Missing Planks

One of the podcasts that I listen to regularly is "The Rest is Politics" with former English politicians Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell. While on "opposite sides of the aisle" as we would say here in the United States, both men were expelled from their former political parties for an unwillingness to walk as far out on the wings as said parties wanted them to.

In a recent episode, Messrs. Campbell and Stewart were speaking about a report, from the Resolution Foundation, that lays out what's currently wrong with the U.K. economy, and how to fix it. They note that there are a lot of things that politicians should be doing, such as avoiding either a nostalgic take on a past that never really existed (MAGA, anyone?) or looking forward to a version of the nation that doesn't yet exist, being realistic about the current strengths and weaknesses of the economy (and playing to those strengths), helping second-tier cities catch up to the top tier, focus on the long term, realism about trade-offs and the like.

When "realism about trade-offs" was raised, Mr. Stewart said: "I would wish that somebody would take this report and lay out the really blunt, brutal implications of this." And those blunt, brutal implications basically came in the form of noting that there are certain things that people want, but that they can't have, and that creating the future will entail pain for certain people, who are going to be asked to bear more of costs than they will directly receive in benefits.

It's all fine and good, but the reason why politicians like Mr. Stewart end up wishing for this sort of straight talk from politicians, but rarely getting it is that it's pretty much always a losing strategy in an election. People want what they want, and simply noting that it's economically infeasible will, more often than not, simply create an opening for someone else to come along and declare that, in fact, it is possible to have one's cake and eat it, too. People tend to want to believe that even serious, long-standing problems have solutions that are straightforward and don't cost them anything. One can chalk this up to ignorance, wishful thinking or what have you, but it's a general fact of politics, and one that needs to be acknowledged. It may be satisfying to complain about people's sense of entitlement, but it's a side effect of the idea that people have rights, which is nothing more than another word for entitlements. In other words, once one opens the idea that there is a way the world should be, it's impossible to dictate to people the contours of "should" that they must stay within.

This is why crises tend to be dealt with only after they have occurred, even when they've been seen coming from a long way off; the teeth of a clear and present crisis tend to dictate what needs to happen, and thus cuts out all of the arguing that otherwise takes place.

Fortunate Ones

If you have people you love and who love you, you're blessed. If you're not homeless or wondering where your next meal is coming from, you're blessed.

I saw this on LinkedIn today, and my first thought was: "That's a pretty low bar for being blessed."

I get where the writer was coming from. The piece as a whole was about taking some time this Christmas season to give something to people who were less well off. But I'm not sure about the attempt to position the reader as somehow doing well for themselves simply because they can routinely manage the basics. Part of it, I think is that it aims low. Most of the people I see from posts from on LinkedIn aren't in the millionaire class. (I suspect that those people have more effective networking tools than LinkedIn.) And I doubt that whatever genuinely wealthy people who are on LinkedIn see any of my posts. So it's middle-income people talking to middle income people. But it's really the wealthy people that one should be talking to, if one is looking for those who are "blessed," "privileged" or just fortunate.

Yes, I understand that by the standards of many people in the world, even those of us in the United States who feel that they're "just getting by" are living like kings. (Even if many Americans I meet are openly envious of the number of families in places like India or Indonesia who have household servants to manage the menial tasks.) But giving from the middle to the bottom doesn't strike me as a workable long-term solution.

If course, foregoing a nice dinner or a new item of some sort to give money to the poor is something that many people can do, and it's something that's easy to control. But it's also the lesser sacrifice. In the big picture, people changing their buying habits would do much more for other people. But, it would mean sacrificing low, low, prices when buying stuff, and people find that painful, rather than gratifying. Easier to count one's blessings.

Zero Sum

Perhaps the strangest thing about the current Israel-Palestinian conflict is the degree to which it's being waged in the Court of Public Opinion in the United States and other Western nations. This has lead to a number of people being at pains to demonstrate that they're on one side or the other, and that neutrality is not an option. (As an aside, I'm apparently complicit in the bad acts that both sides have committed as a result of being unwilling to select a hill to unnecessarily die on.)

Whether it's a cause or an effect, I'm not sure, but related to this is what plays out as a competition by partisans of each side to show that they are the most victimized group in the conflict. The two sides go about this by a single-minded focus on the bad things that people have done to them to the exclusion of all else. Pointing out that there are far more than enough instances of both anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian/Arab/Moslem sentiment to go around can easily trigger a charge of false equivalency.

Domestic American politics does nothing to help, as politicians, never being a bunch that would allow a potential advantage get away from them, have started using the conflict as a signalling device to voters, hoping to gain support from those who might have a favorable partisan lean while convincing those with an unfavorable lean that the other party isn't worth voting for. This, as might be expected, leads to a fairly disingenuous public discourse; nuance interferes with the political point-scoring that is the point of modern politics, and as such, is to be avoided.

It also creates yet another situation where people quickly come to pride themselves on their lack of empathy for others. The recognition that the Palestinians have received a raw deal is seen as being soft on terrorism; understanding that Israelis are legitimately attached to areas that are not part of Israeli is viewed as supporting colonialism and occupation. But here, as in most conflicts, there is no war between peoples, but between governments. (And yes, I'll grant Hamas the status of a de-facto government.)

To the degree that there are factions with both Israel and Palestine who understand that the whole of what was once Mandatory Palestine should belong to them, and them alone, this is a fight between two mutually-incompatible sets of interests. But, like most fights, it's taken on the mantle of a conflict over Right and Wrong. And that's largely what people here in the United States tend to argue over; who's right and who's wrong. But while wars can make people accept certain facts on the ground as existing, wars can't make a new status quo legitimate. And neither can bickering about it at a safe distance from the actual fighting.

Wordy

I believe in creating a country where anyone can do anything and achieve their own American dream.
Nikki Haley

Given that Ambassador Haley is a Republican, I would expect her to frame things this way. But I did notice that she spoke of "creating" such a country. One can take this as a de-facto admission that it does not exist in the present. I'm curious as to what she thinks is missing.

Of course, there is also the small matter of just what "a country where anyone can do anything" looks like in practice. Part of the reason why this is such a popular platitude is that it's easy for people to simply layer what they want to understand the world to be like over it, and call it good. But the real world, as it were, has a habit of not conforming itself to what people might want it to look like. In my conversations with conservatives, I've noticed a belief in what could be called Infinite Demand. One can think of this as what allows Supply-Side economics to work; government policies lower the cost of production, and businesses respond by increasing Aggregate Supply (basically, the sum total of the goods and services available for people to purchase in the economy). As Aggregate Supply expands, prices come down, which, in turn, increases demand, presumably to the degree that company revenues increase, even though unit prices are lower. (Did you follow all of that?) In any event, this where the concept of Infinite Demand comes into play, because the idea that "anyone can do anything" and be successful at it presupposes that the increased supply of whatever good or service that "anyone" creates will be absorbed by the market at a price point that allows it to be profitable. And therein tends to lie the rub. Because for anyone to be able to do anything on the way to achieving their own understanding of the American Dream, the demand for goods and services has to track with the supply; otherwise, it's likely that some number of people are going to pursue careers for which there won't be enough demand to allow them to sustain themselves.

Of course, it's possible to read Ambassador Haley's statement in a way that presumes that training in skills will always be available, so that people can quickly transfer to jobs where labor is scarce, and fund their American Dream in that way. But it's doubtful that even as President, that Ambassador Haley would have enough pull with Congressional Republicans to be able to fund that sort of initiative.

I'm aware that paying very much attention to platitudes is always a fools errand. But people do form opinions of candidates around them. And even though Ambassador Haley has pretty much no chance of securing the Republican nomination this time around, it's a safe bet that she'll make an attempt in 2028.

And Going, and Going...

Back when I first started Nobody In Particular, nearly 17 years ago, my first real post was about some activists who met in Lake Forest Park, Washington, and their idea that the modern United States was, or was on the verge of becoming, a police state. At the time I chalked up their attitude to a combination of paranoia, wishful thinking and a certain freedom to not have to consider that political stands that they took might have consequences.

But after more than a decade and a half of encountering any number of other people who like to tell themselves that the United States has become a genuine police state, I've come to realize that a certain level of narcissism can also play into the mix. I noted back in 2006 that "I don't understand what they are doing that would make the Federal government think them enough of a threat to actually do something to silence them." I suspect that I just should have asked them; they likely would have told me. I suspect that I wouldn't have agreed with their assessment that whatever actions they were taking were really that much of a threat to the status quo, but that's beside the point. The fact is that the activists themselves see their actions as a threat to the wealthy and powerful. There are times, I think where people cast themselves as the "scrappy underdog" out of ego as much as anything else.

Recently, I came across a post on LinkedIn from The Epoch Times, pitching their latest media project, a movie by Dinesh D'Sousa (who else?) that claims (wait for it...) that the modern United States has become a police state. Part of the rationale seems to be a bit of revisionist history and selective understanding of the law. People sent to prison after the rioting in Washington, D.C. on January 6th, 2021 are apparently "political prisoners," rather than people who committed some fairly obvious felonies.

In any event, a number of people were quick to cosign The Epoch Times' assessment of the situation; mainly, I suspect, because the anti-communist Times tends to see the American Left as only one step away from being the next iteration of a communist dictatorship. This gives them common cause with movement Conservatives (such as Mr. D'Sousa) who see any social program that benefits someone other than themselves (or those they favor) as a death knell for Truth, Justice and the American Way. (Not to mention their own cultural and financial interests.) And like other people who see a police state where it's hard to otherwise conclude that one exists, they see their agitation as some sort of existential threat to a power structure that, in all likelihood, barely pays any attention to them. And in that sense, warnings of a creeping police state are self-congratulatory, calling on people to pat themselves on the back for being able to push the current system into wrongdoing in order to save itself.