My personal perspective is American and I spent 34 years of my life in government service.
One can only conclude that “western democracy” is an utter failure, that its governments are now completely controlled by weaselly insiders who through sheer self-regard and dumb perseverance managed to ingratiate themselves with the monomaniacal psychopaths who have gained high office under the control of billionaire oligarchs via election by the plurality of eligible voters who can be bothered to turn out for the limited choices on offer.
I refer in my country to the likes of Larry Summers, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, Victoria Nuland, and Antony Blinken, who have been foremost figures driving America’s inane foreign policy over the past 30 years, resulting in mass slaughter throughout the Levant and now on the northern littoral of the Black Sea. These are the American “sausage makers” and you’re quite right: they don’t appear to listen to anyone but themselves.
This has long been obvious. We are not ruled by well-meaning muddlers but by full-blown Game Of Thrones sociopaths.
Representative democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so.
The technical term for this is a "beard". That is, a cover for the rulers to do what they want, even though the rulers themselves and their policies all may be wildly unpopular. After all, your elected representatives approved this. If you don't like it, you can vote for a different carefully vetted corporate imperialist muppet, so until then, shut up and fall in line!
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind.
This brings me to the real advantage of a western style representative democracy - in a more authoritarian system, everyone knows where the power really lies and there is no passing the buck. A Xi cannot tell the masses that he'd really really like to help but see, his hands are tied by some procedural rule and there's nothing to be done, unfortunately.
Notice that we never hear these excuses when it comes to putting another war on the credit card or when it's time to bail the billionaires out at the casino again. Or, as Aurelien shows, when asking the UK to cease active and conscious support for genocide.
Yet the system worked reasonably well for a hundred years or so. And I suppose it was run by the same kind of stupids then, at least I have read many satires that said so. In Sweden we had the brilliant satirist August Strindberg about 1880-1912; nobody comes close today.
So I guess there were other correcting forces. It seems that we had a reasonable control of the parliamentarians, on different levels. The farmers' party people elected farmers they knew, the labour party people elected trade unionists they knew, I suppose the bourgeoisie party people elected professionals they knew. They might not have been the brightest of people but they were reasonably honest, because the electorate – or a good chunk of it – kept a tight hand. And this was possible because there were public spaces controlled by the participant people. The farmers had their cooperatives and associations, the workers had their trade unions and working-class quarters where they dominated business. Etc.
It was much more difficult to cheat at that time (I'm talking about the the first half of the 20th century). Some fifty years before that time Marx tried to explain the success of the obvious charlatan Louis Napoleon Bonaparte: Farmers voted for him because they had no opportunity to check who he was, but he talked good. But then people began to organize and this kind of charlatans disappeared for a while in the well-organized countries.
But now we are back, because we don't bother to organize; we hope, against all good reason, that the charlatans willl take us out of the mess.
This fear began largely after WWII. But the relative honesty of MPs began as early as the 19th century (I'm now talking about the country I know best, Sweden). For example, when it was discovered that the governing political party had received a lot of money from a shady financier in 1929 its PM was sacked immediately and his party suffered a big setback in the following election. Or another earlier case, when it was discovered that an ex-minister had forged a signature about 1870 he was even forced to flee abroad. People took these things seriously at the time.
I'm not talking about morals, fifty years earlier, in the early 18th century, Sweden was as corrupt as a Central Asian 'stan. But what was true was that people were organized and could keep politicians tight. They can't now. Ability of collective action – asabiya as Ibn Khaldoun called it – is very low. I wonder how that could be changed.
It wasn't serious until WWII. George Kennan witness that the great powers that mixed into the Russian civil war weren't interested in Bolshevik power per se, only in the stability of the Eastern Front so that the Germans wouldn't transfer one million soldiers to the Western Front. He read the government protocols to write Russia and The West under Lenin and Stalin.
It was certainly not serious enough to change the behaviour of the whole political elite. They were serious country builders and representatives of their people (of course mostly the bourgeolsie) from the mid 1800s, not self-seeking and pleasure-loving degenerates as those living now.
What I find amusing and interesting about this is (a) how this utterly undermines the idea deeply baked into the popular understanding of democracy, even the ones that are slightly more sophisticated, that the public as a whole has any hope of using protests and voting to influence the government. Essentially Aurielian in talking about the sausage factory has made it clear that whatever it is that goes into makingthe sausage, citizens are not part of the game. (b) His examples of campaigns that do work have in common people working in an organised fashion and using money, tons of it, to buy lobbying influence either with the media, politicians or both. Again, something the average ordinary citizen has no access to. Again, something utterly divorced from the popular conception of democracy as sold to the electorate.
This essay more than any other I've read from him explodes the idea that the administrative state that comprises western governments, at the minimum in its current form (though it sounds as if it has never been any different), is structured so as to be responsive by the process of elections to make policy that listens to what people want. The people's will is utterly irrelevant to the government. Now, I've personally only believed that when I was a teenage, but he does the valuable in explaining the details and mechanics of why this is so. But remember that this is the basis on which electoral democracies are sold to western publics and non-western nations: elections = government that responds to the people. Little wonder that people are starting to sour on democracy.
Finally, all his comments on NGOs makes clear one thing: whether the NGO ecosystem started primarily as a good will effort, the ecosystem has turned into a grift machine for the very simple reason that where there is money to be made from an activity, the grifters will come in to take it. And for the very simple reason that the NGO grifters will be more adept at focusing on getting money rather than channeling resources into achieving their goals, these will crowd out the ones who are more sincere. Added to the fact that government has also turned into a PR game, the political grifters and the NGO grifters are aligned in their goals and methods.
This is the end result of the current form of the western democratic framework. Whether it can continue to survive in this form or whether changes are imposed on it, time and history will tell.
"Finally, all his comments on NGOs makes clear one thing: whether the NGO ecosystem started primarily as a good will effort, the ecosystem has turned into a grift machine for the very simple reason that where there is money to be made from an activity, the grifters will come in to take it."
Just as money attracts grifters, power attracts sociopaths the way catnip attracts cats, the way a big pile of unguarded cocaine attracts addicts.
Amen. It was obvious when I was a teen, and it is one of the few ideas I never changed. But, for your last sentence, just let me tell you:
The formal structure and instituions of political systems are not so important, and maybe the behaviours and good decisions is what matter. I say it because the "democracy" is not the causo of our failure, like it was not the cause of our succes. Chinese are not succeeding for their system, as they not fall in the XIX for theyr sistem. (I mean, it has influence).
It is well written, although very confusing. This confusion seems to reflect the general state of British and Western politics. This is a psychological crisis when desires do not match with opportunities. The British need to curb their desires to lead the whole world - and, as Comrade Stalin said, life will immediately become better and more fun.
Why are Londoners so worried about Kharkiv and Odessa? When I was a young man, I wanted to go to Kharkov to study, but changed my mind and decided to go to Moscow right at the train station) Trains ran every half hour, and it was easy to make a choice. Compared to the British, at the age of 18, I made the right strategic choice.
Now, living in Moscow and listening to Putin and Russian politicians, I don't feel any confusion. Their words are very rational and understandable to literally everyone. Our goals are clear and our tasks are defined. The budget is calculated and distributed. Of course, there is also enough criticism, but I repeat - everything is very rational.
For the last 2 years I have been a reader of Karl Sanchez's substack where he regularly provides translations of Putin, Lavrov, and other speeches and interviews as well as internal Russian planning meetings covering most areas of the economic and social spectrum. They are, without exception. easy to follow, very logical , and rather compelling.
I would categorise them as containing little 'noise'.
Contrast that with most Western communications, and British in particular, and most is 'noise'. However it is possible to discern trends running through the noise. Applying 'fuzzy logic' you can ascertain the likely outcomes of various apparently inconsistent statements and moves.
My one view is that this is deliberate obfuscation in many instances, its not just the random nature of the sort of contradictory forces that Aurelien describes. Britain didn't get is reputation as 'perfidious albion' for nothing.
Thank you for continuing to explain to the world's idealists, moralists, oversimplifiers and lazy, intellectually-limited pundits, that the world of politics is immensely complex, often opaque to outsiders, and sometimes nearly unfathomable. Even though they are not listening and couldn't hear it even if they wanted to. And continuing to explain that sometimes it can appear fully as a Theatre of the Absurd, such as listening to a Putin or Lavrov speech and then a Trump one. And your lengthy examples are so much more compelling than most of the bald assertions from most political writers.
I thought Yanis Varoufakis' latest interview on Why Everything Feels Broken (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUXiMi4bY68) was, while less nuanced than your article, on point to what you're saying. Excerpt:
[My long-time adversary] Larry Summers, in a midnight bar conversation told me “If you want to be an outsider, then the system will vomit you out, spew you out even, and you will maintain your ethics and do your thing out there, and you'll be irrelevant. If you want to stay inside, there is a golden rule: you never cross other insiders, and you try to make small, marginal changes within as long as the rest of the insiders tolerate it. Which one of the two are you?” The system can deliver gigantic returns to you personally — as long as you accept your powerlessness. You are lured by that powerlessness to try to be part of the powerful thing.
Christine Lagarde, then-managing director of the IMF at the time, said to me that she agreed with everything I was saying, which is shocking. It's shocking, you know, you come off the street as a demonstrator, Marxist, Leftist and she says your analysis is completely right: What [the IMF is] doing cannot work. What the system is doing cannot work. But [when you're an insider] your reputation, she said, and your career will depend on you accepting that we have invested so much political capital in this thing that can't work, that you can't go against it. You've got to accept it.
So, It boils down to: How does the movement make sure that its representatives, once they get elected and they go into these rooms, will not be lured by this and will stay connected to the movement? [Yanis' question, not mine]
There are some things that DO cut through because they are so horrendous. Gaza is one of them. I stand every week with a placard that says Honk (for peace) in Gaza....and most car drivers do. And one point about general politics that you miss is that when Governments become unpopular the masses tend to focus on one thing that sums up all their angst: today it is Gaza. We all have different agends but (almost) everybody wants to stop the slaughter of mothers and children. I have served as a senior officer and as a politician and don't know anybody who doesn't condemn it - and there is overwhelming condemnation that will affect the results of the next election. And as far as I am concerned, Ukraine and Gaza are two fronts in the same war. Sometimes to change policy you need to substitute the scalpal with the blunderbuss....
Where does BBC (and the rest of MSM) with its mastery of narrative control fit in The Sausage Factory? Is there an invisible hand orchestrating Matrix like grip over plebeian population, stirring up Russophobia like it's 1917 (1854) again? Who decides to send a reconnaissance plane over Gaza and pass info to Israel? I'm not sure The Sausage Factory can manage those negligible little things without help of invisible hands.
The usual exercise in cynicism (which I’ve come to expect here), based on acceptance of the status quo. The status quo can only survive through acceptance of it by its minions, and they accept what they are told it is, and 'it' in turn accepts them as its support base. So, a self-supporting, anti-gravity system. But even though this is supposed to be ‘severely practical’ - fortunately for all of us, gravity always wins in the end - at least, until the next cycle is enabled.
Some gems:
“opposition in general came from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its satellites, whose approach eschewed practical arguments altogether, and emphasised moral condemnation”.
So, according to the author, raising the possibility of the extinction of humanity through nuclear war is not a ‘practical argument’. If indeed it is not, then . . . ?
“at a certain point people like me look up from their desks and stare at each other, asking “how the **** did we get here?” - See paragraph 1 above.
“The question, Should we even be doing this? is never actually posed because there isn’t time.” - Or, see paragraph 1 above.
“British participation in the Second Iraq War was a massively important priority for the government of the day, and public opposition, albeit quite extensive, didn’t qualify as one of the deciding factors.”
So, that’s all right then, just a question of focussing the attention in the right place. (Don’t look at the corpses - not the ‘right place’).
Well, I can’t be bothered with any more of my (or possibly his) no-doubt ‘ill-informed assertions’. But I feel sorry for old Niccolo though - jealously’s not a good look for the dead.
Apparently not actively and consciously participating in a full-blown daylight genocide is just not feasible, after all, look how badly it would go over with the Americans!
You stated: "the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in Africa, mostly left over from massive Soviet and Chinese deliveries during the Cold War".
substantiate this comment please, it does not seem plausible as a factor after such intensive and ongoing European colonisation before, during and after the cold war. not to mention that China was dirt poor back then, how could they flood Africa with weapons? come on man.....
Goodness me, it's common knowledge. Look at any number of photos and videos. China had more AK47 copies than it knew what to do with, and of course had a very active Africa policy in the 1970s.
The idea that the uk would have to give up its permanent seat on the UNSC if it were to give up nuclear weapons is a joke. India has The Bomb and doesn't have a Security Council veto. Neither does Pakistan.
Similarly, the idea that the Americans are impressed with british bomb-making and that this somehow represents a source of influence with the Americans.
The uk has a seat on the UNSC because the Americans say so. Similarly, the Americans are impressed with british self-regard and the plummy accents and their ass-kisding talent. That is the source of their influence with the Americans. Not their submarine.
The implied resort to the primacy of 'experience' as opposed to external analysis is just a rhetorical device, and is hardly worth pointing out as a fallacy.
>>Similarly, the idea that the Americans are impressed with british bomb-making and that this somehow represents a source of influence with the Americans.<<
ahhh British tanks are designed to be more eco-friendly while rolling over corpses, you know
This article brought back memories of when I was an adolescent during the Viet Nam war. My young mind was completely convinced by moral arguments and it was very easy to make predictions of all kinds. I was repeatedly perplexed by the fact that things turned out differently than how I had imagined them. Then it dawned on me that moral argument seemed to carry no weight. It was a troubling thought. Then I learned that leading figures could lie, and the media would just repeat those lies without compunction. This article explains this situation from the other side. It is a sad awakening.
The UK civil service when I was there in the late 60s, early 70s, was a technocracy. Buy inclination, education and training I'm an engineer, and I fitted in very well. The politicians, by which I mean the salespeople, came and went with monotonous regularity, but their effect on policy was negligible. To a man (it was only men) we were devoted to getting as much a bang , as you could for the tax payer buck, simple as that.
Fast forward 50 years, to anyone who is looking It will look like a corporatocracy.
In the near the future , a techno feudal society is planned.
One thing is clear and that is the political class treat the electorate with total contempt. Perhaps they deserve to be treated in such a way for being completely shafted.
My take away: They do, indeed, live in a bubble. They don't listen to you because they don't serve you. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. They hate it when you make them do stuff.
This post is related and interesting https://themindness.substack.com/p/weaponizing-time-elite-anxiety-and. Among other things it describes how European politicians are groomed to form a coterie that doesn't have to be influenced since they already have a fixed set of ingredients for the sausage. As a side remark, we have seen fit to borrow the word "coterie" into Swedish (kotteri), probably because we have many of them at all levels.
My personal perspective is American and I spent 34 years of my life in government service.
One can only conclude that “western democracy” is an utter failure, that its governments are now completely controlled by weaselly insiders who through sheer self-regard and dumb perseverance managed to ingratiate themselves with the monomaniacal psychopaths who have gained high office under the control of billionaire oligarchs via election by the plurality of eligible voters who can be bothered to turn out for the limited choices on offer.
I refer in my country to the likes of Larry Summers, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, Victoria Nuland, and Antony Blinken, who have been foremost figures driving America’s inane foreign policy over the past 30 years, resulting in mass slaughter throughout the Levant and now on the northern littoral of the Black Sea. These are the American “sausage makers” and you’re quite right: they don’t appear to listen to anyone but themselves.
This has long been obvious. We are not ruled by well-meaning muddlers but by full-blown Game Of Thrones sociopaths.
Representative democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so.
The technical term for this is a "beard". That is, a cover for the rulers to do what they want, even though the rulers themselves and their policies all may be wildly unpopular. After all, your elected representatives approved this. If you don't like it, you can vote for a different carefully vetted corporate imperialist muppet, so until then, shut up and fall in line!
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind.
This brings me to the real advantage of a western style representative democracy - in a more authoritarian system, everyone knows where the power really lies and there is no passing the buck. A Xi cannot tell the masses that he'd really really like to help but see, his hands are tied by some procedural rule and there's nothing to be done, unfortunately.
Notice that we never hear these excuses when it comes to putting another war on the credit card or when it's time to bail the billionaires out at the casino again. Or, as Aurelien shows, when asking the UK to cease active and conscious support for genocide.
Yet the system worked reasonably well for a hundred years or so. And I suppose it was run by the same kind of stupids then, at least I have read many satires that said so. In Sweden we had the brilliant satirist August Strindberg about 1880-1912; nobody comes close today.
So I guess there were other correcting forces. It seems that we had a reasonable control of the parliamentarians, on different levels. The farmers' party people elected farmers they knew, the labour party people elected trade unionists they knew, I suppose the bourgeoisie party people elected professionals they knew. They might not have been the brightest of people but they were reasonably honest, because the electorate – or a good chunk of it – kept a tight hand. And this was possible because there were public spaces controlled by the participant people. The farmers had their cooperatives and associations, the workers had their trade unions and working-class quarters where they dominated business. Etc.
It was much more difficult to cheat at that time (I'm talking about the the first half of the 20th century). Some fifty years before that time Marx tried to explain the success of the obvious charlatan Louis Napoleon Bonaparte: Farmers voted for him because they had no opportunity to check who he was, but he talked good. But then people began to organize and this kind of charlatans disappeared for a while in the well-organized countries.
But now we are back, because we don't bother to organize; we hope, against all good reason, that the charlatans willl take us out of the mess.
The system was more equitable in large part because of fear of communism.
Now that the Soviet Union is gone, the rulers no longer have to offer a better deal.
This fear began largely after WWII. But the relative honesty of MPs began as early as the 19th century (I'm now talking about the country I know best, Sweden). For example, when it was discovered that the governing political party had received a lot of money from a shady financier in 1929 its PM was sacked immediately and his party suffered a big setback in the following election. Or another earlier case, when it was discovered that an ex-minister had forged a signature about 1870 he was even forced to flee abroad. People took these things seriously at the time.
I'm not talking about morals, fifty years earlier, in the early 18th century, Sweden was as corrupt as a Central Asian 'stan. But what was true was that people were organized and could keep politicians tight. They can't now. Ability of collective action – asabiya as Ibn Khaldoun called it – is very low. I wonder how that could be changed.
I dunno, the Bolshevik Revolution sure threw a scare into elites. Before that, it was anarchists that were the Bete Noire.
It wasn't serious until WWII. George Kennan witness that the great powers that mixed into the Russian civil war weren't interested in Bolshevik power per se, only in the stability of the Eastern Front so that the Germans wouldn't transfer one million soldiers to the Western Front. He read the government protocols to write Russia and The West under Lenin and Stalin.
It was certainly not serious enough to change the behaviour of the whole political elite. They were serious country builders and representatives of their people (of course mostly the bourgeolsie) from the mid 1800s, not self-seeking and pleasure-loving degenerates as those living now.
The structures you are describing remind me of JK Galbraith’s concept of “countervailing power.” This puts you in very good company, indeed.
Been there myself for four decades, and to quote a classic Yankee saying: "Ayuh"
What I find amusing and interesting about this is (a) how this utterly undermines the idea deeply baked into the popular understanding of democracy, even the ones that are slightly more sophisticated, that the public as a whole has any hope of using protests and voting to influence the government. Essentially Aurielian in talking about the sausage factory has made it clear that whatever it is that goes into makingthe sausage, citizens are not part of the game. (b) His examples of campaigns that do work have in common people working in an organised fashion and using money, tons of it, to buy lobbying influence either with the media, politicians or both. Again, something the average ordinary citizen has no access to. Again, something utterly divorced from the popular conception of democracy as sold to the electorate.
This essay more than any other I've read from him explodes the idea that the administrative state that comprises western governments, at the minimum in its current form (though it sounds as if it has never been any different), is structured so as to be responsive by the process of elections to make policy that listens to what people want. The people's will is utterly irrelevant to the government. Now, I've personally only believed that when I was a teenage, but he does the valuable in explaining the details and mechanics of why this is so. But remember that this is the basis on which electoral democracies are sold to western publics and non-western nations: elections = government that responds to the people. Little wonder that people are starting to sour on democracy.
Finally, all his comments on NGOs makes clear one thing: whether the NGO ecosystem started primarily as a good will effort, the ecosystem has turned into a grift machine for the very simple reason that where there is money to be made from an activity, the grifters will come in to take it. And for the very simple reason that the NGO grifters will be more adept at focusing on getting money rather than channeling resources into achieving their goals, these will crowd out the ones who are more sincere. Added to the fact that government has also turned into a PR game, the political grifters and the NGO grifters are aligned in their goals and methods.
This is the end result of the current form of the western democratic framework. Whether it can continue to survive in this form or whether changes are imposed on it, time and history will tell.
"Finally, all his comments on NGOs makes clear one thing: whether the NGO ecosystem started primarily as a good will effort, the ecosystem has turned into a grift machine for the very simple reason that where there is money to be made from an activity, the grifters will come in to take it."
Just as money attracts grifters, power attracts sociopaths the way catnip attracts cats, the way a big pile of unguarded cocaine attracts addicts.
Amen. It was obvious when I was a teen, and it is one of the few ideas I never changed. But, for your last sentence, just let me tell you:
The formal structure and instituions of political systems are not so important, and maybe the behaviours and good decisions is what matter. I say it because the "democracy" is not the causo of our failure, like it was not the cause of our succes. Chinese are not succeeding for their system, as they not fall in the XIX for theyr sistem. (I mean, it has influence).
It is well written, although very confusing. This confusion seems to reflect the general state of British and Western politics. This is a psychological crisis when desires do not match with opportunities. The British need to curb their desires to lead the whole world - and, as Comrade Stalin said, life will immediately become better and more fun.
Why are Londoners so worried about Kharkiv and Odessa? When I was a young man, I wanted to go to Kharkov to study, but changed my mind and decided to go to Moscow right at the train station) Trains ran every half hour, and it was easy to make a choice. Compared to the British, at the age of 18, I made the right strategic choice.
Now, living in Moscow and listening to Putin and Russian politicians, I don't feel any confusion. Their words are very rational and understandable to literally everyone. Our goals are clear and our tasks are defined. The budget is calculated and distributed. Of course, there is also enough criticism, but I repeat - everything is very rational.
For the last 2 years I have been a reader of Karl Sanchez's substack where he regularly provides translations of Putin, Lavrov, and other speeches and interviews as well as internal Russian planning meetings covering most areas of the economic and social spectrum. They are, without exception. easy to follow, very logical , and rather compelling.
I would categorise them as containing little 'noise'.
Contrast that with most Western communications, and British in particular, and most is 'noise'. However it is possible to discern trends running through the noise. Applying 'fuzzy logic' you can ascertain the likely outcomes of various apparently inconsistent statements and moves.
My one view is that this is deliberate obfuscation in many instances, its not just the random nature of the sort of contradictory forces that Aurelien describes. Britain didn't get is reputation as 'perfidious albion' for nothing.
Thank you for continuing to explain to the world's idealists, moralists, oversimplifiers and lazy, intellectually-limited pundits, that the world of politics is immensely complex, often opaque to outsiders, and sometimes nearly unfathomable. Even though they are not listening and couldn't hear it even if they wanted to. And continuing to explain that sometimes it can appear fully as a Theatre of the Absurd, such as listening to a Putin or Lavrov speech and then a Trump one. And your lengthy examples are so much more compelling than most of the bald assertions from most political writers.
I thought Yanis Varoufakis' latest interview on Why Everything Feels Broken (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUXiMi4bY68) was, while less nuanced than your article, on point to what you're saying. Excerpt:
[My long-time adversary] Larry Summers, in a midnight bar conversation told me “If you want to be an outsider, then the system will vomit you out, spew you out even, and you will maintain your ethics and do your thing out there, and you'll be irrelevant. If you want to stay inside, there is a golden rule: you never cross other insiders, and you try to make small, marginal changes within as long as the rest of the insiders tolerate it. Which one of the two are you?” The system can deliver gigantic returns to you personally — as long as you accept your powerlessness. You are lured by that powerlessness to try to be part of the powerful thing.
Christine Lagarde, then-managing director of the IMF at the time, said to me that she agreed with everything I was saying, which is shocking. It's shocking, you know, you come off the street as a demonstrator, Marxist, Leftist and she says your analysis is completely right: What [the IMF is] doing cannot work. What the system is doing cannot work. But [when you're an insider] your reputation, she said, and your career will depend on you accepting that we have invested so much political capital in this thing that can't work, that you can't go against it. You've got to accept it.
So, It boils down to: How does the movement make sure that its representatives, once they get elected and they go into these rooms, will not be lured by this and will stay connected to the movement? [Yanis' question, not mine]
If the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to co-opt, whom to buy off, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
Yes, I remember Chrissie saying almost exactly the same thing to me once or twice.
😜
Beijing's decision-making process consistently outperforms ours. Could seeking truth from facts be a factor, one wonders?
There are some things that DO cut through because they are so horrendous. Gaza is one of them. I stand every week with a placard that says Honk (for peace) in Gaza....and most car drivers do. And one point about general politics that you miss is that when Governments become unpopular the masses tend to focus on one thing that sums up all their angst: today it is Gaza. We all have different agends but (almost) everybody wants to stop the slaughter of mothers and children. I have served as a senior officer and as a politician and don't know anybody who doesn't condemn it - and there is overwhelming condemnation that will affect the results of the next election. And as far as I am concerned, Ukraine and Gaza are two fronts in the same war. Sometimes to change policy you need to substitute the scalpal with the blunderbuss....
Where does BBC (and the rest of MSM) with its mastery of narrative control fit in The Sausage Factory? Is there an invisible hand orchestrating Matrix like grip over plebeian population, stirring up Russophobia like it's 1917 (1854) again? Who decides to send a reconnaissance plane over Gaza and pass info to Israel? I'm not sure The Sausage Factory can manage those negligible little things without help of invisible hands.
The usual exercise in cynicism (which I’ve come to expect here), based on acceptance of the status quo. The status quo can only survive through acceptance of it by its minions, and they accept what they are told it is, and 'it' in turn accepts them as its support base. So, a self-supporting, anti-gravity system. But even though this is supposed to be ‘severely practical’ - fortunately for all of us, gravity always wins in the end - at least, until the next cycle is enabled.
Some gems:
“opposition in general came from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its satellites, whose approach eschewed practical arguments altogether, and emphasised moral condemnation”.
So, according to the author, raising the possibility of the extinction of humanity through nuclear war is not a ‘practical argument’. If indeed it is not, then . . . ?
“at a certain point people like me look up from their desks and stare at each other, asking “how the **** did we get here?” - See paragraph 1 above.
“The question, Should we even be doing this? is never actually posed because there isn’t time.” - Or, see paragraph 1 above.
“British participation in the Second Iraq War was a massively important priority for the government of the day, and public opposition, albeit quite extensive, didn’t qualify as one of the deciding factors.”
So, that’s all right then, just a question of focussing the attention in the right place. (Don’t look at the corpses - not the ‘right place’).
Well, I can’t be bothered with any more of my (or possibly his) no-doubt ‘ill-informed assertions’. But I feel sorry for old Niccolo though - jealously’s not a good look for the dead.
Apparently not actively and consciously participating in a full-blown daylight genocide is just not feasible, after all, look how badly it would go over with the Americans!
I have no idea how the author sleeps at night.
You stated: "the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in Africa, mostly left over from massive Soviet and Chinese deliveries during the Cold War".
substantiate this comment please, it does not seem plausible as a factor after such intensive and ongoing European colonisation before, during and after the cold war. not to mention that China was dirt poor back then, how could they flood Africa with weapons? come on man.....
Goodness me, it's common knowledge. Look at any number of photos and videos. China had more AK47 copies than it knew what to do with, and of course had a very active Africa policy in the 1970s.
Having lost a few subscribers the author doubles down on his take: it’s the demonstrators’ fault. Dang it, why didn’t I think of that?
Because people rarely like being told that what they are doing is wrong or ineffective. Ever had children?
You know, it’s never appropriate to shame the victims or the only people standing up for them, when everyone else cowers in the shadows.
The detached way you write makes me wonder what horribly unpalatable 'sausages' you helped to turn out during your time in the factory.
He is a bit like a surgeon describing a tumor.
The idea that the uk would have to give up its permanent seat on the UNSC if it were to give up nuclear weapons is a joke. India has The Bomb and doesn't have a Security Council veto. Neither does Pakistan.
Similarly, the idea that the Americans are impressed with british bomb-making and that this somehow represents a source of influence with the Americans.
The uk has a seat on the UNSC because the Americans say so. Similarly, the Americans are impressed with british self-regard and the plummy accents and their ass-kisding talent. That is the source of their influence with the Americans. Not their submarine.
That's not my experience. Why don't you tell us about yours?
The implied resort to the primacy of 'experience' as opposed to external analysis is just a rhetorical device, and is hardly worth pointing out as a fallacy.
>>Similarly, the idea that the Americans are impressed with british bomb-making and that this somehow represents a source of influence with the Americans.<<
ahhh British tanks are designed to be more eco-friendly while rolling over corpses, you know
The irony being that british tanks performed poorly in Ukraine and british troops performed poorly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For an extra dollop of cynical irony:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/09/british-made-tanks-about-to-sweep-putins-conscripts-aside/
Yeah. The British Army has conveniently forgotten how it had to be rescued by the US in Afghanistan after getting in out of its depth there.
Also Iraq. And the RAF in Libya.
This article brought back memories of when I was an adolescent during the Viet Nam war. My young mind was completely convinced by moral arguments and it was very easy to make predictions of all kinds. I was repeatedly perplexed by the fact that things turned out differently than how I had imagined them. Then it dawned on me that moral argument seemed to carry no weight. It was a troubling thought. Then I learned that leading figures could lie, and the media would just repeat those lies without compunction. This article explains this situation from the other side. It is a sad awakening.
The UK civil service when I was there in the late 60s, early 70s, was a technocracy. Buy inclination, education and training I'm an engineer, and I fitted in very well. The politicians, by which I mean the salespeople, came and went with monotonous regularity, but their effect on policy was negligible. To a man (it was only men) we were devoted to getting as much a bang , as you could for the tax payer buck, simple as that.
Fast forward 50 years, to anyone who is looking It will look like a corporatocracy.
In the near the future , a techno feudal society is planned.
One thing is clear and that is the political class treat the electorate with total contempt. Perhaps they deserve to be treated in such a way for being completely shafted.
My take away: They do, indeed, live in a bubble. They don't listen to you because they don't serve you. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. They hate it when you make them do stuff.
So, why's this government thing so great again?
This post is related and interesting https://themindness.substack.com/p/weaponizing-time-elite-anxiety-and. Among other things it describes how European politicians are groomed to form a coterie that doesn't have to be influenced since they already have a fixed set of ingredients for the sausage. As a side remark, we have seen fit to borrow the word "coterie" into Swedish (kotteri), probably because we have many of them at all levels.