It’s great that Macron won. But it would be unwise to be complacent. If — as I suspect — we are at the beginning of a real seismic shift in our politics, mainly triggered by populist anger at the way the banks were bailed out in 2008 — then it will take more than the election of a technocratic centrist to stem the tide. As Roger Cohen puts it in today’s New York Times:
Now the hard part begins. For the first time in France, the far right took more than a third of the vote, a reflection of the anger in the country at lost jobs, failed immigrant integration and economic stagnation. Macron, who said he was aware of “the anger, the anxiety, the doubts” needs to address this social unease head-on by reviving a sense of possibility in France. Without change, Le Pen will continue to gain support.
Yep. Macron has, as of now, precisely zero MPs in parliament. This may change at the general election, but it would be extraordinary if a pop-up ‘movement’ (which is really what En Marché is) gained a majority in its first election. If he doesn’t succeed in making some significant changes which indicate that ruling elites have finally learned something from the neoliberal nightmare, then I’d bet on Le Pen making a better showing next time.
Last night we went to see Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary about the legendary battle between the journalist, author and activist Jane Jacobs and the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) New York city planner, Robert Moses.
In the scale of his ambition to impose modernist order on the chaos of the city, Moses’s only historical peer is Baron Haussmann, the planner appointed by Napoléon III to transform Paris from the warren of narrow cobbled streets in which radicals could foment revolution, into the city of wide boulevards we know today. (Among the advantages of said boulevards was that they afforded military units a clear line of fire in the event of trouble.)
Behind the film lie two great books, only one of which is mentioned in the script. The first — and obvious one — is Jacobs’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities, a scarifying attack on the modernist ideology of Le Corbusier and his disciples and a brilliant defence of the organic complexity of urban living, with all its chaos, untidiness and diversity. The other book is Robert Caro’s magnificent biography of Moses — The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. This is a warts-and-all portrayal of a bureaucratic monster, but it also explains how Moses, like many a monster before him, started out as an earnest, idealistic, principled reformer — very much a Progressive.
He was educated at Yale, Oxford (Wadham) and Columbia, where he did a PhD. At Oxford he acquired an admiration for the British civil service, with its political neutrality and meritocratic ethos — but also a rigid distinction between an ‘Administrative’ class (those engaged in policy-making) and the bureaucratic drones (whose role was merely to implement policy). When he returned to the US, Moses found that the political machines of American cities had zero interest in meritocracy, and eventually realised that his path to success lay in hitching his wagon to a machine politician — New York governor Al Smith, a brilliant political operator with an eighth-grade education. Moses started by building public parks, but quickly acquired such a wide range of powers and authority that became was, effectively, the ‘Master Builder’ who remodelled the city of New York.
Because Tyrnauer’s film focusses more on Jacobs, Moses’s Progressive origins are understandably ignored and what comes over is only his monstrous, bullying side — exemplified in his contemptuous aside that “Those who can, build; those who can’t criticize”. In that sense, Moses is very like that other monster, Lyndon Johnson, to whose biography Caro has devoted most of his career.
My interest in Moses was first sparked by something written by a friend, Larry Lessig. In an essay that was a prelude to Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, his first major book, Lessig discussed the role of architecture in regulating behaviour and wrote:
“Robert Moses built highway bridges along the roads to the beaches in Long Island so that busses could not pass under the bridges, thereby assuring that only those with cars (mainly white people) would use certain public beaches, and that those without cars (largely African Americans) would be driven to use other beaches, so that social relations would be properly regulated.”
In later years, this assertion — about the effectiveness of the low underpasses as racial filters — has been challenged, but Lessig’s central proposition (that architecture constrains and determines behaviour) is amply demonstrated in the film. The squalid, slum-like conditions that Moses sought to demolish did indeed enable and determine behaviour: it was the rich, organic, chaotic, vibrant life that Jacobs observed and celebrated. And when those slums were replaced by the ‘projects’ beloved of Moses, le Corbusier et al — high-rise apartment blocks set in rational configurations — they also determined behaviour, mostly by eliminating vibrancy and life and creating urban wastelands of crime, social exclusion and desperation.
A second reflection sparked by the film is its evocation of the way the automobile destroyed cities. Moses believed that what was good for General Motors was good for America and he was determined to make New York automobile-friendly by building expressways that gouged their way through neighbourhoods and rendered them uninhabitable. His first defeat at Jacobs’s hands came when his plan to extend Fifth Avenue by running a road through Washington Square was overturned by inspired campaigning by women he derided as mere “housewives”. But in the end the defeat that really broke him was the failure of his plan to run a motorway through Manhattan.
A third reflection is, in a way, the inverse of that. The film provides a vivid illustration of the extent to which the automobile changed the shape not just of New York but of all American cities (and also positions in intercourse, as some wag once put it; American moralists in the 1920s used to fulminate that cars were “brothels on wheels”) But those vehicles were all driven by humans. If autonomous cars become the norm in urban areas, then the changes they will bring in due course could be equally revolutionary. After all, if mobility is what we really require, then car ownership will decline — as will demand for on- and off-street parking. Pavements (or sidewalks, as they call them in the US) can be made wider, enabling more of the street life that Jacobs so prized.
The final reflection on the film is gloomier. Towards the end, the camera began to pan, zoom and linger on the monstrous cities that are now being built in China, Asia and India — the areas of the world that are going to be more dominant in coming centuries. And as one looks at the resulting forests of high-rise, soulless towers it looks as though the ghosts of Le Corbusier and Moses have come back to earth and are gleefully setting about creating the dysfunctional slums of the future. Which reminds me of a passage in a book I’m currently reading — Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism. “History does not end”, Luce writes. “it is a timeless repetition of human folly and correction”.
On Thursday 16 February, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and supreme leader of Facebook, the world’s most populous virtual country (population 2bn) published an epistle to his 89m disciple-followers. “Building Global Community” was the headline. “On our journey to connect the world,” the supreme leader began, “we often discuss products we’re building and updates on our business. Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?”
Good question. But wait a minute, who’s the “we” here? It crops up 156 times in the 5,700-word epistle…
Ryan and his sidekick, the House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, pushed through a bill that, if it ever goes into effect, could upend one-sixth of the American economy and result in tens of millions of Americans losing their health coverage. Since the Republicans failed to give the Congressional Budget Office time to “score” the bill before voting on it, we don’t have any official estimates of its likely effects. But the bill that was passed on Thursday was an amended version of a bill that the C.B.O. had previously determined would raise the number of uninsured people by twenty-four million over ten years, and increase premiums for many others, particularly the old and the sick, as well.
The Bill now goes to the Senate. What will happen there?
In Copenhagen on Wednesday evening I had dinner with a group of Continental academics. Overhanging the table, like a large cloud, was the fact that — as we ate — the Macron vs Le Pen TV debate was going on in France. The conversation was gloomy: although everyone present was familiar with the electoral arithmetic and the opinion polling that suggested a Macron victory on Sunday, it was clear that they also had what one diner described as “a bad feeling” about the election. In a way, it was like a superstition — so many ‘unthinkable’ things had happened in the last year, that one more shock was now conceivable.
I feel the same. Two reasons for this. The first is an email from a thoughtful and well-informed friend. He’s a political junkie, speaks excellent French, and he had watched the debate in its entirety. Here’s what he wrote:
Last night I watched the 2 hour ‘presidential debate’ on French TV between Macron and Le Pen. A terrible cacophony, nasty, and in fact a disaster for both. It’s yet unclear what its effect will be in the polls and on next Sunday’s election. I’m no longer confident that Macron will win: I think it is possible that the Clinton/Trump disaster will be copied … (e.g because in large numbers people abstain from voting – which be favourable for Le Pen.)
Secondly, there are several well-informed newspaper reports from France (e.g. in today’s Financial Times) about the many voters who despise Le Pen but who are also so hostile to, or unenthusiastic about, Macron that they will not bother to turn out to vote on Sunday. If that happens, then the nightmare might indeed happen.
As to why French voters might react this way, Paul Krugman has written an interesting NYT column which says in part:
There are, no doubt, multiple reasons, especially cultural anxiety over Islamic immigrants. But it seems clear that votes for Le Pen will in part be votes of protest against what are perceived as the highhanded, out-of-touch officials running the European Union. And that perception unfortunately has an element of truth.
Those of us who watched European institutions deal with the debt crisis that began in Greece and spread across much of Europe were shocked at the combination of callousness and arrogance that prevailed throughout.
Even though Brussels and Berlin were wrong again and again about the economics — even though the austerity they imposed was every bit as economically disastrous as critics warned — they continued to act as if they knew all the answers, that any suffering along the way was, in effect, necessary punishment for past sins.
Politically, Eurocrats got away with this behavior because small nations were easy to bully, too terrified of being cut off from euro financing to stand up to unreasonable demands. But Europe’s elite will be making a terrible mistake if it believes it can behave the same way to bigger players.
Finally, there’s the thought that even if Macron wins, could he govern? At the moment, his embryonic, pop-up party (En Marche) hasn’t a single MP. So France could have a president who might be unable to get any significant legislation through parliament. After seven years of this kind of gridlock, Le Pen might be a shoo-in in 2022.
“BRITAIN has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe.” Like many lines delivered by Sir Humphrey, the roguish civil servant in “Yes Minister”, a British television comedy from the 1980s, this carried the ring of truth. But on April 29th it became clear that the current British government has achieved the opposite. One month after Theresa May, the prime minister, triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, notifying the European Union of Britain’s intention to leave, the club’s 27 other leaders met in Brussels to approve a set of negotiating guidelines for the two-year Brexit talks to come. They rubber-stamped the text within minutes of sitting down, and applauded themselves for doing so. Donald Tusk, who chaired the summit as president of the European Council, said it had been far easier to keep unity among “the 27” (as they have come to be called) than he had expected.
The Europeans have spent the ten months since Britain’s referendum in meticulous preparation. But where gung-ho Brexiteers see a “liberation” (in the words of Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary), for the EU’s other members Brexit is strictly an exercise in damage control. They want to clarify and guarantee the rights of their citizens in Britain, and vice versa; ensure that Britain meets its outstanding financial commitments to the EU (the so-called “Brexit bill”); avoid creating a hard border between Britain and Ireland; and strike a trade deal that does not grant Britain overly generous access to the EU single market. All the signs point to a difficult negotiation.
Quite so. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung‘s account of Jean-Claude Juncker’s dinner with Kim Jong-May last Wednesday does indeed suggest that the Brexiteers have already taken up residence on Planet Zog.
Julian Barnes wrote a wonderful LRB Diary piece about Brexit. I particularly liked this passage:
And what is the Brexiteers’ vision of our future, purified nation? It seems to be a mixture of Merrie England, Toytown and Singapore. Outward-looking in the sense of ‘open for business’, which tends to mean ‘up for sale’. Inward-looking in other senses. Morally depleted by cutting ourselves off from Europe and sheltering beneath Trump’s fragrant armpit. What might we end up as? Perhaps a kind of Bigger Belgium with quasi-American values – also, as Belgium might be, torn into separate nations again. Do we seriously think that those who voted for Brexit are going to be better off under this state-shrinking government? (I can’t recall the slogan ‘Poorer but Happier’ being used.) That the NHS will be properly funded? That the increasing numbers on zero-hours will not be exploited further? That the old winners will be the new, even bigger winners? Do we seriously believe that Mrs May will construct ‘a country that works for everyone’? To the pieties of our current political elite, I much prefer the old Portuguese proverb: ‘If shit were valuable, the poor would be born without arses.’
What has come to be called “fake news” is a hard problem to solve, if indeed it is solvable at all. This is because it is created by the interaction of human psychology with several forces: the affordances of digital technology, the business models of giant internet companies and the populist revolt against globalisation. But that hasn’t stopped people trying to solve the problem.
To date, most well-intentioned people have gone down the “fact-checking” route, on the assumption that if only people knew the facts then that would stop them believing lies. This suggests a touching faith in human nature. People have been believing nonsensical things since the beginning of time and nothing we have seen recently indicates that they plan to change the habits of millenniums.
Think, for example, of the infamous lie put about by the Leave campaign in the referendum – that the £350m that the UK supposedly pays every week to the EU could be better spent on the NHS…
Kevin Kelly often annoys me (see his What Technology Wants, but this is rather good, not least because it argues that the biggest flaw in the ‘superintelligence’-as-existential-risk argument is its assumption that intelligence is a one-dimensional attribute. Nobody who has read Howard Gardner can agree with that proposition.
Terrific interview with the Harvard historian and New Yorker writer. Contains this wonderful passage:
“I only ever wanted to be a writer. I love history, and I especially love teaching history, but I never intended to become an academic, and I’m baffled by the idea that reaching a wider audience involves using smaller words, as if there’s some inverse correlation between the size of your audience and of your vocabulary. You don’t talk about, say, technological determinism to a freshman the same way you talk about it to a colleague, right? Is it easier to talk to a freshman? No, it’s harder. Is it more important to give that student a clear explanation of the concept than it is to chat with your colleague about it? I think so, though I suppose that’s debatable. I love the challenge of explaining things to other people, in the same way that I love other people explaining things to me. I love being a student. Nothing is so thrilling as diving into scholarship I’ve never encountered before and trying to get my bearings, learning what so many scholars have been piecing together over a very long period of time, and trying to figure out how to bring that learning to bear on a problem that I, like a lot of people both inside and outside the academy, happen to be struggling with. The hitch is getting the scholarship right. I always worry I’ve missed something, or distorted something, or failed to understand the big picture. That’s the downside: missing something crucial. Nothing is more concerning, or more discouraging, than getting something wrong; there’s no real way to right it. It’s horrible; it kills me.”
