Central banks are only ~ 125 years old, much younger than responsible government (ie, accountable to the people). This critique suggests they have not understood their source of legitimacy – perhaps the Jacksonians were right
https://www.dlnews.com/articles/regulation/cbdcs-give-central-banks-more-power-over-your-money/
Red meat, como los Argentinos. Wonderful historical perspective. It lacks deep vision of resource management and also the useful state (ie the bureaucrat), which are all but 21st century necessities. Still he is undubitably right in identifying the engine of liberty. Always loved Argentina, carajo
In response to Niall Ferguson, ‘Biden Says Democracy Is Winning. It’s Not That Simple‘:
* Agree Ferguson’s view that democracy vs autocracy is silly of Biden. The case for the non-state actor, made in FT by Ganesh, is more compelling. I also concur Zakaria’s typology of illiberal democracies is more useful than Diamond’s democratic deficit
* Agree Ferguson’s view that prudent Western leaders (ie, USA) will necessarily ally w illiberals against the real bad guys, whomever they may be. The same was necessary during the Cold War (e.g., Chile, South Africa)
* Ferguson skips past domestic threats to ‘democracy’ – which as a civic characteristic is better understood as ‘political participation’. See WSJ essay ‘How our democracy became undermocratic‘, which usefully distinguishes between democracy and republicanism, meaning delegation by result of voting. More specifically, Swaim observes:
… In the ’90s and early 2000s, [democracy’s] most prolific users had begun to mean something else by it: Democracy was, for them, something closer to a technocracy — a system run by experts that maximizes equality. The franchise was important, sure, but the essential good of liberal democracy consisted in its social outcomes.
More specifically ‘democracy’ no longer means equality of opportunity, but equality of outcomes. See Sotomayor’s dissent in the Harvard-UNC college admissions case
Borne of Hegel, latter-day Progressives decry as ‘populists’ those who ignore what ‘everybody knows’. Much of the time, these are merely voters who dislike bureaucrats. Ferguson is vastly learned and surely knows this – perhaps he’s intentionally stepping past, since populist sympathies are verboten among policy elites
Individualism lacks a sense of civic virtue, eschews prescription, and is selfish. Individuality expresses freedom within sociopolitical parameters, and blends with pluralistic insitutions which intermediate the state. Robert Nisbet’s
explores how people ought to live together.
Hobbes endorsed authoritarianism as removing barriers to individual autonomy; the Enlightenment more destructively sought to diminish intermediaries as irrational and oppressive, trusting in the reasonable state. Neither has proved out. Nisbet turned to book 2 of the
, supplmenting Aristotle with Burke and Tocqueville.
In the
… A western democratic world in crisis needs above all “harmony,” but a harmony that resists the temptation to settle for a unanimity or unison that is the counterfeit of true harmony. This is the great task of contemporary politics for Nisbet and for us: combining civic and social harmony with a political unity that respects pluralism as such. This means that pluralism is not enough. Our great institutions, public and private, must relearn how to speak and act authoritatively again, imbued a genuine sense of public purpose.
The gross value of Premiership broadcast rights has continued rising, but includes more contests, raising the possibility that additional games might be shown in the 1500h window when lower-division clubs play. As these clubs depend on match-day revenues, violating the window may put lower division sides out of business.
Meanwhile, having cracked the US market, the Premiership’s overseas rights dwarf the continental leagues. The lowest English club makes more from TV’s league rights, approximately £150 million per annum – than Bayern Munich, AC Milan or Paris St Germain – all but Barcelona and Real Madrid.
The overall sense one gets is that the revenue squeeze is replacing three decades of a rising tide that lifted all footballing boats with a winner-takes-all environment in which the highly competitive and expertly marketed Premier League is the clear winner. At home that may endanger smaller English clubs. Abroad it jeopardises viable competition in continental tournaments, and will only put a tighter squeeze on other European clubs and leagues as international broadcasting revenues become the scarce resource.
In a market economy, runaway success creates its own problems.
https://www.ft.com/content/a0430c7a-c8b8-4ca4-b86f-803b369a3f46?segmentId=114a04fe-353d-37db-f705-204c9a0a157b
Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to grapple with socioeconomic equality as a necessary outcome of emerging societies, most famously Jacksonian America. For Guy Sorman, ‘Democracy in America is, in fact, a meditation on how the contradiction between equality and liberty might be overcome, or at least eased, by American society’s civil and religious institutions—schools of self-governance in Tocqueville’s famous interpretation.’
Tocqueville missed industrialization and underplayed slavery. ‘…he sees a civilized man as someone who is attached to the land and cultivates it, transforming it by his labor and making it more valuable—the American pioneer, in other words. Tocqueville has the greatest respect for such an entrepreneur of the soil. Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman would agree: if I did not fear the anachronism, I would qualify Tocqueville, for all his lack of focus on industrial transformation, as a free marketeer.’
Concerned also with French Algeria and British India, Tocqueville is a liberal struggling to enshrine checks on the state: ‘A democratic government is such a dangerous machine that, even in America, we are obliged to take a great many precautions against the errors and the passions of democracy: two chambers, veto by governors, and judicial institutions.’
‘Nations in our day can do nothing to prevent conditions in their midst from being equal. But it is up to them to decide whether the equality of conditions leads to servitude or to freedom, to enlightenment or to barbarism, to prosperity or to misery’, Tocqueville added.
Having earned precious fame, his later studies of the 1848 revolution and the fall of the ancien regime, as well as his refusal to participate in Bonapartist politics, meant his views were those of the bypassed aristocrat, according to Carl Schmitt. He was restored only in the 1960s by Francois Furet and Raymond Aron.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/tocqueville-then-and-now
Mansfield, conversely to Schmitt and Brogan, sees Tocqueville as alive to democracy’s sources of liberty in aristocracy. In a review of Lucien Jaume’s
, Mansfield points to nobles as establishing desire for self-rule, trial by jury, associations as derived from public obligations of feudal lords, and most prominently, desire for greatness and acclaim independent of the state. Tocqueville was alive to these and their dynamics, whereas Jaume sees only writing for Tocqueville’s contemporaries, only context and commonplace, leading to nostalgia for aristocracy, thereby discounting the author’s fundamental creativity.
In searching for causation, the balance between social forces and individual agency is contingent on the subject. In ‘Edward Gibbon & the Enlightenment’,
Keith Windschuttle observes:
… In opposition to the French [i.e., Montesquieu’s] search for general laws of historical causation, Gibbon argues that explanations need to be appropriate to their subject. In some historical circumstances, such as newly formed or emerging polities, the role of individuals such as founding fathers may be profound; in other circumstances, a system may be so well entrenched that it might survive the worst kind of abuse from apparently powerful political figures. Similarly, once major internal systemic problems have emerged, neither the fortunes nor adversities of politics may be able to stem the tide.
And further, echoing Himmelfarb’s
:
…The intellectual product and legacy of the English Enlightenment is quite different from that of the French. In Gibbon, the spirit of inquiry and the fruits of research confirm the value of the existing institutions of English society, including its religion. In France, these tools were deployed in opposition to the same institutions. In England, Gibbon emphasized the responsibility of individuals and celebrated the virtue and courage of statesmen and churchmen, where they existed, even though he recorded that the natural passions of humanity were likely to leave such qualities in short supply. In France, the philosophes sought to find general laws of society that would render the actions of individuals irrelevant. The intellectual heritage of the English Enlightenment, as exemplified in Gibbon, clearly goes some of the way to explaining the different political histories of the two countries in the ensuing two centuries. England has enjoyed a stable and peaceful national history marked by a gradual extension of its democracy; France has been periodically racked by revolution, internal collapse, and foreign invasion.
New Criterion, June 1997
A long-form interview between two Obama historians, assessing the president’s character and comparing him with Martin King, generally unfavorably. David Garrow’s
‘is a tragic story about a young man who was deeply wounded by the abandonment of both his white mother and his Black father—a wound that gifted him with political genius and at the same time made him the victim of a profound narcissism that first whispered to him in his mid-twenties that he was destined to be president.’ Of interest:
To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms.
In the absence of what was once American journalism, it is hard to know which portrait of Obama’s post-presidency is truer to life: Obama as a celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or as a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society from his basement, in his sweats.
I think Barack in that winter of ‘08, ‘09, realized there was no way that his presidency could actually live up to the expectations. And I think even the fanboy journalists would acknowledge, under a little bit of pressure, that it ended up being an underwhelming, disappointing presidency. It will, in the long run, be seen as a failed presidency because of the international failures.
Samuels: How do you write a biography of a fictional character authored by someone who’s deliberately created and obscured and erased their actual life and replaced that self with a fiction?
For Barack, everything has to be a success. Everything has to be a victory. I mean, I’m not a health policy expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve always thought that the whole Obamacare thing was, in large part, a fraud. It’s a great achievement for the health insurance industry.
Barack is actually just as insecure as Trump, but in ways that are not readily perceived by the vast majority of people. I think that’s probably my most basic takeaway.
it’s inescapable that Barack’s success in ‘08 is rooted in white people seeing him as an easy ticket toward racial absolution. It’s a need that white people in this country have. And what we’re still seeing week after week now for these past two or three years, especially with places like the Times and the Post, is that this white need for absolution was not cured by the Obama presidency. I frankly don’t understand it.
‘The Obama Factor: A Q&A with historian David Garrow’, 2 August 2023, Tablet.
On the opponents of Whiggish and, worse, philosophy of history:
History has no sides. That this has been easily missed by modern conservatives arises, I suspect, from the dearth of conservative historical consciousness. The bulk of modern conservative intellectual energy has been devoted to politics, economic policy, and political philosophy; there has been no corresponding conservative historical theory, much less a natural law theory of history. But there should, and must, be one. We will need it, too, because all the major movements of the last century into tyranny and intellectual vacuity have been built on theories, not of economics or politics, but of history. Not Webster, not G.F.W. Hegel, not Leopold von Ranke or Jacob Burckhardt, but Lincoln, James Madison, Trenchard and Gordon, Samuel Johnson, and Emmerich de Vattel are the path we need to rediscover. Perhaps we shall soon enough do so.
Allen Guelzo’s ‘Black Dan’ in Claremont Review Winter 2022/23
America’s unresolved tension between Hamiltonian pursuit of political development and Madisonian balance of interests is corruption: ‘maldistribution of federal resources to vested interests’. Hamilton, seeking to address the young country’s evident political needs, sought to tap economic resources by appealing to elite self-interest. Madison wrote (in Federalist 10?) that ‘a power independent of the society may as well espouse the unjust views of the major, as the rightful interests of the minor party, and may possibly be turned against both parties’. Madison thought of government as a referee among domestic citizenry, Hamilton as a coach facing rival nations.
America is Hamiltonian, in part because Madison and Jefferson never development an alternate dynamic. The trouble is politics remains Madisonian: national powers are inherently weak, and parochial interests must be mollified. To compound, economic ends have been supplemented by sociopolitical goals (e.g., environmentalism, egalitarianism) which add another layer of faction.