Westward Ho!
Donegal coast, Ireland.
Quote of the Day
Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”
- Michel Foucault
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bird Song | The Wailin’ Jennys
Long Read of the Day
Back to the Thirties
Way back in 2015, David Runciman and I had a small research project in Cambridge on “technology and democracy” which was about trying to figure out what the implications of digital technology might be for democracy. (Spoiler alert: the prospects were not good.) This little project was the inspiration for the Minderoo Centre for Technology that I co-founded with Steve Connor in 2020; but another major outcome was David’s book, How Democracy Ends, which came out in 2019.
In it, David argued that liberal democracy will end eventually, but when we think about how it might end we shouldn’t assume that the failure mode will be like earlier periods of failure — military coups, revolutions etc. When it fails, he argued, democracy will fail forward in novel and unexpected ways. For that reason, it was no good looking back to the past for lessons — say to Germany in the 1930s, as many people were doing after Trump won in 2016.
At the time, I found that reassuring, but now I don’t. The reason? I’ve been reading Richard Evans’s new book, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich which is on the one hand spellbinding and on the other hand alarming because of the eerie echoes of it that one hears in what is currently going on in the US. A while back I saw the beginnings of an odious parallel between the way tech titans were starting to cosy up to Trump, and how the corporate giants of inter-war Germany started to line up behind Hitler. (I wrote an OpEd about this in the Observer on October 20.)
Then on Saturday morning I wake up to discover that both the Washington Post and the New York Times have decided that they will not endorse a candidate in the upcoming election. I find that really chilling; it means that two powerful and wealthy newspaper proprietors are second-guessing the outcome of the election; they think that Trump might win and don’t want to be on the wrong side of him when he does.
Like the directors of I.G. Farben and its corporate ilk in the 1930s, these folks have skin in the game. The owner of the Post, for example, is Jeff Bezos, who has a spacecraft business and hopes to suck on the teats of the federal government in that context. He is probably incensed that a rival spacecraft hustler, Elon Musk, (who has been sucking on the aforesaid teats for some years) has now gone the whole hog and is vigorously campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania, the state that could well decide the outcome of the election. Characteristically, though, Musk currently sees Trump as a kind of useful idiot (aka Trojan horse) for his own imperial delusions — just like von Papen and others in the 1930s thought that Hitler could be their idiot.
The historian Tim Snyder, who — like Richard Evans — is an expert on Nazi Germany. On Saturday he posted a sobering short video about the newspapers’ decision on his blog. It’s four minutes long and worth watching, but if you’re stretched for time, here’s a lightly-edited transcript:
I’m thinking today about the First lesson of On Tyranny, which is: do not obey in advance. The reason why that’s the first lesson is that, for me, it’s the first thing that we should be remembering, the first thing we should be learning from the horrors of the 20th century, that each of us does have some responsibility, and perhaps the wealthy and the powerful, maybe just a tiny bit more.
The reason why this is the lesson of the 20/20 century, the reason why it’s the first lesson in On Tyranny, is this: those who work on the Nazi period, the period of the Nazi takeover, know that much of Hitler’s rise to power had to do with people making adjustments in 1933 and 1934 — people anticipating what he would want from them and then going halfway.
A very similar lesson was drawn by the anti-communist dissidents of the 1970s who realized that every little thing that we do has consequences for those around us. They counselled as well, not to obey in advance, but to instead live as if we were free.
I have all this in mind, of course, because of these decisions by newspapers owned by very wealthy Americans not to endorse a presidential candidate. I gotta say, this strikes me as ignoring the essential thing that we were supposed to have learned from the 20th century — which is, in circumstances like these, do not obey in advance. If what you do is based on your anticipation — as it so obviously is — that an authoritarian might be about to come to power, and what you are doing is making it more likely that that authoritarian will come to power, and since you have already made concessions before he came to power, you’re preparing yourself for making more concessions after he comes to power.
And what’s worse, if you’re in a position of wealth and power yourself, you’re discouraging all the other people who are less wealthy and less powerful; and aside from being politically wrong and morally outrageous this is just simply unfair, because it puts the burden on taking action to those who are less fortunate than you, puts them in the position of having to be more courageous than you. And of course, what it really means when someone who’s wealthy and powerful makes adjustments, obeys in advance, what it really means is that they think, “Well, I’m going to be fine when democracy dies in darkness, I’m going to enjoy the shadows”. That’s what it really means.
So for all these reasons, this is outrageous. I hope these decisions will be changed, and regardless of that, I hope that the rest of us will keep in mind that we ought not to be obeying in advance. What we do always matters. What we do in the next few days matters a great deal, and the fact that people are obeying in advance is just a sign of how great the threat, really is. So, let’s all do what we can again.
Tim Snyder 25 October 1024, Oklahoma City.
The aphrodisiac effect of obscene wealth
The megalomaniacs who control X and Facebook are only able to pollute the public sphere and undermine democracy because of our deference to money
Yesterday’s Observer column:
There are two kinds of aphrodisiac. The first is power. A good example was provided by the late Henry Kissinger, who could hardly be described as toothsome yet was doted upon by a host of glamorous women.
The other powerful aphrodisiac is immense wealth. This has all kinds of effects. It makes people (even journalists who should know better) deferential, presumably because they subscribe to the delusion that if someone is rich then they must be clever. But its effects on the rich person are more profound: it cuts them off from reality. When they travel, writes Jack Self in an absorbing essay: “The car takes them to the aerodrome, where the plane takes them to another aerodrome, where a car takes them to the destination (with perhaps a helicopter inserted somewhere). Every journey is bookended by identical Mercedes Vito Tourers (gloss black, tinted windows). Every flight is within the cosy confines of a Cessna Citation (or a King Air or Embraer)… The ultra-rich never wait in line at a carousel or a customs table or a passport control. There are no accidental encounters. No unwelcome, unapproved or unsanitary humans enter their sight – no souls that could espouse a foreign view. The ultra-rich do not see anything they do not want to see.”
Mr Self estimates that there are currently 2,781 of these gilded creatures in the world. He divides them into two kinds: “self-made” and “second gen”…
My commonplace booklet
From Nicholas Harris, writing in this week’s New Statesman:
”A sort of Weimar without the sex”, was how Christopher Hitchens unimprovably described joyless Britain in the late 1970s. The country has returned to a similar condition of bleak, stagnant ungovernability over the past few years. The least we might have expected is a debauched youth subculture to accompany it – even if not quite to the degeneracy of 1920s Berlin. Instead, the old dynamic has recurred, and even by English standards the nation seems locked in a condition of anti-festivity.
This week, new findings from the Night Time Industries Association found that clubbing could be “extinct” by end of the 2020s, with 37 per cent of venues having permanently shut since March 2020.”
Don’t you just love the idea of a ‘Night Time Industries Association’? It’s a bit like the Amalgamated Union of Underwater Basket-Weavers and Muff Divers, one of my favourite trade unions.
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