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Europe Where the Right and Left Converge
Historian Perry Anderson is one of the luminaries of the so-called Western Marxists, that is, Marxist theoreticians who were based in Western and Central Europe, rather than the Soviet Union. He’s now a professor of history and sociology at UCLA. He used to be the editor of the New Left Review. This pedigree, I should think, would be sufficient for most on Ricochet to consider calling in an exorcist.
But I’m going to ask you to read him anyway. Just one essay, actually. It’s a piece about the EU in Le Monde Diplomatique, titled “Why the System Will Still Win,” in which he predicts that the European center will hold and the EU will survive. This is an outcome that as a revolutionary he deplores, of course.
What struck me reading it was how similar his arguments against the EU, and against Europe’s center-right and center-left parties and coalitions, are to those I’ve heard here on Ricochet — another forum where many (not all) of our members seem devoutly to hope “the system” will lose, too.
In some places, he uses a different vocabulary than Americans on the right would use. But I’m not sure he’s meaningfully describing different concepts. For example, he relies heavily on the word “neoliberalism,” which he defines this as “deregulated financial flows, privatised services and escalating social inequality.” But I don’t think this definition succeeds in distinguishing “neoliberalism” from “capitalism.” The word, it seems to me, has simply taken the place of “capitalism” in the Left’s vocabulary because after the fall of the Soviet Union, it sounded antiquated — and clueless — to say that one was “against capitalism.”
When you read what he’s written, mentally replace the word “neoliberalism” in every case with “capitalism.” I’m curious to know where, and how, his analysis substantively differs from yours. I stress that I’m asking in good faith, and I hope you’ll read his article in the same spirit, with an open mind.
The whole article won’t take long to read, but I’ll point out some of the passages that struck me:
The term ‘anti-systemic movements’ was commonly used 25 years ago to characterise forces on the left in revolt against capitalism. Today, it has not lost relevance in the West, but its meaning has changed. The movements of revolt that have multiplied over the past decade no longer rebel against capitalism, but neoliberalism — deregulated financial flows, privatised services and escalating social inequality, that specific variant of the reign of capital set in place in Europe and America since the 1980s. The resultant economic and political order has been accepted all but indistinguishably by governments of the centre-right and centre-left, in accordance with the central tenet of la pensée unique, Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘there is no alternative’. Two kinds of movement are now arrayed against this system; the established order stigmatises them, whether from the right or left, as the menace of populism.
These “movements of revolt” in Europe, I’ll add parenthetically, now receive financial and political support from both Russia and the United States. For example, the largest donors to Geert Wilders’ campaign, by far, were Americans.
Also parenthetically, while he’s right to say that financial deregulation and privatisation were policies championed by Margaret Thatcher, many people overestimate the extent of financial deregulation she championed, wrongly associating the kind of reforms she advocated with those that led to the 2007 financial crisis. As I argued in this piece for the Washington Post, that’s a myth.
Like many on Ricochet, Anderson holds the European Union to be an unaccountable, massive bureaucracy that robs national parliaments of their sovereignty and subordinates them to Germany’s will.
From monetary union (1990) to the Stability Pact (1997), then the Single Market Act (2011), the powers of national parliaments were voided in a supranational structure of bureaucratic authority shielded from popular will, just as the ultraliberal economist Friedrich Hayek had prophesied. With this machinery in place, draconian austerity could be imposed on helpless electorates, under the joint direction of the Commission and a reunified Germany, now the most powerful state in the union, where leading thinkers candidly announce its vocation as continental hegemon. Externally, over the same period, the EU and its members ceased to play any significant role in the world at variance with US directives, becoming the advance guard of neo-cold war policies towards Russia set by the US and paid for by Europe.
So it is no surprise that the ever more oligarchic cast of the EU, defying popular will in successive referendums and embedding budgetary diktats in constitutional law, should have generated so many movements of protest against it.
He reviews these forces in broad outline: In pre-enlargement Western Europe, protest movements of the far-right predominate. In post-enlargement Western Europe — Spain, Greece, and Ireland — protest movements of the far-left predominate. Italy has both.
He takes it as given that pooled sovereignty and the Continent’s domination by a peaceful, democratic Germany are undesirable. These are both points that I think need to be argued, not assumed; and I think they’re both wrong. But it’s his article, not mine, and I know many on Ricochet take his side of this argument.
All the significant movements of the far-right, he correctly notes, save Germany’s AfD, predate the economic crisis. Some have roots that date to the 1970s or earlier. But they grew in influence, he argues — and Syriza, M5S, Podemos and Momentum were born — as a direct result of the global financial crisis. This, in his view, is a reaction to “the structure of the neoliberal system,” which finds “its starkest, most concentrated expression in today’s EU,”
with its order founded on the reduction and privatisation of public services; the abrogation of democratic control and representation; and deregulation of the factors of production. All three are present at national level in Europe, as elsewhere, but they are of a higher degree of intensity at EU level, as the torture of Greece, trampling of referendums and scale of human trafficking attest. In the political arena, they are the overriding issues of popular concern, driving protests against the system over austerity, sovereignty and immigration. Anti-systemic movements are differentiated by the weight they attach to each — to which colour in the neoliberal palette they direct most hostility.
Movements of the far-right, he argues, now predominate because if their focus on immigration. But as he notes, and I agree, “this is typically linked (in France, Denmark, Sweden and Finland) not to denunciation but to defence of the welfare state; it is claimed the arrival of immigrants undermines this.”
In some countries, he argues, particularly France, the far-right has another advantage over the far-left:
The single currency and central bank, designed at Maastricht, have made the imposition of austerity and denial of popular sovereignty into a single system. Movements of the left may attack these as vehemently as any movement of the right, if not more so. But the solutions they propose are less radical. On the right, the FN and the Lega have clear remedies to the strains of the single currency and immigration: exit the euro and stop the influx. On the left, with isolated exceptions, no such unambiguous demands have ever been made. At best, the substitutes are technical adjustments to the single currency, too complicated to have much popular purchase, and vague, embarrassed allusions to quotas; neither is as readily intelligible to voters as the straightforward propositions of the right.
Now, what I think I detect in his tone is a reluctant admiration of the far-right: They’re the only ones, he seems to be saying, who are really willing to tear the whole system down and to use whatever levers need to be used to do it. We’ve seen a lot of this, historically: the far-left has always been vulnerable to co-option by the far-right; the segment of the population that for temperamental or socioeconomic reasons is drawn to revolution tends to be drawn by the group that promises it more convincingly, rather than the one that’s ideologically most pure. Modern nationalism was one of the earliest leftist ideologies; it emerged in the French Revolution. National Socialism was called National Socialism because that’s what it was. And so forth.
But to Anderson’s dismay — and to my relief — he concludes that anti-systemic parties have no hope of succeeding in Europe:
Polls now post record levels of voter disaffection with the EU. But, right or left, the electoral weight of anti-systemic movements remains limited. In the last European elections, the three most successful results for the right — UKIP, the FN and the Danish People’s Party — were around 25% of the vote. In national elections, the average figure across western Europe for all such right and left forces combined is about 15%. That percentage of the electorate poses little threat to the system; 25% can represent a headache, but the ‘populist danger’ of media alarm remains to date very modest.
I hope so, although I worry he may be wrong.
Now, he attributes the lack of enthusiasm for anti-systemic movements (or in more traditional vocabulary, the Revolution), to the widespread fear (justified, in my view) that it would make things much worse, economically:
The socio-economic status quo is widely detested. But it is regularly ratified at the polls with the re-election of parties responsible for it, because of fears that to upset the status, alarming markets, would bring worse misery.
He seems to dismiss this fear of “alarming markets” as a form of cowardice, whereas I see it as common sense. His seem to be standard far-left assumptions: the capitalist (or neoliberal) system should be destroyed; “the markets” and their judgments are bad things, rather than the only tool humanity’s ever successfully employed, ever, anywhere, to achieve First World standards of living; and the preference of most Europeans for “less misery” is somehow vaguely contemptible, given that it’s at odds with Revolution.
I’ll let you read his explanation for Brexit, which he believes will be the last success of the anti-systemic movement in Europe.
He then proceeds to write a paragraph that might have been written by a member of Ricochet:
Trump’s victory has thrown the European political class, centre-right and centre-left united, into outraged dismay. Breaking established conventions on immigration is bad enough. … [But] Trump’s lack of inhibition in these matters does not directly affect the union. What does, and is cause for far more serious concern, is his rejection of the ideology of free movement of the factors of production, and, even more so, his apparently cavalier disregard for NATO and his comments about a less belligerent attitude to Russia.
Whether Brexit or Trump succeed in tearing down the capitalist system that he so deplores, he writes, remains to be seen. But he concludes there’s little hope of revolution in the rest of Europe:
The established order is far from beaten … and, as Greece has shown, is capable of absorbing and neutralising revolts from whatever direction with impressive speed. Among the antibodies it has already generated are yuppie simulacra of populist breakthroughs (Albert Rivera in Spain, Emmanuel Macron in France), inveighing against the deadlocks and corruptions of the present, and promising a cleaner and more dynamic politics of the future, beyond the decaying parties.
There are some obvious differences between his view of Europe and those I’ve seen here. He views Europe as the hellish apotheosis of capitalism, whereas many on Ricochet seem persuaded it’s an exemplar of a socialism no less horrifying than the Soviet Union.
It’s a lot closer to the first than the second. I saw the Soviet Union with my own eyes, and I live in Europe: Europe is nothing like the Soviet Union. Europe is tremendously capitalist and prosperous by comparison with most of the rest of the world. I think this is a good thing. There’s a lot of room for reform, but a revolution, anywhere in Europe, would be insane.
This, I’d say, is the difference between the conservative view and the populist or far-right view. My view: Revolutions never deliver on their promises and result in something far worse than what preceded them. (And if I thought that before, I think it twice as much since the Arab Spring.) Don’t tear down a fence until you know why it was built in the first place. In other words: It’s insane to dismiss as irrelevant the reasons the EU was built, and particularly to dismiss as irrelevant Europe’s history as the most bloodthirsty, aggressive and violent continent in human history. Changes to any political system, especially in an ecosystem as prone to war as Europe’s, should be made gradually and incrementally. If the EU is to be dismantled, it should be done as slowly as it was assembled.
Anderson concludes that the Left must become more radical if it’s to have any hope of destroying the system in Europe:
For anti-systemic movements of the left in Europe, the lesson of recent years is clear. If they are not to go on being outpaced by movements of the right, they cannot afford to be less radical in attacking the system, and must be more coherent in their opposition to it. That means facing the probability the EU is now so path-dependent as a neoliberal construction that reform of it is no longer seriously conceivable. It would have to be undone before anything better could be built, either by breaking out of the current EU, or by reconstructing Europe on another foundation, committing Maastricht to the flames. Unless there is a further, deeper economic crisis, there is little likelihood of either.
I don’t believe committing Maastricht (or anything, for that matter) “to the flames” is apt to result in “something better” being built. Ever.
I’d like to know — and again, I’m asking this in good faith, I’m genuinely curious: If you believe the destruction of the EU and the far-right have something to offer Europe, why? Have you lost faith in the kind of conservatism I describe, and if so, why? If you’ve lost confidence in capitalism, why? (I think many have, in the wake of the financial crisis, and not without cause.) Are the steps in your argument very different from Anderson’s? If so, where?
Published in General
I direct your attention back to my initial response to your question. Civilization does rely on law enforcement. It does not intrinsically rely on that law enforcement resorting to lethal force, although as a practical matter there are times when it is better to give the police the option.
Just to be clear, your suggestion is that The Reticulator is correct to suggest that these things are alike in kind, but incorrect because they are not alike in degree? I suspect that The Reticulator would not disagree with you if that was your claim.
I think both farm subsidies and collectivization in some way involve the application of state force. Both ultimately depend on the willingness to use violence. The imminence and intensity, to say nothing of the arbitrariness, of the threat of violence (to say nothing of the frequency of its actual use) varies so dramatically between the two that they are far more different than they are similar. But to your suggestion that I should object to claims that the former ultimately depends on the threat of violence, I demur. Depend on that threat it does.
Just now put Brave New World on my Kindle so I can re-read it for new insights. It may have been in my high school days when I last read it, or maybe it was more recently than that. But I don’t remember violence being part of it. There are other ways to control populations than through violence, which after all is kind of messy and risks upsetting the populace. Stalin was clumsy and that’s the method he used; maybe he would have been more successful (and more sinister) if he had used gentler methods like those in Sweden.
The libertarian position is “force” not “lethal force”. The end result of any enforcement that is repudiated is what?
It would be strange if you did recall it – for the particular reason that (as my junior high school history teacher used to say) you didn’t say it. It was @jamielockett; it was in the comments for Ricochet and the TPP back in January.
The body is the TPP Commission, set up in Chapter 27 and “composed of government representatives of each Party at the level of Ministers or senior officials” with a lot of flexibility for delegation.
I wrote:
To which @jamielockett replied.
Another relevant comment here.
I’m sorry that I put words in your mouth.
To be fair – when it comes to understanding international trade law I defer to @jamesofengland in all things. I might agree with your analysis but I’ll accept I was wrong if James says so.
Works for me. But if @jamesofengland admits the possibility but disputes the severity of the problem I’m still not reassured. Recently there has been more emphasis on replicating studies and open access to data; these are healthy signs – and much opposed by Big Pharma. My hunch is that the power to suppress unfavorable studies is an existential threat to the free flow of scientific information and hence to scientific progress.
If you want to see how that played out in a single drug category, kelly Brogan does a good job with the SSRI saga in her A Mind of Your Own.
I’m just going to bail on this discussion. If you really think you see substantial similarities between the EU and either the Stalinist USSR or the world Huxley envisions, I’ll leave you to it. Other than the fact that both had air, and both had people (people-ish, in the case of BNW), I don’t see many.
That’s OK. Feel free. I’m busy re-reading the book and am finding it worthwhile. There are parts I hadn’t remembered. So far I’m finding it even more insightful than I remembered. If you haven’t read it, it would be harder to know where to start explaining.
It probably depends on how you define “no-go” in Sweden. Breitbart London:
There is no change that I am aware of in IP law in the TPP. We already commit to every IP TPP promise in both domestic and treaty law.
The TPP Commission is not likely to usefully delegate much; it can act only through the unanimous agreement of the cabinet secretaries or equivalents from all parties. It is hard to see IP reform being something that could be achieved through this mechanism. Firstly, on what issue of IP reform do both Vietnam and Japan have a shared interest?
Regardless, this sort of summit happens pretty rarely. Cabinet secretaries, even when assisted by staff, are not exactly within the core meaning of “unelected bureaucrats”.
Furthermore, if there were to be a circumstance under which IP reform that could not pass Congress but that the President was able to persuade all TPP partners to sign onto, amending the TPP through this process would not amend US IP law. Rather, it would leave the US in violation of the TPP until Congress passed the desired reform. It does not appear plausible to me that this would be an effective way of gaining Congressional support; rather, it would be rightly seen as an outrageous act of sabotage.
As I understand Jamie’s position, he acknowledges that TPP does not in any way change US IP law, but he believes that it is possible that the US will reform its existing domestic law, existing free trade agreements, existing IP treaty commitments, and other challenging reforms in order to reduce IP protections. Since he would like to see these reforms, which I believe he concedes to be unlikely in the foreseeable future, and because he believes that it would be harder to renegotiate the TPP than to renegotiate the currently existing bilateral agreements, this is a concern for him.
@jamielockett is this accurate? Do you believe that TPP would compound the suppression of inconvenient studies?
I agree that there is a more thoughtful position that refers to force rather than to lethal force. It appears to me that “men with guns” heightens this, which is why it is unsurprising to me that Jonah does not use this formulation. Jonah’s version is clumsier and less succinct, but honest. The changes draw the distinction that it seemed to me that Cato was drawing; the US still ensures a reasonable degree of compliance with the law, but it does not generally do so with lethal force (where lethal force is used the issue is generally the self defense of LEOs rather than enforcement as such).
It is not particularly unusual for libertarians to flatten out the distinctions between the tyranny of a near utopia and the tyranny of a dystopia. This slogan seems to me to be a pretty good example of it; one can change it a little and leave it legitimate, but few libertarians do. Rather, they tend to adopt The Reticulator’s position (I should clarify that if one actually stands by the claim, as The Reticulator appears to be doing, the rhetoric is not illegitimate). Since Cato appeared to find the claim of similarity repugnant, I thought I’d check if he also found the claim repugnant when his team made it.
The claim that “The libertarian position is [x]” is generally a claim that would be more interesting if it were supported by an authoritative libertarian source of dogma. Absent that, “My position is [x]”, “Richard Epstein’s position is [x]”, “The LP position is [x]” or some other supportable claim would be better.
James, the distinction I was drawing wasn’t a strict dichotomy between lethal and non-lethal force. The willingness to use, and frequency of use of, lethal force does characterize more tyrannical regimes, certainly. But our own government is not unwilling to use lethal force against one who persists in defiance of the law. So while there’s a difference in degree (as I said earlier) it’s not a difference in kind.
There are also other differences on entirely different dimensions than the lethal/non-lethal dimension. For example, it is tolerably predictable what acts will put an American into confrontation with state sanctioned force. In Stalinist Russia, not so much. Terror regimes make the randomness of the violence a tactic of repression and control. States with functioning legal orders may not eschew violence, and they don’t always operate by rules I’d call just, but they do tend to at least operate based on some system of more or less transparent rules that at least put the citizens on notice of where the lines are. They prefer coerced compliance to violence.
I’m still very comfortable saying “taxes are collected by men with guns” though, even in America. Not because it is literally true in every case that they are collected at gunpoint, but because ultimately, they are paid in large part because of the reality of men with guns willing to deprive us of our liberty if possible, and our lives if necessary, to compel payment.
Can you give me a for instance of a time when men use guns for law enforcement, rather than as a preventative measure to avoid injury? Other than “do not attack people”, there’s essentially no law that is enforced through the use of firearms. I guess Utah’s three murderers with firing squad deaths in my lifetimes, maybe four in yours.
Again, if you could provide an example of someone being deprived of their life in order to compel their payment of taxes, I would appreciate it. The phrase is intended to evoke a police state and you appear to recognize that such an evocation is inappropriate. I feel wholly confident that were the police to be largely disarmed the level of taxpayer compliance would not substantially drop.
Whenever someone resists arrest and is shot for it.
I’m no libertarian, but you’re being far too literal here. Just because most people who are arrested go quietly doesn’t mean the threat of being shot isn’t there.
It literally happens every day James. I’ll give you a couple headliners — Ferguson, Waco — but this is a weird question. It’s routine enough that most of the instances get little or no coverage so I certainly can’t name every instance. But you know perfectly well guns are used in law enforcement.
See Umbra’s comment. No, it is not common in the United States for IRS agents to stick guns in people’s faces to collect taxes. We sheeple are too submissive to make that necessary. But stop filing your returns, ignore the letters and the calls, and watch what happens. First, they find your assets if they can and they just take them. If that isn’t sufficient, they prosecute you for tax evasion. It is at that point that the guys with the guns show up to take you away. Resist them, and they will use force. Everyone knows this, which is why most people never get to that point.
I downloaded the book. I wasn’t sure that would be enough to put me on a federal watch list, so I searched for it on Amazon as well.
I’m pretty sure that most of our law enforcers on the street carry guns.
It used to be that liberals would complain about this and wish for a society in which our police were unarmed like English bobbies. (I’m old enough to remember this.) But the English police are increasingly armed (though not necessarily the bobbies) and here in the United States the USDA, SSA, NOAA, and just about every national administrative agency now has heavily armed officers. Now the left (no longer liberal) sneers at any concerns about this, or at least did when Obama was upping the arms race. In the early Obama administration the Fish and Wildlife Service did a politically motivated paramilitary raid on the Gibson Guitar Company, and the people who used to wish for unarmed bobbies were cool with it.
Is it really your position that Darren Wilson was not shooting in self defense when he killed Michael Brown?
I’m not sure which of the shootings at Waco you’re referring to. Do you mean the initial raid, the final assault, or a different moment?
I should be clear that I am not denying that this sort of oppression exists. This is why I find The Reticulator’s Stalinist analogy more convincing than the men with guns line; we do use oppressive non-lethal methods. Obviously, it is not on the scale of Stalin’s use of them and it is not remotely comparable in its intensity; Schmidt was in no danger of starvation or torture while he was serving his time. I believe that The Reticulator accepts this, though.
This is sophistry. The ultimate power behind all of those nonlethal methods is a man with a gun. The only reason the nonlethal methods work is because in the end they are backed with lethal force.
I’m not sure we’re both thinking the same about this or not. I just now upgraded my membership to the Thatcher level in the hope that I could use extra words to explain myself better sometimes, in this case about the genteel non-lethal methods that can be used to control a population. (BTW, the Ricochet sign-up pages now seem to be hiding the information that the Thatcher level gives one more words to use in comments. Maybe it’s an attempt to emulate the Obama version of transparency.)
No, but that wasn’t what you asked. You asked for an example of “us[ing] guns for law enforcement. Darren Wilson used his gun for law enforcement. At Waco, guns were used both in the initial raid and the final assault (and the whole time in between).
Using a gun for self defense is not the same thing as using a gun for law enforcement. If you’re suggesting that the problem is that we cannot attack and murder policemen, then describing them as men with guns is much more relevant than I thought.
It may be, in part, my growing up in a country where very few policemen had guns, but I simply do not believe this to be true. I don’t think that Cato or John believe it, either, although I’d welcome clarification if they do. This is true in the case of abuses (what happened to Schiff in no way required anyone to use lethal force, or even to consider so) and in the case of most legitimate law enforcement.
There are cases where the UK felt that it needed to have armed police; IRA issues and such. Outside the kind of issue that is relevant only to a very few (the reason you’re not a terrorist is not because of the police being armed, right?), societies can get along just fine with only non-lethal violence.
People are more fundamentally decent than one might imagine. It is incredible to me, for instance, that we were able to run an international banking system before the days of instant long distance communication. It appears not to have been all that challenging to engage in bank, particularly check, fraud, but sufficiently few people did that the world carried on. It feels a little weird to say this to someone who calls themselves a libertarian, but in general people will try to do the right thing even without massive government coercion; the trick is to persuade people that, eg., complying with the tax law is the right thing to do. There’s a cultural difference between Greece and America, but that difference is not that the Greek police are less violent.
James, you’ve been putting words in my mouth this entire conversation and I’m kind of sick of it. You made a dumb claim: that guns weren’t used in law enforcement. I rebutted it. Now you keep moving the goalposts and mischaracterizing my responses in an effort to avoid admitting that you overreached at the outset. This is tedious. I’m done.
I’m not putting words into your mouth. I’m drawing a distinction between a policeman shooting in self defense and shooting to enforce the law. I gather you didn’t pick up on that distinction earlier (is it my asking if you intended to claim that the purpose of Wilson’s shot was law enforcement that you felt was the previous putting of words into your mouth?)
Ironically, when you say “that wasn’t what you asked”, you’re putting words into my mouth. You then do it again when you say that I deny guns are used “in” law enforcement, rather than “for” law enforcement. I’ve made the distinction repeatedly; it might be one that you disagree with, but that doesn’t mean that you get to claim that I’m not making it.
If the word putting was about my saying that you disagreed with Jamie about the necessity of lethal force for the maintainance of civilization, then that was a question, and one that I’d be interested in the answer to.
James, if human beings are basically descent (an odd admission coming from a Christian) then why aren’t you an anarcho-capitalist? The Libertarian idea that rational selfinterest and social interaction can force human beings to act against their instincts in no way inflicts with the libertarian lament that governments monopoly on force is abused in arenas beyond the extremely limited role for government in civil society.