Excellent article, I have to say the academic lit certainly indicates your proposition holds significant weight. I think on the whole the political elite are incompetent and do not posses the knowledge or the impetus to examine the evidence, and as you say the discourse is stifled by the Jeremiad authors of the Anywhere's.
I think the UK has been subjected to a 3 phase destabilisation of society starting post war although the deindustrialisation process at this juncture was of little note by the 3rd phase of deindutrialisation and the rejection of the moral economy approach, it was obvious at this point capital had been maneuvering for 3 decades to create a hegemony. The Chicago school of economics were shilling for position and the Jeremiad men of letters were scribing letters of doom in the press and academia. Reagan and Thatcher were elected.
In the UK starting in 79 the stepping stones plan was implemented by Thatcher, this plan was preconceived before election by high profile Industrialists, financiers and patrons of the NRC. Sir John Hoskyn's the industrialist appears to have been the steering hand of the plan. The unions were to be emasculated leaving the workers with no recourse over pay and conditions and social solidarity and community cohesion were via Neo-liberalism to be fractured by a pure form of individualism that encourages an incontinence of self control to self service.
Alongside neo-liberalism New Public Management systems of governance were implemented to embed neoliberalism in all institutions including the welfare state, targets, performance indicators and league tables were implemented alongside privatisation deregulation and attacking the unions through legislation.
A comprehensive top down ideological revolution was inaugurated that was to over the last 4 decades by the plurality of politics in the UK reduce society to a business model that was clearly dominated by political economy discourses, culturalism and structuralism were sidelined. Blair and his executive were in fact Thatcherites with a Labour face, the so called 3rd way was in effect a pig midden of undecipherable political misdirection to hide that fact.
The effects of two ideologies working in conjunction, a) Managerialism and b) Neoliberalism were used to implement an inverted form of neo-colonialism of society by capital. Capital and capitalism in all previous crises have devised constructs that create monopoly and oppression of the workers.
I don't have a problem with capitalism.
However it cant be unbridled as we well know at present it is untethered and dominating by political economy with no regard for society and culture in general.
At the time the middle classes were unaware of the long game and were complacent in their own egoism while society and community were in a perpetual state of anomie.
Without diving deeper into the vagueness of the neo-liberal assault and rushing forward to present date the middle classes are waking up. Realising the end game is to drive their position in society via mass migration downward with no view to upward mobility and slowly are backing unions again although they are in a weakened state there is potential for a revival.
If and only if public opinion can force a stifling of IGOs de-facto power and any adoption of external supranational (EU) IMF and WB both latter USA neo-colonialist constructs from dictating immigration policy.
One of the reasons why modern China was able to keep its "Zero Covid" policy going for so long is because the vast majority of urban Chinese live in walled compounds (xiaoqu) that are easy to seal off from the outside world, and apparently this has been a feature of Chinese urbanism going back at least as far as the Tang Dynasty.
I wonder if the historic Chinese problem with incel bandits that you referred to was one of the reasons why Chinese cities came to be laid out that way?
Things you find. I was re-reading the first volume of ‘The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System’, which is a danmei novel. As an English translation, it has footnotes to explain cultural nuances to the round-eyes. One such footnote mentioned that concubines were not permitted to leave the compound. This is fairly typical control of female bodies in a polygynous culture.
That is a very good question. A quick Google does not answer the question, with the walled compound pattern either being seen as “traditional” or a mechanism of political control.
As usual, the government/corporate spin on their Great Reset or grand scheme politics are based in idealogical and political motives. They try to hide it with feigned altruism and when the policy fails or backfires, they move in to the next designed crisis. Wash, rinse, repeat.
"A British feminist establishment that patently don’t care how many Muslim gangs—which are not allowed to be called Muslim gangs but must instead implicitly slander Hindus, Buddhist, Sikhs, Christians, etc. by calling them Asian gangs—sexual predate on how many underage girls in care, or from welfare or working class families, provided they get to keep their Pakistani nannies."
Except that a more restrictive immigration policy wouldn't do anything about grooming gangs, given that their members were mostly born in Britain, and are descendants of immigrants who arrived in the post-WWII era to work in the textile mills that then dominated Lancashire and west Yorkshire.
Deporting native-born descendants of immigrants because their culture is undesirable wouldn't just be a racist policy (in that it would reduce citizenship for certain ethnicities to a glorified visa) but would also likely be impractical because their ancestral homelands wouldn't be willing to take them back.
Currently, UK policy is adding to the problem. While I know the principle never explain by conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence is generally sensible, the way much of the welfare state colonises social dysfunction raises questions about incentive structures for bad policy. The more the state does, the more we have decision-making by those who do not bear the costs of their decisions.
Well, a more restrictive migration policy would stop adding to the problem. And by no means all of the grooming gang members are native born. Also, Muslims aren’t a racial group. Indeed, minority Islam is generally not a problem.
The public cheering for Hamas’s gleeful slaughters is not improving matters. Of course, that would also be an argument for kicking out some impeccably local-ancestry academics and students who aren’t Muslim.
You describe Muscovy and its successor states as combining "the Greek Christianity of the Eastern Roman Empire mixed in with the political and institutional culture of Tartary": are you sure about that?
Muscovy was an extreme absolute monarchy, while the Crimean Khanate (and thus presumably the Golden Horde from which it descended, but which we know little about directly because their cities were almost all obliterated by either the Timurids or the Muscovites) was more of a decentralized tribal confederacy where the Khan's powers were quite limited.
To me it seems more likely that while Muscovy's extreme murderous brutality in war was driven by the trauma of its conflicts with the Tatars and other steppe nomads, its autocratic system of government owes more to the Byzantines. Especially given that the Ottoman state (which also began as a somewhat decentralized Turkic tribal state much like the Golden Horde) turned into an autocratic monarchy after it conquered Constantinople, and broke tribal power by turning to Christian boys enslaved via the devşirme system as their main source of military manpower.
Yes, the Kurultai deliberative assemblies were not carried over in any form. But it was Muscovy’s interaction with being Tartary’s tax collector that was the biggest single factor in driving its institutional development.
While Novgorod was a standard commercial republic, Muscovy was not much like any other Christian state. It was much more patrimonial than the medieval Roman/Byzantine state, with which its interactions were very limited. (In the words of Richard Pipes, a patrimonial regime is “a regime where the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of being indistinguishable, and political power is exercised in the same manner as economic power”.)
So, Ivan Grozny looks like no European monarch, but he absolutely fits in with the patterns of a Timur Lenke (Tamurlaine). Muscovy absorbed the worst features of such rule without taking in the better features of such polities.
King Leopold and his Congo Free State are rightfully infamous for their murderous rapacity, but was the Belgian Congo that replaced it anywhere near as bad?
One thing that did screw up Congo though was that while the Belgians were one of the best colonial powers in Africa at providing their subjects with elementary-level education, they totally failed to provide any with higher education (IIRC because they expected to remain in control until at least the 1980s) meaning that there were no people with the skills to run an independent state.
Yes, it is normal for elites to be more cosmopolitan than the population they rule over. I am afraid I find the “fake left” arguments mostly tedious, though I agree that Anywhere progressives concern for others has a very strong performative element. And whether the political entrepreneurs mobilising populism will actually deliver is a very good question.
Excellent article, I have to say the academic lit certainly indicates your proposition holds significant weight. I think on the whole the political elite are incompetent and do not posses the knowledge or the impetus to examine the evidence, and as you say the discourse is stifled by the Jeremiad authors of the Anywhere's.
I think the UK has been subjected to a 3 phase destabilisation of society starting post war although the deindustrialisation process at this juncture was of little note by the 3rd phase of deindutrialisation and the rejection of the moral economy approach, it was obvious at this point capital had been maneuvering for 3 decades to create a hegemony. The Chicago school of economics were shilling for position and the Jeremiad men of letters were scribing letters of doom in the press and academia. Reagan and Thatcher were elected.
In the UK starting in 79 the stepping stones plan was implemented by Thatcher, this plan was preconceived before election by high profile Industrialists, financiers and patrons of the NRC. Sir John Hoskyn's the industrialist appears to have been the steering hand of the plan. The unions were to be emasculated leaving the workers with no recourse over pay and conditions and social solidarity and community cohesion were via Neo-liberalism to be fractured by a pure form of individualism that encourages an incontinence of self control to self service.
Alongside neo-liberalism New Public Management systems of governance were implemented to embed neoliberalism in all institutions including the welfare state, targets, performance indicators and league tables were implemented alongside privatisation deregulation and attacking the unions through legislation.
A comprehensive top down ideological revolution was inaugurated that was to over the last 4 decades by the plurality of politics in the UK reduce society to a business model that was clearly dominated by political economy discourses, culturalism and structuralism were sidelined. Blair and his executive were in fact Thatcherites with a Labour face, the so called 3rd way was in effect a pig midden of undecipherable political misdirection to hide that fact.
The effects of two ideologies working in conjunction, a) Managerialism and b) Neoliberalism were used to implement an inverted form of neo-colonialism of society by capital. Capital and capitalism in all previous crises have devised constructs that create monopoly and oppression of the workers.
I don't have a problem with capitalism.
However it cant be unbridled as we well know at present it is untethered and dominating by political economy with no regard for society and culture in general.
At the time the middle classes were unaware of the long game and were complacent in their own egoism while society and community were in a perpetual state of anomie.
Without diving deeper into the vagueness of the neo-liberal assault and rushing forward to present date the middle classes are waking up. Realising the end game is to drive their position in society via mass migration downward with no view to upward mobility and slowly are backing unions again although they are in a weakened state there is potential for a revival.
If and only if public opinion can force a stifling of IGOs de-facto power and any adoption of external supranational (EU) IMF and WB both latter USA neo-colonialist constructs from dictating immigration policy.
One of the reasons why modern China was able to keep its "Zero Covid" policy going for so long is because the vast majority of urban Chinese live in walled compounds (xiaoqu) that are easy to seal off from the outside world, and apparently this has been a feature of Chinese urbanism going back at least as far as the Tang Dynasty.
I wonder if the historic Chinese problem with incel bandits that you referred to was one of the reasons why Chinese cities came to be laid out that way?
Things you find. I was re-reading the first volume of ‘The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System’, which is a danmei novel. As an English translation, it has footnotes to explain cultural nuances to the round-eyes. One such footnote mentioned that concubines were not permitted to leave the compound. This is fairly typical control of female bodies in a polygynous culture.
That is a very good question. A quick Google does not answer the question, with the walled compound pattern either being seen as “traditional” or a mechanism of political control.
Wouldn't a fifth strategy (which Islam also forbids) to deal with a male surplus be to encourage homosexuality?
Well, yes.
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/83859
Right now we're having a sale on life insurance: please call me to discuss ;-)
Bad man :)
My black humour, I apologise.
Quite superb. Thank you.
As usual, the government/corporate spin on their Great Reset or grand scheme politics are based in idealogical and political motives. They try to hide it with feigned altruism and when the policy fails or backfires, they move in to the next designed crisis. Wash, rinse, repeat.
"A British feminist establishment that patently don’t care how many Muslim gangs—which are not allowed to be called Muslim gangs but must instead implicitly slander Hindus, Buddhist, Sikhs, Christians, etc. by calling them Asian gangs—sexual predate on how many underage girls in care, or from welfare or working class families, provided they get to keep their Pakistani nannies."
Except that a more restrictive immigration policy wouldn't do anything about grooming gangs, given that their members were mostly born in Britain, and are descendants of immigrants who arrived in the post-WWII era to work in the textile mills that then dominated Lancashire and west Yorkshire.
Deporting native-born descendants of immigrants because their culture is undesirable wouldn't just be a racist policy (in that it would reduce citizenship for certain ethnicities to a glorified visa) but would also likely be impractical because their ancestral homelands wouldn't be willing to take them back.
Currently, UK policy is adding to the problem. While I know the principle never explain by conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence is generally sensible, the way much of the welfare state colonises social dysfunction raises questions about incentive structures for bad policy. The more the state does, the more we have decision-making by those who do not bear the costs of their decisions.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/yes-multiculturalism-is-failing
Well, a more restrictive migration policy would stop adding to the problem. And by no means all of the grooming gang members are native born. Also, Muslims aren’t a racial group. Indeed, minority Islam is generally not a problem.
The public cheering for Hamas’s gleeful slaughters is not improving matters. Of course, that would also be an argument for kicking out some impeccably local-ancestry academics and students who aren’t Muslim.
You describe Muscovy and its successor states as combining "the Greek Christianity of the Eastern Roman Empire mixed in with the political and institutional culture of Tartary": are you sure about that?
Muscovy was an extreme absolute monarchy, while the Crimean Khanate (and thus presumably the Golden Horde from which it descended, but which we know little about directly because their cities were almost all obliterated by either the Timurids or the Muscovites) was more of a decentralized tribal confederacy where the Khan's powers were quite limited.
To me it seems more likely that while Muscovy's extreme murderous brutality in war was driven by the trauma of its conflicts with the Tatars and other steppe nomads, its autocratic system of government owes more to the Byzantines. Especially given that the Ottoman state (which also began as a somewhat decentralized Turkic tribal state much like the Golden Horde) turned into an autocratic monarchy after it conquered Constantinople, and broke tribal power by turning to Christian boys enslaved via the devşirme system as their main source of military manpower.
Yes, the Kurultai deliberative assemblies were not carried over in any form. But it was Muscovy’s interaction with being Tartary’s tax collector that was the biggest single factor in driving its institutional development.
While Novgorod was a standard commercial republic, Muscovy was not much like any other Christian state. It was much more patrimonial than the medieval Roman/Byzantine state, with which its interactions were very limited. (In the words of Richard Pipes, a patrimonial regime is “a regime where the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of being indistinguishable, and political power is exercised in the same manner as economic power”.)
So, Ivan Grozny looks like no European monarch, but he absolutely fits in with the patterns of a Timur Lenke (Tamurlaine). Muscovy absorbed the worst features of such rule without taking in the better features of such polities.
It makes me wonder how much kleptocratic dictatorship in African countries (for example) is rooted in the exploitative nature of European colonialism.
In the case of the Congo in particular, quite a lot.
King Leopold and his Congo Free State are rightfully infamous for their murderous rapacity, but was the Belgian Congo that replaced it anywhere near as bad?
One thing that did screw up Congo though was that while the Belgians were one of the best colonial powers in Africa at providing their subjects with elementary-level education, they totally failed to provide any with higher education (IIRC because they expected to remain in control until at least the 1980s) meaning that there were no people with the skills to run an independent state.
Mobutu’s rule was fairly appalling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko
Yes, it is normal for elites to be more cosmopolitan than the population they rule over. I am afraid I find the “fake left” arguments mostly tedious, though I agree that Anywhere progressives concern for others has a very strong performative element. And whether the political entrepreneurs mobilising populism will actually deliver is a very good question.