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.

The Rise of authoritarians and Worse

American Fascism, Books, Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

I am continuing my exploration of what happened in Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Much to my surprise, what has happened in Ukraine explains a lot about what has happened in the west. To do that, I am referring to what we have learned recently as a result of the second invasion of Ukraine be Russia and a wonderful book that I recommend to one and all, The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder a history professor from Yale University. That book written in 2018, helps us to understand what is happening there now.  And here too for that  matter.

It was shocking to some that in the 2010s America and Europe saw the rise of authoritarian political leaders and the serious decay of democracy.  Many of us never believed this was possible. How could so many countries, such as England,  the United States, and many others seem to lose faith in democracy? The Russians gave up on Europe and turned instead to Ukraine. The Brexit referendum seemed like a trip into madness, but was really another case of the people asking for and getting a wrecking ball for a leader. The Americans did the same thing.

Russian oligarchs took advantage of the vacuum of reason and good government along with the weakness of democratic institutions to pillage their county and deposit the spoils in offshore bank accounts, shell companies, and engineered dark deals of capitalism eating its young. After a brief flirtation with democracy, that basically ended soon after Boris Yeltsin  selected Vladimir Putin as the next leader,  Russia went from Communism direct to predatory capitalism of the most extreme sort.

Surprising to many, political practices that found favour in the Russian oligarchic state found fertile ground in the United States and Britain. The politics of inevitability had thought that influence would travel from the west to the east but reality turned the tables. Snyder explained it this way,

Concepts and practices moved from east to west. An example is the word “fake,” as in “fake news.”  This sounds like an American invention, and Donald Trump claimed it, as his own, but the term was used in Russia and Ukraine long before it began it’s career in the United States. As Snyder explained in his book,  “It meant creating a fictional text that posed as a piece of journalism, both to  spread confusion about a particular event and to discredit journalism as such. Eternity politicians first spread fake news themselves, then claim that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacles are real.” [I will explain his idea of eternity politics and inevitability  politics in a subsequent post]

Again, to many this was a shocking event. Some attributed the appearance of fake news in the west as a shocking and completely unanticipated development, but that only proves how blind the political elites were in the United States.

We in the west had a lot to learn from what happened in Ukraine.

 

The Road to Unfreedom: Political Fiction

American Fascism, Books, Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Trump the Saviour, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Like most everyone I have become fascinated by what is happening in Ukraine.  What is particularly fascinating to me  is how much of what is happening now happened earlier in the Ukraine in 2014 and how much of this was presaged by what happened in Russia.  We did not learn our lessons in 2014 and now we are paying a hefty price.

In 2018 I read a very important book called The Road to Unfreedom by a historian from Yale University Timothy Snyder.  It described the road from freedom to unfreedom in Russia, Ukraine, Britain, and finally the United States.

 

According to Snyder,

“In the 2010s, much of what was happening was the deliberate creation of political fiction, outsized stories and medium-sized lies that commanded attention and colonized the space needed for contemplation.”

 

This was when people began to speak about the death of truth or decay of truth or living in a post-truth world. In American and the United Kingdom people were shocked to see political leaders who seemed uniquely incapable and unqualified but appealed to large segments of their society nonetheless. Reality was being shredded. As Snyder said,  It was “a time when factuality itself was put into question.” The road to unfreedom was being paved with lies.

 

Journalism during this time was attacked by demagogic leaders for their own nefarious purposes.  Donald Trump for example, did not want anyone to pursue him with claims of being a liar, so he usurped the notion of fake news that had referred to internet lies that crushed the truth. As we will see, this is direct from the fascist playbook.  Call out others for your own faults. That can create the illusion of innocence. Hitler did it. Putin did it.  So did Trump. Trump did that while lifting himself  into an office for which he was uniquely unsuited, but his followers did not care.  His followers wanted a wrecking ball and they got one and were entirely satisfied. Truth was  as irrelevant as morality.

Russia has already completed its road to fascism while America and Europe seem not that far behind. As Snyder said,

“What has already happened in Russia, is what might happen in America and Europe, the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia got their first. They understood American and European weaknesses, which they had first seen and exploited at home.”

 

The times were ripe for authoritarian or even worse. The times were ripe for fascism.

 

The time for change is here and now

Climate change, Social democracy

 

We were all warned about the dangers of climate change in the 1960s. In fact for a while, governments led by Republicans like George Bush Sr. actually took it seriously, until corporate raiders let loose the hounds of PR firms and government lobbyists persuaded politicians  to shelve all talk of doing something about climate change. As a result, we have squandered decades, while businesses that got rich on selling products that increased greenhouse gas emissions got rich.

Yet what are we doing about it? We are subsidizing the fossil fuel industry! As the Guardian reporters Oliver Milman, Andrew Witherspoon, Rita Liu, and Alvin Chang, explained,

“Despite the rapid advance of renewable energy and, more recently, electric vehicles, countries still remain umbilically connected to fossil fuels, subsidizing oil, coal and gas to the tune of around $11m every single minute.”

 

The capitalists from the oil and gas sector have used their vast resources to persuade us and our political leaders to do nothing about climate change for decades and instead subsidize them. That’s why I call them predatory capitalists. I think the name fits. The Guardian reporters reminded us that Lynden Johnson was warned about the dangers of climate change when Joe Biden, a pretty old guy now, was in college. Now that I think about it, I am a pretty old guy and I was in High School at the time.

 

Because  industry funded delays most scientists now say we are headed towards temperature changes of +2.7 degrees, or worse,  even if our countries meet all of their UN climate change pledges, which so far they have shown no inclination to do.

According to the Guardian reporters,

“By the end of this year (2021) the world will have burned through 86% of the carbon “budget” that would allow us just a coin flip’s chance of staying below 1.5C. The Glasgow COP talks will somehow have to bridge this yawning gap, with scientists warning the world will have to cut emissions in half this decade before zeroing them out by 2050.”

 

According to Michael Wehner, who specializes in climate attribution at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “2.7C would be very bad.” “Not bad” is not a scientific expression but we know it means  not good. Then Amanda Maycock climate dynamics expert from University of Leeds was even more blunt, at that level the planet will become “uninhabitable. We would not want to live in that world” In other words, we are right there. This is what we are now committed to unless we make significant changes and there is no good evidence yet—none—that we will make the necessary changes. Right now, we are committed to making the planet uninhabitable for people.

Apocalypse now.

 

 

There is a Precedent

Climate change, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Lawyers are usually slaves to precedents.  I don’t consider myself such a slave, but there are places for precedents.  Bill McKibben pointed out, there is a precedent we should consider.  Even though we have got ourselves into a very bad position by supporting monsters like Putin and other autocratic leaders of oil and gas states for so many years, we should be able to stop such support and take a new path even in the midst of a war in Ukraine. Wars are fought on many fronts and that includes the war in Ukraine.

 

One of the fronts against Russia and Putin does not require anyone to die or put their lives in danger. In fact, it involves taking one out of danger by withdrawing from supporting Putin and Russia.  It does however require us to enlist the same kind of efforts we have done in past. For example, in the year before the United States entered the Second World War Canada and the United States transformed the industrial system of North America in an all-out effort to provide the military hardware their forces would require to defeat Germany and Japan. It was an astonishing transformation. For example. Ford Motor Company converted its industrial structures from supplying automobiles to supply aircraft and other military equipment and this was a very significant part of the Allied war effort. At the height of the war, a bomber was produced in the United States every hour! The industrial might of North America became one of the most important instruments of the Allied war effort that led to victory in Europe and Japan.

 

Now we need to transform our economy to produce instruments to fight climate change and convert to green sources such as solar and wind power. We will need a similar effort. We did this before and we can do it again. A bomber is a hugely complicated piece of machinery. Solar panels and wind farms are much easier to produce. As McKibben said,

 

None of this is simple. None of this comes without cost, but add it up against the cost of allowing despots to dominate our politics and then add up the costs of allowing climate change to proceed. The latest economic projections I have seen for allowing climate change to proceed unchecked this century is $550 trillion, which is more money than currently exists on planet earth!

 

Now it is true that some people are undermining solidarity on issues such as this. For example, some politicians running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada are promising to do away with carbon taxes in Canada and pay rebates to Canadians paying a lot for fuel right now. As in World War II, this is a time to build solidarity and tackle a big problem. It is not a time to hand out baubles to unhappy Conservative supporters. This will require a big effort. We have done it in the past; we can do it again.

 

Bill McKibben said he had trouble feeling confidence right now. When he hears Canadian conservatives begging for relief he gets discouraged. He admitted he was angry with political leaders like Vladimir Putin and Jason Kenney who just want to take windfall profits at such a dangerous time. As he said, referring to leaders in the energy sector, “It is a reminder of just how irresponsible they have been for decade upon decade and that irresponsibility is killing people in Ukraine and is killing the planet and this may be our last good chance to do something about it.”

 

There is a precedent for getting together and tackling a tough job. We can do this. But we must not defer to vested interests.

A Better Way

Climate change, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Just like Boris Johnson, Alberta’s premier Jason Kenney, has argued that now because of the war in Ukraine we should open the floodgates to Alberta’s oil and gas to flood Europe. Alberta would benefit from that (in the short run at least), but that is not the way to go. That will lead to more misery not a solution. More of the same is rarely a solution to any problem.

 

It is clear that we have made a lot of mistakes.  We have got suckered. Just like every other addict we bought the lies, got sucked in, and now find we have a hefty price to pay. Our addiction to fossil fuels has come at an awesome expense. We have only started to pay that price. What can we do to get off this train?  As Bill McKibben pointed out,

 

“Sun and wind come from everywhere. They are ubiquitous and omnipresent. A world that runs on them won’t have the equivalent of Vladimir Putin. There is no way for a character like Putin to embargo the sun or block the wind. So it is fake realism to pretend the way to stand up to him is to somehow produce more of this stuff. The way to stand up to Putin is to move the world to the way we know it needs to go anyway if we don’t want it to overheat even more disastrously than it already has. This is a choice point. This is a pivot point—the kind of place where we could make a big shift. We’ll see. And Canada is one of the places where we will decide. The oil and gas industry is using this moment to push for more offshore drilling.”

 

We can follow the advice of the oil and gas industry as we have done so often in the past and then pay the price again, as we have also done in the past.  We need to get advice from disinterested parties who don’t stand to make fortunes from our decisions. The pushers of oil and gas don’t have our best interests at heart. This is the time for the right decision, and I believe, we must make a change. Right now. The old ways will merely deepen our dependence on fossil fuels. We know where that leads. We should not listen to dealer in the back alley.

 

We could listen instead to Canada’s Minister of the Environment the Honourable Steven Guilbeault. And guess what? He actually is honourable. He has pointed out clearly that we need to bust the habit.

Now I am not clean here. I like to travel a lot.  My environmental footprint is pretty deep. I have a son who works in the oil and gas industry. I don’t want to see him unemployed.  But, I think we as a community must work with the people who work in the industry to shield them from the blows and direct them to better industries where their talents can be better used. We as a society need to do this together. We can’t just let them hold the bag. That is not justice. And if we don’t have a just society I don’t want it.

 

It will also demand sacrifices. But we must remember the sacrifices the people in Ukraine are making. They make our sacrifices look like pretty thin gruel.

I think a lot of people are willing to pay for higher gas prices if it means we can help the people in Ukraine. Pundits always assume that we are all selfish. I don’t think that is always true. This war is a reminder of our problem.  The war in Ukraine has helped to drive up oil prices, but as McKibben reminded us, the sun is still delivering energy at the same price it did a week ago or a year ago. Same with wind. And the prices of both will be the same next year. Why do we keep paying for the one energy that keeps skyrocketing up from time to time as regularly as wars?

This is a good moment to make the move that we must make anyway. How many more chances will we get before we cause irreparable damage to our planet. That is the approach the oil and gas industry tried to foist on us as they have done so often in the past. By now we know– there is a better way. Let’s take it.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  told us 6 years ago that we had to cut our emission increases to zero by 2030.  Just recently, their latest scientific report said they were wrong. It is now worse than they thought it would be. We have to make those changes by 2025. That is less than 3 years!  And the alternative as we knew 6 years ago, and still know today, are devastating.  Just ask the Ukrainians. The world acknowledged this 6 years ago. Now we know it is even more urgent. This is the time to do it.

 

Should we listen to the Pushers?

Climate change, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Ukraine  offers a lesson to all of us—don’t become beholden to autocrats. Ukraine made that mistake; so did much of Europe. Becoming beholden to autocrats is a dangerous thing to do. The clearest example of that is European dependence on oil from dictators.

 

Addicts usually look to the pushers for wisdom. After all, pushers get rich from pushing. They must be smart. Right?  Yes they are smart, at least from their own perspective.

In Canada Jason Kenney the Premier of Alberta wants  us all to be beholden to Alberta and its  oil. Listen to what Jason Kenney said recently at an energy conference in Houston:

 

“We are the natural answer to the global issue of energy security. We have talked for years about how some of the world’s worst regimes have had a growing presence in global energy markets. Revenues generated from those sales have been converted into violence, terrorism, conflict, and global instability. Much of that energy being produced by regimes with radically lower levels of transparency, of environmental standards, not to mention labour and basic human rights standards.”

 

Now I agree it is better to buy fossil fuels from liberal democratic countries than wicked oil barons from the seediest parts of the globe. But that is not the answer. There is a better way.

As Bill McKibben said,

“People like Jason Kenney have been keeping us hooked on fossil fuels for decades. I wrote the first book on climate change which came out 33 years ago. We’ve known for a very long time what we need to do. And if we had done it, if we had been able to overcome the opposition of vested interests  and Jason Kenney is obviously a perfect representative of vested interests… then we would long since have put people like Putin the rear view mirror. He is just making the argument for more of the same because it benefits him. And actually, it is at this point disgusting…”

 

People in the fossil fuel industry have for decades spent a lot of money convincing us not to do anything about climate change and they have profited enormously by those delays. But we have paid, and are paying, a horrible price. Nowhere is that more obvious than Ukraine, but actually we will all be paying that price. Had we ignored their cries 30 years ago the cost of mitigation efforts for climate change today would be much less, and despots like Putin and the King of Arabia would have been starved out years ago. One of the worst things we ever did was to listen to them for 30 years and one of the worst things we could now would to be to listen to them some more. They are pushers pushing our addiction for their benefit and to our peril. These pushers are our enemies not our friends.

If we don’t get out of our addiction now, we will no doubt have an endless series of such wars as the war in Ukraine. As the temperature rises and rises, the world will become increasingly unstable and unsafe. The sooner we stop that train the better we will be. If, as the UN has predicted,  we will have a billion climate refugees on top of the “regular refugees” we will be in a very dangerous place. We won’t have purchased security and stability as Kenney suggests. We will have purchased bedlam instead.

30 years ago, we might have had an excuse to keep on our course. But now wind and solar energy are the cheapest sources of energy. We don’t need to follow the old path to oblivion. Batteries to store that power have also come down. There are still challenges but the old way is not the best way anymore.

There is a better way—get off the addiction to fossil fuels  now.