Modern Politicians

Aurelien explains why most modern politicians are not up to the task.

They will know a great deal about how to make a good career, who to suck up to, and how to please important people. They will have effectively zero relevant experience as public servants...

This is important, because the skills needed to succeed in politics today have very little to do with the skills needed to be a good politician. That may sound odd, so let’s set out the differences. Traditionally, politicians seeking high office had to be fairly robust, managing on little sleep, largely foregoing real vacations, ready to give up evenings and weekends, able to absorb insults and invective without worrying about it. They had to be able to think on their feet, deal with an unscrupulous media, master detailed briefs quickly and sound at least half-way intelligent at seven in the morning or at midnight. As they advanced, they needed a sense of what their parliament and their public would accept, how to present themselves to the media, and how to retain the support of their colleagues. At a high level, they needed to be able to distinguish between causes that were hopeless, and causes worth fighting for.

Modern politicians are generally better educated (though not necessarily more intelligent) than those of previous generations, but they are not necessarily educated in the right things. It’s more important to have gone to the right University, and studied the right subject, than it is to know anything about anything. Their skills are those of survival and advancement inside an organisation... with the end of fundamental political differences between parties and the increasing homogenisation of the political class itself, it is the skills of advancement in an organisation that count. Belonging to the right faction, attaching yourself to rising stars, having the right opinions at a given moment: these are the skills to cultivate.

Almost by definition, such people are unprepared for the responsibility of running a Ministry, let alone a country. They have not done the kind of job, in politics, in business, in the media, even in academia, where they have to take responsibility for things. They do not know how to manage, and so they practice “management,” as ticking boxes and reciting slogans is now known. Unfamiliar with the need to engage with detail, they are obsessed with image and presentation...

The full article is here.

Identity Politics

The latest article by Aurelien explains the emergence of “identity politics”, which dominates the Western wor’d. Other connections that unite people have been destroyed by liberalism.

I just want to discuss the damage that Liberalism has caused to the traditional intermediate structures of western societies, and that has provoked the disastrous attempts to make up for it through Identity Politics, or, as I would prefer to call it, the Politics of Grievance.

Some of these problems could legitimately be described as side-effects. The worship of property-ownership and the encouragement of speculation drove ordinary people out of cities, and scattered families around the country, to wherever they could afford to live. The financialisation of the economy destroyed entire industries, devastated entire communities, made health-care and education more difficult to obtain, and destroyed careers and the stability that went with them. The preference of governments for cars and motorways rather than public transport destroyed city centres, the abolition of barriers to movements of goods, capital and people produced a race to the bottom which has benefitted almost nobody.

Yet, whilst people have got rich from these developments, and whilst there were certainly those who saw political profit in some of them, most ordinary Liberals who went along with them did so because of a naive belief in “freedom,” and in the ability of the market to sort everything out. Even now, some hold desperately to the belief that “flexibility” of some kind, or more education, or information technology, or artificial intelligence, or something, will put things right again.

Liberalism was impatient with the past, and wanted to sweep away traditions, superstitions, religion, history, even nations, and replace everything with rational, mathematical calculations of the common good. So instead of compassion we get Quality-adjusted Life Years, instead of education being a public good and a means to personal betterment, it is a cold investment intended to produce a revenue stream later. Instead of citizens, with rights and responsibilities, we have residents who might as well be customers, paying fees to governments and benefiting from services, like shareholders in a company... Most of the points through which individuals were previously able to situate themselves with respect to others simply disappeared.

Read the full article to understand the implications of these changes.

Civilisational States

In a recent Substack post called We Are All Civilisational States, Aurelien has some interesting comments on the concept of a civilisational State.

Liberalism has always tended towards a kind of blank, managerial efficiency, bereft of any of the characteristics that make us human. It regards beliefs, loyalties, friendship, and social bonds of any kind as at best inefficient, preventing the smooth functioning of the market economy, and at worst as symbols of darkness and superstition, to be driven away by the pure light of reason... Such a society is actually already present in outline in the assumptions of the European Union. Religion, history, culture, language and belief divide people against each other, and so (it is argued) cause conflicts and even wars. Consequently, every effort must be made to extinguish national differences by discouraging the teaching and invocation of separate histories and cultures, except for warnings against their negative aspects, whilst promoting a tasteless, grey Brussels soup, largely distinguished by the ingredients that are missing. History, insofar as its existence is acknowledged, has gone from being a national story to a field of vicious debate and struggle where groups seek to impose their interpretations of history on each other, like family members fighting each other in front of a judge over inheritance rights.

Brussels today is, effectively, Nowhere: no history, no culture, no common heritage, and an ideology constructed entirely out of clichés, where difficult subjects are just not discussed. (Religion is considered a purely cultural artefact, and any criticism of practitioners of non-European religions for any reason is considered racism). History, in the form of buildings and monuments, is acceptable only insofar as it encourages the tourism industry or represents a business opportunity. Even the official language is artificial: a kind of simplified English, with a large influence from French legal vocabulary, often called Globisch.

"Free speech” used to be a Liberal principle, and in theory still is. Yet of course its origins lie in the struggle by Liberals to express themselves freely under absolutist or authoritarian regimes from the eighteenth century onward. Once they had achieved these freedoms, Liberals inevitably began to notice the inconveniences associated with free speech which they did not agree with. And because theirs was an ideology based essentially on a series of unsupported assertions about the world, free enquiry and rational questioning, ironically, were inimical to it. So it’s not surprising that support for freedom of expression has been falling sharply recently among people who identify as liberal.

Poltical and Social Change

In his latest post on Substack, Aurelien makes some interesting comments about the things necessary to bring about political and social transformation.

If we look at history, we see that bringing about fundamental, discontinuous political change requires three things. One is a group of individuals with a common (though not necessarily identical) purpose. The second is a clear vision of what is wanted, either in terms of ideology or at least of defined political objectives. And the third is the resources and organisation capable of bringing it about. Having only two of these is not enough. This may seem mundane, but then quite a lot of the nuts and bolts of history are. And it reminds us that history is not, in fact, entirely the product of blind forces, but rather of a complex interaction between individuals, groups and society.

He explains how these things are lacking in the modern world, as political parties become technocratic and difference between them have blurred. Public interest and trust in existing political systems is reducing all over the western world. This is a huge risk.

As I read the word in the quotes above, I thought about the role of the church in society. Once it would have met these requirements, but I am not sure if it is true anymore. It seems to be divided and lacking a common purpose. The church has no clear vision of what is needed. There is no evidence that it can work together to bring about change.

Distributed Power

Aurelien suggests that the US dominance that emerged after the end of the Cold War was never as powerful as many pundits believed.

There has never been a time when the world has actually been unipolar, or dominated by a single power. Things changed at the end of the Cold War, but what changed were perceptions: at least as much as reality, and often more so. The resulting fiction of a unipolar world was partly a deliberate creation, partly the result of ignorance, partly a collective hallucination of people who didn’t know any better.

American political culture generally is competitive, aggressive, power-obsessed, and prizes victories, even empty ones, over agreements and consensus. All political questions in Washington are settled by defeats for some and victories for others, and the weak are trodden into the ground. Consensus, where absolutely required, is a long and exhausting process of trials of strength, with agencies not scrupling to privately or publicly dissociate themselves from that consensus.

This culture contributed in two ways to the rise of the illusion of unipolarity. First, the decision-making process in Washington is so exhausting and time-consuming that there is little time, energy or inclination to worry about what others think and, from the US perspective, no reason to do so. With the Cold War over and the Soviet Union gone, the narcissist tendency to self-absorption became absolute.

And there were, of course, failures: Iraq became a nightmare, Afghanistan a political graveyard. But it didn’t really matter, not least because for the first time in world history the most powerful single grouping in the world had an unchallengeable and inextinguishable faith in its own rightness and in the tenets of the Liberalism it professed. And it lived in a hall of mirrors where its own glory was reflected back on itself by the media and by its acolytes elsewhere in the world. Failure was always somebody else’s fault.

Yet to the more perceptive, it was always obvious that the collective fantasy of a unipolar world dominated by a hyper-power was a dangerous illusion which concealed a much more complicated reality... So the real question is, how effectively has the West been able to use its power to determine the way the world is run, since power in the end can only be evaluated by what it produces.

The answer is, not very, at least if we concentrate less on rhetoric and theatre and more on underlying mechanisms. At the most basic level, every war, every military intervention and every nation-building enterprise the West has engaged in over the last thirty years to make the world more like itself has failed. Indeed, it could be plausibly argued that the world today is a great deal less to the taste of the collective West than it was thirty years ago... But much of what was intended and attempted was probably impossible anyway, and was never going to happen.

He suggests that we are moving back toward distributed power.

Aurelien (5) Weak Economy

The nations of the West are facing many political challenges at a time when they are economically weak. Aurelien has not written about this issue so much, but he makes some pertinent comments.

In the last thirty to forty years, the Global West has largely offshored its productive capacity, and so its way of life now depends overwhelmingly on imported goods. Such industry as still exists is itself greatly dependent on raw materials and components supplied by countries with which it is not necessarily on good terms.

This is a huge problem because the Western nations have created a dangerously vulnerable financial system. Artificially low interest rates have created a massive financial superstructure that looks good in GDP statistics, but produces nothing of value, while it sucks wealth out of the economy and feeds it up to the already wealthy.

Aurelien (4) Weak Military

Political weakness is compounded in the West by military weakness. The West has invested too much in the wrong weapons. It has also over-extended its attempts to control other nations at a time when the fragility of its weapon's choices is being exposed.

Given that they worked in World War 2, the United States has focused its defense on aircraft carriers and attack aircraft and helicopters. This has worked reasonably well because all its wars since World War 2, have been expeditionary attacks against weaker nations and rebellions in other parts of the world. Actually it did not work that well in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

In the current world, missile technology makes aircraft carriers and airplanes vulnerable, and this is an area where the US has underinvested.

In spite of spending a collective fortune on defence capabilities, the West is only capable of operating successfully in a limited number of scenarios, and it is not obvious how this can change. We can list some of the principal ones. (Nuclear forces exist in a different conceptual category, and I’m not going to say any more about them here.) Western aircraft could successfully gain and hold air superiority against, say Russia or China, provided the enemy agreed to limit the engagements strictly to air-to-air combat out of the range of anti-aircraft missiles. Western submarines, surface ships and carriers could probably prevail against, say the Chinese Navy, provided the latter agreed to fight outside the range of land-based missiles. Reasonable amounts of force could be projected by sea and air into permissive environments where air superiority could be guaranteed. This could include combat operations with mechanised forces and artillery, provided that operations did not last for more than a few weeks. And peacekeeping missions could still be undertaken, though probably not on a large scale. There are, of course, very important differences and nuances among western nations, but all of them, at different levels, are trapped in a process of smaller and smaller forces with smaller and smaller numbers of increasingly expensive and sophisticated equipment which is more and more expensive to maintain, and impossible to replace once a conflict has begun. The latter point has political consequences that are often ignored: under what circumstances are you going to risk your entire fleet of perhaps 100 front-line combat aircraft in a war which could leave you disarmed in a few days, and unable to rebuild your forces in less than a decade?

These force structures today did not develop by accident: they reflected beliefs about the missions that military forces would be likely to undertake. Essentially, western forces have a lot of super-sophisticated capabilities, and a fair amount of low-intensity and counter-insurgency capabilities, but not a lot in between. But they cannot fight a major conventional land/air war, or even a limited one that goes on for more than a few weeks. They also face the twin problems of the widespread proliferation of relatively cheap and accurate cruise and ballistic missiles capable of overwhelming defences and destroying highly expensive and complex weapons systems on the one hand, and their own lack of investment in sustainability, on the other. There is nothing magical about the technology involved in the new missiles; it is just that the West saw no virtue in developing that technology itself. Likewise, the West saw no virtue in large and expensive stocks of ammunition. As a result, from now on, the West will simply not be able to rely on automatic air superiority in any serious conflict, nor will its navies be able to operate safely anywhere near an enemy coast, or within the range of air-launched stand-off missiles, nor will it be able to conduct sustained operations on land...

To repeat, none of the above would necessarily have been a problem, provided the overall security policies of western nations had been consistent with these limitations. But they weren’t, and in essence they have provoked a situation where military problems are starting to arise to which the West has no adequate response.

So the existing force-structures of western states are going to have problems coping with the likely domestic security threats of the near future. Most western militaries are simply too small, too highly specialised and too technological to deal with situations where the basic tool of military force is required: large numbers of trained and disciplined personnel, able to provide and maintain a secure environment, and enforce the monopoly of legitimate violence.

This decline in influence will also apply to the United States. Its most powerful and expensive weapons—nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines, carrier battle groups, high performance air-superiority fighters — are either not usable, or simply not relevant, to most of the security problems of today. We do not know the precise numbers and effectiveness of Chinese land-based anti-shipping missiles for example, but it’s clear that sending US surface ships anywhere within their range is going to be too great a risk for any US government to take. And since the Chinese know this, the subtle nuances of power relations between the two countries are altered. Again, the US has found itself unable to actually influence the outcome of a major war in Europe, because it does not have the forces to intervene directly, and the weapons it has been able to send are too few and in many cases of the wrong kind.

More at https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-west-is-weak-where-it-matters

Aurelien (3) Nihilistic Political Philosophy

Aurelien warns that western political philosophy has become increasingly nihilistic, and consequently incapable.

We are dealing with the immense and still poorly understood psychological and spiritual consequences of forty years of Liberal Nihilism. (Yes, that’s a concept I just invented, I think.) What I mean by that phrase, is that the uncontrolled growth, and universal application, of Liberal social and political ideas in the last forty-odd years have produced the expected result: we are degenerating into isolated, alienated individuals, with no relations except economic ones, no society, no common points of reference, no hope and no future.

This is the natural result of the thorough-going application of an ideology which has no moral compass except short-term financial efficiency and total personal autonomy, and so as a result, we have lost not only the ability to manage and plan at the level of the community and the state, but even the awareness that such a thing might be necessary. It is also the natural result of an ideology which is fundamentally negative, which is always fighting against things, and so cannot express the positive except as the destruction of a negative: as a consequence we have lost our ability to act collectively, since each of us is a suspicious, hostile, monad, seeing others as a threat; an island entire of itself, as John Donne put it. But now, of course, the bell tolls for all of us.

All of this was entirely predictable, and was predicted, from the tenets of a political ideology of selfishness, that puts individual needs and wants before collective ones, and where the more power and money you have, the more your private needs will be fulfilled. China builds railroads while we build electronic currency markets. Russia does real mining while we do Bitcoin mining. Nobody forced our leaders to banish manufacturing industry abroad, to eviscerate public services in the name of management efficiency or to turn all activities, even education, even social life itself, into machines for generating money for those who have too much already. And now all we do have is money, or the luckiest of us, anyway, who mostly have other peoples’...

There was nothing inevitable to the change which eventually led to Liberal Nihilism: it depended on a series of decisions made by particular individuals at particular times and under specific circumstances. For all that real issues (competition from Japan, oil-price driven inflation, the need to modernise the Trades Unions) were prayed in aid, the actual process was one of deliberate, if incoherent, attempts to impose abstruse, unworkable and even dangerous economic theories, which nonetheless were strongly supported by certain groups, notably the rich.

This wasn’t a conspiracy though, much as some would be comforted to think it was. Nor were the pointy-headed economists behind it consciously evil : they were mostly just misguided and divorced from reality. And even the politicians who adopted these ideas do generally seem to have thought, in their confused and ignorant fashion, that they would be good for the economy, rather than injecting a potentially-lethal poison into it. Beyond a few nutcases, none of them would actually have wished to bring about the situation we have now. But then evil is always easier to deal with than incompetence...

This is why the current situation is so dangerous and so apparently hopeless: elites have so internalised “technical” solutions which are “effective” by the most banal of criteria, that they are literally incapable of thinking any other way even as disaster approaches. Failure to them simply means that the ideology has not been tried hard enough, and they continue to self-inflict pain, as did the Xhosa tribes who famously killed all their cattle in the 1850s, after a prophecy that it would restore their former greatness as a nation.

The worship of “technique” of course, is the opposite of “vision,” even in the debased sense in which that word appears on company PowerPoint slides. Our current leaderships have been trained in technique to the exclusion of everything else, and are obsessed with “technical” solutions to problems, the more complex the better. Ask them what the actual purpose of politics is, and they stammer incoherently. Its hard to believe that the Sunaks and Macrons of the world, with their mere smattering of genuine education, have really thought deeply about the policies they are trying to thrust on their populations: they are as much intellectual prisoners as everyone else. That Macron could possibly believe, at a time like this, that forcing French people to work longer for smaller pensions should be the highest priority for his government, may seem to defy belief. But the fact is that, when all you know is how to build Lego models, every problem looks like a Lego model needing to be built.

And so we live in a kind of Hell where nothing changes, or ever can change, except for the worse. CS Lewis observed once that the only people in Hell are the ones who want to be there, by which he meant that they were incapable of understanding and learning, and incapable of changing their minds. Escape from our current problems is thus dependent on the only thing that is excluded in principle: a change of mind...

We are more used these days to revolts and revolutions that have an eye towards the future, but for this you have to believe that a different future is in fact possible, and at least some vague idea what it may look like. For a long time, religion supplied a possible conceptual framework, as it still does with some fringe movements in Islam, but in the West its place has been taken by the secular apocalyptic cult I described a few weeks ago, whose ideology is precisely the absolute triumph of Liberal Nihilism. With the abandonment of Marxism, and even of reformist Socialism, and their effective suppression from political discourse in the West, there are no shared alternative frameworks within which a different and better future could even be imagined.

More at https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-years-midnight

Aurelien (2) Elitist Political Systems

Political systems right across the western world have become fragile and ineffective, while becoming more and more elitist.

Elections have become a party game in which different members of the elite group take turns at governing. The courts and news media that are supposed to keep them accountable and the security services that are supposed to protect the overall system both come from the same professional, fairly prosperous, political class that lives in the capital and attended the same schools and universities. The problem is that this elite group has become more and more detached from the people that they govern.

People tend to vote for parties that represent, or at least acknowledge, their interests, and if a party no longer does that, they will stop voting for the party, or stop voting altogether. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence of the move towards elite Professional and Managerial Class (PMC)-based political parties.

In the past, for as long as there were genuine differences between parties, and parties themselves had mass memberships, the problem was containable. Most people were prepared to go along with the system, believing that their vote could change things, if only at the margins. That’s no longer true, and not only do people increasingly not vote, which is awkward in a democracy, but when they do vote, it might be essentially a vote of protest against the system, out of a desire to demonstrate a lack of faith in it. So other methods have been required as well...

In most western countries there is now a professional political class, with links of family and education to similar classes in the media, professional and intellectual worlds, who mostly think alike, and who believe, and tell each other, that they know what’s best, and so should be allowed to rule. This political class itself is drawn from a far narrower and far more homogeneous group than at any point in modern history.

So this professional political class, narrowly based and insulated from much of real life, but with close and overlapping contacts with other parts of the establishment, naturally thinks that it knows best...

But this class is only part of a larger PMC, which also includes the traditional establishment professions: law, education, banking, the media, the public service and so forth. Structurally, we can look at much of the rhetoric around the functioning of today’s political system as different expressions of the class power of the PMC, and to some extent a reflection of the competition for power and influence within it...

After all, the elites move between the various spheres, and sometimes occupy them simultaneously: a politician may go on to a lucrative media career, a lawyer may also advise and work for NGOs. If one part of the ecosystem seems to be getting a little out of control, other parts can step in to restore order. Above all, the system is multiply redundant in obstructing attempts from any quarter to challenge its power, or to advance the interests of ordinary people.

Liberalism, the dominant political force in modern western societies, has been elitist since its conception: it’s just that we are more conscious of that now, as the gap between the interests and preoccupations of ordinary people and the PMC continues to grow all over the world.

The sociologist Robert Michels developed what he called the Iron Law of Oligarchy, based partly on his experiences in the German Social Democratic Party before the First World War. All organisations, he argued, even the most faultlessly democratic, ultimately wind up being run by a “leadership class” which takes decisions and renews itself. Anyone who has observed, or participated in, organisations large or small, is likely to find this argument persuasive, but it’s clear that, beyond a certain level of complexity, it applies to nations as well. Perhaps the PMC is, in part, a natural consequence of a complex society.

The problem is the rest of us, and especially those whose only relationship to the PMC will be that of a servant class.

More at https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/lets-all-be-accountable-

Aurelien

Some of the most thoughtful articles that I have read in rececent times are published by a person writing under the name Aurelien on Substack (Aurelien was emperor at a time when the Roman Empire was disintegrating). He writes that he has had a long professional career in government, before and after the Cold War, and in many parts of the world. He claims to have been to enough places, met enough people and done enough things, to have some idea about how stuff works in real life (Given his age, I am presuming he is “he”). I agree with his basic premise that we are at a turning point in world history, and I believe that he has something useful to say about it.

The following quote describes the changes he is concerned about.

As you get older, you become more and more distrustful of people who tell you that, “we are living today in a tme of unprecedented change.” Normally, that’s just an excuse to make life worse for you, get money from you, or force you to do things you don’t want to do. Ironically, though, we are now at a point of major change that hardly any of the usual suspects are prepared to recognise, because, for once, it’s their version of the world which is being upended.

Put simply, we are one of those periods in history where things move extremely rapidly, and after which nothing is ever really the same again. It’s accepted that 1914, 1945 and 1989 were like that. It is pretty clear that we are now living in such a period, for all that the political classes of the West are desperately trying to avoid seeing it, and to discourage the rest of us from doing so.

Like most seemingly violent changes, this one has been building up for some time. The roots of it lie in a whole series of progressive, unconnected, but cumulatively catastrophic errors made at the end of the Cold War, essentially by people who wanted the illusion of change without the hard work of actually deciding and implementing it. True to the short-term benefit-maximising culture that has dominated the last thirty years, the future was expected to be much like the present only more so, and anyway capable of looking after itself, so we only needed to think about the next few years at any one time. Liberal political and economic ideas would spread without limit or resistance, it was thought. NATO and the EU would expand forever, without resistance or consequences. Western domination of the world economy, of international trade and international institutions, would continue forever, without resistance and ever more intensively. At some vague, indeterminate, point in the future, it was thought, the whole world would come to resemble a brown-bag lunch at a progressive American think-tank. The fact that if something can’t go on literally forever there must be a point at which it stops, was somehow overlooked. Indeed, if there is a single phrase that encapsulates the intellectual lethargy of the last thirty years, it’s “we’ll worry about that when it happens.“ Well, it’s happening now, and western elites have absolutely no idea how to deal with it (Politics is like Engineering).