Walking the planks

On a boardwalk in an RSPB reserve, yesterday.

Quote of the Day

“Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography: hard to define but you know it when you see it.It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the professional: precise, restrained — and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Salvador Dali (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing — and cupidity — of Damien Hurst.”

• Tony Judt, in The Memory Chalet

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Taj Mahal Ry Cooder | Statesboro Blues

Link

Ry Cooder (Lead Guitar), Buddy Miller (Guitar), Don Was (Bass), Joachim Cooder(Drums), Tim Lauer(Piano), Taj Mahal (Vocals)

Long Read of the Day

The night after the election before 

I woke up in the middle of Wednesday night and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got up and started scribbling. Here’s the result. It’s long, so if you’re not interested in this stuff, feel free to skip it. After all, I’m no expert, just an interested spectator (aka blogger).

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Trump’s victory is being billed the greatest comeback since Lazarus and accordingly he is being retrospectively canonised by the new realists, including the high-class savants of the Hoover Institution, the Economist, the so-called ‘serious’ newspapers, etc. They may, of course, be holding their noses as they do it, but they all regard his election as a pivotal event, which it undoubtably is. Accordingly, the party line of the ‘new realism’ is that we all have to adjust to that reality. Trump may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he’s our SOB. (Which remains to be seen. To me he looks like his own SOB: the rest of us don’t figure in his narcissistic universe.)

More worrying is the fact that he is now being feted as a political genius — the guy who intuited the ‘real’ nature of the’ real’ Americans: white racists, misogynists and authoritarians. Cue Adolf Hitler. But whereas Hitler reshaped the German people into the master-race Herrenvolk, Trump merely intuited what his’ Volk’ were like and celebrated (and exploited) it.

The inescapable conclusion I had reached from watching videos of some of his rallies was that Trumpism had most of the hallmarks of a cult. He’s the leader who can do no wrong – except to those defined as the “enemies of the people”. So, to his followers, Trump has many of the qualities of a prophet who will lead his people into the promised land.

His comeback triggers some uncomfortable thoughts. Here are a few:

• The election result reveals how chronically dysfunctional American’ democracy’ has become – and in particular how the vaunted founding principles of the ‘checks and balances’ ensured by the separation of powers between the Executive branch, the two houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, has broken down. Trump now controls all four. Game over.
• Also, we have learned from his first term as President that the unwritten conventions that lubricate the working of functioning democracies are useless in the face of an authoritarian who chooses to ignore them. Peter Hennessy’s ‘Good chap theory of government’ no longer applies.
• Trump’s success confirms what critics like Thomas Frank pointed out decades ago – that the Democrats had lost touch with the people whom the party ostensibly represented – and became instead an enabler of the elites who were the beneficiaries of a neoliberal society. In that sense Hilary Clinton was the most inappropriate candidate imaginable in 2016, and Kamala Harris had some of the same disabilities in 2024.
• There’s something in the theory that Joe Biden’s cussedness in wanting to run again made Harris’s task impossible. But my hunch is that even if the Democrats had had a ‘normal’ process with primaries etc. they might not have beaten Trump. In any event, that’s now just an interesting but irrelevant counterfactual.
• All the passionate, grief-stricken expressions of determination to ‘restore’ or ‘rescue’ democracy in America are doomed to fail without a recognition that Trump’s win was actually a ‘democratic’one. It seems to have been a fair and legally-sound election. (I read somewhere that the alt-right sites which had been incessantly relaying the charge that the election would be ‘stolen’ by the Democrats suddenly went quiet when it became clear that Trump was going to win!)
• The underlying problem – the reason why Trump’s campaigning rhetoric fell on such fertile ground – lies deeper. It is that American democracy has been twisted out of recognition by the economic system to which it is in thrall. The fact that the neoliberal thinking — to which Western governments have been addicted for decades — produces gross social inequality is not an externality; it’s what the system is designed to do. Or, as geeks say, it’s a feature, not a bug.
• In that context the British economic sage Martin Wolf published an interesting book a few years ago based on a metaphor: that the relationship between democracy and capitalism is a marriage – and, like all marriages, it has its ups and downs. In the decades since 1970, it’s been mostly downs. In fact the marriage has become a chronically abusive one, with democracy being bent out of shape to facilitate the needs and priorities of the exploitative partner. Which is why bleating about ‘restoring’ the ‘democracy’ that Trump now threatens is just that – bleating. Much more fundamental change is needed.
• The big question, therefore, is whether this latest dramatic lurch into authoritarianism by the world’s most important democracy can be reversed. We need to adjust to the unpalatable thought that Trumpism may be a longer-term phenomenon than we think. Although he’s ageing and displaying unmistakable signs of cognitive decay, so we should be paying more attention to J.D. Vance, who is hale and hearty and may be president sooner than we think.
• Can liberal democracy be saved? In principle, maybe. But it would require pretty radical changes to revitalise democracies that have been hollowed out by capitalism. And democracies are slow-moving beasts, as David Runciman pointed out years ago. More ominously, though, history suggests that fundamental social change happens only through two processes — revolution or war. The explosion in liberal democracies that we have grown up with was a reaction to the cataclysmic horrors of the Second World War, as Tony Judt demonstrated so vividly in his book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. It has become our ‘normal’, something to be taken for granted. But what we are now discovering is that it’s much more fragile than we realised. And it may not last.
• Which leads to a really nightmarish thought. If humans endure for another millennium, might future historians looking back at our period see the post-war proliferation of liberal democracies not as an enduring phenomenon, but as a statistical blip in the history of governance? So might it be time to begin re-reading Thomas Hobbes?
• The fevered speculation about what Trump will do when he takes office in January is already in overdrive. He has said really wild things during the campaign — including proposing to round up and deport 20 million ‘illegal’ immigrants, prosecuting and imprisoning Joe Biden and the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, firing tens of thousands of civil servants and so on. Some people have taken comfort from the thought that much of this stuff is too wild to be realistic. After all, as a friend put it to me, “last time he wasn’t able even to build that bloody wall!”.
• As Francis Fukuyama put it in the FT at the weekend, “The real question at this point is not the malignity of his intentions, but rather his ability to carry out what he threatens.” It would require, for example, “years of investment in the infrastructure necessary to carry it out — detention centres, immigration control agents, courts and so on.” And then I open the Sunday Times yesterday and find the front page story on how the guy Trump proposes to put in charge of the operation describes his plans for carrying it out. And then I remember from reading Richard Evans’s fascinating new book that the original Nazi idea in the 1930s was to force Jews to emigrate, and it was only when that proved slow and inefficient that they built an infrastructure for achieving the same objective by different means.
• Predicting how Trump’s second term will play out is a mug’s game, but there is one racing certainty: there will be tariff wars which will have predictable consequences, most of them bad. And interestingly, this is not because Trump — as Will Dunn puts it in the New Statesman — has “bought a copy of Eighteenth-Century Mercantilism For Dummies” but because just about the only issue on which he has been consistent since he first broke cover in the 1980s is… tariffs. “This is the thread”, wrote Janan Ganesh in the FT, “that runs through his more than four decades on the public record: an intense belief that to run a current account deficit with another nation is to ‘lose’ to it.” And now he believes that by imposing much higher tariffs on imports he can force companies to return manufacturing jobs to the US — which is bad news for the UK, whose biggest single trading partner happens to be the US. (The EU is, of course more important, but that’s a trading bloc.)

Er, that’s it. If you have been, thanks for reading.

Those images of Spain’s floods that went viral

Yesterday’s Observer column:

My eye was caught by a striking photograph in the most recent edition of Charles Arthur’s Substack newsletter Social Warming. It shows a narrow street in the aftermath of the “rain bomb” that devastated the region of Valencia in Spain. A year’s worth of rain fell in a single day, and in some towns more than 490 litres a square metre fell in eight hours. Water is very heavy, so if there’s a gradient it will flow downhill with the kind of force that can pick up a heavy SUV and toss it around like a toy. And if it channels down a narrow urban street, it will throw parked cars around like King Kong in a bad mood.

The photograph in Arthur’s article showed what had happened in a particular street. Taken with a telephoto lens from an upper storey of a building, it showed a chaotic and almost surreal scene: about 70 vehicles of all sizes jumbled up and scattered at crazy angles along the length of the street.

It was an astonishing image which really stopped me in my tracks. Not surprisingly, it also went viral on social media. And then came the reaction: “AI image, fake news.”

Read on

My commonplace booklet

The Berlin Wall Never Fell

We (me included) often use the phrase “after the Berlin Wall came down” as shorthand when writing about Gorbachev, the end of communism, the collapse of the USSR, etc. So this blog post by the historian Timothy Snyder comes as an embarrassing reproof.

In summer and autumn 1989, amidst Gorbachev’s perestroika and reforms and gestures among neighboring communist countries, East Germans were finding ways to visit or to emigrate to West Germany. The East German regime, in turmoil itself amid protests, was trying to formulate a new set of rules for the border. Amidst a great deal of confusion, a regime spokesman seemed to announce, in response to a question by an Italian journalist, that the border posts at the wall would allow East Germans to depart for the West.

That was on November 9th, 1989. The Berlin Wall did not topple over because of that press conference. What happened was that tens of thousands of East Berliners took advantage of the pronouncement and crowded the border checkpoints, one of which eventually opened. People rushed through to forbidden West Berlin, where they were greeted with champagne and flowers. It was a night that changed the history of Germany, which would unify less than a year later.

But no wall actually fell. People eventually clambered on it, and chipped off pieces of it…

They did, and I have a piece of it on the window-sill of my study as I write this. It was given to me by a journalistic colleague who had been sent to Berlin by our newspaper to report on the story. Sigh.

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Wheels within Wheels

Quote of the Day

”The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

• Flannery O’Connor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vaughan Williams | How cold the wind doth blow | Ellen Leslie, soprano

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are

This remarkable essay by Carlos Ozada appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday. It captures the central, unpalatable message of the Trump victory, which is that the America the readers of the NYT live in is not the real America. The piece is behind the Times paywall but the link is a gift one, so it should work for most readers. If it doesn’t, you can find the text on Robert Reich’s Substack.

It’s a perceptive piece, worth reading in full. But here’s the nub of it:

The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris reminded us, likening him to the crooks and predators she’d battled as a California prosecutor. She even urged voters to watch Trump’s rallies — to witness his line-crossing, norm-obliterating moments — as if doing so would inoculate the electorate against him.

It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it. His critics have long argued that he is just conning his voters — making them feel that he’s fighting for them when he’s just in it for himself and his wealthy allies — but part of Trump’s appeal is that his supporters recognize the con, that they feel that they’re in on it.

Books, etc.

After Trump won in 2016 this book was the most interesting thing I read. It’s a searing critique of the Democratic Party in which Frank argues that, in failing to curb growing economic inequality, the left in America had abandoned its roots to pursue a new class of supporter — college-educated elite professionals.

That lesson failed to land. But people had noticed that the people Obama — a Democratic president — reached for in 2008 to rescue the banks were the self-same elite professionals who had caused the crisis. And maybe then they started to wonder whose side the Democrats were on.

My commonplace booklet

What happens if Americans claim asylum from a Trump regime?

A sobering post by Chris Bertram on the wonderful Crooked Timber blog.

Donald Trump has made very public threats to persecute his political opponents should he be re-elected and statements by him and by other leading Republicans suggests that he might persecute others on the grounds of their religion or their membership of certain social groups. If this were happen (rather than simply being bluster) then it could turn out, very soon, that some US citizens will find themselves outside of their country, with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, and on the territory of a state signatory of the Convention. Some of those states will also be allies of the US through NATO and other treaties and will have extradition treaties with the US. In which case what might happen?

Bertram then outlines four possibilities for Americans fleeing persecution or prosecution by Trump’s agencies.

The basic pattern, he says, is clear:

Liberal democratic states allied to the US would face a choice between their state interests as allies of the US on the one hand and upholding the right to asylum and defending liberal democratic values on the other. Nobody can be confident about what would happen in practice. If I were a US dissident, I would choose my place of asylum carefully.

Although it’s not a parallel, the case of Julian Assange comes immediately to mind.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Watch SpaceX Catch A Starship Booster In Air An astonishing video of a SpaceX booster rocket returning to its nest. (The ‘boosting’ in this case is providing propulsion of a rocket into space, not boosting Musk into the Trump administration.)

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Presidential doodles

Dwight Eisenhower (34th President of the US) seems to have been quite a good artist, as the nice detail in this doodle suggests.

(From Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles and Scrawls from the Oval Office.)

Quote of the Day

“LLMs are quite good at reproducing culture, but not so good at introducing cultural variation.”

• Alison Gopnik

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

Link

Seems prescient when listened to 62 years after it was first recorded.

Long Read of the Day

What comes after Moore’s Law? Why, Huang’s Law, of course…

…and why that might not be such good news.

Last Sunday’s Observer column:

Although Moore’s “law” was bound to run out of steam eventually, it shaped an entire industry and – more importantly – changed the way we thought about computing. In particular, it fostered a hubristic mindset: confidence that if a problem could be solved by computing, if today’s machines weren’t powerful enough, Moore’s law guaranteed that it would be soluble really soon.

As the ancient Greeks knew only too well, after hubris comes nemesis. In the computing world it came in the computational needs of machine learning, which were orders of magnitude greater than those of more conventional serial processing – computing in sequence, one thing at a time (albeit at astonishing speeds). In one of those happy accidents, there was a part of the computer industry – gaming, which needed processors that could do several calculations simultaneously, or “in parallel” – to ensure that fast-changing scenes could be rendered realistically. And one particular company, Nvidia, was a prominent caterer to this esoteric requirement by providing what became known as graphics processing units (GPUs).

At some point, Jensen Huang, a smart cookie who is the founder and chief executive of Nvidia, realised that his company had the technology that the burgeoning new field of machine learning (afterwards rebranded AI) needed, and he pivoted his entire company to focus on it. The rest, as they say, is history. Irrational exuberance about AI took over the tech industry, fuelling a gold rush in which Huang was the premier supplier of picks and shovels, and his company is now the second most valuable corporation on the planet, just behind Apple…

Read on

Books, etc.

On glutinous prose

Julian Barnes has a lovely review of Adam D. Zientek’s book, A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front, in the current edition of theLRB. His review contains the following passage:

Zientek is a professor of history with a strong sociological approach. His preface contains this forbidding statement of intent: ‘The model I propose to elaborate below is this: the alcohol supplied by the French army generated shared interoceptive and affective sensations that were then interpreted through culturally learned and contextually bound intoxication concepts, making for distinct and entraining emotional experience and group behaviours that tended to bolster the war effort.’ It’s tempting (if facetious) to rephrase this as: ‘French soldiers liked to get pissed with their mates, and it was good for morale.’

The book, says Barnes, “features tracts of prose as glutinous as Flanders mud”. And it makes one wonder why Humanities scholars write such constipated prose in a book ostensibly aimed at the general reader (what academics disdainfully call “trade books”).

Many years ago, I succeeded Julian as the Observer’s TV critic. Reading this review (or indeed anything he writes), you can see what a hard act he was to follow.

My commonplace booklet

Darwin and Dawkins: a tale of two biologists

The Economist has an informative review (probably paywalled) of Richard Dawkins’s intriguing new book — his 19th!

Its working hypothesis is that modern organisms are, indeed, like books, but of a particular, peculiar, variety. Dr Dawkins uses the analogy of palimpsests: the parchments scraped and reused by medieval scribes that accidentally preserved enough traces of their previous content for the older text to be discerned.

At the moment, only fragments of the overwritten messages of these biological palimpsests can be parsed. A human genome, for example, contains many “pseudogenes” that once encoded proteins related to the sense of smell, but which have now been disabled because, presumably, they are no longer needed in an animal whose dominant sense is vision. Similarly (and more familiarly), a human spine’s ancestral role as a suspension bridge from which the body hangs, rather than as a pillar that holds it upright, is clear from the compromises in its modern structure.

Dr Dawkins’s contention is that, by proper scrutiny of genetics and anatomy, a scientist armed with the tools of the future will be able to draw far more sophisticated and connected inferences than these. This will then illuminate parts of evolutionary history that are currently invisible.

As an analogy, describing organisms as palimpsests is a bit of a stretch. A palimpsest’s original text is unrelated to its new one, rather than being an earlier version of it, so it can tell you nothing about how the later text was composed. But that quibble aside, the tantalising idea is that reading genomes for their history is an endeavour that may form the basis of a new science.

What I like about Dawkins is his fearlessness, which I guess is why someone once described him as “Darwin’s Rottweiler”, and echo of the soubriquet given to TH Huxley of “Darwin’s Bulldog”.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Rolls Royce has finally given up on internal combustion and gone electric. Its new ‘Sceptre’ EV will set you back $420,000 without extras, and on a good day you’ll get up to 266 miles from its 102kWh battery.

The Verge was granted an audience with the beast. Here’s a sample from the review.

It’s a rolling cocoon made inherently anti-acoustic thanks to the tireless work of some surely big-eared scientists. So, to inject a little more life into the driving experience, the Spectre plays a little digital tone when you accelerate.

Yes, nearly every modern EV emits some kind of synthetic whir or trill when you get on the accelerator — but nothing like the Spectre. This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.

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American options

Screenshot

This is a flow-chart that the economist and blogger John Quiggin drew up on the Crooked Timber blog to help him think about the various possible paths that the US could follow after tomorrow’s presidential election. The diamonds denote decision nodes — points in the process where things could go either way — and the numbers on the arrows coming out of the nodes represent the probability of that outcome happening. I’m not sure about the logic behind the numbers in bold type beside the various destination boxes. Quiggin says they are the (cumulative) probability of reaching that box. The numbers next to arrows coming out of decision nodes (diamonds) are the probability of that decision.

The chart doesn’t include all the possible decision-nodes that might emerge. But it’s an interesting way of thinking about what could happen. And the only unproblematic path is the vertical one on the left.

Quote of the Day

”If history has a lesson, it is that we don’t learn from it.”

• Stephen Bush, FT, 19/20 October, 2024

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dvorak | Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” | 3rd movement | Wiener Phil and Karajan

Link

Long Read of the Day

Rituals of Childhood 

A remarkable (and sobering) essay by Kieran Healy which explains why one might not want to bring up children in the US now.

Sociologists like me often highlight these rituals of childhood in our writing and teaching. One of the founders of our field, Émile Durkheim, made them the centerpiece of his work. Institutions, he argued, are rituals that bind people to one another as a group. In a ritual, each person finds their place and does their part, and expects everyone else to do the same. Crucially, those involved all see one another participating in the event. By doing so, they enact their collective life in view of one another, demonstrating its reality, expressing its meaning, and feeling its pulse in their veins. That, Durkheim thought, is at root what a society is.

In any given week in America, you can watch as a different ritual of childhood plays itself out. Perhaps it will be in El Paso, at a shopping mall; or in Gilroy, at a food festival; or in Denver, at a school. Having heard gunshots, and been lucky enough to survive, children emerge to be shepherded to safety by their parents, their teachers, or heavily-armed police officers…

Do read it.

Books, etc.

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

We were talking about the power of nostalgia in contemporary politics and my friend Gerard told me about this novel which won the Booker Prize in 2023. The blurb is intriguing. Here’s an excerpt:

An enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.

As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape from the horrors of our present – a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.

It seems timely. One reviewer wrote that “Gospodinov’s vision of tomorrow is the nightmare from which Europe knows it must awake”. That struck a chord with me. As the first videos of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began to appear, my first thought was they they were reminiscent of the celluloid newsreels of 1940 — shattered buildings, rubble-strewn streets, shell-shocked people — except this time the ‘newsreels’ were in colour. And I remember thinking that Europe’s long post-war holiday from history is over.

So, of course, I’ve ordered a copy.

My commonplace booklet

Last week Andrew Sullivan asked “Does Liberal Democracy End Next Week?” — and came up with a definite maybe.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!