You can get Spanish citizenship with two years residency
Spain’s
approach tolerates dual citizenship. In Spain, this tolerance reaches
into centuries of its history as the centre of colonial and religious
power. Spanish nationality law operates on the basis of jus sanguinis (Latin for right of blood). Citizenship is conferred by having one or both parents who already citizens. This contrasts with jus soli (Latin for right of the soil), where citizenship is conferred by where you were born.
It is the Spanish system of jus sanguinis that underpins the specific entitlements of citizens of former Spanish colonies to citizenship.In
two years of residency in Spain, citizens of Ibero-American countries
(which covers the majority of former Spanish-speaking colonies in South
America), Andorra, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea can apply for
citizenship. This is better than the standard residency period of ten years.
Here is a proposal to the King of Spain on behalf the Puerto Rican people:
Rather than become Spanish citizens after two years of
residency, Puerto Ricans would be eligible for immediate Spanish
citizenship — albeit without the right to vote.
This arrangement would replicate the unusual status of Puerto Ricans
within the USA, which confers unique economic advantages but denies
certain political rights and powers.
The political status of Puerto Rico is that of an unincorporated territory of the United States. As such, the island of Puerto Rico is neither a sovereign nation nor a U.S. state.
Because of that ambiguity, the territory, as a polity, lacks certain
rights but enjoys certain benefits that other polities have or lack. For
instance, in contrast to U.S. states, Puerto Rico residents
cannot vote in U.S. presidential elections nor can they elect their own
senators and representatives to the U.S. Congress. On the other hand, in
contrast to U.S. states, only some residents of Puerto Rico are subject
to federal income taxes.[a]
The political status of the island thus stems from how different Puerto
Rico is politically from sovereign nations and from U.S. states.
Puerto Ricans with Spanish passports could legally work within the European Union.
That would presumably solve some economic problems for them.
What would be in it for Spain and Europe?
Europe, with its declining fertility rate, needs immigrants.
For instance, in Spain, the fertility rate is 1.24 births per woman.
That is well below the population replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.
In fact, it is even below the average fertility rate of 1.55 births per woman in the European Union.
Of course, all those Puerto Ricans moving to Europe means fewer Puerto Rican workers and consumers in the USA.
The fertility rate in the USA is 1.7 births per woman, also well below the replacement level.
Indeed, Puerto Rico itself already has its own problems with depopulation.
The purpose of giving limited Spanish citizenship to Puerto Ricans
would be to give them employment opportunities, but this would
accelerated depopulation of Puerto Rico.
The assumption here, however, is that Puerto Rico is economically doomed because of its peripheral, rural nature.
Puerto Rico is a relatively small island in the Caribbean Sea that is closer to Venezuela than it is to Florida.
How would Puerto Ricans feel about the prospect of limited Spanish
citizenship that would open the doors of opportunity to the European
Union?
To be honest, what Puerto Ricans want for their collective future remains a mystery.
Politically, it is uncertain what exactly Puerto Ricans want for
their island because efforts to gauge their opinions have been so
biased.
Although the previous two referendums (November 2012 and June 2017) also had ostensibly pro-statehood outcomes, the New York Times described them as “marred, with ballot language phrased to favor the party in office”.[24] For example, the fourth referendum, held in November
2012, asked voters (1) whether they wanted to maintain the current
political status of Puerto Rico and, if not, (2) which alternative
status they prefer. Of the fifty-four percent (54.0%) who voted “No” on
maintaining the status quo, 61.11% chose statehood, 33.34% chose free association, and 5.55% chose independence.[25][26][27][28] Opponents of statehood argued that these results did not show that a majority of Puerto Rican voters support statehood. The June
2017 referendum was, according to the New York Times, a “flawed
election” where the turnout was only 23%, in part because most statehood
opponents sat out. 97% of votes cast favored statehood.
The
November 2020 referendum, by contrast, was the first to ask voters a
simple yes-or-no question: “Should Puerto Rico be admitted immediately
into the Union as a State?”. There were 655,505 votes in favor of
statehood (52.52%) and 592,671 votes opposed (47.48%). The 55% turnout
rate equaled that for the simultaneous 2020 gubernatorial race and the 2016 gubernatorial race.
There does not seem to be any great passion for US statehood on the part of ordinary Puerto Ricans.
According to the internet, the real force for giving statehood to
Puerto Rico is liberal white Americans who know little about Puerto Rico
or its history.
Like so many of the big reforms proposed by the Democratic Party,
Puerto Rican statehood has the bonus of eliminating the Democratic
Party’s handicap in the Electoral College.
That might be the ulterior motive.
Also, if you ask Puerto Ricans what it is they want, they don’t tend to think of their desires in political terms.
What Puerto Ricans want above all else is to live in same neighborhood as their parents.
It’s a very culturally conservative rural ideal that one also finds
throughout the American heartland, a powerful sentiment that binds
people to places that are economically obsolete.
So what can be done for Puerto Rico’s economy?
The policy proposals would be predictable.
Democrats would call for state investments.
Republicans would call for tax cuts (and abolishing the Jones Act).
If both of these policies were implemented, it might nevertheless
have little benefit for Puerto Rico as a whole — except for the most
urbanized sections of Puerto Rico.
These are the most affluent places within San Juan, and are full of non-Puerto Ricans.
Ultimately, rural areas and peripheral places are becoming economically obsolete.
Throughout the Covid pandemic, there were predictions that America
would fall into chaos or civil war. Instead, one-and-a-half years after
the introduction of the vaccines, there is an atmosphere of callousness
and hostility punctuated by random acts of senseless violence. That
might be disappointing and disturbing, but the direst predictions of
organized violence have, so far, not been borne out. However, there is
evidence that political polarization is intensifying and becoming a
long-term trend. Until recently, although there had been increased
combativeness between the two major political parties, this was based on
emotion and not ideology, because each of the two parties still
contained within themselves considerable ideological diversity. There is
evidence that the two parties are now in a new era of increasing
internal ideological homogeneity. One of the root causes for political
polarization is national economic development and integration, which
shifts the focus of individual experience away from the locality and
community toward abstract identities based on ideological conflict
fostered by the national media. One counterweight against this trend
would be to shift the locus of political decisionmaking to the locality
and regions, although this move would be opposed by the elites of both
political parties based on their self-interest.
In the first year of the Covid pandemic, Americans rushed out and
bought a record number of guns. This panic buying seemed to feed upon
itself, with soaring gun sales fueling a belief that America was headed
toward civil war. In the context of political polarization and street
protests, the nation’s mood did seemed headed toward some kind of
reckoning. However, there was a sense that politically, the fever broke
with the capitol riots of January 6th.
Aside from current events, however, early on there were historians
weighing in on the possibility of civil strife in America based on
historical precedent, ranging from the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic to
the 14th-century plague. The real threat of chaos, they wrote, comes after a
pandemic. During a pandemic, society becomes a pressure cooker under
intense and prolonged compression. When the pandemic subsides, society
begins to loosen up and vent all that accumulated frustration and grief.
The more devastating and prolonged the plague, the more intense the
post-pandemic turmoil will be.
Countries that did well during the pandemic will have less turmoil in
its aftermath. That would include America’s western Pacific allies like
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. These countries
took basic precautions, kept their death rates low, and remained open
for business. Those countries can also enjoy a greater measure of
societal harmony in the post-vaccination era compared to countries that
toggled between lockdowns and the complete abandonment of restrictions.
There is another side of these countries’ pandemic success that is
not often discussed. These countries had their people adopt a few simple
precautions, but these governments also provided their populations with
a sense of normality, entertainment, and emotional outlets. For
example, early on the Japanese and Koreans figured out that the virus
was airborne and not transmitted by droplets on surface, and so they
warned their people to wear masks. Japan in particular warned their
people to avoid the “3 Cs”:
Closed spaces with poor ventilation.
Crowded places with many people nearby.
Close-contact settings such as close-range.
Despite this warning and the declaration of a state of emergence, the
Japanese kept their hostess bars open. This was done for financial
reasons, because bars and restaurants bring in tax revenues and
unemployed workers would become a drain on government resources. But
keeping hostess bars open in Tokyo probably had the effect of reducing
social pressures and providing a sense of continuity and stability.
Ideally, such indoor entertainment in Japan should have been moved
outdoors because the Japanese did know that the virus was airborne. But
the point is that safe outlets need to be found. Closing beaches, parks,
and hiking trails in the USA was wrongheaded. Likewise, in 17th-century
Italy, an outbreak of the plague was dealt with by selling wine through
tiny windows rather than indoors.
In this light, vaccine passports are not ideal. The idea of a vaccine
passport is that people would need to prove that they are vaccinated in
order to enter a restaurant. This might actually turn some of the
public against vaccines, and make it more difficult to promote vaccines
in general. But it would it would also subject restaurant workers to the
rage of the customers that they would have to confront daily. Also,
vaccine passports would raise the emotional tension and sense of
compression during a pandemic, which leads to a post-pandemic incivility
and strife. The best way to improve vaccination rates is to have
community groups engage with and talk to their own people about getting
vaccinated. Not only does this raise vaccination rates, but it promotes
the infrastructure of public health outreach generally. It also lowers
tensions in society. Ironically, the libertarian argument against
vaccine passports seems to be valid, but the proper alternative to
vaccine passports seems to be a communitarian engagement by community
groups with individuals and their families. For example, the poorest
region of Germany has the highest vaccination rate thanks to public
outreach by community groups:
Since the rollout of vaccines, America has not fallen into chaos or
civil war. Today, there is instead an atmosphere of callousness and
malice punctuated by random acts of senseless violence. The new reality
might be disappointing and disturbing, but it is comparatively a relief
compared to the prospect of organized civil strife. However, there might
be a couple of provisos attached to the idea that instead of descending
into another civil war, Americans have instead merely transformed into
the equivalent of 330 million abrasive New Yorkers.
First, Americans were always known for being unsentimental in their
pragmatism. For example, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake ignited
several fires that burned down 500 city blocks over the course of three
days, Americans flocked to San Francisco to cash in on the rebuilding.
Whereas in other societies, great novels, poems, and operas would be
written to commemorate the national tragedy, not so much in America.
Likewise, during the worst days of the pandemic in 2020, where European
newspapers would print the daily death toll on the top of the front
pages of their newspaper, American newspapers would instead print the
days stock market data. Rather than view this lack of sentiment as an
expression of American “greed” and “ruthlessness”, it might be better to
observe layers of paradox in the American personality structure. In the
outermost, public layer, there is that famous American friendliness,
generosity, and openness, which is underpinned by a democratic
egalitarianism that glues the society together in a kind of public
religion. One typical criticism is that, at a deeper level, Americans
are comparatively distant and self-absorbed, and preoccupied with
materialism. But a more positive view is that behind this materialism,
at a deeper level still, Americans have a faith in self-fulfillment,
self-actualization, and the “American Dream”. Perhaps the pandemic and
political conflict have stripped away the outermost layer of public
civility, but at the deepest level of their psyche, Americans still
might have their famous idealism and optimism about their own lives that
can nourish the political culture. But this faith might depend on the
condition of the economy and the state of international affairs, which
are not as certain as they once seemed.
Second, long-term ideological trends might not bode well for the
stability of the American polity. There is a lot of talk that “America
is politically polarized”, but that is complicated. People can become
polarized emotionally in terms of competition between political parties (“affective polarization”), but this is not ideological conflict.
Rather, this is a tribal phenomenon and does not mean that people are
in conflict along coherent ideological lines. People like to fight, and
often their fights have nothing to do with beliefs. It has been noted
for a long time that American politics resembles professional wrestling,
with audiences becoming all riled up over contrived battles between
celebrity politicians — with actual policy issues and ideological
differences becoming lost amidst the wild spectacle.
Indeed, polarization along ideological lines is not true for average
citizens because they still maintain a diversity of beliefs. It is the politicians who
have become polarized over ideology. This is different from a century
ago, when joining a political party for a politician was a matter of
ingratiating himself into local patronage networks. Back then, within
their own party, politicians had to deal with and regularly socialize
with other politicians who did not agree with them ideologically, and
this process had a moderating effect. Politicians prided themselves on
working with one another and getting a lot of work done, and not
grandstanding over ideology. However, as the American economy developed
and transformed and became nationally integrated, the political parties
took on a national character and began to define themselves according to
ideology and not local economic self-interest. The two political
parties have subsequently become more ideologically divided against each
other.
As the two political parties grew apart ideologically, there was also
a growing gap between politically polarized politicians and the
ideologically diverse citizenry that voted for them. One can see this
among working-class people who belong to labor unions, and who in the
1980s were often just as likely to vote for Ronald Reagan as they were
to support a Democratic politician. In contrast, the leadership of the
labor unions, especially at the higher levels, fully buys into the broad
platform of the Democratic Party. The typical American is politically
“multidimentional” and has all kinds of beliefs on all sorts of
political issues, whereas elites like politicians are “unidimensional”
and predictably adhere to their party’s package deal of political
positions.
However, this might be changing. Like politicians, ordinary Americans
are becoming ideologically homogeneous and polarized. That is, American
voters are losing their “dimensionality” or the unique complexity of
their own personal political beliefs and they are becoming like the
ideologically polarized politicians that they vote for.
That is, if I knew your position
on abortion, I didn’t necessarily know your position on health care. [In
contrast, among] elites, the dimensionality of the issue space has
completely collapsed. If I know where a senator stands on abortion, I
know where that senator stands on health care, gun rights, immigration,
etc.
The disconnect between the mass public and elites is that the
mass public’s attitudes are multidimensional (knowing where someone
stands on abortion doesn’t necessarily tell me where they stand on
health care), while elites’ attitudes are unidimensional.
That is
changing, Lelkes argued, citing the work of Chris Hare in the paper I
already mentioned: “Hare (who knows a ton about this stuff) has recently
shown that public opinion is now collapsing onto one dimension.”
This new ideological homogenization within each political party — and
the future intensification of political conflict which it foretells —
brings to mind Roy Amara’s famous adage about forecasting the effects of
technology: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
For example, there is a lot of talk about how self-driving Teslas are
going to change everything soon, but the real changes that autonomous
EVs will produce are much farther off in the future and more profound
than we can now imagine. Likewise, when social indicators point toward
future ideological conflict, that conflict will be both much more
distant in future and more extreme than we can now contemplate.
The rise of political polarization might be a story about how both
modern governments and economic development foster the homogeneity of
modern societies. An example from agriculture might be how there were
once thousands of local varieties of apple that were as sweet as candy,
but industrialization and long-distance trade promoted the development
of a handful of varieties that were hard and round enough to roll along
conveyor belts without being damaged, but which lacked the distinct
flavor of local varieties. The alternative to such homogeneity in the
American diet are local produce and regional cuisine.
In politics, the parallel to being a locavore would be the
revitalization of local politics. A classic American version of local
democracy would be the New England town meeting. That did not really
catch on throughout America, but there might be alternative forms of
making the locality central to decision making. One approach might be to
collect taxes at the state level (for public schools, for example) and
to distribute these revenues to localities on a per capita basis. But
this is not popular with elites regardless of their ideology because it
runs counter to their financial self-interest.
A compliment to strengthening local government would be the creation
by the federal government of regional governments. Regional government,
unlike like local government, is not a reality in the USA. What does it
look like abroad?
Regional governance involves the “devolution” of some of the national government’s mission and power.
In the United Kingdom, devolution is the Parliament of the United Kingdom’s statutory granting of a greater level of self-government to:
the Scottish Parliament,
the Senedd (Welsh Parliament),
the Northern Ireland Assembly and
the
London Assembly and to their associated executive bodies the Scottish
Government, the Welsh Government, the Northern Ireland Executive and in
England, the Greater London Authority and combined authorities.
Again, the assumption here is that the sheer scale of the USA is the
source of its political polarization. Over the generations, Americans
have turned away from immediate, concrete connection and community and
toward national political parties for their tribal identity; now, their
values and beliefs are coming to conform entirely to their party’s
dominant ideology (and that ideology has itself become more extreme).
Indeed, relatively small and isolated countries like New Zealand do not
seem to exhibit significant political polarization. If scale is the
primary culprit in the escalation of civil conflict based on
increasingly uniform values and identities, then localism and regional
devolution might conceivably be two effective countermeasures.
People have different ways of talking about the ethics of health care policy.
The question is how these ways of talking relate to concepts that have been developed within academia, especially economics.
Sometimes in ordinary conversation people do not refer
specifically to the concepts that economists articulate — but their
meaning seems to be identical.
At other times, people refer
explicitly to economic and theoretical concepts — but on closer
inspection, these people are actually talking about entirely different
ideas.
The concept of “moral hazard” provides an example.
Conservatives express a skepticism toward the idea of healthcare
as a right, which they consider unfair to those who work hard for what
they have; and although they do not explicitly talk about “moral
hazard”, it consistently seems identical to what they mean.
Conservative populists,
in contrast, use libertarian language to express their frustration at
being forced to buy health insurance; but on closer inspection, they are
not libertarian and they do not oppose the idea of healthcare as a
right.
The concept of “moral hazard” in economics refers to the lack of
incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its
consequences.
For example, if the government bails out banks during a crisis caused
by irresponsible bank lending, then in the future it becomes MORE
likely that banks will again make bad loans.
In daily life, people express opinions that sound similar to the
concept of moral hazard. On closer inspection, sometimes they are indeed
talking about moral hazard and at other times they only seem to. For
example, the surgeon Atul Gawande returned to his hometown of Athens,
Ohio to see how people felt about the idea of health care as a right.
The sentiments expressed by some of the more conservative residents
sound a lot like a wariness of moral hazard.
In fact, the whole idea that
government would get involved in the financing of health care bothered
him. One person’s right to health care becomes another person’s burden
to pay for it, he said. Taking other people’s money had to be justified,
and he didn’t see how it could be in cases like this.
“Everybody
has a right to access health care,” he allowed, “but they should be
contributing to the cost.” He pointed out that anyone could walk into a
hospital with an emergency condition, get treated, and be billed
afterward. “Yes, they may have collectors coming after them,” he said.
“But I believe everybody should contribute for the treatment they
receive.”
A right makes no distinction between the deserving and
the undeserving, and that felt perverse to Maria and Joe. They both told
me about people they know who don’t work and yet get Medicaid coverage
with no premiums, no deductibles, no co-pays, no costs at all—coverage
that the Duttons couldn’t dream of.
“I see people on the same road
I live on who have never worked a lick in their life,” Joe said, his
voice rising. “They’re living on disability incomes, and they’re
healthier than I am.” Maria described a relative who got disability
payments and a Medicaid card for a supposedly bad back, while taking
off-the-books roofing jobs.
Complaints about people unethically exploiting taxpayer-financed
healthcare programs seems identical to the concept of moral hazard.
Again, this attitude is also associated with political conservatism.
But conservatism is not identical to what has been called
“conservative populism” (although the distinction between these two
factions has eroded since 2016). Gawande did not seem to encounter or
engage with conservative populists in his visit to his hometown in Ohio.
Notably, the “free riders” that conservatives lament are abusing
government programs often seem to be … conservative populists.
During the 2016 elections, the BBC News did its own anthropological
fieldwork, and engaged with Trump supporters in small-town North
Carolina. As with the conservative voters that Gawande conversed with,
health care as a right was a hot issue. Unlike conservatives, however,
the conservative populists did not have a problem with the idea of
universal health coverage provided by the government. Their beef was
instead with the Affordable Care Act of 2010. More specifically,
“Obamacare” mandates the purchase of private health insurance — and
conservative populists cannot tolerate government mandates. As a matter
of principle, this would seem to reflect a libertarian desire for
minimal government. However, the conservative populist does not have a
problem with the idea of universal health coverage in itself.
Conservative populists are not classic libertarians any more than
they are classic conservatives. It is difficult to understate just how
economically hollowed-out these rural areas have become — yet unlike the
individualistic, rational libertarian, the conservative populist will
not move to a less blighted area because their hometown is everything to
them. Instead, they blame: foreign countries like China, establishment
“elites”, and foreigners in their midst. In one case, with the closure
of factories, the only good jobs in town were janitorial and were
monopolized by Hispanics who had settled on this niche long before the
collapse of the local economy. Locals stated that once Trump was
elected, the Hispanics would be sent back to Mexico, and locals could
then take their place as janitors and custodians (the journalist noted
that the Hispanics were actually American citizens). Instead of a
libertarian individualist, the rural conservative populist is best
understood as tribal. Sometimes tribalism is starkly individualistic,
and other times it is collectivist and xenophobic (for example, there is
the Arab saying “Me against my brother; me and my brother against our
cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the outsider.”)
.
Another distinction between the libertarian and the conservative
populist pivots on the concept from economics of “negative
externalities”.
In economics, an externality or external cost
is an indirect cost or benefit to an uninvolved third party that arises
as an effect of another party’s (or parties’) activity. It exists when the production or consumption of a product results in a cost to a third party. Air and noise pollution are commonly cited examples of negative externalities.
Libertarians believe in minimal government in contrast to anarchists
who believe in abolishing government. The libertarian believes that
government is necessary to protect citizens from negative externalities
(as well as to compensate for positive externalities, such as the broad
benefits to society from schools and churches). In contrast, the
conservative populist is intensely preoccupied with his own rights — but
not the rights of others. For example, in the 2017 Netflix documentary
“Trophy” about staged big-game hunting in South Africa, an American
“hunter” states that according to the Bible man has dominion over
nature, and therefore he can do whatever he wants to animals. This type
of rationalization typifies how the conservative populist uses orthodox
language to defend his own transgression of the orthodoxy. It could be
that the libertarian streak that distinguishes American conservatism
from its European counterpart is largely an illusion in that that so
much of what seems to be classic American individualism is something
more complicated. The true American libertarian might be a rarer and
more elite character such as an urban professional or a corporate
executive as opposed to the less esteemed yet assertive small
businessman or worker (or “Karen” who insists on personally complaining
to the manager). That is to say, the establishment of the Republican
Party (and of the Democratic Party in a qualified way since the 1990s)
are libertarian in orientation, and this diverges from the
traditionalism of the European conservative establishment (such as the
“Tories” in Britain and the Christian Democrats on the continent) which
has its own collectivism and is not so adverse to big government. In
Europe, the traditionalism of conservative elites trickles down and
stabilizes society and promotes social cohesion, whereas in the USA the
libertarian philosophy of the business elites sinks deep into the
society at large and provides a framework which ordinary people can use
against the establishment. This is very much in line with a major theme
in cultural studies about how ordinary people slyly and surreptitiously
utilize to their advantage the structures of domination that are imposed
upon them by authority. However, in the case of the American lower
classes — and Americans more generally — when they adopt the libertarian
rhetoric of the business elites, it’s also a case of drinking the
ideological Kool-Aid and imagining oneself akin to the affluent,
educated, and isolated suburban individualist.
In sum, the main distinguishing characteristics for the conservative populist in terms of health care as a right are:
They don’t object to it in principle, but
they just don’t want to be forced to buy it.
They are wary of outsiders accruing public benefits, and
they mobilize libertarian rhetoric to diminish the rights of others.
So, the libertarian rhetoric of the conservative populist masks a
very different set of values from that of the classic libertarian.
All of this puts into question the standard view that Americans have a
libertarian bent because they inherited the rugged individualism of
frontiersmen like Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Andrew Jackson.
First, Americans might trace a certain spirit of independence to the
frontier, but the frontier represents community just as much as
individualism. Second, it is the capitalist leadership that had the true
libertarian ethos, and Americans engage in this libertarian ideology —
and sometimes utilize it against the elites.
The rural conservative and the conservative populist are similar to
one another in having a starkly communal and collectivist orientation so
different from the individualistic libertarian ethos. An article in the
New Yorker magazine from 2016 explains that West Virginia’s culture in
particular is unlike the rest of the USA in terms of its commitment to
community and its fervor for Trump. A recent arrival to a town in West Virginia described how he found out that a local church was praying for him every Sunday; it was not even his church and he had never met those parishioners. But the flip side to this communal spirit is communal hostility. A Black man told of how when his family moved into the West Virginia suburbs, on the street in front of his house there was always a car parked with a few white men keeping the family under constant surveillance, and of how cars would drive past their home and the passengers would shoot at the house. In rural West Virginia, people live in
isolated valleys populated by their relatives, and in some cases they
have been in those valleys for generations. They have also been staunch
Democrats in all that time, and their switch to Republican Party is a
wrenching decision. For them, Trump represents everything that the
Democratic Party once stood for. Rather than being corrupted by Trump
(as the leadership of Democratic Party believes), Trump has shown them
the way home.
Another distinction between the conservative and the conservative
populist is the attitude toward authority, with conservatives respectful
of and compliant with legitimate authority figures and conservative
populists suspicious and resentful of authority.
During the initial phase of the vaccine rollout, the New York Times
reported on vaccine hesitancy in rural West Virginia, with some people
expressing complete suspicion of vaccines. One person they interviewed
said that he would avoid any vaccine and instead put his faith into
apple cider vinegar, which he swore cured every affliction that he had
ever suffered from. A community leader explained that a distrust of
authority — both political and medical — among people in the area ran
deep and went back centuries. In fact, he explained that these people
are the descendants of what Americans refer to as the “Scotch-Irish” or
“Scots-Irish” who originated from the chaotic and violent border regions
of Scotland and later settled in Northern Ireland, and so their
hostility to authority dates back to long before their immigration to
the New World. They may have once been Presbyterians and Democrats, and
now they are Evangelicals and Republicans, but their core anti-elitist
attitudes and values have not changed that much.
.
Another fundamental distinction between the conservative, the
libertarian, and the conservative populist is the types of mentality
that ground their self-justification.
Conservatives — and liberals — base their agenda on moral concerns,
whereas libertarians argue that individual rationality is the proper
basis of public policy. As a result, liberals and conservatives
sometimes regard libertarians as sociopaths.
It should be added that progressives like Barack Obama are similar to
libertarians in that they regard reason as the proper guiding principle
of public policy — although for progressives, this rationality is
collective and managerial (for example, Obamacare and public health
generally). Perhaps this technocratic tendency of progressives can be
off-putting to both liberals and conservatives, who might both regard it
as amoral. Indeed, one frequent Republican slur against Obama was that
he was a narcissistic sociopath and con-artist.
Perhaps populism on both the left and the right is based on passion
and emotion rather than on either morality or reason. The difference
between the far-left and far-right might be in the types of emotion that
they exhibit. For leftists, it is intense, breathless idealism, and for
the right it is rage. In sum:
Progressives and libertarians frame their views in terms of rationality.
Liberals and conservatives establish their values on a moral basis.
Populism is based on emotion.
.
In sum, ideological differences that can be obscured under rhetoric.
In fact, hiding such divisions is part of the hard work of any political
party because political parties are always coalitions. Consequently,
identifying the deeper values of all the factions in society can help to
forge public policy that would appeal to a broad swath. In terms of
avoiding moral hazard as an issue in health care, there are at least
three groups of people who are generally perceived as deserving of
health care as a right even if they are not directly paying for it:
military veterans (especially combat veterans);
the elderly; and
children.
Medicare for children is especially of interest because funding for
early childhood development might be one of the most effective ways of
promoting health. Human lifespans have expanded in the developed world
for the past century, but the reasons for this might not be intuitive.
It has been asserted that the primary reason is not because improved
conditions for adults. Rather, humans live longer thanks to improved
prenatal health and improved health in the first two years of life — not
just during the child’s life, but during that of the child’s mother.
Therefore, if a female receives proper care and nutrition while still a
fetus in the womb and during the first two years of her life, and later
her own offspring do as well, then lifespans begin to grow. This would
be the scientific rationale for Medicare for infants. Aside from the
policy objective of improved health, such a policy would form a basis of
cross-ideological understanding and improved social cohesion. (Of
course, there is a question whether Americans actually want social
accord because ideological conflict serves as a source of identity when
community withers as it has in the USA, and is also a source of
entertainment. Some people want to be polarized and do not want to solve
problems.)
No person in the United States
shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied
the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education
program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
— Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute (20 U.S. Code § 1681 – Sex)
One criticism of this policy is that sports programs for girls and
women created to satisfy the requirements of Title 9 do not get funded
like those for males.
There seems to be a tendency to scapegoat school administrators and politicians for not funding female sports.
The reality is that the public has less interest in women’s sports.
Community leaders can feel that they are throwing money away on sports that have a small audience.
It could be that equality in funding school sports will not be
achieved until there is a shift toward participatory sports and away
from spectator sports.
.
The root problem is that "sports" in American schools refers to spectator sports.
In Europe, the focus in the schools is on participatory club sports.
In Europe, anyone who want to play a sport can join a team and play for enjoyment.
Europeans still love spectator sports.
In fact, Europeans spend more per capita than Americans do on spectator sports.
Europeans are sport-obsessed and are sports elitists just like Americans.
But in Europe spectator sports are privatized.
In the USA, in contrast, spectator sports are so often funded by taxpayers or tuition payers in the schools.
It’s one version of the American system in which “profits are privatized and risks and costs are socialized”.
It’s a perverse kind of socialism and a self-destructive kind of capitalism.
However, this arrangement is not perceived as a problem in American schools.
.
It’s been claimed that an emphasis on spectator sports in the schools has health consequences such as the “obesity epidemic”.
For example, twenty years ago, Iceland had a problem with teenage alcoholics.
That problem has been solved with participatory sports for all
students, strict curfews, and public education on the science of brain
development in adolescents.
Just like the “Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan says, a tired dog is a good dog.
Also, dogs secretly want to have rules, structure, community, and leadership.
The Icelandic policy of participatory sports in the schools feels more natural and normal, and less superficial and spectacular.
That is, spectacle is great — at the national and professional level, and not at the local level.
In fact, it might be best if college spectator sports were to be fully professionalized and privatized.
Athletes would be properly compensated professionals within a certain age bracket.
They would never need to set foot on campus.
So-called “college sports” as such would be run by corporations who would pay a fee and/or royalties to the university.
The games would still be played on campus in order to boost school spirit.
But the real “college sports” and high-school sports would be all the
students signing up for all kinds of participatory sports regardless of
audience size.
The idea is to create an educational system that is more inclusive
for students and offers them alternatives and options and choices in
terms of participatory sports — and is properly funded.
This system would also teaches all students the discipline and
teamwork and sportsmanship and so forth that is so valuable to elite
competitive athletes.
Unlike spectator sports, participatory sports would be oriented toward promoting academic performance in the schools.
It would hopefully also reduce social dysfunction like drug use.
.
When we think of “college sports”, we often imagine the small,
homogeneous colleges of a century ago, where the “student athlete” was
someone everyone knew.
Universities today are really corporations that resemble cities — and
they need to be run as the corporations that they really are.
Spectator sports need to be run like the business they are because money-losing operations just don’t make any sense.
Also, the athletes need to recognized as professionals who deserve to
be financially compensated as such — and they don’t need to take
coursework to serve as a locus of identity for the campus.
Immigration rates in the USA are almost at the peak they reached a
century ago before severe restrictions on immigration were imposed in
1924. About 14% of Americans today are foreign born.
In contrast, Australia’s immigration rate is more than twice that of
America’s with 30% of Australia’s population born elsewhere. There is a
certain mystery as to why Australia allows a much higher rate of
immigration because historically Americans have been more open to
immigration. Australians claim that they allow large numbers of
immigrants into their country out of economic necessity, but the same
economic laws also apply to the USA, where immigration is not as popular
as one would expect.
The reason for Australia’s higher immigration rates might be the fact
that Australia does not share a land border with any other country —
especially a poor and populous country. By this theory, if Australia did hypothetically
share land borders with Indonesia and Malaysia, then Australia’s
immigration policy might be as restrictive as Japan’s — with almost zero
immigration.
There might be a tendency for the human mind to lump together all
foreign-born newcomers — whether they are immigrants, refugees, seasonal
migrant workers, or migrants without permission to settle. When a
society experiences an incoming surge of seasonal migrant workers and
migrants without permission to settle, it develops an allergic reaction
against immigrants and refugees. It is guilt by association, and
although it is not fair, it is reality.
But there is also a reverse phenomenon in which idealists react
against restrictions against refugees and immigrants by advocating for
totally unrestricted migration of any sort. For example, the New York
Times tech writer Farhad Manjoo once wrote that the best way to address
Trump-era restrictions on immigration was to adopt the exact opposite
policy. He argued that a borderless world would have thriving economies
because countries with high unemployment rates would find work for their
citizens abroad, and countries with low birth rates would have a new
source of workers, taxpayers, and consumers. First, the best way to
oppose extremism might not be the articulation of a polar opposite
extremist view. Second, the advocacy of a borderless world is not
liberal or socialist, but libertarian or anarchist, and it might have
been the Democratic Party’s libertarian turn in the 1990s that triggered
the backlash from conservative populists (who were, until the 1970s,
the core voters of the Democratic Party).
The argument here is that in a future with less unregulated migration
and fewer migrants, opposition to refugees and immigrants might
diminish. But the 21st-century environmental challenges faced by Central
America and the Caribbean are increasingly harsh, and will probably
lead to economic and state failures that will, in turn, make mass
migration to the USA a constant condition. Because humans tend to
conceptually lump together immigrants, refugees, migrant workers and
mass migration, hostility toward even modest numbers of refugees and
immigrants might intensify. That is not good for the American economy
because America needs population growth. Also, there is a moral
obligation to accept refugees whose lives are endangered and who have no
other options.
The classic example of how unrestricted mass migration can cause a
backlash that lasts for generations is Chinese immigration during the
gold-rush era, when “ceremonial greetings swiftly gave way to bigotry
and violence.”
immigration to the west coast was largely unrestricted, and
pleas by American officials for the Chinese to limit their immigration
went unheeded;
the growth of immigrants from Guangdong province to California grew explosively once gold was discovered in 1849;
almost all the Chinese immigrants were young men rather than families;
there
was a sense that the Chinese were from an alien civilization and
radically different, and while at first that made the Chinese objects of
fascination who were welcome, gold-rush era mass migration from China
triggered a disgust response that mass migration from Ireland and
Germany did not.
To some extent, these are also characteristics of the mass migration
to Europe that commenced in 2015. Most indications today are that the
migrants have settled into their new homes. However, the political
consequences of mass migration to Europe seem to involve a long-term
shift toward the extreme right — and this shift might still be in its
early stages. This shift is evident in the transformation of French
political culture, in which right-wing sentiment that was once taboo is
now mainstream. But there is also the subterranean sweep of such
sentiment throughout the military and police forces in Germany, as a
broad swath of the security forces in Germany conspire to overthrow the
German government if it allows another “invasion”. In fact, the reaction
against unrestricted mass migration might be permanent. After all, the
culminating reaction to young Chinese men flooding into California in
the early 1850s was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which serves as a
backdrop to the Immigration Act of 1924. (The Immigration Act of 1965
opened up immigration to non-Western immigrants, but at the time it was
seen largely as symbolic and not expected to increase immigration rates;
it also favored educated immigrants, which has transformed elite
American universities. In fact, the audience for immigration reform at
the time might have been Blacks and non-Americans; President John
Kennedy republished his 1958 book “A Nation of Immigrants” in 1963,
after his electoral strategy shifted away from the white Southern base
of the Democratic Party toward urban Blacks, but up until this time
Kennedy was focused on the Cold War and lukewarm or even suspicious of
the civil rights movement — until the rest of a world still embroiled in
decolonization and clueless about American segregation started seeing
photographs of Blacks being attacked by police.)
Another example of the tendency to lump together different groups of
people into a single stereotype can be found in the way that the public
perceives homeless people as homogeneous. For some people, the homeless
are “bums” who should be arrested for vagrancy; indeed, in some cases,
the homeless are young men sound in mind and body living a care-free,
wandering life. For others, the homeless are purely victims of society.
It does seem that large numbers of homeless people are schizophrenics
who have been forgotten by society in the aftermath of the
“deinstitutionalization” of the mentally ill from mental hospitals in
the 1970s and the abortive shift to halfway houses. Still other homeless
people are intellectually disabled people who in the past would be
taken care of in small towns, but are now living in the big city (when
they are given a home to live in, so often they will abandon it within
weeks for no good reason). And still other homeless people are bright,
hardworking, middle-class people who ran into a spell of bad luck. The
human brain lumps all these people together into a single group with
uniform characteristics — and tends to (mis-)understand them in
moralistic terms. This results in an inability for politically divided
communities to agree on policy; moreover, when communities are not
ideologically divided (like liberal San Francisco), they end up with a
one-sided and dysfunctional approach that fails to recognize the
complexity of the issues.
There has been a rising trend
among tech elites of ditching digital devices at home. “Bill Gates and
Steve Jobs raised their kids tech-free” was a popular headline for news
stories two years ago. The trend is proven by the enrolment of the
children of tech industry parents in unconventional low-tech schools
such as Brightworks in San Francisco and the many Waldorf schools across
the country. These schools are known for their emphasis on creative
play and a strategic lack of technology based on the belief that kids
learn best through playful, learner-led approaches.
The parents might seem like hypocrites who shield their children from
the technology that they created and sell to the world as a panacea.
However, the parents are not really educational Luddites and the reality
is more complicated. These Silicon Valley parents actually do expose
their children to technology – but only in a restricted way. They want
their children to be creative, and so they limit their children’s
exposure to creative technology (for example, in “makerspaces”) and
avoid destructive technology.
What we found is that tech-elite
parents seeking makerspaces don’t really focus on the technology but are
keen to cultivate creativity and messy play in a safe place, away from
what they view as the harms of unfettered technology use. One could even
argue there is a distinct synergy between the ethos of the makerspace
and that of early years’ learning (even though most makerspaces are for
adults, as is most research about them).
Makerspaces range from no- to
high-tech but the ones we observed in Silicon Valley all relied on
technological resources to a greater or lesser degree. And despite
claims of “tech-free” parenting among tech-elite parents, we found them
eager to benefit from makerspaces provided for young children. Although
seemingly contradictory, as noted in our previous work, parents
attempting a deliberately low-tech home draw a distinction between
productive uses of technology and “mindless” screen time. As they told
us, on the one hand, they restrict technology use at home but, on the
other, they see makerspaces as opportunities for children to engage with
the technological resources in a more controlled way that, as they see
it, is productive rather than “socially destructive.” Indeed, despite
restricting technology at home, these parents still recognised the
importance of digital skills today. Their aim is to stave off technology
as long as possible, building their child’s other skills first in the
hope that they would be sufficient to ensure later responsible and safe
use of technology.
However, they may be enmeshed in a contradiction by carefully guiding
their children’s use of technology (and not banning it) because the
corporations that they work for are pushing for the unrestricted use of
technology.
Again, to their credit, these Silicon Valley parents do publicly
admit that technology can be destructive. Their bosses don’t talk that
way — but in their actions they not only admit it but broadcast it to
the world. Tech industry leaders are buying estates in Hawaii and New
Zealand in order to escape from a potential apocalypse that their own
technology is helping to bring about.
By the standards of American history, this seems like a strange situation on several levels.
It would have been unthinkable if industrialists in the 1920s openly
built estates on distant islands to escape the fall of Western
civilization. It would have been regarded as the stuff of comedy or
treason, especially after the deaths of over one hundred thousand young
American men in the trenches of Europe a few years earlier. There was in
particular a WASP attitude that the captain goes down with the ship
when things do go awry.
Also, the sentiment did not seem to exist a century ago that
industrialists were essentially drug barons getting people addicted to
hatred for one another (although “yellow press” barons like William
Randolf Hearst did whip up hysteria that got America into wars). The
industrialists of the past — like Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller —
might have felt guilty about the lives that they destroyed or the
businesses that they crushed or the politicians that they bought, but
they believed that they were fulfilling a historical mission by building
a new economy. Also, they dealt with their guilt by dedicating their
fortunes to trusts, endowments, and universities. Perhaps Bill Gates
embodies that old pattern of being a hated but respected figure who
built a useful and transformative monopoly, and then dedicated himself
to philanthropy. But Gates seems a singular figure today in this
traditional form of reputation laundering (and he has ironically become a
polarizing figure for presciently warning about pandemics and investing
in vaccines and so forth).
The industrialists of a century ago were compelled to share their wealth out of a mix of calculation and religious belief.
In the 1890s, the first public
relations professionals began advising the wealthy on how to use
philanthropy to placate the public. Many Gilded Age industrialists, like
John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, donated money to support cultural institutions and scientific advancement.
Hamer suggests that these men were
motivated not just by public relations concerns but also by their own
moral codes. Rockefeller’s Baptist faith, for example, taught him that
his monopolistic business practices were in line with Godly behavior,
but also that he was obligated to contribute to his church and to social
causes.
On the other hand, to a number of
other business leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, philanthropy was in conflict with their personal beliefs. Hamer
writes that Wall Street investment speculator Jay Gould “considered
philanthropy hypocrisy, and the future of the public dependent upon his
willingness to take business risks.” Meanwhile, Cornelius Vanderbilt
demonstrated that he wasn’t worried about looking like a bad guy. He won
public favor by reducing transportation costs, but, once the price cuts
had driven competitors out of business, simply hiked them again. “He
cared nothing for public affairs, business ethics, or charity,” Hamer
writes.
Today, the growth of global, publicly financed companies
has further rationalized the business world. It’s up to consumers to
decide whether or not efforts like Walmart’s are cynical public
relations ploys or genuine attempts to do what is right.
The tech billionaires of today are less religious, and so they may be
less inclined toward philanthropy. But in other ways, they may be
captive to the techno-utopianism of 1970s science fiction, and this is
where their religious impulses have been channeled. Like Jay Gould, the
likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk may see their work as their true
legacy and suspect that philanthropy is a distraction. On the other
hand, most of the tech billionaires might not have any idealistic
impulse at all. The historian Jill Lepore examined Facebook’s evolving
mission statements and noted that its earliest statements were merely
utilitarian and described Facebook as a useful tool to keep in touch
with acquaintances, but as Facebook became more controversial the
mission statements took on an increasingly overblown idealistic
save-the-world tone. It turns out that the story of Facebook is really
more about a parochial, for-profit, family-owned business like Forever21
failing to adjust to its eventual gigantic scale, and not a tragedy
about American idealism gone wrong. Once upon a time, California was
ruled by ruthless visionaries like the Stanfords and the Chandlers, but
Silicon Valley today is more like the amoral Cornelius Vanderbilt
talking like Andrew Carnegie.
Perhaps we are all still living in the “reality distortion field”
created by the computer salesman Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs created a subtle
techno-dystopian nightmare when he recast personal technology as
rapidly obsolete consumer luxury goods — and then he tricked idealists
into swooning over Apple’s high-tech jewelry as symbols of progress.
Silicon Valley did not have anything like this prior to Steve Jobs, but
so much that came after Jobs seems like fake gurus and deluded con
artists conning themselves.
How realistic is the prospect that Western civilization will
collapse? There was an article in Foreign Policy that described how
state failure follows a predictable course. In the early stages, the
political culture becomes increasingly corrupted even though political
institutions remain functional and intact. At first, politics starts to
resemble lighthearted entertainment, with politicians like Mussolini
behaving like clowns. However, once installed in power, these
politicians aggressively undermine public institutions, and within at
most a generation the government collapses. In Russia, the staid
mid-level KGB officer Vladimir Putin came into power in 2000 and soon
thereafter started strutting around like a cartoon character without a
shirt; it could be that by 2025 or 2030, Russia will have collapsed and
fragmented into multiple states.
In the democratic world, state collapse might happen in a more benign
fashion. Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, and Britain might
fragment into different countries by 2045 (including northern and
southern England comprising two different countries). Maybe by that time
most Britons will see this as a blessing. After all, a carefully
managed dismemberment of a union that does not make sense in the 21st
century might seem more appealing than perpetual stagnation and
ineptitude.
In the second stage, people become permanently and irreversibly
addicted, and in some cases there is no choice but to cut them out of
your life. That may be where the British have been since the end of WW2,
with their imperialist cosplay paraphernalia of nuclear weapons,
aircraft carriers, pretend monarchy, and James Bond movies.
The third stage is when the brain and body have been permanently wrecked. That might be where Russia is today.
When does a country reach the point of no return in terms of its own fundamental internal cohesion?
Perhaps Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a classic example of living
in a fantasy world and going too far. The Russia expert Fiona Hill
claims that Putin’s objective was not to absorb Ukraine but to shatter
it into several pieces, hence Putin’s use of minimal force early in the
invasion. Hill also noted that Putin is running for reelection in 2024,
and that whenever he invades a country his popularity soars. Of course,
two effects of the invasion have been the exhaustion of the Russian
military, and the disappearance of the mirage of its invincibility. But
the invasion also destroyed Putin’s reputation and that of Russia —
perhaps even in the eyes of educated Russians. For example, here is the
opinion of a Russian dissident and rock star who escaped from Russia.
Exactly 10 years to the day after the cathedral protest, Mr. Putin delivered a ranting speech in which he called Ukraine a country “created by Russia,” laying the groundwork for his invasion.
Ms.
Alyokhina listened to the speech on the radio from a jail cell. The
invasion, she said, had changed everything, not just for her, but for
her country.
“I don’t think Russia has a right to exist anymore,”
she said. “Even before, there were questions about how it is united, by
what values it is united, and where it is going. But now I don’t think
that is a question anymore.”
In a sense, Putin “jumped the shark” in his invasion of Ukraine.
Jumping the shark is a reference to when television sitcoms attempt to
rejuvenate their declining ratings by pulling outrageous stunts that are
out of character for the show.
The idiom “jumping the shark” was coined in 1985 by Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode from the fifth season of the American sitcom Happy Days, in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler)
jumps over a shark while on water-skis. The phrase is pejorative and is
used to argue that a creative outlet or work appears to be making a
misguided attempt at generating new attention or publicity for something
that is perceived once to have been widely popular, but is no longer.
It could be that Brexit was the moment that Britain jumped the shark.
Prime Minister David Cameron had been warned by advisors that Britain
leaving the European Union was so unthinkable that it should never be
put on the ballot and instead Britain should negotiate with the EU to
alter its status. But Cameron seemed to interpret the warning that
Brexit was unthinkable to mean that few would actually vote for it, and
by putting Brexit to a vote he could finally eliminate the issue. In
fact, it has been argued that even the politicians who were Brexit’s
greatest advocates did not actually believe in it or think it would
happen because they were just clowning around to get attention. In a
sense, they were playing to audience of wealthy white suburbanites and
white working-class Londoners who lived in the past and for whom Brexit
represented an amusing way to stick it to the Europeans and their
Napoleonic project. But the lines of fracture on the vote could have
consequences for Britain’s regional politics.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has roused the international community
to the possibility of China invading Taiwan. The invasion of Taiwan
would be a classic case of jumping the shark in that it would be an
outrageous attempt by China to regain popularity with the Chinese people
that would backfire. Such an invasion would be impractical, and the
media keeps pointing out how Taiwan is one of the leading investors in
China and an invasion of Taiwan would be economic suicide for China. On
the other hand, all the other sources of legitimacy of the Chinese
government have disappeared and the project of “reuniting” China has
become China’s only ideological justification. Moreover, reunification
has become a symbolic issue that represents something more obscure. That
is, conquering Taiwan is not the real objective but rather a symbol of
something else — and symbols can take on a greater emotional intensity
than the hidden thing that they represent. This emotional intensity
increases the possibility of an invasion of Taiwan.
What exactly is that largely unspoken issue that hides in plain sight
and feeds China’s anxiety? It is discussed in the American mass media,
but only rarely. It is the history of the Western colonization of Asia.
Despite the very different
experiences — continuous colonial rule in India and piecemeal foreign
domination in China — their history textbooks deal with the past in
similar ways. Two rich, glorious civilizations were humiliated and
brought to their knees, their lands lost and borders redrawn, their
people forced to endure barbarous cruelty and suffering. Today this
bitter remembrance plays out in subtle but important ways in the
international arena.
The legacy of redrawn borders is a key
example. India and China have a reputation for inflexibility when it
comes to territories that they believe were “lost” due to colonialism.
Yet prior to the colonial era, the rulers of both countries had very
flexible ideas about sovereignty.
In India, the Mughal dynasty
controlled the subcontinent through the mansabdari system. The power of
the Mughal ruler, today often called “emperor” but in truth
shah-en-shah, or the king-of-kings, came through his mansabdars —
conquered kings or their descendants who kept their wealth and territory
but swore allegiance to the Mughals and helped defend and administer
their empire.
In China, the emperor’s relationship with the
“barbarians” who peopled the lands around the Middle Kingdom was based
on a tributary system in which they kowtowed to his authority and
received gifts in return. There were no fixed boundaries; they ebbed and
flowed depending on the strength of the relationship.
The rigid
stance on border issues today — India with Pakistan over Kashmir, for
example, and China with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, as well
as tensions over Taiwan — are seen as the result of colonial meddling.
External intervention or offers of mediation are vehemently rejected
because they revive memories of foreign interference.
“Humiliation”
is a word that appears over and over in the two countries — in
political speeches, newspapers articles and history textbooks.
Government officials are extremely sensitive to any appearance of caving
in to foreign pressure and interference.
In their earlier histories, great civilizations were conquered by
stereotypical “barbarians” like the Mongols. As intolerable as that
might have been, it was not as humiliating as being conquered by a
technologically superior West (and this includes social technology, like
“democracy”). Making it even worse, the West had a radically
egalitarian religion, which swept through the world like a pandemic and
served to dissolve and discredit indigenous traditions. In the case of
China, a political and economic variant of this alien religion is now
the official ideology of the nation (Marxism). Perhaps an ongoing
project of self-Westernization creates a lingering self-loathing and a
haunting feeling that one is being colonized and humiliated.
There is the possibility that China has already jumped the shark in
terms of its post-vaccination zero Covid policy. Putting entire regions
into lockdown and killing everyone’s pets is going to outrage the
population. But this can be seen as classic jumping the shark in that popularity was
the objective of a draconian zero-Covid policy that has become absurd
in the face of the extremely transmissible Omicron variants. That is,
zero Covid as a policy was popular in the pre-Omicron era and was
advertised as reflecting the unique efficacy of the Chinese government.
This is an example of the appeal of authoritarianism and how
authoritarian states must sell themselves to the population as being
capable of doing what other forms of government cannot.
In fact, authoritarianism or any other form of government has
democratic roots because in order to survive, the government must appeal
to pre-existing values and attitudes. This “sociological democracy” was
evident in, for example, the Scandinavian conquest of Sicily in that
Sicily’s Scandinavian rulers pragmatically maintained traditional
Sicilian institutions and adopted themselves to the ways of the
conquered.
But what do these blond-haired,
blue-eyed paladins have to do with the folklore of Sicily? This island
was once ruled by a people that made Palermo the seat of one of the most
brilliant and enlightened courts in all of Europe. The people, who were
descendants of the Vikings, came from the north and were called
Norsemen or Normans. They brilliantly executed several expansionist
campaigns that led to the invasion of France (Normandy) in the ninth
century, the conquest of England in 1066 and the acquisition of southern
Italy between the 11th and 12th centuries.
Moreover, their
tolerance for the existing cultures and their benevolence in ruling
gained them such a secure place in the folklore of this land that it is
not unusual, even today, for a Sicilian boy’s heroes to include, not
only soccer players and rock stars, but also knights of old with names
like Ruggero (Roger) and Guglielmo (William) – which are still popular
boy’s names here.
Besides being good statesmen and rulers, the
Normans also made a significant cultural contribution by bringing
together in harmony – in the churches, palaces and castles they built –
the skill of French and Sicilian masons, the decorative purity of Arab
ornamentation and the splendor of Greek Byzantine mosaics.
Likewise, the Chinese state has to appeal to deeply held traditional
values such as the desire for prosperity, security, and prestige rather
than an exuberant and potentially reckless open political system. In
fact, these same conservative values explicitly underpin Singapore’s
democracy. Lee Kwan Yew used to say that China was Confucian and not
really communist, meaning that even the revolutionary communist
leadership still unknowingly functioned along traditional lines. But
what if the tradition in China runs deeper than Confucianism? Recently,
there have been violent attacks in China by men against women in public
because the women were not escorted by men. The police make obligatory
arrests such incidents, but there is no sense of urgency or a desire to
address the problem. There is a brutal patriarchal core to Chinese
society onto which Confucius merely tacked on his philosophy of
education. At least, this was one critique of the 1990 film “Dou Ju”
which portrayed an unhappy adulterous couple languishing amidst the
brute machinery of their dye factory, which was a metaphor for the
patriarchy. The movie reflected Marxist and liberal values and
accordingly won all sorts of international awards, but it was banned for
a time in China, and was even unpopular among Chinese women.
Americans cannot understand the democratic roots of authoritarianism
because they think in simple terms of “democracy versus
authoritarianism”. Moreover, authoritarian states create their own
malignant kind of democracy once they become entrenched. In a
totalitarian society, civil society is either eliminated or appropriated
by the state, but in its place there emerges a poisonous new kind of
democracy in which people become preoccupied with surveilling and
snitching on their neighbors. For example, the typical Gestapo officer
in Nazi Germany supposedly did not carry a gun because he was a
librarian amassing and organizing the copious (and unsolicited)
information poring in from ordinary Germans.
The sociologist and computer scientist Zeynep Tufekci warns that the
personal information that Americans have been complacent about sharing —
such as search histories on the symptoms of pregnancy, location data,
medical appointment histories, and purchase records for items such as
pregnancy test kits — can now be used as circumstantial evidence in a
murder trial. Tufekci does not mention that this information will
probably not be rooted out and collected by reluctant and exhausted
police officers or prosecuting attorneys, but rather by anonymous
do-gooders publishing your private stuff online (with much of the data
being erroneous — or worse yet, even the accurate stuff will be
misconstrued to imply guilt).
Also, there is already an established puritanical culture of
snitching within left-wing academia. The right-wing is purely reactive
to and imitative of the left-wing, so that radical activism really
starts in left-wing universities and eventually finds a home among
conservative populists. Academia today is quite notorious for its
culture of ratting out professors and students who are not perfectly
“woke” or politically correct (or who have the misfortune of appearing
apostate at one forgotten moment long ago). The right-wing will
eventually turn against itself in the same way, outing people who are
not extreme enough. Among the right-wing, this might involve more than
“merely” the loss of a tenure-track professorial job at an elite
university, but the loss of life. The point is that snitching — even
over illusory transgressions — might go mainstream.
The point is that democracy and authoritarianism are not quite the
opposites that Americans assume they are, and this has implications for
digital security. For example, it has been noted that Russian and
American histories are inverted reflections of one another. That is, the
great crimes against humanity committed by the Russian state find their
parallel in the USA in the activities of the American public. For
instance, in Russia, the tsars pushed their domains eastward into
Siberia, whereas in the USA it was ordinary people who ventured out onto
the western frontier. In Russia, the aristocracy imposed serfdom on the
population, whereas in America it was the majority that imposed chattel
slavery on a minority. In the Soviet Union, Stalinist mock trials
condemned those who might someday pose a threat to the regime, whereas
in the USA there were the communist “witch hunts” of the 1950s. Today,
the Chinese state is using Covid as an excuse to build up a surveillance
state, whereas in America today it is ordinary Americans who are
creating such a state through complacency and snitching.
.
Perhaps the most peculiar thing about extremely intelligent
billionaires preparing for an apocalypse is the ill-conceived way that
they are going about it. For example, there are businesses that rent out
luxury apartments in decommissioned missile silos; but if the world is
slipping into chaos and societal collapse, is the best place to weather
out the storm in an underground bunker for months or years with 75
wealthy and heavily armed strangers (especially if the most realistic
threat is another pandemic)?
Also, civilizations might collapse, but societies don’t — because
they reconstitute themselves at the local level. If civilization were to
collapse, eventually the long-aggravated locals on Kauai and Lanai and
in New Zealand might turn against tech billionaires in their midst.
Also, in the extreme scenario that these billionaires are planning for,
their wealth on the stock market might no longer exist, and money might
not be in circulation. Also, in the apocalypse, the last place that one
wants to be is on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that
imports almost all of its food and has an economy based almost entirely
on tourism, real estate, and the military, and has only clinics and not
serious hospitals.
The best places for the tech elite to survive the apocalyptic
scenario that haunts their guilt-ridden dreams might be the same places
that have been described as the best places to survive global warming.
Everyone seems to have their own list of such places, but in an extreme
scenario, the best places would supposedly be just north of mid-sized
American cities along the Canadian border which have abundant sources of
water. That boils down to at least two places: Seattle, and the chain
of cities from the Great Lakes to Maine.
Another way to survive for the super-wealthy would be to stop showing
off all their stuff in public. Instead of a $250 condominium in
Manhattan that grabs headlines, it might be more prudent to emulate Ted
Turner, who owns two million acres of land and ranches bison on it. No
one resents Turner for owning ranch land, and it just might make a great
getaway during the zombie apocalypse.
“[Wanting to form my own eponymous
line] came from a desire to create something that wasn’t out there
already. I was really in tune with the market—I knew what existed, and I
wanted this to be different. Maybe it’s the small-town boy in me, but
I’ve always loved the prep school look, traditional Ivy League, and the
clothes that sailors and jocks wear. I wanted to take these familiar old
things and give them a more laid-back attitude, to make them modern and
cool.”
Hilfiger was also inspired by “subcultures” in the music industry.
A professed lifelong fan of rock and roll, Hilfiger’s collections are often influenced by the fashion of music subcultures.
Word on the street back in the 1990s was that Hilfiger was inspired
by African American designers of men’s clothes. In particular, Hilfiger
was inspired by their earth-toned panel shirts for men that were loose,
longs-sleeved, and buttoned down. Hilfiger took this design and shifted
to bright primary colors and marketed it as a fun preppie design. In a
way, Hilfiger did what the early Beatles had done by:
taking “rhythm and blues” and
making it more fun, whimsical, mainstream, and approachable, but
also keeping it clean, classy, and formal.
That’s a perfect recipe for artistic success and a difficult
balancing act. It’s also another case of getting rich by rebranding a
minority’s creativity (although rebranding is itself a creative
endeavor).
Unfortunately, none of the above can be confirmed because there is no
trace of it on the Internet. And that’s a shame because the old
whispered rumors of the Hilfiger origin story triggered everything
written below.
The 1980s was also the period when Benetton rose to fame through its controversial shock advertising campaign.
Under the guise of enlightened progressive politics, Benetton aimed
to trigger a reactionary repulsion — for example, to racial integration.
Benetton is known for its sports sponsorships, and for its “United Colors” advertising campaign. In 1982, Benetton hired Oliviero Toscani as creative director, which led to a change in advertising focus towards raising awareness for various issues worldwide.[12] In 1984, Toscani photographed the first multiracial ad for the brand.[3]
In
1989, Toscani refocused Benetton’s advertising strategy under the
“United Colors of Benetton” campaign. The campaign’s graphic,
billboard-sized ads depicted a variety of shocking subjects, including
the deathbed scene of a man (AIDS activist David Kirby) dying from AIDS.[13] Another
ad featured a bloodied, unwashed newborn baby with umbilical cord still
attached. The newborn ad prompted roughly 650 complaints to the British Advertising Standards Authority,
which noted in its 1991 annual report that the Benetton baby ad
“attracted more complaints than we have ever previously known.”[14] A third ad included a black stallion copulating with a white mare,[15] while a fourth advert showed a light-skinned girl with blond hair hugging a dark-skinned boy whose hair was shaped into devil horns.[16]
In 2000, Benetton was included in the reference publication Guinness World Records for the “Most Controversial Campaign.”[17]
In
November 2011, Benetton created the UNHATE Foundation, launching a
worldwide communication campaign described as an invitation to leaders
and citizens of the world to combat the “culture of hatred.”
In some ways, Ralph Lauren’s 2022 Polo advertising campaign has the
fashion sense of Tommy Hilfiger in the 1980s, with the primary colors of
a McDonald’s restaurant applied to preppie fashion. It also has
Benetton’s advertising hallmark of conspicuous racial diversity, but
with shock value replaced by elite appeal.
To be sure, Ralph Lauren’s 2022 Polo is tasteful and excellent. But
it doesn’t seem original and daring or brilliant. The preppie aspect
brings to mind the critique of Ivy League graduates as “excellent sheep”
with perfect SAT scores. In retrospect, while Benetton’s shock campaign
represented 1980s capitalism at its most cynical, it was bold and
imaginative. Likewise, Tommy Hilfiger was also genuinely new and
invigorating, with its fun, modernized take on stodgy upper-class,
east-coast clothing. Fashion always involves recycling old ideas, but
with an inspired new twist. That does not seem to exist today. That is,
Ralph Lauren’s Polo seems to aim (unconsciously?) for a sweet spot of
the 1980s, without the innovation of the 1980s.
First, none of the above can be confirmed, especially by we outsiders
who do not live in Manhattan nor work in fashion. So everything above
is admittedly free association regarding what by all accounts seems to
be an thoroughly amoral yet captivating fashion industry.
Second, this is just one more take on the theme of stagnation which has become so popular.
This sterile nostalgia is reminiscent of the past several years. The
2020 protests gave off a kind of retro cosplay vibe of the 1960s, like
Coachella or Burning Man. The 2022 Supreme Court is likewise a fantasy
simulation of the 1950s uncoupled from a true conservatism that would
evolve to solve practical modern problems even while committed to
maintaining legal continuity by observing precedent. (The abortion rate
of American Catholics is the same as the general American population.)
Cultural stagnation touches on the subject of nostalgia, which might
be stronger in the political realm than in the realm of fashion. After
all, it’s normal to recycle the obscure fashions of their grandparents
for a younger generation that has a naive sense of fun about the past.
For example, when the movie “Bonnie and Clyde” came out in 1967, it
generated a fashion craze for the forgotten styles and clothing of the
1920s and 1930s — which would probably have seemed peculiar for those
who lived through the First World War, the “Spanish flu” pandemic, and
the Great Depression. That is, the movie was politically conscious in
that it was set during the Great Depression, but the fads inspired by
the movie seem depoliticized. Likewise, “That ’70s Show” debuted in
1998, but it portrayed the 1970s as a time of innocence and blandness,
with the adults locked into the 1950s and the hip kids more like
creatures of the generic 1980s. And maybe the current discussion of
decadence and creative stagnation has its own nostalgia and might
overlook the darkness and disintegration of eras like the 1970s that
were creative but were characterized by tumult and anomie. Perhaps those
who live in chaotic times yearn for a wholesome past (and so Reagan got
elected), whereas those who live in a period of peace and relative
prosperity worry about economic, cultural, and moral stagnation and
decadence. So, on television in the 2000s, the 1970s was a golden age of
innocence, while for cinema buffs, the 1970s was the high point of the
bold New Hollywood that washed away the stale studio system.
It’s not surprising that people tend to have a nostalgia for periods
of time that they did not live through. But what about those who have a
very strong nostalgia for a period of time that they did live through?
It could be that they are really thinking about personal memories as
opposed to social history. For example, during the protests of 2020, it
was often stated that “2020 was 1968 all over again”. This raised to
prominence models of cyclical political history that Peter Turchin has
most recently revitalized by illustrating underlying cycles of economic
inequality. This seems ominously valid as work by economists who study
inequality has moved into the mainstream. However, 1968 was a special
case because all over the world there was civil unrest and a breakdown
of authority, even in radically egalitarian China under Mao. In
contrast, the protests of 2020 were quite limited and mild compared to
1968 — and mostly limited to the USA — and political scientists (and
Turchin, IIRC) are warning that the real unrest and political
polarization is going to happen the future and is not behind us. Also,
in the USA, 1968 was the year that the civil rights movement largely
unraveled. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of
1965 were breakthroughs but a sense of disappointment set in soon after
because the legal revolution did not lead to an immediate social and
economic transformation. It could be argued that the riots of 1968
following the assassination of Martin Luther King brought an end to the
civil rights movement.
But 1968 was also the year of the riot at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago. The protests at the convention related to the
Vietnam War and not the civil rights movement. Moreover, this has been
described as a “police riot” because it was the police who were engaged
in violence against almost any civilian in the vicinity.
During
the evening of August 28, 1968, with the police riot in full swing on
Michigan Avenue in front of the Democratic party’s convention
headquarters, the Conrad Hilton hotel, television networks broadcast
live as the anti-war protesters began the now-iconic chant “The whole world is watching“.
When the older generation of Baby Boomers stated that “2020 is 1968
all over again”, it was this police riot against young white protesters
opposed to the Vietnam War that might have been what they were referring
to — and not the civil rights movement.
Also, to some extent the Baby Boomers might be thinking of the
Woodstock concert of 1969 when they think of the “revolution of 1968”.
For them, the real transformation was personal, with their embrace of
critical thought, creativity, and individualism (and new forms of
consumerism and conformity), and their sharp break from their parents’
stoic ethic of duty.
