Bubble-think and the ultraleft

Peter Turchin has a phrase, the 'overproduction of elites'.

"Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions."

He writes:

"The youth cohort in Europe, those in their 20s and 30s, are the highest educated in the history of humanity – and there are not enough jobs that would use their skills. History shows that the overproduction of youth with education credentials is a sure sign of political turbulence to come."

Ed West (The Spectator blog) describes what these elites believe:

"More widely, in political discourse and culture, warm, fluffy notions about human nature are favoured over depressive realism. From a very young age children are read books and shown films that teach the message that we are all basically good and just like us, and then the more intelligent ones are sent off to universities where conservatism has been frozen out."

It is sometimes thought that the chic-radicalism of the bien-pensant is politically represented by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and the hard left. But this isn't really true: the Marxist left privately characterises bubble-think as petit-bourgeois, a utopian worldview in which everyone is 'nice' and there are no more victims. Petit-bourgeois utopians aren't known for letting the class structure of society trouble their righteous little heads.

Whatever Corbyn may himself believe (who knows?) the hard left supporting him are in no doubt that the way forward is not to manage or prettify capitalism but to destroy it, replacing it with a 'democratic, centrally-planned economy under the control of workers' councils'.

The Marxist position on the EU of the Capitalists is Brexit; the EU is to be replaced by a post-capitalist socialist Europe.

The Bubble  is firmly Remain, as they identify with their pan-European elite tribe (as Ross Douthat observed).

The Marxist left is a highly-ideological minority which for tactical reasons hides its differences with bubble-leftism. This has been the strategy for decades: the expectation is that as the crisis of capitalism develops, the faux-leftists will become amenable to Marxist ideas, swelling the ranks of the Revolutionary Party.

It seemed to work for Lenin, back in 1917.

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The non-Corbynistas in the PLP, what we used to call 'The Labour Party', are no less bubble-thinkers. The Tristram Hunts and Chuka Umunnas are not unfamiliar with Hampstead and Islington. It's just that they have a sense that managing a capitalist economy does impose some constraints over generalised niceness, equality of outcome and punching-up: decisions necessarily make enemies.

And what about the real proletarians, those millions of workers - mostly outside London - who really are working class and who recognise neither their identity nor their interests in Corbyn politics, or leftist or neo-Blairite bubble-think?

I suggest those Labour policy-makers not in thrall to bubble identity-politics might think a bit about a manifesto for them (here's an idea).

The Warrior, the Priest and the King

The roles required for effective governance: the warrior, the priest and the king.

• The warrior is the enforcer, using charm, gifts and bludgeons to get stuff done
• The priest is the strategist, directing the plays with divinely-inspired vision
• The king exemplifies the unity and purpose of the community as a whole.

Many political failures result from getting these roles wrong; either by omitting one or more of them or misallocating power between them. Take Brexit (from an elite point of view):

David Cameron was the King, George Osborne was the Warrior (the Treasury frequently plays the role of enforcer) and people like Gove and Hilton were the Priests. But Osborne also played the strategist while Gove was used merely departmentally and Hilton bailed. The result was a fatal lack of coherent strategy and a sense of visionless coasting on the part of the Cameron administration.

Sometimes the Warrior is in the ascendant. When Margaret Thatcher came to power, the Establishment was beset by enemies: unruly trades unions, a rapacious EU bureaucracy, a stumbling economy. The Warrior demolished her opponents but couldn't progress to the role of King. Her endless search for further enemies brought about her downfall. Her successor, the emollient John Major, was a weak King.

You could tell a similar story about Winston Churchill.

In Myers-Briggs terms:

• the King is a Guardian, most likely an ESTJ/ESFJ; 
• the Warrior is often an Artisan ESTP .. or perhaps a righteous Idealist ENFJ; 
• the priest is typically an intellectual Rational (NT).

The Labour Party

They have a diffident intellectual leader (Corbyn) failing to play the King; they have a far-left intellectual John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor, failing as an effective Enforcer; and no Priest with a widely-supported political programme. In short: leaderless, ineffectual and all over the place; a party in civil war.

The Tories

Faced with novel challenges post-Brexit, they need powerful people in all three roles. Gove would be a good candidate as the Priest, although his political ineptness would have to be supervised; the Warrior role is up for grabs and not really visible in this leadership election, while Theresa May is a psychological match for the King role.

The question for Theresa May is whether she's up for the mission, or sees herself instead as a trojan horse for the dominant Establishment Remain faction. In the latter case, there will be tears before bedtime.

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All of the above informs programme management as well. And business: COO, CMO, CEO.

Leave wins 421 seats across the UK, Remain just 229

A lot of chat, including here, about the prospects of weaselling out of the Brexit vote.

The referendum aggregated individual votes across the UK. But what if you group the votes by constituencies and see how each constituency would have voted?

BuzzFeedNews did it here (h/t: Marginal Revolution).

"To see how the country’s referendum vote could affect a general election, we’ve translated the referendum results (which in England, Scotland and Wales were counted by council area, not constituency) into results broken down by parliamentary seats.

"And when you do that, you get a radically different outcome. Instead of a close result, Leave win in a landslide.

"Although the referendum result was close nationally, Remain piled up many of its votes in a relatively small number of constituencies (London and Scotland being prime examples). As a result, the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system would produce an extremely skewed result.

"In our projection, Leave would win 421 seats across the UK, while Remain would win just 229."

A solid sea of blue = Leave constituencies.

Yellow (Remain) indicates two things: the anti-English nationalist votes in Northern Ireland, Scotland and the northern part of Wales, plus the geography of the Elite Bubble in English/south Wales constituencies.

Most MPs won't be backing the coup, I suggest.

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Peter Turchin (Cliodynamics) has an interesting piece: "Brexit as Destructive Creation".

"Now, in the aftermath of the referendum, the main question is, what’s next? In the following I propose some answers suggested by the new discipline of Cultural Evolution and my research on historical dynamics (Cliodynamics).

"My proposal is quite radical. Rather than trying to fight the disintegrative trend, we should allow it to run its course, destroying the EU as it is now. But we need a European Union. Thus, what I hope will happen is another integrative project within Europe, one that will learn from the mistakes of the last one.

"In other words, the EU is dead; long live a new and better EU."

Read the whole thing.

Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal

We're recently back from a break in Portugal at Póvoa de Varzim, north of Porto. These holidays are rather exploratory for us - this one was with Newmarket Holidays and rather underperformed (in my opinion).

The four star Axis Vermar Hotel looks good in the photos. It's just across the road from the beach and has its own pool. It can't help its location though, bathed in a continuous cold, blustery wind from the north combined with freezing Atlantic sea temperatures. This whole stretch of coastline is a concrete ribbon development, which minimises the attractions of walking out (when the wind dies down, which is seldom).

Newmarket had laid on daily coach trips to places inland, hotter and less windy. We mostly didn't take them, having opted for relaxation over hours in a coach every day.

On my second day, I contracted a savage sore throat and then succumbed to an unpleasant debilitating cold for the remainder of the holiday. I saw a lot of the hotel lounge and the recliners by the pool, while Alex and Clare got more adventurous with extended walks and one of the coach trips (to Porto).

In fact I didn't care so much: I was plugged in to all the Brexit kerfuffle and had books to read. And back in the UK now, I've returned with a pretty good tan.

Alex took this: Clare and myself on the coach back to the airport

These two are obsessively sun-shy. Everyone else
 around the pool had their kit off and were in swimwear.

My main hang-out: the hotel lounge

While I'm reviewing, let me say that the Axis Vermar rooms were good but the restaurant (everything buffet and salad-centric) was merely average - mass-catering logistics trumping flair.

We were two hours delayed going out, due to the French air traffic controllers' strike; we arrived there around midnight. Coming back - no problems.

Shadow: August 2000 - July 1st 2016

#TheCatDied    #ShadowPassedOver

He'd been off-colour for a week or so, spending much of his time sleeping. On his last day he vanished into the garden before returning in the evening to rest in his basket. Clare put the electric heater under his towel there to ease his swollen stomach.

Just after 8.30 pm he stood up, as if he wanted to experience nature one last time. We put him outside the front door and he looked around. Then, with an effort, he walked up the steps and into the hall. There he stood panting, before collapsing onto his side. The unblinking eyes delivered the news, although the odd twitch continued for a while.

He was placed (and buried) on a copy of The Guardian.

It is what he would have wanted.

Shadow, moments after his passing

'I'm so glad I'm a Beta'

Many people have said this, but not as well as Ross Douthat in the NYT yesterday.

"Now that populist rebellions are taking Britain out of the European Union and the Republican Party out of contention for the presidency, perhaps we should speak no more of left and right, liberals and conservatives. From now on the great political battles will be fought between nationalists and internationalists, nativists and globalists. From now on the loyalties that matter will be narrowly tribal — Make America Great Again, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England — or multicultural and cosmopolitan.

Well, maybe. But describing the division this way has one great flaw. It gives the elite side of the debate (the side that does most of the describing) too much credit for being truly cosmopolitan.

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.

The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”

This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe.

They have their own distinctive worldview (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), and of course their own outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise. And like any tribal cohort they seek comfort and familiarity: From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city” (like each “global university”) is increasingly interchangeable, so that wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home.

Indeed elite tribalism is actively encouraged by the technologies of globalization, the ease of travel and communication. Distance and separation force encounter and immersion, which is why the age of empire made cosmopolitans as well as chauvinists — sometimes out of the same people. (There is more genuine cosmopolitanism in Rudyard Kipling and T. E. Lawrence and Richard Francis Burton than in a hundred Davos sessions.)

It is still possible to disappear into someone else’s culture, to leave the global-citizen bubble behind. But in my experience the people who do are exceptional or eccentric or natural outsiders to begin with — like a young writer I knew who had traveled Africa and Asia more or less on foot for years, not for a book but just because, or the daughter of evangelical missionaries who grew up in South Asia and lived in Washington, D.C., as a way station before moving her own family to the Middle East. They are not the people who ascend to power, who become the insiders against whom populists revolt.

In my own case — to speak as an insider for a moment — my cosmopolitanism probably peaked when I was about 11 years old, when I was simultaneously attending tongues-speaking Pentecostalist worship services, playing Little League in a working-class neighborhood, eating alongside aging hippies in macrobiotic restaurants on weekends, all the while attending a liberal Episcopalian parochial school. (It’s a long story.)

Whereas once I began attending a global university, living in global cities, working and traveling and socializing with my fellow global citizens, my experience of genuine cultural difference became far more superficial.

Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with this. Human beings seek community, and permanent openness is hard to sustain.

But it’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe: because that means our leaders can’t see themselves the way the Brexiteers and Trumpistas and Marine Le Pen voters see them.

They can’t see that what feels diverse on the inside can still seem like an aristocracy to the excluded, who look at cities like London and see, as Peter Mandler wrote for Dissent after the Brexit vote, “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”

They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools.

They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world."

H/t: Steve Sailer.

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Here's the full quote (chapter 2).

"At the end of the room a loudspeaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.

"… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."

There was a pause; then the voice began again.

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"

The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.

"They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."

Ganging up on the English

The Northern Ireland Protestants tended to vote leave, identifying with the English working class.

The Northern Ireland Catholics tended to vote remain, identifying with their brethren across the border.

The Scots voted remain to arm themselves with countervailing power against the English.

The Welsh showed their shallow sense of national ethnic identity by identifying more with the English working class. I don't know the figures for the more nationalist North Wales.

The illusions of the new European demos so cruelly exposed - it lives only in the elite bubble.

The fault lines in that historical and increasingly wobbly construct, the 'United Kingdom', are equally exposed to view.

My fantasy Labour Party

I'm watching the Labour shadow cabinet implode this morning with emotional detachment. There was a time, in my twenties, when I was tribally Labour; later I confess I voted for Blair. But it's all been downhill since then, Gordon, Ed and Jeremy.

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My ideal, fantasy Labour Party

1. Puts its hands up for capitalism, predatory and destructive though it is, as no other economic system can take us forwards. My Labour Party supports technological innovation and accepts there can be no equality of outcome in a successful capitalist society.

Yes, we can and should do mitigation.

2. My Labour Party controls immigration on the basis of individual skills, talent and character according to national needs. No uncontrolled admission on the basis of which nation state the enquiring immigrant happens to reside in.

The most salient reason for this is that both our social fabric and the functioning of our institutions are critically dependent on our human capital. We need more people who are smart, skilled, conscientious and prosocial. They're hardly the majority of those wanting in.

3. I'd rather like the Labour Party to exhibit, or at least partially reflect, the value system of its mass base. Hampstead champagne-socialism and Islington bien-pensant liberalism doesn't do it for me.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't actively ban readers of The Guardian from joining or leading my Labour Party - I do believe in toleration.

Weaselling out of Brexit

David Lammy MP has called for Parliament to vote to continue with membership of the EU, pointing out that the Brexit Referendum was advisory and non-binding. "Let this nightmare end!"

Such a vote would be superfluous. The exit process can only begin once Article 50 is invoked by the UK government. The 'Leave' leadership doesn't seem very keen, and apart from Gove, no senior Tory seems to have their heart really and truly set on Brexit.

The vast majority of parliamentarians, along with the bulk of the establishment elite want to stay in the EU. Here is how to weasel out of Thursday's inconvenient result (which was pretty close, right?).

1. Do nothing quickly. Any backsliding right now would have the northern masses on the street. Things would get ugly.

2. Do what Boris suggested a few months back. With article 50 in the back pocket, wring some further concessions out of Germany. Choose the issues which are both achievable and targeted to detach 3-4% of leavers back to remain.

3. Towards the end of the year - no sooner! - announce that the EU has finally seen sense and that there is no need to go through the upheaval of Brexit. After months of scare stories and a few actual horrors, see if you can get away without holding another referendum, just let the whole thing fade away (it was only 'advisory' 😉).

It was all a ghastly glitch, but things are now reassuringly back to normal.

See if I'm wrong.

Scottish Referendum v.2

Question for SNP supporters. You say you don't want to be a satellite country of the English. And I understand that, the history and everything. But why switch to becoming a satellite of the Germans instead?

We all like the Germans, of course. It was the satellite bit you should be worried about.

My advice: vote for your independence and then keep it. Like a grown-up country. Norway comes to mind. And Switzerland.

So don't apply to join the EU - and you do know they intend to humiliate you, right?