Category Archives: Capitalism

A Survival Condo Project in Missile Silo

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Social democracy

 

 

Evan Osnos in his New Yorker article, described the Kansas landscape that Chris and I  drove through on this trip to Arizona.  He drove to a place  called the Survival Condo Project near the town of Concordia and Salina Kansas which we drove through. When he arrived, he was met by a guard dressed in camouflage holding a semiautomatic rifle.  It looked impressive. The condo project was being built inside  an underground missile silo like the one Chris and I had seen a few years ago in Green Valley Arizona. That has been turned into a museum.

The facility housed nuclear warheads from 1961 to 1965–a mere 5 years. After that the site was decommissioned and a bigger and better silo was built somewhere else. I think that site is still secret as this one had been.  The  developers were building 15 luxury condos there because the site had been built with walls so thick it was supposed to survive a nuclear attack by the Russians. The site was originally built in response to a perceived threat from the Soviet Union that was engaged in a long-standing “cold war” with the United States and its allies. The developers are led by Larry Hall the CEO of the new project. As Osnos said, “Hall has erected a defense against the fears of a new era. “It’s true relaxation for the ultra-wealthy,” he said. “They can come out here, they know there are armed guards outside. The kids can run around.”

Wow is that the best the super-rich can do? Is there not more to life than being ensconced in a concrete cocoon? Presumably its better than getting incinerated in the nuclear attack. To me that sounds horribly limited. Maybe being super-rich is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Hall developed the property for which he paid $300,000 by spending another $20,000,000 for renovations. With that he created 12 private apartments that he sold for $3 million each in the case of full floor units and $1.5 in the case of half floor units. He sold them all except for one that he decided to keep for himself.

The silos in which the apartments are located are solid.  They were built by the Army Corp of Engineers to withstand a nuclear strike.  The inside has enough food and fuel for 5 years off the grid. Of course, it will require that people raise tilapia in fish tanks and hydroponic vegetables under grow lamps and supposedly renewable power that could function indefinitely, according to Hall. I am not sure how he would accomplish that.

In a crisis more drastic measures can be expected. According to Hall,

“In a crisis, his swat-team-style trucks (“the Pit-Bull VX, armored up to fifty-caliber”) will pick up any owner within four hundred miles. Residents with private planes can land in Salina, about thirty miles away. In his view, the Army Corps did the hardest work by choosing the location. “They looked at height above sea level, the seismology of an area, how close it is to large population centers.”

 

If owners of planes can’t fly them in they will need to make arrangements for a pilot and family members of the pilot. Where would they go after flying in? That does not mean that each prepper has an individual bunker. After all, hardened bunkers are expensive and complicated to construct. The complex looked and felt like a ski condo that did not have any windows. What kind of ski condo is that? But it had a central area with pool table, stone fireplace, a kitchen, and leather couches. No TVs of course. No poor people will stick around to man the TV stations.

What will life be like without poor people to do all the manual work needed to keep the place going.  Why will the people hired by Hall as security and to do necessary tasks  continue to work for the group? How will they be paid? Where will money come from? Why won’t they just take over and kick out the rich people whose wealth will no longer have any meaning? I have a lot of questions about this project.

It sounds to me like a crazy scheme for rich people that makes no sense except to the paranoid rich. Would you invest in it?

This might be the real grand finale.

 

Over valuing private goods and undervaluing public goods

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Social democracy, Social Justice

 

 

For a long time, it has been my opinion that people under value pubic goods and over value private goods. For example, good schools, hospitals, libraries, parks and many others are really important and valuable.  One of the problems with some rich people, like those who bought condos in the missile silos of Salina Kansas, was that most of these privileged people no longer recognize the benefits–the mutual benefits–provided by the commons. They have either forgotten how important they are or they never realized it.  They really believe only private goods count. Only private goods are really good. Public goods are irrelevant.  Robert Johnson who Osnos interviewed for his  New Yorker article realized  this was not the case. He said,

“If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”

 

It is difficult to discern why the privileged are so fearful. What do these ultra-wealthy people have to fear? If money does not buy happiness, surely it buys security. If one thought that, one would be wrong. As Osnos reported,

“As public institutions deteriorate, élite anxiety has emerged as a gauge of our national predicament. “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”

In other words if people valued the common good as much as they valued their own private good, there might be a lot less anxiety.  When the über rich are so fearful it really make you wonder about the stability of the system. Do they know something the rest of us don’t know? Or it that guilt poisons their perception? Or do they just not understand what is important?

Sometimes the most. important things we have are the things that we share.

 

 

A Deeper Crisis

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Social democracy, Social Justice

It is also interesting how the privileged classes have selected things to worry about.  As Evan Osnos reported in his New Yorker article:

 

“Élite anxiety cuts across political lines. Even financiers who supported Trump for President, hoping that he would cut taxes and regulations, have been unnerved at the ways his insurgent campaign seems to have hastened a collapse of respect for established institutions. Dugger said, “The media is under attack now. They wonder, Is the court system next? Do we go from ‘fake news’ to ‘fake evidence’? For people whose existence depends on enforceable contracts, this is life or death.”

 

It is also interesting how the privileged classes have selected things to worry about.  As Osnos reported

 

“Robert A. Johnson was another person that Osnos interviewed.  He saw the fear of his peers as “the symptom of a deeper crisis.”[2]  I agree with that. I too see the fear as a manifestation of fundamental unease about their place in modern society. They are unmoored and their wealth, which often is extreme wealth, is not able to fill the void. Johnson was the manager of a hedge fund. He was also the head of a think tank. He called himself “an accidental student of civic anxiety.”From my own career, I would just talk to people. More and more were saying, ‘you’ve got to have a private plane. You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’ ”

 Johnson saw the fear of his peers as “the symptom of a deeper crisis.”  I agree with that. I too see the fear experienced by the über wealthy as a manifestation of fundamental unease about their place in modern society like those who bought condos in a concrete missile silo in Kansa. They are unmoored and their wealth, which these days often is extreme wealth, is not able to fill the void. Johnson was the manager of a hedge fund. He was also the head of a think tank. He called himself “an accidental student of civic anxiety. More and more wealthy people were telling. him, ‘you’ve got to have a private plane. You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’ ” Escaping the apocalypse is not easy.

Osnos analyzed this situation this way,

“By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”

Johnson is like some other wealthy people that have not entirely lost their sense of empathy or their sense of justice. Osnos described their situation this way,

“Johnson wishes that the wealthy would adopt a greater “spirit of stewardship,” an openness to policy change that could include, for instance, a more aggressive tax on inheritance. “Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he said. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.” The gap is widening further. In December, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new analysis, by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.” Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled. That gap is comparable to the gap between average incomes in the U.S. and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the authors wrote.”

If you are the fortunate beneficiary of such largesse, it is difficult to believe that that such extreme inequality is justified. It takes a special kind hubris. Or perhaps blindness. The result is fear that some day that injustice might be rectified.

The Rich need money; the Poor need Poverty

Capitalism, Green New Deal, Social democracy, Sociology of Knowledge

 

Although John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out how  the socialist and capitalist countries are similar, but in the west the

“controlling contentment and resulting belief is now that of the many, not just of the few.  It operates under the compelling cover of democracy, albeit a democracy not of all citizens but of those who, in defense of their social and economic  advantage, actually go to the polls.  The result is government that is accommodated not to reality or common need but to the beliefs of the contented, who are now the majority of those who vote.”

 

Galbraith points out this discrepancy of governmental treatment of the poor compared to the wealthy in amusing terms, though the consequences are far from amusing:

“The substantial role of the government in subsidizing this well-being deserves more than passing notice.  Where the impoverished are concerned — a point to which I return — government support and subsidy are seriously suspect as to need and effectiveness of administration and because of their adverse effect on morals and working morale.  This, however, is not true of government support to comparative well-being.  By Social Security pensions or their prospect no one is thought damaged, nor, as a depositor, by being rescued from a failed bank.  The comparatively affluent can withstand the adverse moral effect of being subsidized and supported by the government, not so the poor.”

 

 

Subsidies to the poor are always on a very different level than subsidies for the wealthy. The poor are always underserving, the rich always in need. Not only that but subsidies to the rich or well-off are always for the benefit of society as a whole. Subsidies to the poor are given out of the largesse of the well-off. The rich are to be complemented for permitting their money to be used on the poor. As well, the rich are to be complemented for accepting subsidies not really for themselves but in order to benefit society as a whole. The poor should be looked down on for accepting charity. It shows they are not of strong character. That is just how it works when you control the political process. As a result of such attitudes, when the Green New Deal proposes to spend money to ease inequality of incomes, we must treat the howls of protest from the affluent with careful skepticism. They might have a point, but we should not assume they have a point.

Although Galbraith was describing the United States the same things happen in Canada too.  In Canada the contented accept government subsidies through CMHC, CDIC, RRSP’s, farm supports, DREE, and numerous grants to businesses.  Particularly the oil and gas sector which has done so much to create the problem of climate change enjoys subsidies in the billions. Subsidizing clean energy or green projects is seen instead with alarm by the contented.

 

Business sees no problem in going to the public trough for itself, but not so for the poor. They are also extreme in their defence of their own privilege. Witness the recent puny attempt by the Liberal government led by Justin Trudeau in making fairly modest tax reform proposals in Canada principally around reducing the benefits of well-off Canadians in earning money through a corporation rather than personally. Those benefits of course go largely to the rich. In my practice of law it was not common to see homeless people come in to incorporate their scrounging ‘businesses.’

Even though he was a privileged Harvard economist, former Ambassador, and confidant of the rich and famous, Galbraith had similar scepticism:

 “While self-interest, as we shall see, does frequently operate under a formal cover of social concern, much social concern is genuinely and generously motivated.

Nonetheless, self-regard is, and predictably, the dominant, indeed the controlling, mood of the contented majority.  This becomes wholly evident when public action on behalf of those outside this electoral majority is the issue.  If it is to be effective, such action is invariably at public cost.  Accordingly, it is regularly resisted as a matter of high, if sometimes rather visibly contrived, principle…”

Given the power of the affluent to influence public opinion, it would be surprising if the Green New Deal were easily proven to be a rational plan to reduce climate change.

A Conservative  Wet Nightmare

Capitalism, Green New Deal, Sociology of Knowledge

 

I was hearing a lot about the New Green Deal.  Until I wasn’t hearing anything anymore. The Green New Deal drives Republicans in the US and Conservatives in Canada, apoplectic. That is why Samantha Bee has called the Green New Deal the “Republicans wet nightmare.”

 

Why  don’t we hear about it anymore. Were the criticisms of it from conservatives so radically convincing? Or did interest groups get their away (again)?

Dominant groups invariably react to anything that undermines their dominance with scorn, mockery, and howls of opposition. They think the upstart must be irrational, if not absolutely insane. Listen to their howls. They scream it; they mean it. It makes no sense. None.

This is what the dominant groups in the US did when Roosevelt introduced the original New Deal. It was completely absurd they claimed. We can’t afford it. It will bankrupt the nation. How could anyone say in a time of 25% unemployment that the country must put those people to work? It made absolutely no sense they assured us. Well–they were wrong. Entirely absolutely wrong. Roosevelt has been credited with saving capitalism from its greatest foes–the capitalists! Now they complain similarly about the Green New Deal.

Is that how it will be with the Green New Deal? We have already heard the screams and howls of laughter, mockery and pain.

Karl Mannheim, in his landmark book, Ideology and Utopia, building on an insight of Marx, first pointed out that ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are no longer able to see certain facts which might tend to undermine their sense of domination.  The ideology of ruling groups often obscures the real condition of society from itself, and often even to those groups that dominate.  The ideology of ruling groups is self-serving.  As a consequence, such groups often do not recognize the unpleasant facts which might detract from their domination.  This is usually accomplished naturally, without conspiracy.  To them, all dissent, as Herbert Marcuse noticed, is irrational, if not insane.

No one likes to lose privileges. That is the long and short of it. In fact, groups with resources, will use those resources to protect their privileges. That does not mean that all their arguments are bogus. It just means we ought to be wary of them. We should, as John Stuart Mill made clear, always look at the other side. Are we getting the whole truth from the privileged groups or are they using their influence to influence those in power to do their bidding?

Over that past 3 decades industries in the oil and gas sector, including some of the richest corporations in the world have spent enormous sums of money to convince political leaders, and even us the mere peons, that what is good for ExxonMobil is good for us too.  Is it?  Is the Green New Deal really that radically subversive? Or are we being sold another bill of goods? As the Sergeant on the television series, Hill Street Blues used to warn the police before they went out on their beat each morning: ‘Be careful out there.”

That was wise advice to the beat cops. That would be wise advice to us peons.

Putin: Ivan Ilyin’s Disciple

American Fascism, Books, Capitalism, Politics & Religion, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Iraq ( Gulf or First War), War in Iraq (2nd war)

 

After he died Ivan Ilyin’s ideas were largely ignored for about 50 years. Then they were revived with vigour, by “post-Soviet billionaires.” The oligarchs in other words, found his ideas congenial. They found these ideas enormously convenient to justify the incredible inequality in Russia. As Timothy Snyder said,

“Putin and his friends and allies accumulated vast wealth beyond the law, and then remade the state to preserve their own gains. Having achieved this, Russian leaders had to define politics as being rather than doing. An ideology such as Ilyin’s purports to explain why certain men have wealth and power in terms other than greed and ambition. What robber would not prefer to be called a redeemer?”

Thus, the ideas of Ilyin became the ideology of Putin and his cronies. The ideology of Christian fascism replaced Marxist ideology. They are no more communist than the Chinese leaders. Of course, all of this was amazingly similar to the practice of Soviet power before the collapse of communism. All Soviet citizens had been educated in that system so this felt familiar and comfortable to them compared to the anarchic kleptocracy that followed a brief near neo-liberalism after the fall of communism. It came as a relief to Russians, as fascism came as a relief to Germans and Italians in the 1930s.

This brings me back to the politics of eternity.  As Snyder said,

“The politics of eternity cannot make Putin or any other man immortal. But it can make other ideas unthinkable.  And that is what eternity means: the same thing over and over again, a tedium exciting to believers because of the illusion that it is particularly theirs. Of course, this sense of “us and them,” or as fascists prefer, “friends and enemies,” is the least specific human experience of them all; to live within it is to sacrifice individuality.”

 

Once again, it is amazing how Trump fits in once more. He hinted he wanted to be president for life, like some of his dictator pals. He wanted to be added to Mount Rushmore. And he was serious. And of course, Trump saw the world as one of friends and enemies. Everyone who did not do and think like him was an enemy. Those who paid obeisance were friends, so long as they did not stop. Of course, the incredible inequality in Russia is mirrored in the United States.

 

Christian Fascism

American Fascism, Books, Capitalism, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

I had never heard of the idea of Christian fascism before I read Timothy Snyder’s book The Road to Unfreedom.

 

According to  the historian Timothy Snyder, Ivan Ilyin was a philosopher from a noble family in Russia who found in the disastrous situation that Russia found itself in after World War I that he wanted to oppose Bolshevism and the instrument he chose for that purpose was Christian fascism.  Interestingly, this was the same instrument chosen by Putin and Trump. There are deep historical roots to that process. Ilyin’s ideas though became popular much later, after the fall of Communism even though Ilyin had died 30 years earlier in 1954.

 

Vladimir Putin adopted Ilyin’s views as the intellectual foundation for his oligarchy. According to Snyder, “Ilyin was a politician of eternity. His thought held sway as the capitalist version of the politics of inevitability collapsed in the Russia of the 1990s and 2000s. As Russia became an organized kleptocracy in the 2010s, as domestic inequality reached stupefying proportions, Ilyin’s influence peaked.”

 

Very few people in the west have been aware of the influence of Ilyin. I know I never heard of him before I read Snyder’s The road to Unfreedom. His name has come up much more often after the second war in Ukraine. Snyder says Ilyin reached magnificent heights in Russia after the fall of communism and the brief interlude that followed. Snyder said, “he has become the philosopher for our time. No thinker of the twentieth century has been rehabilitated in such grand style in the twenty-first, nor enjoyed such influence on world politics. If this went unnoticed it was because we are in the thrall of inevitability: we believe that ideas do not matter.”

 

According to the Romanian thinker E. M. Cioran, Christian fascism embraced the ideas that before history God is perfect and eternal. But once he begins history, God seems “frenetic, committing error upon error.” Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s inspiration, took up this idea. He thought it would take a philosopher like himself to regain the solid ground of reality—i.e. the divine totality that would avoid the spiritual and moral relativism” that God’s “mistake” led us into.

 

Ilyin realized that the politics of from the 1880s to the early 1910s were the politics of globalization, just as they were again later from the 1980s to 2010s. In both eras the conventional wisdom was that export led growth would bring enlightened politics and end fanaticism. During the First World that optimism broke down. In the 2010s Trump and the resentful class to whom he appealed, showed that this optimism had also broken down in America. As Snyder says, “Ilyin regarded fascism as the politics of the world to come.”  And of course so did Trump and his 73 million voters. The phrase politics of the world to come, reminds me of what George Orwell said, “If you want an image of the future imagine a boot stomping a human face forever.”

 

Ilyin in the 1920s was in exile in Italy and he was disappointed that the Italians arrived at fascism before the Russians. Just as Trump later yearned for fascism when he looked at Putin and a host of other tyrants around the world and wished he could be like them. Trump always found dictators and tyrants more congenial than the leaders of the world’s democracies. That is not as surprising as it might sound. Trump naturally swam in the waters of tyranny. That was where he felt most at home. Ilyin was also impressed with Hitler. Just as Trump was impressed with Putin. Like liked like.  Ilyin actually spent most of his time from 1922 to 1938 in Germany.

 

The attraction of Hitler for Ilyin was the same as for so many fascists: “Ilyin saw Hitler as a defender of civilization from Bolshevism. The Führer, he wrote had “performed an enormous service for all of Europe” by preventing further revolutions on the Russian model.”

 

This is an important thought to remember. Capitalists are quite comfortable with fascists, because the real enemy is communism, or even socialism. In fact historically, capitalists are more friendly with fascism than democracy.

 

At this same time in Europe ,American capitalists were swarming to adopt Hitler as a congenial ally. Communists those were the real enemies of American capitalists. The connection between capitalism and fascism is deep. The connection to democracy is much more tenuous. It was therefore no surprise to see American capitalists enthralled by Trump, notwithstanding his obvious authoritarian tendencies. Later many were enthralled by Putin.

 

As Snyder pointed out, “Closely related to the fantasy of an eternally innocent Russia includes the fantasy of an eternally innocent redeemer, who does no wrong and therefore will not die.”

 

Fantasy: The Intellectual roots of Fascism

American Fascism, Capitalism, Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014)

 

Timothy Snyder found the intellectual roots of fascism, at least Russian fascism, or Putin’s fascism,  in a little-known philosopher Ivan Ilyin who lived  in the first half of the 20th century.  Putin and his cronies revived him in the 1990s and 2000s.

According to Timothy Snyder who has spent his academic life studying fascism, the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s to which Ilyin was attracted,  had three core features:

 

  1. It celebrated will and violence over reason and law;
  2. It proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people;
  3. It characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than a set of problems to be solved

 

In the 21st century fascism has been revived by populist leaders around the world. According to Snyder the driving force of that process is inequality. I agree. I said earlier inequality promotes resentment and contempt, particularly self-contempt. And that leads directly to fascism.   According to Snyder,

“Fascism serves oligarchs as a catalyst for transitions away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and toward personalist regimes.”

 

In other words, the politics of eternity are what Putin has achieved and Trump did his best to achieve. I call that fascism. Trump was just a wanna be fascist. Of course in the last election in the US he had more than 73 million supporters many of whom now believe he was cheated out of his rightful second term as president of the United States. That is his fantasy and it has been taken up by his supporters. That makes Trump a force to be reckoned with. He could return in 2024 or earlier if there is successful insurrection, which cannot be ruled out. Even if Trump does not return, Trumpism is alive and well in the United States with millions supporters. In only 1 America election were more than 73 million votes needed to be elected President , and that was of course in 2020. The yearning for the politics of eternity, as Snyder calls it, is far from dead. It could come back to haunt the country and in fact the world at any time.

 

According to Snyder, Ilyin is “a guide on the darkening road to unfreedom, which leads from inevitability to eternity.”

 

Snyder also makes clear that eternity, like inevitability, as he calls it, “is another idea that says there are no ideas.”

Snyder explained this idea this way:

“The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one.  The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that “there are no alternatives.” To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to  premarked grave in a prepurchased plot.

Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality, that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarch spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith in technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle. As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustration of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin, escorted another, Donald Trump, from fiction to power. ”

 

Those are the ideas that Snyder uses to describe fascists from Hitler to Stalin, to Putin to Trump. And their essence is fantasies.

Inequality Breeds Contempt

American Fascism, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Modern History, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014)

 

I want to continue talking about Snyder’s idea of “the politics of inevitability” just a little bit more.

One of my readers pointed out that this theory that was employed by people in the west as well as the east is really a version of determinism.  And the problem with determinism is that even if  events are determined it is extremely difficult to predict the future.

 

What the Americans thought was their own inevitable dominance after that collapse of the Soviet Empire turned out to be one more dangerous illusion. The road to heaven turned out to be more complicated than that. In fact, the road to heaven turned out to be a road to unfreedom. Inevitability turned out to be a churlish illusion. As Timothy Snyder said,

 

“The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.”

 

The decline of America was set in motion. Nothing was inevitable except the crushing power of wealth.

Americans don’t believe this even though they so powerfully demonstrate it. Inequality breeds contempt. First inequality ushers in resentment, then contempt. First, the lowly feel resentment about their “betters” and then they feel contempt for themselves for failing to live up to their own ideals. They see themselves as losers. Their self-respect is curdled by envy.  It had happened earlier to African Americans enslaved for centuries until many of them lost their ability to love even themselves as shown in the novels of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We need a writer of equal power to tell us the truth of what happened after 2008. Instead, we have too many people who don’t want to look at the truth of modern North American society and prefer the contentment of looking at comfortable myths.

Such a situation is ripe for the demagogue.  America got exactly that. It got Donald Trump to make America (and of course Americans) great again. What a wonderful illusion. All they had to do was keep out the undesirables and have faith in their new leader. He could do it. And astonishingly, millions of Americans believed him, without any evidence that he could do it. They believed it because they wanted it so much to be true.

The same thing happened in Russia. They got Putin. He promised Russians that the Soviet Empire could be revived.  He would do that in Ukraine. So far he has just brought ruin without empire.  In Russia, as in the United States, some people achieved enormous wealth while ordinary people were left to suck socks. And that created huge problems in both countries.

The Politics of Inevitability

American Fascism, Books, Capitalism, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

I thought I would skirt around 2 concepts that are actually very important to Timothy Snyder’s thesis in the book The Road to Unfreedom. These are the closely related concepts of “the politics of inevitability” and “the politics of eternity” as he called.  I thought I would leave both of these concepts  out of my posts, but have realized I already  included a reference to these ideas without explanation.   I also decided that just because I had difficulty understanding them, did not mean my faithful readers would find them difficult. After all most of them are much smarter than me. So I am backing up here to explain them now.

I will first try to explain the politics of inevitability. As I understand it, Snyder describes the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity as 2 steps on the road to unfreedom.

According to Snyder,

“The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that ‘there are no alternatives. To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a pre-marked grave in a pre-purchased plot.”

 

Of course, if there are no choices there is no personal freedom, for we can’t do otherwise. We only have personal responsibility if we also have freedom. How could we be responsible for something we cannot possibly avoid? That is the sense in which responsibility and freedom are conjoined.

But freedom can be lost. First comes cynicism then comes tyranny whether in the form of authoritarianism, fascism or totalitarianism. That is the end of the road to unfreedom. The other two are stops along the way. At least this is how I interpret these difficult concepts.

In the United States the politics of inevitability meant that “capitalism was unalterable and democracy inevitable.”  Things could have been very different for Russia and Ukraine had the Americans not been under the spell of this illusion. That contented state did not last long. By the 1910s people were beginning to realize that his had been a pipe dream. Nothing was inevitable or unalterable. As Snyder said, “The twentieth century was well and truly over, its lessons unlearned. A new form of politics was emerging in Russia, Europe, and America, a new unfreedom to suit a new time.

Until then,

 “Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about “the end of history,” by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity.”

 

As Snyder posits: Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 it too had a version of the politics of inevitability:

“nature permits technology, technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turns out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americas reasoned that the failure of communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so a millennia generation without history.”

 

Americans thought they had achieved a new world order of which they were the sole superpower. The Americans believed they were the inevitable driving force of history that would push the world to the utopia of capitalism without rivals. That was an illusion—a deadly one at that. From that mistake a lot of misery for Russia and Ukraine was born.