As the Guardian notes this morning:
The selection of Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of the far-right website Breitbart News and the CEO of Trump's presidential campaign, deepened the fears of liberal activists that the Trump administration would embolden and enable antisemites, racists and misogynists.
I think there's a mistake in there. The sentence is constructed conditionally, and I think that's wrong. There's not a chance that this might embolden antisemites, racists and misogynists: it will do so.
That is reason for fear in itself. But the list of those who might be impacted is incomplete. Without in any way diminishing the risk to those noted, the list should include the ordinary working people of America, whether middle or working class. They too are at risk here.
I have already this morning noted Theresa May advocating a new structure for British business based on the logic of the City of London's Guilds. The implication is clear: she believes in a neo-feudal model of the economy where the winners take all and some hand downs from them are the best anyone in need might expect. I believe that this is the model for the Trump administration as well.
On Friday I took part in a radio discussion with Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation who is one of Trump's senior economic advisers. During it he said two things of especial note. The first was that everything government did was bad. The second was that all government spending was wasted. And he meant it. This is the philosophy Trump is listening too.
It was also the logic of the City of London's Guilds, long established as the alternative power base to challenge the legitimate authority based in the City of Westminster just down the river. And it is the Guilds who are apparently supplying May's role model.
The specific prejudice of Steve Bannon is shocking but the move towards a society based on contempt is much more widely based. It's not just anti-democratic. It's in the proper sense of the word anti-social. And it's highly likely that you are included the subjects for its contempt.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
I think it is notable how much the classic idea of the responsible democratic state is breaking up under the pressure of its perceived failure to bring benefits to the broad range of society, and the extent to which the initiative is being seized by the ‘right’ and the privileged. ‘Anarcho-capitalist’ ideas have advanced in the imtellectual undergrowth for many years, especially in the US, penetrating political discourse and programmes (notwithstanding that some of those programmes are much more about wealth than liberty and would receive short shrift from the thinkers or disciples who have prepared the way for them in practice). May’s ‘love-in’ with the City Guilds, for all their anachronistic ridiculousness, might be seen to fit into that pattern somewhere. I am not sure how much attention you give to this phenomenom in your books, or whether you think that the Murray Rothbard tribe is not worth engaging with. Whether it can wisely be ingored I do not know.
Hey do I need to engage with a minor Austrian school libertarian?
No need to worry then.
There are reasons to worry
But why is this the right direction to go?
Bannon’s appointment is very worrying.
I like this blog – short and to the very point. I’m quite sick of hearing from lefties that Trump was somehow a better choice than Clinton (bad as Clinton is). They seem to think that Trump will actually do some good just because he presented himself as anti-establishment or that if he makes a mess then it will result in a wave of populism for socialism in 4 years time. I fear they are deluded and what’s going to come will be horrendous.
I agree with you
All I see is Power and Capital moving to protect itself even more securely against ‘the people’. Which is what I’d expect Power and Capital to do.
They’ve been aided and abetted by the failure of the very democractic structures and parties to ensure they were a) properly representative and b) engaged their electorate. Though it is clear that this disintegration has been aided and abetted by a vicious, insidious and powerful anti-democratic ‘anti-people’ media. And our current politicians thought they could use the media!
Sorry. I’ve still not managed to pick myself up from the despair that hit the moment Trump opened his campaign.
I’ll be working to promote cooperativism. It seems to provide an business model that could be an antidote to the neo-feudal model you describe. Though it feels like a straw I am clutching.
Excuse me but may I……….?
I still hope that Trump does something for those Americans who are suffering and being left behind by the rest of the country – their numbers are growing all the time. And they are a ticking time bomb of an electorate.
Only time will tell but I know that the portents are not good.
However I can tell you now that Clinton was a big mistake. I still think that the Democrats should have tried Saunders because he was not as closely aligned to the establishment as Clinton yet he spoke openly about the issues affecting ordinary people (without the ‘someone else to blame’ rhetoric of Trump).
Saunders is the closest I’ve seen to a courageous politician. He’s no God but he makes sense even to me. The fact that the Democrats did not back
him tells you everything you need to know about them and the deep existential crisis American progressives are in.
Progressive politics in America is now stymied because of cowardly decisions that lead to people like Clinton being put up for president. The nomination process is nothing but an auction to those with money.
American ‘democracy’? Fiddlesticks! We are a seeing a long drawn out coup unfold before us. In a corrupt class ridden system like here in the UK you’d expect this. But America was not supposed to work like that. But it does.
Sorry.
I think there must be many who rue Sanders not being the candidate
Sanders included
Richard , there is even polling evidence that Sanders could have won in those swing states…but as usual, the neo-libs wouldn’t smell the coffee and felt entitled to keep going even if they caused fascism in the process…neo-liberalism has gone for broke and we got Trump.
But let’s be clear: the signs were there in the UK over the lat six years:
1) The marginalisation of the poor
2) The marginalisation of the disabled (giving rise to a massive increase in attacks on this group).
3) The idea that if you don’t get financials you are a non-person.
4) Politicians like Johnson and Farage offering condescending and dumbed-down explanations of economic phenomena.
If the neo-Libs had said enough! in 2008 then things might be different now…..but….where’s the Left -doing Bake Off and Strictly-a suitable metaphor!
I’ve mentioned that I fear Vice President-elect Pence; it did not occur to me that someone even worse might be invited into the corridors of power on day one.
It makes sense, but not in the way I expected it to: whenever stupid people gain a position with real power, someone clever will turn up and help them out with all the difficult thinking.
But someone worse than Cheney, and he was invited in? If Bannon has none of Cheney’s Machiavellian cunning, he has little need of it in a regime where the steamroller is a better metaphor than the stiletto.
“everything government did was bad. The second was that all government spending was wasted.”
This is actually a rather clever line. You can answer by saying the contrary which is that there are multipliers which the private sector is immune from for some unexplained reason, and that everything government does is good and there is no such thing as wasteful government spending. But such a line would come across as absurd to the listener.
Or you could counter by saying much of government spending is good, which just leads the argument into eliminating the stuff that isn’t. By identifying suitable cuts, you’ve done the job of your opponent in the debate.
It’s a bit like the ‘£350m a week to the EU’ line of argument. If you try to counter it by saying well actually it’s about £210m a week net, then you are still giving a number which the public sees as large, and once again you end up doing the job of your opponent.
But you’re falling into the trap of thinking it’s a binary choice:
Spend or cut.
Is it not obvious that the world is more complicated than that?
Makes a snappy headline I suppose though and that’s all our mainstream political debate seems to be.
I believe it was footage in one of Michael Moore’s films, which showed Newt Gingrich, without any sense of irony, leading a large street demonstration protesting against federal government cuts to a military installation in his state, which would result in big job losses.
When the corporations sucking at the US government teat start feeling the pinch from any significant reductions in public spending, the taps will be turned on again soon enough.
@Simon
“4) Politicians like Johnson and Farage offering condescending and dumbed-down explanations of economic phenomena.”
I contend the net has to be cast much wider. Labour, even today, is prepared to trot out the ludicrous “we must live within our means” and “we cannot spend more than we earn” message. Witness Rebecca Long Bailey on the Daily Politics yesterday.
Labour is being crass on economics