’s Labour government is an aberration, not a rule.)
So, this involves also a very different party structure. The Lenist communist party is a “democratically centralise” structure, where a small, ostensibly democratically elected cabal holds a party conference every few years. (In practice, the cell system makes the election of the conference members completely opaque.) Between the conferences, the practical leadership is in the hands of a politburo, and the party members are supposed to obey unconditionally, with their whole lives as tools for the party to use. This means a party where only the elect few professional revolutionaries can be members, with a very authoritarian commitment to the cause.
A social democratic party is a mass organisation, which welcomes everybody. Your foremost duty is paying your membership dues, and if you like, you are welcome to participate in the formulation of policy, as the culture allows internal discussion. And the actual organisational model of the party is democratic, with elected party organs at all organisational levels. The mindset you get in such a party is quite different.
I definitely agree with this – there’s at least a general sense in media/academia that left wing ideas/regimes are better and so not really responsible for anything going wrong, or that they should be judged on intention rather than outcome.
“The bio of Marx said that his ideas of class struggle had inspired millions and opposed capitalism, ”
That seems fairly neutral and straightforward to me, I’m not sure what it is that you’re disagreeing with?
“Fidel Castro got bothsidesed in a footnote to the spread on Che Guevara, who was also bothsidesed–and this was the most evenhanded and reasonable coverage of Marxism present.”
I have a lot of criticisms of Che Guevara, personally, but if I were writng a piece on Castro it would be overwhelmingly positive. I have little time for “both-sides” discussion of Fidel Castro, but I suspect I’m criticizing “both sides” from a very different perspective than you are.
For the record, I agree with you that if you’re going to address Stalin at all you need to bring up issues liek the famines.
I’m sorry, but the “kinder, gentler” communism you concede has been so frequently not been the case has never actually existed except to the extent it was only partial communism in those times and places. And, in my opinion, inherently never can.
Of course it would. You have made it clear that you think the state controlling the economy is simply a good thing in itself, regardless of what effects it has on anything else.
There are a lot of reasons why the US occupations of Germany and Iraq ended differently before you even get to cultural ideas like “tribal social structures”. For one thing, the Nazis ran Germany for a little over a decade; Saddam was in power 24 years, and he took charge of an already authoritarian system in a country comparatively much poorer than Germany was in the 20s and 30s. There are also some pretty big differences in how those occupations, 60 years apart, handled rebuilding the defeated country’s economy and institutions.
sorry, this was meant to be a reply ey81’s comment above that “the US did succeed in imposing at gunpoint a liberal democratic mentality on Germany and Japan” – I do not understand wordpress!
OK, but neither Germany nor Japan had ever been a liberal democracy until the US conquered them, and Japan was a relatively poor country. A good explanation has to cover both countries and distinguish them from Iraq, Afghanistan, and a host of other failures. Destruction of the old landowning class, perhaps?
The fact liberalism had been a political force in Germany for a hundred years by the formation of West Germany might have some relevance.
while neither had been fully functioning liberal democracies, both had been states with liberal democratic elements like constitutionalism, parliamentarism, and (though in Japan’s case briefly) universal male suffrage; as Some Stranger points out liberalism as an idea was not new to Germany at all. I think Brent F. above phrases it a little glibly, but there is some truth to the statement that:
> In both Germany and Japan, what the Americans really did was turn back the clock to the 20s and put the democratic losers of the power struggle with authoritarians in charge
One major difference was that this time, the Liberal elements were serious about winning, and on the other hand, the old, authoritarian bureaucracies were quite a lot more cowed, so it was much easier to get democratic reforms done. In particular, there was no threat of a military coup, as the German and Japanese militaries were first disbanded, and they were explicitly rebuilt to be institutions under democratic control.
In Germany, the other difference was that the three major democratic blocks were willing to cooperate. Before the nazis, the Catholics, the Protestant liberals and social democrats had all considered each other anathema. Now, they were willing to compromise and form coalitions.
These three basically founded the Weimar Republic, so they were willing to work together back then. It is rather the other way round: After the nazis these three factions decided it would be anathema to work together with parties hostile to liberal democracy.
And of course when the National Socialist Party in Germany first became significant, it was far from clear (to outsiders) that they were anything particularly worse than an ultraconservative nationalist group, who in any event were staunchly anti-Soviet. An analogy would be if American voters thought they were supporting MAGA and what they got was the Turner Diaries/ A Handmaid’s Tale.
The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz is interesting on it.
Corrected. The majority of German Jews left Germany before the war. It’s just, at the time, anti-Semitism was more or less universal everywhere in Western civilization with significant Jewish populations, so people who sounded the alarm early were accused of premature anti-fascism.
Germany had been a constitutional monarchy or a republic for most of its history prior to the Allied conquest at the end of World War Two. The Second Reich was a monarchy with some very powerful conservative institutions (e.g. the aristocracy and the army), but it also had quite a few liberal institutions by the standards of a late 19th century European power. The Weimar Republic was uncomplicatedly a liberal democracy, and while it collapsed it did exist. Instating a liberal government in post-WWII Germany was not some kind of unprecedented challenge; it was to a large extent a matter of telling the Germans to do only some, but not all, of the things they’d done before.
Japan, likewise. Japan had elections and a parliament; the constitution was significantly rewritten but there was already a basic set of institutions set up to enable democracy to exist within the country.
I think a lot of the Russian invasion discussion is based on the before/after simplified view, that the destruction of warfare to an industrial country makes it a net loss. But Russia isn’t an industrial country, it is an *extractive* country. There are apparently vast oil and gas reserves off the coast of Ukraine. If Russia were to hold that territory long term, it becomes a significantly more dominant petroleum supplier to Europe.
We’ve got global warming as a major thing going right now, so having more oil and gas that could be mined in the future isn’t great value. (Either other energy sources replace the or large scale destruction makes the point moot.)
If they are that vast and easily extracted, why weren’t the Ukrainians already extracting them?
Because, IIRC, they were found in 2012 or 2013. Off the coast of Crimea as well as East-Northeast Ukraine. A year or two later, Euromaidan happens and Russia militarily occupies Crimea and eastern Donbass. Even in places which are still accessible to Ukraine, developing new oil wells requires Western technological infrastructure – and the companies that may have wanted to invest in Ukraine’s oil before got cowed by Russia’s rampant militarism and the threat of future occupation and nationalization.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the thrust of your argument, but I would quibble that liberal democratic constitutions allow “large, complex human societies (like basically all countries are) to function without violence”. It may well allow them to function with a minimum of violence, or substantially less violence than many other systems; but I would argue their function is more to pre-empt existential threats to the state from within, like coups and civil wars (to wildly varying degrees of success).
“it is for the most part in the interests of the members of the status quo coalition that the rest of the world be richer, more free and more stable, and that is new (though, again, no one has any good idea of how to reliably make that change happen on purpose).”
While I think this argument is broadly true regarding how countries *within* the Status Quo Coalition treat each other, I have serious doubts about how well it describes their attitude to outsiders. Stability at least is good for business, and I would agree that a high level of trade integration and economic freedom seems to be core to the coalition’s priorities. But the impression I get from the last 30 years of history (to say nothing of the preceding century which laid the groundwork) is not that the US and its allies are sincerely interested in making other countries richer or more free. Their competitors have demonstrated a similar level of interest; but even so, I think the most you can really say about the Status Quo Coalition’s principles are that it’s generally happy for countries to become richer and free-er *as long as* those trends don’t threaten the higher priorities of trade and stability. It seems quite a stretch, for example, to suggest coalition members don’t engage in “active campaigns of imperialism and economic sabotage against developing economies”. The economic incentives you noted in the original article provide one good reason why military intervention is relatively rare compared to the hegemonies of ages past, but I wouldn’t characterise the way modern great powers interfere with smaller countries as ‘passive’.
Everything that the Status Quo Coalition does is ultimately to make themselves richer and/or more powerful. Now, quite often, that also makes other countries or their citizens also richer, that’s true. But oftentimes it does not, and in those cases the SQC does not have (many) qualms about showing their muscles – including literally, if it’s necessary (and it can be internally justified). Examples are ample, from the way the EU and Germany handled Greek debt crisis and the unfavorable treaties the EU has with some African countries on the more peaceful side, to various US and British interventions in Middle East and elsewhere on the more violent one.
Also, SQC cannot allow other countries to become *too* rich. Even in the European Union, which is moving to be almost a single country (although it is still pretty far from it), any mention of social union is anathema. The social compact in SQC countries would utterly collapse if it were to be suddenly cut from cheap labour, products and resources from the “third world” and they (we) are damn well aware of that.
Dr. Deveraux has made a point in a few of his texts about (grossly oversimplified) our societies nowadays are better because we don’t have slaves, but if we’re being honest, it’s more that our slaves are actually elsewhere and we pretend they don’t exist by not looking too closely at what happens elsewhere. Although that’s changing to an extent too, so some credit must be given to western liberal democracies. But we still have to see what EXACTLY will happen with the various supply chain legislation and how it will be enforced.
In short, western liberal democracies are not the devil that some authoritarian fans try to paint them as, but they are also most certainly not the angels they and their fans often pretend that they are.
Eh, I’ve never seen numerical substantiation for the claim that First World lifestyles depend on cheap labor, here or overseas. The most obvious candidates are produce (fruit and vegetable) picking and textiles, and while I don’t have great numbers, the best numbers I’ve found indicate that paying “a fair wage” (like $25/hour) would mean maybe a 20-30% increase in the price of lettuce and berries and such, and maybe tripling the cost of low-end cheap clothing. Which would hurt some poorer families, but is hardly a threat to being a developed country.
Cars? The value added from manufacturing dwarfs the prices of raw materials like iron and rubber; increasing the latter wouldn’t change much. (And you don’t need US levels of cars to be a developed country.)
Oil? We already pay the source countries quite a fair bit. From an environmental POV we should be paying more (or not buying it at all) but it’s hard to argue that we’re cheating the Saudis or Kuwaitis.
Coal? In the US, mined domestically, and they seem decently paid and taken care of, though could be better.
Most rich countries are rich because of technology, social capital, and cheap energy from fossil fuels, not because of cheap labor. Fossil fuels have their own huge problems, but it’s not a “exploit labor” problem.
Why all the outsourcing, then? Because it makes _corporations_ richer. Profit seeking firms may seek any additional profit, no matter how marginal. Doesn’t mean what they do is _necessary_.
(US farms are dependent on migrant labor because natives don’t really have the skills or tolerance; if we block migrants, produce rots in the orchards, as Florida is discovering. But as a pure cost thing, the low pay is not that vital for retail consumers. Retail prices go in large part to retail labor and store rent.)
I think if we shifted who’s effectively collecting that rent, via a Georgist land value tax and UBI, that could solve… maybe not all, but at least a solid half of the problems which usually get attributed to “capitalism,” while causing very few new problems.
Hasn’t already been done because right at the top of that list of new problems is rich people worldwide being temporarily inconvenienced by an urgent need to rethink their long-term investment portfolios.
Nah, they will already have long rethought them, as soon as the proposal gained traction. Hence, you would get much less than you think.
“Nah, they will already have long rethought them, as soon as the proposal gained traction. Hence, you would get much less than you think.”
This implies it’s a pure zero-sum game, border skirmishes shifting slices of a fixed-size pie back and forth. Certainly there are superficially similar-sounding programs which work out that way. For example, if you give a poor person some money and say “this can only be spent on rent,” landlords will simply raise the rent to match, because all that program has really done is written out a check to the landlord and charged the tenant with delivering it – underlying negotiating positions are unchanged. Crucial difference about a land value tax is how it raises costs to the landlord when they haven’t got a tenant, and how the benefits are divided when an improvement on one lot makes the whole neighborhood more valuable.
More efficient land use, particularly denser cities with shorter commutes, no profitable niche for slumlords or vacant lots, and giving poor people adequate resources to proactively solve their own problems (or pay others to do so at fair market rates) ultimately benefit basically everyone, not just those who end up receiving more in UBI than they’re paying back in taxes. ‘A stitch in time saves nine,’ and deferred maintenance costs still end up getting paid one way or another, because famine, war, and pestilence never stay neatly contained.
When new laws force investment portfolios to shift from something with net negative externalities to net positive, they likely provide very similar rates of return once a new equilibrium emerges – thus equal or better standard of living, and retaining positions of political influence for the investors – with less pointless misery for everyone else, because the overall economic “pie” has expanded.
Sole exception I can think of to the ‘basically everyone’ would be those so eager for chaos and obsessed with relative social status that no plausible amount of security and material prosperity would be (from their perspective) adequate compensation for losing access to underlings they can freely abuse. To the extent such preferences deserve a voice in policy decisions at all, hopefully they can be satisfied (or at least placated and contained) with technological advancements in AI, VR, and BDSM.
That sort of logic has been used again and again and again to justify taxes. And you always get less than anticipated because your belief that you can spend other people’s money better than they can is not their belief.
Also, you reward bad behavior that way.
I guess you support using “other people’s money” for border control?
Facts don’t change according to what I support.
Clothing and textiles? Major consumer item, largely produced in sweatshops. Recycling (or dumping industrial waste). Picked apart in the Philippines or Africa. Meat processing?
Retail prices may not reflect the value extraction further up the chain.
At least in the UK where I am, much of the work those migrant laborers are asked to do is under intolerable conditions – the difference with native workers is that they have more options to avoid it, whereas migrants are often trapped by debt or the risk of deportation (and frequently misled as to the conditions before they came).
But I believe the point Draugdur was making wasn’t that developed nations would cease to be developed without cheap labour, but that the social compact in many of those countries has been built on goods like clothing, electronics, and perishable food from the other side of the world being cheap and widely available. This is the rising tide that’s supposed to lift all boats (or as UK politicians love saying, “growing the pie” rather than re-dividing it). If those goods become sufficiently more expensive, less available, or both, people in those countries may not be so willing to accept the downsides of that system.
“But I believe the point Draugdur was making wasn’t that developed nations would cease to be developed without cheap labour, but that the social compact in many of those countries has been built on goods like clothing, electronics, and perishable food from the other side of the world being cheap and widely available.”
Indeed, this was exactly the point I was trying to make, thanks!
Granted, what I said might not be universally true for every sort of goods and every western country. But from the European perspective at least, I don’t remember the last time I bought a clothing item that was produced in Europe, and I don’t think I own a single item produced in the EU (and it’s not like I buy the cheapest stuff, or at least not *just* the cheap stuff, anyway). Heck, even the few remaining shops where you can get your clothes tailor made increasingly operate on the business model that your measurements get taken here and sent to Vietnam or Thailand where the actual sewing takes place (at the prices that are unaffordable to the average consumer, at that). Similar with electronics, even if the last assembling takes place in the EU, all the parts are from Asia.
I wasn’t denying outsourcing has happened; that would be silly. I was saying it’s not essential for rich countries to be rich. The things that give rich countries a rich lifestyle depend on domestic labor, technology, and abundant energy:
good housing (good structure, temperature control if you want it)
superabundant and reliable staple crops
good medical care
clean water, easily provided
sewers
good transportation options
abundant mechanically produced thread and cloth
good education
The question isn’t whether clothing is made in Europe, but how much it would cost if it were made in Europe, and whether that would mean lots of Europeans going inadequately clothed. And from US numbers, my answer to the latter is “probably not”. It might shrink or kill off the ‘fast fashion’ industry (probably good, IMO) and some people might have to shift toward laundry more frequently, or accepting a lower tier of tailoring.
I just searched on allegedly “made in USA” T-shirts and jeans, and they’re not that much more expensive.
We can also look at the US and Europe _before_ massive outsourcing happened, and see that they were still rich/developed/industrialized countries with the things in my list above.
Clothing is very heavily offshored, but is also a tiny proportion of the economy, and brands that proudly talk about how they’re made domestically and with union labor are hardly luxuries. The US has a breakdown of household spending by category here. The biggest item is by far housing, followed by a near-tie between food and transport, and in these items, the only one with significant import dependence is fuel, which is about 3% of US consumer spending and most likely less in Europe – and Europe is decoupling from Russian oil right now at limited economic cost.
“Also, SQC cannot allow other countries to become *too* rich. Even in the European Union, which is moving to be almost a single country (although it is still pretty far from it), any mention of social union is anathema.”
The rich countries object to “social union” because they don’t want to have to make transfer payments to poorer countries. Which they wouldn’t have to do if those countries were richer. Their complaint is that the poor countries are too poor, not too rich. They would prefer them to be richer, so that they took less from, and added more to, the EU budget.
Re social union, if I’m understanding this correctly, the EU-wide Gini index is 30.1, which is about the same as the domestic Gini of France or Germany, and lower than the lowest Gini in modern recorded American history (31 in 1980), all country-level numbers coming from the LIS.
The bit about relying on cheap third-world labor is mostly cope. The EU, as a whole, is not especially trade-dependent, especially not with non-rich countries. On 2020 numbers, the EU’s top gross trade partners are the US and UK; China is #3, Switzerland is #4. One of the foundational observations of New Trade Theory is that most international trade takes place between similar countries, like France and Germany, or the US and Canada. In fact, one of the arguments made by New Keynesian economists against the early-2010s austerity push was precisely that: the EU is not very trade-dependent, unlike the small open economies that constitute it, and therefore, unlike in those small open economies, the effect of austerity on domestic demand cannot be offset by relying on exports.
From my (a non-liberal leftist) perspective, the function of liberalism isn’t to reduce violence at all, but to reify a social construct that leads to patterns of violence that are less disruptive to the continued existence of that social construct (the nation-state). That’s why Dr Devereux can describe the running of a state that has 2-3 genocides under its belt as “without violence”, and why he withdraws his insistence on the freedom from, say, arbitrary torture, of people who would like to do away with a violent regime as peacefully as possible.
Another example — the French revolutionaries killed 35,000 people over ten months in the Reign of Terror, far more than the ancien regime had ever managed.
Given that the ancien regime (French monarchy and hereditary landed aristocracy) existed for many centuries across a country with a population of millions, it seems most implausible that in all those ages it was responsible for less than 35,000 deaths.
Notorious communist (/s) Mark Twain’s remarks may apply here:
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
Given that the ancien regime (French monarchy and hereditary landed aristocracy) existed for many centuries across a country with a population of millions, it seems most implausible that in all those ages it was responsible for less than 35,000 deaths.
A modest application of the principle of charity would suggest that by “far more than the ancien regime had ever managed” I meant “far more than the ancien regime had ever managed over a similar timescale”. Which is, in fact, what I meant.
As for Mark Twain’s apologia for mass murder, no documents from medieval or early modern France indicate that the period was one single reign of terror like that of 1793-4. Twain is simply comparing everything bad that happened in ancien regime France, most of which was due to the ordinary hardship of life in a pre-modern society (“hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break”), and calling it “Terror” to try and deflect attention from the atrocities of the Revolutionary regime. It’s no different to present-day tankies who call every death in western countries a death from capitalism to try and pretend that Stalin wasn’t acting differently from any other world leader when he deliberately starved millions of people to death.
To be sure, if somehow medieval and early modern France could have been a nation of yeoman farmers who owned the land they worked and a secular realm in which modern standards of religious tolerance held sway, the lot of the peasantry would have been much less hard. By modern humanist standards the behavior of the French crown and the Catholic Church left much to be desired. But like many Twain falls into the nihilistic trap of presuming that the ancien regime was so evil that anything whatsoever that could overthrow it was justified.
Be more specific.
Yes, and that too is wrong – one famine killed 1.3 million people in France in 1693-4, for a similar cause as the famines under Lenin and many other communists, i.e. a combination of poor climate and the stresses of war caused by the regime’s thirst for blood.
Yes, and that too is wrong – one famine killed 1.3 million people in France in 1693-4, for a similar cause as the famines under Lenin and many other communists, i.e. a combination of poor climate and the stresses of war caused by the regime’s thirst for blood.
Famines afflicted lots of countries before the Agricultural Revolution, of every ideology. On the other hand, by the time Lenin et al. came along, avoiding famines was a solved problem. So no, I don’t think the two cases are comparable, in the same way that I don’t think a modern government presiding over an outbreak of bubonic plague would be comparable to a seventeenth-century government presiding over the same.
As for “the stresses of war caused by the regime’s thirst for blood”, all I’ll say is that it takes a lot of chutzpah to bring this up in order to try and defend the guys responsible for these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolutionary_and_Napoleonic_Wars
The 1693-4 famine didn’t occur in a vacuum. It happened while the state was levying a heavy tax burden to fight the Nine Years’ War. It’s the same as most communist famines – a bad harvest is involved but then the state takes all the food from whichever group the party doesn’t like (e.g. Ukrainians in 1933, or Tigray in 1983-5).
As Amartya Sen points out, famines do not occur in independent democracies with a free press. This includes hideously poor ones, like independent India, which managed to avoid famines even before the Green Revolution, perhaps because Nehru was sane enough to prioritize basic living standards and not, as Paul Johnson laments in Modern Times, starting wars with China. Or for that matter eve-of-industrialization England: hunger yes, 7% of the population dying in famine no.
As Amartya Sen points out, famines do not occur in independent democracies with a free press. This includes hideously poor ones, like independent India, which managed to avoid famines even before the Green Revolution, perhaps because Nehru was sane enough to prioritize basic living standards and not, as Paul Johnson laments in Modern Times, starting wars with China.
India gained independence in 1947, and the Green Revolution reached the country in 1966. I don’t think that’s long enough to draw any conclusions one way or the other; there had been nineteen-year periods in British India without any famines, after all.
Or for that matter eve-of-industrialization England: hunger yes, 7% of the population dying in famine no.
Eve-of-industrialisation England was an oligarchy, not a democracy.
An oligarchy that managed to avoid famines, because it had to do some things to prevent even its poorest members from starving. Meanwhile, France managed to keep having famines, the biggest two happening exactly while it was raising taxes to pay for some bullshit wars (1693-4, and again 1709).
And the issue with the 19 years of India is that India was not the only third-world democracy. Give Sen some credit for working this out more systematically; you can cite a critique from the literature if you’d like, but don’t ad lib this.
An oligarchy that managed to avoid famines, because it had to do some things to prevent even its poorest members from starving.
An oligarchy, and therefore not relevant to the question of whether democracies are less prone to suffering famines.
And the issue with the 19 years of India is that India was not the only third-world democracy. Give Sen some credit for working this out more systematically; you can cite a critique from the literature if you’d like, but don’t ad lib this.
I was just going with the example you gave. By all means feel free to present a fuller summary of Sen’s evidence.
Come to think of it, the biggest famine in nineteenth-century Europe wasn’t in one of the absolutist monarchies, but in liberal, progressive, democratic Britain.
As you know, Ireland was not part of the ‘democracy’, such as it was.
As you know, Ireland was not part of the ‘democracy’, such as it was.
Ireland had been an integral part of the United Kingdom since 1800: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1800
Let’s not beat around the bush about this. The point under debate is, essentially:
“Do famines occur in societies where (1) there is a free press to disseminate information about what is happening, and where (2) the average citizen plausibly threatened by the famine has a vote in government policy?”
Rephrasing this as “no democracy with a free press has ever suffered a famine” or suchlike is just an attempt to make things more concise. The underlying meaning of the statement, the actual point, is not changed.
The Irish Potato Famine, the famines in Ukraine under Stalin, the famines in France under Louis XIV, the 1944 famine in Bengal under Churchill, all share a single common element. Namely, that the people who were starving did not have any realistic hope of getting a meaningful vote in the policies of the government making policies that affected them.
Famines under British rule in India and Ireland occurred for the same reason that famines occur under absolutist rule in other places. Because imperialism, by nature, subjects the peripheral colonies to the same kind of oppression and misrule that everyone suffers under an absolutist state.
…
The point remains that ancien regime France was an absolutist dictatorship whose power and control was mediated through the ‘first and second Estates’ of the hereditary landholding aristocracy and the clergy. It was not an admirable kind of state, and when it did things badly (e.g. the 1693 famine, or the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleu) it could easily kill hundreds of thousands of its own citizens, or drive them into exile. And it did. Repeatedly.
Mark Twain was not wrong to point out the truly enormous amount of bloodshed caused by the French monarchy, even if we restrict ourselves to the relatively well-documented Early Modern period of about 200-250 years prior to the French Revolution.
The point remains that ancien regime France was an absolutist dictatorship whose power and control was mediated through the ‘first and second Estates’ of the hereditary landholding aristocracy and the clergy.
In theory, maybe. In practical terms, the French King had less control than the contemporary British government.
It was not an admirable kind of state, and when it did things badly (e.g. the 1693 famine, or the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleu) it could easily kill hundreds of thousands of its own citizens, or drive them into exile. And it did. Repeatedly.
As opposed to Revolutionary France, which killed hundreds of thousands of its own citizens and plunged Europe into a quarter century of war, which incidentally caused so much death amongst its young male population that France arguably hasn’t recovered, relatively speaking, to this day.
Mark Twain was not wrong to point out the truly enormous amount of bloodshed caused by the French monarchy, even if we restrict ourselves to the relatively well-documented Early Modern period of about 200-250 years prior to the French Revolution.
Mark Twain was carrying water for a proto-totalitarian regime, as are you.
“Do famines occur in societies where (1) there is a free press to disseminate information about what is happening, and where (2) the average citizen plausibly threatened by the famine has a vote in government policy?”
Yes; for example, Bihar (1966), Maharashtra (1973), Orissa (1990s), Malawi (2002) and Niger (2005): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247478202_The_Merits_of_Democracy_in_Famine_Protection_-_Fact_or_Fallacy
Incidentally, one feature of several of the above examples is governments trying to deny the existence of a famine for political reasons, or trying to blame some other level of government for the situation, again for political reasons. Democracy, then, is no panacaea against famine, and in some situations can actively make it worse.
No shit, it’s implausible. Bourbon France did a ton of terrible things, each alone worse than the Reign of Terror – it’s just that the victims were not the sort of people who wrote books, so they get ignored. It had oar convict slavery, Haitian slavery (where the life expectancy of a slave was a few years – this was a lot more brutal than the American South), ethnic cleansing of Huguenots (the one big class of victims who did write books), multiple bullshit wars with death tolls in the hundreds of thousands to millions each, and a taxation system that led to such decline in worker incomes in 1650-1789 that there was literal starvation among the commoners.
Hell, even during the Revolution, the single worst episode of mass killing was not the Reign of Terror, but the suppression of the revolt in the Vendée, where Wikipedia says the death toll was 170,000; a bunch of conservative intellectuals call it genocide (and are wrong but that’s a different point), but the broader anti-revolutionary project doesn’t care about 170,000 peasants as much as about 35,000 toffs and literati.
“the broader anti-revolutionary project doesn’t care about 170,000 peasants”
Call me cynical if you will, but I find it hard to believe the pro-revolutionary project cares more about 170,000 peasants killed by the revolutionaries.
Although I do feel this shows why there are PR advantages to committing your massacres out in the sticks, where there are fewer journalists and well-connected people likely to comment.
I mean, yes. Same thing with certain modern mass murders:
* Western culture is generally more aware of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution because the CCP shipped the urban middle class to the villages than of those of the Great Leap Forward, where the urban middle class did okay whereas the peasants starved at such rates that it’s visible in world population
* Socialists who decry anti-communist mass murder generally talk about Pinochet – but Pinochet killed 2,000-3,000 people in 17 years, not even the worst in the Americas (Baby Doc killed far more), let alone in the anti-communist world (the genocide in Indonesia has only recently attracted more attention)
And then there’s how most cultural depictions of Julius Caesar, even negative ones, don’t really get how he was genocidal even by Roman standards, because the Gauls didn’t leave writings.
Plenty of anti-French Revolution people complain about the suppression of the Vendee revolt. As I understand French academic politics, however, it’s okay to criticize the Terror, but the not the Vendee suppression, for reasons that are a little too complicated for me: somehow the Vendee suppression is part of the Revolution, which is sacrosanct, but the Terror is a regrettable excess.
False, and easily shown as false.
The wars of religion killed an estimated 2-4 million people in France over a period of 36 years, an average of between 4,600 and 9,200 people a month, or 46,000 to 92,000 people every ten months.
So the lowest estimate for the average number of deaths (and there were almost certainly periods well above the average!) is higher than the dead of the Terror.
If we’re counting deaths in war, then the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars caused more.
Yes, I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare total casualties in war to those in civilian repression. The appropriate comparison for the Terror would be the number of legal executions for heresy under the ancien regime, and the appropriate comparison for the wars of religion would be the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. I don’t think the French Revolution will come off particularly well from those comparisons.
Where does he do that (either of the two claims)
“The rights of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not there randomly, but instead they are specific solutions to particular problems of allowing large, complex human societies (like basically all countries are) to function without violence.”
Chattel slavery, the general native American genocide – let’s take the Trail of Tears as an example – and the Philippine-American war all happened after the Bill of Rights. So either a) these don’t qualify as violence somehow, b) liberal democracies are capable of operating without violence, but choose violence anyway, or c) the US has never been a liberal democracy.
I happen to think c) is a pretty compelling point but think it’s very unlikely that Dr. Devereaux does.
Article 5 of the UDHR:
“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Dr. Devereaux:
“a basic affinity for liberalism as a political philosophy means I think…basic freedoms [such as the UDHR]…are a valid way to judge the performance of governments…I will insist on your freedoms first…so long as you are not trying to upend the system itself with violence”
“Chattel slavery, the general native American genocide – let’s take the Trail of Tears as an example – and the Philippine-American war all happened after the Bill of Rights.”
None of those were acts of violence by the American government against its own citizens.
Denial of citizenship to longstanding residents is one of the things that happen before genocide – for example, in the Nuremberg Laws, or in the modern situation of the Rohingya (who the junta insists are all Bengali migrants).
Then it may have been fortunate that they did not take US citizenship from the chattel slaves, native Americans or Filipinos.
In the nature of things, they did not have US citizenship to begin with, so it couldn’t have been taken from them.
It is very clear that Devereaux is talking in terms of ideals when he is referring to the Bill of Rights.
“The rights of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not there randomly, but instead they are specific solutions to particular problems of allowing large, complex human societies (like basically all countries are) to function without violence.”
It is like saying that cars are designed to get people quickly from place to place while keeping the occupant protected.
“But sometimes cars break, and there are collisions where people die! So they obviously don’t design them that way!”
“It is like saying that cars are designed to get people quickly from place to place while keeping the occupant protected.”
It’s rather more like saying that cars are designed to get people from A to B “without inconvenience”, glossing over the inconvenience of lead poisoning, car accidents, air pollution and so on. Remember (and this goes to the other reply that I didn’t bother responding to) that my thesis is that liberalism doesn’t reduce violence, it merely creates a category of un-people who it is acceptable to do violence to, and that categorization is more structurally stable than the previous one. So replies like “but they weren’t citizens” or “you’re objecting to there still being violence” are _agreeing with my argument_, not in any way refuting or addressing it.
My impression is that the history of liberalism has been one of steadily expanding the range of people who “count” and therefore are not summarily dismissed as outsiders who have no protection. We’ve come a long way from e.g. eighteenth century Britain where liberalism meant liberalism towards white Protestant male landowners. While albeit it was with a great many delays and diversions in the cases where self-interest introduced cognitive dissonance, liberalism itself made reform and greater inclusivity possible and dismissing early examples as mere hypocrisy ignores that.
My impression is that the history of liberalism has been one of steadily expanding the range of people who “count” and therefore are not summarily dismissed as outsiders who have no protection.
The history of abortion laws is a rather big counterexample to that.
There were laws against abortion for a long time but I’m unaware that any of them were based on concern for a prenatal human life. Their primary emphasis, along with laws against birth control, was to prevent people from “getting away” with “fornication”. In other words, they were part of a multitude of laws proscribing sex outside of marriage on grounds of morality.
For that matter, I’ve heard plenty of self-described liberals say that, e.g., Trump supporters or Brexit voters are bad people, and therefore that we shouldn’t take their views or interests into consideration.
There were laws against abortion for a long time but I’m unaware that any of them were based on concern for a prenatal human life. Their primary emphasis, along with laws against birth control, was to prevent people from “getting away” with “fornication”. In other words, they were part of a multitude of laws proscribing sex outside of marriage on grounds of morality.
The law governing abortion in the UK was called the Offences Against the Person Act, not the Stopping People Getting Away With Fornication Act. It also dealt with murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, and various other violent crimes against human beings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offences_Against_the_Person_Act_1861
Also relevant is Blackstone’s comment that “begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb.” English (and early American) common law forbade abortion after quickening, i.e., when the infant was considered to be alive. If the purpose wasn’t to stop the taking of prenatal life but instead to punish people for fornication, it would have made more sense to ban the practice at all stages of pregnancy.
My impression is that the history of liberalism has been one of steadily expanding the range of people who “count” and therefore are not summarily dismissed as outsiders who have no protection.
Another counter-example:
“Ms Jeong wrote in one tweet from July 2014: “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”
One online critic posted a selection of Ms Jeong’s other tweets, which contain obscenities.
“Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins,” she said in December 2014.
The South Korea-born journalist, who was raised in the US, also used the hashtag “#CancelWhitePeople” and complained about “white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants”.”
None of this stopped her getting a seat on the board of the US’ most prestigious newspaper, of course.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45052534
People even let her claim to be satirizing people who were clearly satirizing her because they posted after her.
> “liberalism itself made reform and greater inclusivity possible and dismissing early examples as mere hypocrisy ignores that”
We’re extending the same courtesy to authcomm regimes too, I imagine, since they stopped being quite as killy at almost exactly the same time as the liberal democracies did.
My impression is that the history of liberalism has been one of steadily expanding the range of people who “count” and therefore are not summarily dismissed as outsiders who have no protection.
Of further relevance:
“The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism). Here we report seven studies illustrating universalist versus parochial differences in compassion. Studies 1a-1c show that liberals, relative to conservatives, express greater moral concern toward friends relative to family, and the world relative to the nation. Studies 2a-2b demonstrate these universalist versus parochial preferences extend toward simple shapes depicted as proxies for loose versus tight social circles. Using stimuli devoid of political relevance demonstrates that the universalist-parochialist distinction does not simply reflect differing policy preferences. Studies 3a-3b indicate these universalist versus parochial tendencies extend to humans versus nonhumans more generally, demonstrating the breadth of these psychological differences.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0
So it’s not so much that liberals think more people count, as that liberals think that distant people count more than close people. Which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why the Sarah Jeongs of this world are able to say the things they do without any consequence, or why so many of those who loudly trumpet their compassion are such horrible people in real life.
Hasn’t this discussion now totally left the subject. Bret Devereaux clearly distinguished in his post between liberal democracy as a general term for the current western system(s), and the American use of “liberal” and “liberalism” for a specific ideology.
Actually I was using liberalism to mean what Bret called liberal democracy- i.e. in favor of liberty. (“Libertarian” is now hopelessly appropriated).
Perhaps this is the sort of thing that one needs to be a Patreon supporter to know about (entirely fair, if so!), but what can you tell us at this juncture about how accessible to the general public your book will be? I mean ‘accessible’ in the sense of how difficult/expensive it will be to get one’s hands on it, not how readable it is by a member the lay public, though I will be very keen to see how much your distinctive voice from the blog shines through in more formal scholarly writing.
Apropos: Timothy Snyder, “Why Freedom Matters More Than Everything”
That’s why freedom of religion?
As someone who’s followed the war in Ukraine closely for personal reasons, I think an important thing to consider is that a lot of modern countries *aren’t* really industrialized. Russia for example produces very little in terms of manufactured goods today. Most of its factories shuttered when it opened itself up to global trade. Having been there, most manufactured goods there are from China or Europe. Instead Russia relies on raw material extraction and that is exactly why they went into Ukraine. Recall Prigozhin bragging about how much the salt of Soledar would enrich his megacorporation. Russia’s elite doesn’t see the world in Azar Gat’s terms because their wealth comes from raw resource extraction, not industry or human capital, unlike, for instance, China’s elite or the elite of the status quo coalition, but very much like, for instance, Saddam’s government when it invaded Kuwait
The thing is, Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of potential for extractive industries. It has a decent sized agricultural sector and tons of low-productivity heavy industry. Perhaps conquering Mongolia or North Korea would make sense in that extractive-industry sense, but Ukrainian natural resources don’t even cover its own needs.
I think that for Putin and his favored oligarchs, conquering Ukraine was about a combination of “this may not be profitable for Russia but I can make it be profitable for my own corporations and personal slush fund” and a belief that prestige, strength, and national vigor require conquest of areas that in the mind of the Putinistas are “rightfully” Russian.
I think the latter is a bigger factor than the latter – cultural/political considerations dominating over material ones. But you may be right about elite opportunities for embezzlement.
Most likely. But if you hear an oligarch boasting about how profitable it will be to, say, capture a specific Ukrainian salt mine or oil field, it’s because he confidently expects to keep all the profits for himself, while exporting all the costs onto people he doesn’t care about (enslaved Ukrainians, Russian conscripts from “middle of nowhere” provinces, the state treasury).
Of course any discussion the Thirty Years’ War in the context of religious/holy warfare has a huge flashing neon asterisk, namely that the military backstop of the “Protestant” coalition was Catholic France, which supported and ultimately shouldered the war effort against the Habsburgs for run-of-the-mill geopolitical reasons. The upshot of course is that as much as religious/ideological extremism can be a powerful motivation for fighters in such a conflict to take up arms, the policymakers putting those arms in their hands don’t necessarily share those motivations, and often end up using them purely instrumentally as a recruitment tool for their own unrelated purposes — Cardinal Richelieu was no more dedicated to the Protestantism of Gustav Adolf than, say, Zbigniew Brzezinski to the Wahhabism of Osama bin Laden, or Victoria Nuland to the neo-Nazism of Andriy Biletsky.
The 30-years war is usually presented as three interconnected wars, the religious war, the imperial civil war about various matters of the imperial constitution, and the Great Power war.
All of these interaction in some really complicated ways (eg. many of the issues at stake in the “Civil” war were issues relating to the various treatment of religious communities, what religious groups should sit on what seats, what shoulde be done with religious lands, etc. but didn’t always boil down to protestant vs. catholic) and the Great Powers likewise had stakes in the internal running of the HRE and thus ahd interests in how the Civil War portions unfolded, etc.
In general religious wars of the time (the french wars of religiou, the english civil wars, etc.) were oftena s much about internal constitutional/political matters.
Except that France did not enter the war until 1635. The war had been going for 17 years by then.
France didn’t officially declare war until 1635, but it had been providing diplomatic and financial support to the anti-Hapsburg side for many years before that.
TBH I think “pro-Hapsburg” and “anti-Hapsburg” would be a better description of the sides than “Catholic” and “Protestant”.
“For a fun historical exercise, take each of the protections of the US Bill of Rights or the UDHR and go figure out exactly what historical problem that particular protection is intended to solve.” Sounds like a stupendous idea for the ACOUP for next Independence Day!
Seconded! In fact you could point to examples from English history for almost every provision in the constitution and the Bill of Rights concerned with guarantees of rights or limits on government power. Half or more would probably refer to practices in the English Civil Wars or the Commonwealth.
Yes, I think English history had more influence on the framers of the Bill of Rights than continental European history. So for example I would describe the freedom of religion clause as preventing civil war followed by theocratic military dictatorship rather than preventing another Thirty Years War.
Worth pointing out that several states had established Churches, and continued to have them for decades after the constitution was ratified (the last state to disestablish its Church was, IIRC, Massachussets sometime in the 1830s). I would guess, therefore, that Congress was forbidden from establishing a state religion because the country as a whole was too religiously diverse for a majority of people to get behind any particular Church; where a majority did belong to the same denomination, the Framers had no problem with this being recognised in law.
Well, I used to think the 2nd Amendment really meant, “We’re not having any Marian Reforms here, buckaroo!” But if the Marian Reforms don’t exist, I’ll have to think something else. 🙂
My understanding is that the 2nd Amendment was mainly to ensure that the federal government would not be able to disband state militias, which were the main source of state sovereignty at the time. (And also necessary for slave patrols, war against Indians and for quelling riots.)
One thing I’ve been unclear on is the legal distinction between “troops” forbidden to the states by Article One, Section 10 Clause Three of the constitution, and militia. If the latter are a state-constituted military force, what makes the difference?
William Hogeland has what seems to me like a reasonable take on the underlying meaning of the Second Amendment: that there is no underlying meaning, the confusing/ambiguous wording of the clause about militias having come about as a bid by nationalists like Madison to placate anti-Federalist hardliners who were championing state militias as an alternative to the establishment of a strong permanent federal military, without actually committing to anything concrete.
As much as Americans seem to love arguing over whether our much-ballyhooed “Founders” were saints or demons or prophets or geniuses or whatever, the much more banal underlying truth is that they were first and foremost politicians, every bit as prone to deceptive weasel words and flowery empty pablum as any other politicians at any other time or place in human history.
Just because the Romans didn’t have them doesn’t mean we can’t not have them too.
When I bought Flower 2010, it arrived in the post around 8p. I then stayed up until 6a reading it through. It’s an excellent book. That said, I think Flower takes too traditional a view on the “Marian reforms”.
> I do not think that any of the other things opposing political systems promise (and rarely deliver), like prosperity or equality or the ‘common good,’ can actually be durably, reliably delivered over the long term by any other sort of system.
The decline in world-wide poverty over the last 30 years has been overwhelmingly driven by China, which you identified as illiberal.
I find this even more fun on a comparative level: the specific rights different countries enshrine in their constitutions often reflect very specific historical circumstances. See eg the Israeli we-swear-it’s-not-a-constitution: no explicit right to free speech (only one inferred by courts), but explicit rights to intimacy and to freedom of occupation.
Brett’s use of ‘liberalism’ is very broad. I’m not sure I would date it as an ideological force until the mid 19th century, although there are earlier fore-runners. And, of course, the practice has always been much messier than the ideal (slavery anyone? colonialism? JS Mill was not just a political philosopher, but also an official of the East India Company). And from its inception it has always been in competitive tension with various forms of socialism, over how much freedom should be accorded to property, and to some degree with democracy too. Brett’s SQC is largely a group of liberal/socialist/democracies – some more liberal, some more socialist, some more democratic. As befits its founders, the US is less socialist, somewhat less democratic and somewhat more liberal than most.
This attitude is the thing I like most about Bret’s views on politics. Another example of this is how he doesn’t consider democracy “rule by the people”, but a way to integrate the population into elite competition and make elite competition peaceful. With political systems, asking what is possible much better than just thinking about how things should be. For this reason, I actually tend to respect tankies more than “real communism has never been tried”-guys or the magical thinking of some anarchists. As long as those tankies don’t present a fantasy version of Soviet history, but try to provide an argument that even with all the bad things the USSR was a net-positive. (Even though my current understanding of the fact makes me think the realistic argument for liberalism wins over the realistic argument for marxism-leninism.)
“For this reason, I actually tend to respect tankies more than “real communism has never been tried”-guys or the magical thinking of some anarchists. As long as those tankies don’t present a fantasy version of Soviet history, but try to provide an argument that even with all the bad things the USSR was a net-positive”
This is more or less where I am, with some *strong* qualifications.
1) I would never say that the best model of communism was the Soviet Union- in a lot of ways the Soviets did communism a lot worse than most of their Eastern European allies, just like the Russian version of feudalism was unusually bad and the Russian version of capitalism is unusually bad today. If I was arguing with someone about the *proven best* that communism has to offer, I’d probably point to (for different reasons), the GDR, or Hungary, or Yugoslavia (the latter two of which did incorporate a fair degree of market pricing into their model of communism). I think it’s only fair to, at least in part, judge any socio-economic order by the *best* that it has to offer: it would be unfair to use US levels of crime, inequality, or foreign policy malfeasance as an argument against “capitalism” in general (plenty of other capitalist countries don’t have anywhere near the same levels of any of those problems), and likewise, I think it’s only fair to judge communism in terms of the countries that really did it the best. Which the Soviet Union was *not*, probably at least in part because of some longstanding cultural issues in Russian society.
2) I think it’s important to separate what were the *core* tradeoffs within communist societies, from what were due to historical or personal contingencies. Do I think that communism inevitably or usually involves famines or mass murders on the scale of the 1930s Soviet Union? Well, no, since most communist societies didn’t have either one, and even in the Soviet Union they ended after Stalin’s death. Do I think that any society that wants to really enact socialism is going to have to engage in *some* level of political repression, in terms of suppressing explicitly oppositional parties? Yes, I think that’s probably the case, and I think that’s a cost worth paying, in terms of the virtues I see in a planned or at least semi-planned economy with public ownership of the means of production.
3) The basic tradeoff that I see, and that I think says a lot about who you as as a person, is this: is eliminating capitalism, and getting the resulting benefits (full employment, job security, relatively lower inequality, the ability to direct the economy towards goals that might not be rewarded by market signals), is that all worth some significant sacrifice in terms of political and social freedom in the long run? I would say absolutely yes, although other people are going to come down somewhere different.
Any discussion of the communist countries of Eastern Europe has to address the elephant in the room: that they were imposed externally by the Soviet Union, forced to integrate with the USSR’s command economy. They vanished like ghosts at sunrise when the Soviet Union collapsed, and Yugoslavia did not survive the death of its founding strongman.
The post-Stalin Soviet Union didn’t represent a reformed system so much as a legacy system: Lenin and Stalin having created something close to an industrial form of serfdom by mass murder, it was all Stalin’s successors had to work with; Beria was actually deposed for considering reforming the system and the moment Gorbachev proposed real reforms the wheels came off the whole thing. In any event “no longer starves or murders millions of people like we used to” isn’t exactly the highest of bars to clear.
As for the supposed virtues of planned economies I’m doubtful. “The ability to direct the economy towards goals that might not be rewarded by market signals” includes goals that are politically useful to shoring up the power of the ruling clique or making bureaucrats look good, but useless or even counter-productive economically; or at times oppressive or outright insane. Full employment and job security sound good until you look at what they mean in practice: keeping essentially useless people formally employed rather than reclassifying them as unemployed and on the dole. Japan encouraged this to maintain artificially low unemployment rates and avoid stigmatizing displaced workers; and we’re all familiar with the cliché of the unfireable “union man”. If one wants to avoid merciless, Dickensian “let the poor starve” capitalism, there are far better ways to go about it.
Also, you don’t need anything like Warsaw Pact Communism to get “direct the economy” and “full employment”. The US for example is perfectly capable of directing the economy via taxation (both to raise money and to discourage things it dislikes) and spending, as well as outright law (such as banning apartments on most urban land). (Whether the direction is _good_ in practice is hit or miss.)
Likewise you can get pretty close to full employment with basic Keynesian policies, plus the right structures: capitalist Switzerland historically runs a very low unemployment rate (their high rate would, in the US, have people worrying about inflation spirals) and a very high employment-population ratio.
The Yugoslavian communist state wasn’t imposed by the Soviets, and in Czechoslovakia it’s complicated- they won an election in 1946 and then created a single party state.
In Yugoslavia and Hungary both, their failure mode was that they borrowed money to finance cheap consumer goods and got into debt. Which is very unfortunate and was a serious mistake on the part of the governments, but it’s a mistake that lots of capitalist countries have committed too- it’s not unique to socialism.
And as noted, there is majority support in Hungary today for the idea that “on the whole, things were better off under communism”. Here’s the survey from Policy Solutions in 2020.
https://www.policysolutions.hu/userfiles/Regime_change_30_years_on_EN_summary.pdf
The question is not whether other countries have done it, but whether other countries have avoided it, and not gotten a worse situation. If the *best* socialist states fall into an error that capitalist states have fallen into, it is still marked against socialism.
Surely the question of whether the Czechoslovak communist state was imposed by the USSR can be best answered with reference not to 1946 but to 1948, when the Red Army served as the backstop for the KSČ coup, and 1968, when the Red Army made good on its threat against any liberalization of government.
I’m interested to know what Our Host has to say about the work of Peter Connolly, the British illustrator and popular historian. His books on ancient armies are very influential among wargamers and toy soldier modellers and painters. Are they regarded as well by academics? (Who sometimes share interests in gaming applications.) Also Connolly’s big illustrated volume focusing on Athens and Rome. It’s gorgeous — is it also reliable?
BTW, on the recommendation in a previous column, I bought and very much enjoyed
With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775-1783
by Matthew H. Spring. I already knew some of this, but mostly it was new information and I learned a lot. The AWI is not a conflict I’ve studied very much or ever gamed in.
Funnily enough, the following story just popped up in my news feed:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/nigel-farage-s-coutts-account-closed-as-bank-felt-he-did-not-align-with-their-values/ar-AA1e1G1m?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=5e4e886e130148edbf2a6d245e994005&ei=9
And it’s not the first time something like this has happened, either:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergencies-act-banks-ottawa-protests-1.6353968
Call me crazy, but I have my doubts as to how free society really is if you can get financially destroyed for supporting certain policy positions. At least the evil old ancien regime usually gave you a trial before sentencing you.
This is fine. Back in the ancien regime, banks were run by random wealthy families and didn’t open access to everyone.
In these cases, the people involved are free to stash their money under a mattress if they so desire.
In these cases, the people involved are free to stash their money under a mattress if they so desire.
Unless you plan on interacting with one of the many businesses or government agencies that don’t accept cash, of course — a problem which is only likely to get worse in future: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/cash-coins-notes-money-cashless-society-card-payments-coronavirus-112834843.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAA3FBz2wFeLzgXvV3nZwHTuW4m1Lx03ZF5l6JuvaZ5QlB4DINSzHIqYxR9x7NVeATzTD9GA7c0MtkOeRskauoqAx0H4fDhUaX5XkbcBkDczQ_8ewm8ZOngkHmfw-0HQbjtUU6Wv7-Zq0T2-2sxOFkf6Z8CUZXYdDrFKu9Ryvj-R3
Just a note on internet etiquette: it’s considered polite to reduce the verbiage of links by stripping out code related to how the link was forwarded to you. In the above example everything after .html is unnecessary.
“Consequently my opinion on marginal tax rates, trade policy, industrial regulation all take a back seat to the necessary first condition that all of those choices must be made within the liberal system – those self-evident truths and unalienable rights – as a precondition. I will insist on your freedoms first, before I will discuss the policy differences we may have (so long as you are not trying to upend the system itself with violence).”
I’ve never understood this point of view. Not to say I object to your holding it, but it’s completely foreign to me.
I can see the appeal of communism, and I can see the appeal of syndicalism, and I can see the appeal of nationalism, but what’s the intuitive appeal of liberalism?
If you don’t see the point of freedom, try living with little or none.
He doesn’t want to live with little or none. He wants to be in the government crushing other people’s freedom. Freedom as an ideal opposes that.
I think most people care about *political* freedom, in particular, a lot less than you (and most Americans) think.
People don’t care about political freedom if they don’t believe it’s possible, or if they think the government will magically do what they want without it.
For example, they might support an authoritarian government, fantasizing that it will do only the things they find desirable and acceptable. Or they might believe that free speech and fair elections can’t exist, thus aren’t worth agitating for. (I’ve heard that alleged of many Russians or other people living under autocratic governments.)