The stunning end to the twenty-year war in Afghanistan with an unambiguous defeat has had little consequences in American domestic politics. To be sure, the final rout may have contributed to President Bidens decline in public opinion polls, but there are plenty of other reasons for that. The end of the Afghanistan War, surely a matter of historical import, just disappeared into the news cycle. After the lives lost, the resources wasted, and the ideals betrayed, one might expect the political class to pay attention and to demand accountability. Yet no one seems to notice.

Such an accounting could take the form, for example, of congressional hearingsbut instead Congress prefers to rehash the sad political circus of the January6 riot. It has no time for the two decades in Afghanistan, telling evidence of our legislators priorities. Instead of congressional hearings, a special commission might be convened, serious and bipartisan, such as the one that followed on 9/11. No one is taking this road either. Enormous expenditure of resources and a defeat clearer even than the exit from Vietnam, and Washington doesnt care. The impassioned call by Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller has not been heeded; on the contrary, he was punished for making the suggestion. It is as if the war were already well on the way to being forgotten by an amnesiac political culture at large. At least the veterans, their families, and the families of soldiers who lost their lives will remember.

The congressional avoidance is the most salient piece of evidence of a general cultural repression that deserves closer scrutiny. It involves more than the standard marginality of foreign policy for the domestic public. Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat has addressed the problem in terms of a lack of patience, a mindset that helps us understand the eagerness to end the so-called endless war. But there is another, perhaps deeper connection between the Afghanistan defeat and contemporary American politics. The impatience with the duration of the commitment in Afghanistan and the perplexed relationship to the distinct features of its culture are indicators of aspects of contradictions in American society and in Western modernity more broadly. Two commentaries by French geographical thinkers, Fabrice Balanche and Christophe Guilluy, have been translated and juxtaposed on this site. Taken together, their focus on space and culture sheds important light on these matters.

Balanche proceeds from the material priority of the geographical terrain in Afghanistan, a country defined by its steep mountains and valleys that have produced a society of compartmentalized ethnicities and tribes, while also posing genuine physical challenges to any invading force. It is this physical and existential reality of Afghanistan that, he argues, was largely ignored by American and Western military planners, as well as by the Soviet occupation effort before them. The aspiration for any homogenizing polity of equal rights, the core ideal of modernity, turned out to be a bad fit for the conservatism and regionalism of the Afghan condition. One might wish that it would be otherwise; one might wish that that the effort to establish a regime of democracy and liberty had succeeded. That emancipation project is what the mission in Afghanistan grew into, after it expanded by mission creep beyond the initial goal to defeat al-Qaeda. The ideals of that modernization and democratization are hard to dismiss. They evidently were not achieved.

Balanche attributes this defeat to a structural ignorance on the part of the planners, who remained separated from the material and cultural reality of the place. They had little appreciation for the facts of life on the ground, for the difficulties of the terrain and the recalcitrance of the culture. Instead they engaged in an abstract projection of Western ideals onto a very foreign arena, both physically and culturally. Given their training and mindset, the planners operateso Balanche argueswith the assumption of a global uniformity of space, devoid of particularity, and they therefore do not take into account the radically heterogeneous conditions of the distinct situation in which they hope to operate. For Balanche this is not only a problem with regard to the Wests inability to understand Afghanistan, but one that is symptomatic of the Western approach to a much wider swath of the Middle East and Central Asia, where the lifeworlds of the population are rooted in diversities that the universalism of modernity discounts. Instead that modernizing perspective treats local culture exclusively as an obstacle to be excised in order to establish a universal regime of liberalism, regardless of the local will.

Guilluy in contrast takes us to one of the paradigmatic sites of contemporary modernity, analyzing socio-economic transformations in France and their geographic expression. His approach overlaps with Balanches account in bringing a spatial-geographic perspective to bear. He describes the metropolitan centers, foremost among them Paris of course, but the other major cities as well, as real estate from which the middle and working classes have largely been expelled, a long-term process of systematic gentrification. After the exile of the popular classes, the inhabitants who remain are the well-salaried bourgeoisie, some slightly to the left, some to the right, in either case well off. These are, for Guilluy, the core base of the political support for Emmanuel Macron. Nearby but safely separated from them live the large populations of immigrants who find their livelihoods in service positions for the wealthy. The traditional French middle and working classes have had to migrate to the peripheries of the country, outside of the French metropoles but also away from those regions that the wealthy have selected for their second homes, especially along the coast. An extensive deracination has taken place. This displacement fed into the populist revolt of the Yellow Vest movement and continues to motivate the far-right electorate. It is often the traditional working class or its children that has migrated from the left to the right, as globalization pushed employment opportunities overseas. They voted for LePen in 2017, and Guilluy predicts that they will vote similarly in 2022, as we still await the selection of candidates.

Against this background, Guilluy details the geographical tension between metropolitan center and the French periphery. To be precise, for Guilluy it is not only genuine location that counts, i.e., measurable distance from a metropolitan center, but rather the distance from integration into the neoliberal model of economic globalization, which has its winners and its losers. And the winners in globalization cannot help but rub salt in the wounds of the losers, declaring them deplorable.

Balanche and Guilluy approach two very different contexts, and there are important differences in their methodologies, but they agree in their central account of a binary structure of spacethe showcase city of Kabul versus the deep Afghanistan valleys, the opulence of the center of Paris in contrast to the degraded periphery with its decaying regions. This is not only a matter of parallel bifurcations; these are genealogically the same bifurcation, to the extent that the abstract universalism that the West attempted to impose on Afghanistan is cut from the same cloth as the liberal globalism of the metropolitan economic model that Guilluy associates with Macronism. (To be sure, the features of cultural conservatism associated with the French periphery are hardly identical to the conservatism of the Afghan countryside, although both stand in important proximity to the category of tradition: the spatial divide maps onto the difference between abstraction and particularity, or between progress and tradition.)

The similarity of these parallel analyses points us back to our initial question: the connection between the disinterest in the Afghanistan defeat and the politics of contemporary American society. The familiar opposition of the American coasts and flyover country is effectively identical to Guilluys contrast of cities and periphery in France. Metropolitan universalism is based on an abstract liberalism that is impervious to the lived experience of a countrys population, held in disdain because it clings to traditions, or at least is treated as if it does. Power, wealth, and what is valued as intelligence are concentrated in enclaves, and what lies beyond is left to decay. The same abstraction that, according to Balanche, could not grasp the geographical particularity of Afghanistan recurs in the metropolitan disdain of the domestic hinterland. This is where the connection to the American situation becomes clear. The political choice to forget Afghanistan is the same as the disregard for the expanses between the coasts. The politics that holds deplorables in contempt is the same politics that does not want to examine its own culpability in the war. This refusal to face up to the war and its lessons will further embitter the domestic conflict between liberalism of the metropoles and the populism of the periphery.

Read more here:

Geographies of Populism and the End of the Afghanistan War - Telos Press

Dec 11th 2021

SEVERAL RECENT elections in Latin America have seen the collapse, or at least the defeat, of the moderate centre. It was true of Chiles presidential election last month, of Perus earlier this year and of those in Brazil and Colombia in 2018. Will it be true of the next big election in the region, in Colombia in May? There are reasons to think that, in this case, a victory for the centre would not just be especially beneficial, but also that it might come about.

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That is not the conventional forecast. Many analysts believe that next years contest will be a repeat, in reverse, of the previous one. In a run-off in 2018 Ivn Duque, a protg of lvaro Uribe, a former president of the populist right, defeated Gustavo Petro, a populist of the left, by 56% to 44%. In a poll of voting intentions by Invamer, published this week, Mr Petro is way out in front with 42%, ahead of Sergio Fajardo of the centre-left (with 19%) and a host of also-rans. Mr Petro would easily defeat any opponent in a run-off, the pollster thinks.

Mr Duque won in 2018 because of fear of Mr Petro, a former guerrilla who was a fan of Hugo Chvez in Venezuela. But he also benefited from Mr Uribes campaign against a peace agreement in 2016 that ended half a century of war between the state and the FARC guerrillas. The centre was identified with the accord, which many Colombians thought too lenient. It was hurt, too, by a failure to unite behind a single candidate. That allowed Mr Petro to pip Mr Fajardo, an academic and innovative former mayor of Medelln, by just 250,000 votes (out of more than 19m) to reach the run-off.

This time Mr Petro looks stronger than in 2018. Mr Uribe is not the force he once was. Mr Duques government has been mediocre and is unpopular, and was shaken by weeks of strikes and sometimes violent protests earlier this year. With no serious rivals on the hard left, Mr Petro has spent the past four years campaigning. A former senator and an undistinguished mayor of Bogot, he has very simplistic ideas but he works politically very, very hard, says Malcolm Deas, a British historian of Colombia. Several opportunistic political hustlers of the right have declared their support for his candidacy because they think he will win.

But it is early days. According to the Invamer polls fine print, 43% of respondents have yet to declare a preference. Mr Petro still scares many middle-class voters. The centre looks more organised than in 2018. Mr Fajardo and five other candidates of the centre-left have formed a Coalition of Hope and agreed to face each other in a primary in conjunction with the legislative election in March. On the centre-right the Coalition of Experience unites five presidential hopefuls, including several former mayors, in a similar primary. Mr Uribes nominee, scar Ivn Zuluaga, who lost the 2014 election, may or may not join them. But he is a weaker candidate than Mr Duque was. Miguel Silva, a political consultant, reckons around 14m Colombians will choose to vote in one of the simultaneous primaries and expects these to be divided roughly equally between hard-left, centre-right and centre-left. That could change the momentum of the race.

The run-off is thus likely to pit Mr Petro against a candidate either of the centre-right or centre-left. This time the peace agreement is unlikely to be a big issue. Colombians hate the FARC but they like peace, says Mr Deas. They want a new political agenda. That could involve security against criminal gangs, better public education and a return to economic growth (something Mr Petros protectionism and his opposition to mining and oil are unlikely to achieve).

So the centre has an opportunity. To seize it requires not just a clear programme but a break with the unpopular status quo and connecting emotionally with Colombians. Mr Uribe mobilised fear of the guerrillas; Mr Petro channels the kind of rage against the establishment that was expressed in the protests.

In a recent book Mauricio Garca Villegas, a Colombian political philosopher, argues that his countrys long history of armed conflict has been driven by a political culture which exalted tribal emotions, of nation, party, class and religion, which turned adversaries into enemies and in which we tend to disqualify too easily those who think differently. In Colombia, he concludes, the real contrast is not between the radicals of each extremebut between these and the moderates. To prevail, the centre will have to tap into more peaceful emotionsof unity, solidarity and hope for a better future.

Read more from Bello, our columnist on Latin America:

Politicians are sparring over colonial history in Latin America (Dec 4th)Latin America waits for tourists to return (Nov 27th 2021)Will electoral defeat favour moderation in Argentina? (Nov 20th 2021)

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Between hope and experience"

Continued here:

Despite the polls, a centrist could win Colombia's election in May - The Economist

The idea that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch is old and familiar, but like so many popular sayings, its unclear where the phrase originated.

While economist Milton Friedman is often credited as the man who popularized the ideathe notion that free lunches dont actually exist because someone always paysthe adage appeared in Robert Heinleins 1966 science-fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress nearly a decade before Friedmans 1975 book featured it in its title. (The phrase is actually the title of Book 3 in Heinleins work, for which he received the Hugo Award in 1967.)

Historians, meanwhile, say the phrase had been around for decades prior to Heinleins book. Whatever its origins, the idea that theres no free lunchthat everything has an opportunity costis one author David Bahnsen says humans have not learned very well.

For this reason, Bahnsenchief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group, a National Review contributor, and FEE supporterfeatured the concept in the title of his own economics book: There's No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths, released on November 9.

I recently sat down with Bahnsen to discuss his book and a range of economic subjects, including financial markets, cryptocurrencies, and the key to addressing poverty.*

Q: In the introduction of your book, you say many of the problems permeating economic teaching today stem from a flawed definition of what economics is. So lets start there. What is economics?

I define economics as the study of human action around the allocation of scarce resources. I think you get two components that are both individually well regarded as part of economics. Theres obviously a strong relationship between human action out of the Austrian tradition. And the idea of the allocation of resources being fundamental to what we mean as far as household management has a tradition going to Plato and Aristotle.

I like to blend those two ideas together. It captures the humanity of economics and the incentives in economics. In this definition you wont find anything that can be reduced to a formula or a mere econometric analysis. The focus is much more on the human person, and much less on mathematics.

Q: You mention Plato and Aristotle. In your book you collected some of the most timeless economic insights in human history250 quotes, to be precise. How relevant are these ideas today?

I personally believe that they are more important now than they ever have been. There is a certain timelessness to a lot of the wisdom that some of the great classical economists shared. Obviously you can go back to scholastics and the ancients from Aquinas to Augustine to Aristotle and Plato. There are certain nuggets of wisdom and truth there, but I mostly focused my attention on the classical economists.

Theres a lot on Adam Smith, a little from David Ricardo and Jean-Baptiste Say and some highly regarded 19th-century economists. But even as you come into the 20th century, whether its Milton Friedman or the supply side contemporaries like Art Laffer and Bob Mundell who recently passed awayeven guys like Mises and Hayek havent been gone that longthere was a time when these guys were all winning Nobel Prizes in economics.

Now the Nobel methodology has changed completely away from praxeology and the logic of human action to model-driven economics. I think its bad for the profession of economics, its bad for the academic discipline, but its even worse for the laymen and their understanding of how economics affects the real world because it strips out the wisdom of the masters.

And thats why I wrote the book and centered it around some of their foundational truths.

Q: You're considered one of the best financial advisors in America by Barrons, Forbes, etc. What do you make of financial markets right now?

I definitely believe that were living in a timewe have been for a while and likely will for some timethat were going to have to deal with the good and the bad of the Federal Reserve playing such a prominent role in the economy.

This was always one of the dangers of the monetarist school. Fundamentally, the monetarist always invited a higher role for the Fed into the economy, and we kind of have gotten it. More than just their administration of the money supply by their control of the interest rate, the Fed now has become a sort of mitigator of business cycle risks. When I look at financial markets now, I think thats mostly what were dealing with.

Why are equity market multiples at 22x or 23x earnings? Why is the 10-year bond rate at 1.5 percent, and why are investors totally okay with that? Why are real-estate investors willing to buy very significant real-estate investments for a 3 percent cap rate?

These things all seem quite expensive. But they are all done with a repricing of risk, and that repricing of risk is a byproduct of a Federal Reserve put [a put, referring to a put option, is a financial contract that allows the owner to mitigate risk]. We used to talk about a Greenspan put in the stock market, but I dont think thats adequate anymore. I think its become much more comprehensive. There is an expectation the Fed will be there to smooth out any disruptions that take place in the business cycle.

I think thats something investors have to understand. Theyre not getting the price discovery F.A. Hayek wrote about. Theyre not getting the clean allocation of capital Id like to see as an investor.

Now, I also dont want to bet against the Fed. I dont say this to take a blindly pessimistic position. We have to invest for what is, not what we want it to be. But we also have to recognize this is inviting a high degree of malinvestment and misallocation of resources. This requires us to be more prudent and more diligent in the projects we choose to invest in on behalf of our clients.

Q: You say there are major trends in economics today that should be resisted. One is the trend of collectivism as a means of alleviating poverty and inequality. Can you elaborate?

The left-wing risk is relatively well known. A greater invitation into socialism or quasi-socialism. A higher role of the central planner in the economy. But right now a lot of the right-wing populism were seeing is inviting a certain amount of authoritarianism. I think its doing it out of frustration. Theres a culture war issue, as well as cronyism and the way things are playing out in the economy.

Rather than attack subsidies and the regulatory apparatus, many have said if you cant beat em join em. That we need Big Government to work for us instead of them. Im concerned about that approach. When you have a good aim in mind and go about it with bad means, it usually doesnt work out very well.

My fear right now is that the populist economic ethos is going to embolden and empower the central planner. Its going to embolden and empower the collectivist.

My hope is that some of the principles Im inviting people to rediscover in the book can be persuasive. What we need to do is dig in our heels more around the principles of a free society we believe in, and not concede by just trying to switch the uniform of authoritarianism.

Q: I live in the Twin Cities. Minneapolis and St. Paul, like many other cities, recently raised the minimum wage. They also both passed rent control measures. Minimum wage laws. Rent control. Are these effective ways to fight poverty?

No, they are horrible ways to fight poverty. And the reason is explained through the principles that I believe need to be at the foundation of our economics. The knowledge problem leads to a significant distortion in the economy because we ask someone who doesnt have full knowledge of time and place circumstances to set prices.

When we set prices in a transaction, we take what could take place on a voluntary basis under a precondition of freedom, and we make it happen on an involuntary basis. That takes away clarity. It takes away price discovery. It takes away freedom. It takes away incentives for further developers. It could give false signals to produce.

If one believes that prices, including the price of rent, are packets of information, then rent controls take away information. And because I believe the greatest wealth-building activities in history come about by us adding information and knowledge and ideas to raw materialsthats where I believe wealth creation comes fromby distorting knowledge I think we effectively suppress the creation of wealth.

I believe that the intent of a lot of the policymakers is good, but I believe that free exchange in the economy will lead to the right calibration of supply and demand to set prices in a way that meets the needs of humanity. The government intervention is not just unnecessary, but counterproductive.

Q: Once upon a time this was basically Economics 101, wasnt it? So why are these policies coming back? Is it ignorance of economics or is it related more to the populism you mentioned?

The danger of populism is that it lacks a limiting principle. When youre content to work off a playbook of real principles in the way you develop an economic worldview and structure the scaffolding of what you believe as far as social organization, then I think youre less exposed to the arbitrariness of populism, less exposed to the potential abuses.

You say there was a time when this was considered Economics 101. I think its still Economics 101. Its just that some people have decided they dont need Econ 101. Theyll overlook the economic principle on behalf of a desired political aim and what feels right in the moment. Thats by definition what populism is.

Q: You write that class warfare is at an all-time high in the US. Why do you think that is?

If Im giving a gracious and empathetic answer, I think some of it comes down to the cultural ethos in the post-financial crisis. So many did an atrocious job of identifying the players in the financial crisis and providing proper and comprehensive cultural, political, and economic commentary as to what took place in what was the defining economic event of our lifetime.

Because we let others define that moment, were stuck with a narrative of the oppressor and the oppressed out of the crisis. The only difference is many on the right will claim the oppressor was the Fed or Fannie Mae or the government. Many on the left will claim the oppressor was Wall Street or the big banks.

The fact of the matter is we have this environment now where people believe these narratives. If youre 30 years old, your entire adult life has been bookended by the financial crisis and COVID. People see a system that has not worked for a lot of people but does seem to work for others. It exacerbates class aggravations.

Rather than digging our heels in against cronyism, against a relationship between Fannie Mae and K Street, against bailouts, against a monetary policy that serves to boost asset prices, against the subsidization of student loans that gives college administrators a blank check on how they move tuition prices, we saw more of the same.

A lot of frustrations young people have are frustrations I have. But their emotional intuition is to default to something that makes those problems worse, not better.

We have solutions that address what theyre frustrated about. We need to show that human flourishing is enhanced by free enterprise, but that message is not getting through. I blame those of us on the right who do defend free markets; were not defending them well enough.

Q: You bring up young people. They are facing a very different environment than you and I were. Any financial advice for them or tips for living?

I do believe ideologically that young people have been deprived of the ability to learn basic economics, basic finance. I want young people to have a strong self-determination, to believe in self government and the character traits and virtues that are necessary to have a fulfilling and rewarding life.

But when you get to practical finance and engagement with these circumstances, tenacity is the non-commoditized virtue. Young people cant be replaced by a robot who works harder than them. You can always have a work ethic that will make you desirable in the marketplace.

If I can talk to people before they go to college, Id say half of the people spending a quarter-million dollars on an overrated bachelor's degree from an overrated college could rethink that decision. Or at least have a little more specific strategy behind it.

For people who are already graduated or are already in the workforce, I say wealth creation comes from creating more than you consume. That is a tautology that is never going away. That will always be the story of economics, and thats the best way they can apply it to their own lives.

Q: The sustained inflation weve seen in 2021, combined with issues with the supply chain and labor markets, has resulted in a great deal of economic uncertainty. How precarious is the situation right now?

I am of the opinion that a lot of the inflation were seeing right now is heavily supply chain oriented. I think the velocity of the money in supply right now is so low and going lower that we do face a lot of Japan-like deflationary risk.

Its hard to feel that way when prices are doing what you see now, I know. But I think QE and low interests and other distortive measurements of the Fed have a diminishing return for their policy goals. And the excessive government spending has served to take away future growth, so it ends up putting downward pressure on velocity. But then you have an increase in demand for goods and services coming out of COVID, combined with a woeful capacity for productionfrom port disruptions, labor shortages, to the semiconductor problem, which is quite underrated as a problem.

So Im a little less concerned about Milton Friedman-like monetary inflation than I am of voluntary supply-driven inflation because we as a society are not producing the goods and services we need.

Im hopeful some of those things will start to correct. But Im not hopeful that the economic stagnation that theyve created through excessive doses of fiscal and monetary policy is treatable.

Were blessed to have somewhat better demographics, and somewhat better economic organic growth, than Japan. But if were going to continue at halfhalf!of our real GDP growth rate average for another 15 years, like we have the last 15 years, I think its totally unacceptableboth economically and morally. Yet that seems to be in store for us.

Im hopeful we can somehow get back on track, but right now were not even trying to get back on track. Were just debating how much worse we want to make it.

Q: Do you have any thoughts on cryptocurrencies? Are they a hedge against inflation? A revolutionary new form of money? A pyramid scheme built on speculation fed by the Feds money pumping?

I fear that Ill inevitably lose some part of the audience here, because its not a very popular viewpoint right now. But obviously I cant defend it as an inflation hedge when it has no intrinsic value. The argument many of us have made about money and currency for some time has been it has to be a stable medium of exchange. Anything that goes from $60,000 to $30,000 because of a tweet from Elon Musk is probably not a stable medium of exchange.

I think something whose primary utility is for ransomware criminals is probably not a stable medium of exchange. It will grow in its utility, I dont deny that, but fundamentally it doesnt have an intrinsic value. Therefore the question becomes how long regulators will allow it to function the way it does. I dont think that will be very long.

From an investment standpoint, whether or not one believes in the utility of the medium of exchange, why would the value of a coin inevitably go higher? The only answer for that is speculation.

That does make it more pyramid-like in my mind. Never in my investing life have I seen something end well when the majority of people doing it dont know why theyre doing it.

Q: Your book includes quotes from some of the greatest economic thinkers of all time. Mises. Hayek. Friedman. Sowell. Bastiat. Hazlitt. Do you have a personal favorite?

Ive actually been asked this question in other interviews and I have to say the same thing: I just cant pick one. Hayek at some periods of my life was so instrumental in my development. At other periods of my life Milton Friedman was.

In terms of my own sort of anthropology of economics, the way in which I view the human person and how central my belief about humanity is to economics, Im grateful to people like Father Robert Sirico at the Acton Institute. There are contemporaries like that in the book who are at the top of my list.

As far as the subject matter in the book that is nearest and dearest to my heart, it is about human flourishing and establishing our aim in economics. The material and spiritual flourishing which includes abundance, but also peace and balance and joy that the human person can have.

What is the economic structure that can most facilitate that? Thats an entirely different question than saying how can we get everyone to make the most similar amount of money to each other, this obsession with equity and wealth and income inequality. In trying to do economics as social justice, were trying to do something that is neither economic, nor social, nor just.

Q: That leads right into my next question. You write that a materialistic view of poverty alleviation dominates todays culture, one that does nothing to alleviate poverty. Whats a better way?

I believe that the number one thing we need to do when we look to alleviate poverty is, first, we need to define poverty and wealth. If poverty is the opposite of wealth, how do you create wealth?

As I said earlier, you create wealth by creating more than you consume. So do we solve poverty by having no supply-side solution, but only think about wealth redistribution?

My view is we need to focus on wealth creation. In a free society of free exchange where there is true respect for the dignity of the human person, wed never tolerate an approach that treats half of society like they're incapable of being productive, incapable of being creative, incapable of being innovativeand have them live off the largesse of the other half. I think its insulting and dehumanizing.

We want a system that creates more and more wealth creators. That is the solution to poverty. I want more people who produce more than they can consume.

*This interview was condensed and edited for clarity

See the original post:

Economics, Finance, Populism, and the Fed: An Interview With David Bahnsen - Foundation for Economic Education

A MAJOR flaw or indeed a huge problem if you prefer, with not having a written constitution to safeguard our liberties is that when a populist administration quite legally gets elected then they can attempt a shut out.

History is littered with such events and quite recent history in particular with the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington by supporters of the American populist president shows just how precious and precarious democracy is and that was a democracy with a written constitution.

So back to the UK and its constitutional monarchy that practises some democratic principles, that does not have the safeguards written in stone, instead we are governed by convention and precedent.

READ MORE:Michael Gove's words on Boris Johnson come back to haunt him

The way I see it is that Boris Johnson is just foolish enough to believe as PM he can do anything, his attempt to illegally shutdown parliament is testimony to that. He is also just the correct kind of egotistical maniac to quickly forget about that and go for the ignoring of law to further his own ideas. Again history is littered with idiots of that type they have all ether ended their time in burnt out capitals or having faced international law and lost faced then the final walk.

So yes Johnson will huff and puff but will his party follow him, will the majority in that Westminster Parliament actually vote for dictatorship?

My gut feeling is they will not, my instinct is that already there will be lines drawn by the backbenchers because there is now I think clear water between the Johnson administration and reality and many of those within the Tory party will not want to be remembered by history for supporting Generalissimo Johnson.

Sure he could disregard the courts placing him and his administration above the law but he would then need the police and the military on his side for that to work and he can barely keep the press on side these days. No, I definitely feel that we are witnessing the last attempts of a very spoiled brat of man child attempting to impose his will on everyone and he is about to get the biggest rebuff since history first started recording rebuffs.

So what of us north of the Rio Tweed? Well for us that are already committed to that second referendum life will not change other than bloggers getting more paragraphs from the Johnson administration sordid actions (it is so easy).

What we will see happen is that those wavering, those as yet undecided, they will start switching to decision mode and in doing so join the ranks of the Yes movement. Again I state they are to be embraced and made to feel welcome as a lot of soul searching will have been done by them, so let us offer that hand of friendship an unconditional hand proffered, it is after all most definitely more than OK to change ones mind.

We have all sorts of polls being published showing voting intentions at the next Westminster elections ranging from 56 to 59 seats being won by the SNP which again should not be happening considering just how long the Scottish National Party have been in power here in Scotland.

If nothing else it does show the divergence in the political roads a divergence that starts at the Rio Tweed even if Westminster manage to reign in, control, or replace Johnson, he or she that follows will still be a Tory and we here in Scotland have had quite enough of them.

For you see in Scotland we have most definitely marked our own cards as being so very different from that rancid organisation beside the Thames and the world is noticing and do you know something else, the world approves.

The world likes this country called Scotland, likes our brand of democracy, likes our brand of government and likes our government. When we come out of winter and into spring and the date of the next referendum is announced then we will see those countries very much in a supportive role because many are thoroughly hacked off with Westminster and have grievances going back decades, centuries and some even count in multiples of centuries.

So in a few months as the sky begins to clear and daylight returns so will the Yes movement returning to our streets with marches, rallies and door to door canvassing.

For myself by that time, I will most definitely be as proactive as possible alongside all the other happy champions, aye champions for that is what each and everyone of us is, we are all champions, all supporters of the Scottish right to self determination.

Our future is bright, Independence is right.Cliff PurvisVeterans for Scottish Independence 2.0

See the rest here:

Time to get canvassing for the wide world is out there waiting for us - The National

Anti-vaccine movements, fuelled by Covid-19 conspiracy beliefs, are a notable political force in 2021. In Europe, the United States and Australia, lockdowns and vaccine mandates have been met with protests often accompanied by violence.

In South Africa, conspiracy beliefs, inflamed by social media disinformation, have substantially contributed to the slow pace of the governments vaccination campaign. Anti-vaccine beliefs have a broad appeal, on a spectrum that includes New Age wellness advocates and conservative Christian ideas about immunisation policies being an attack on both bodily and spiritual integrity.

As noted in medical journal The Lancet, there is a key difference between vaccine hesitancy and outright opposition to vaccinations in general. With the former, people may often be hesitant because of poor experiences with medical systems in the past, but they can be persuaded with education and incentives. In contrast, true believers are fanatical and refuse compromise or discussion.

Different elements of the political right have aggressively capitalised on the proliferation of medical conspiracies. In Europe, far-right political parties such as the Alternative for Germany have courted voters by shifting their attacks from migrants to vaccines and mask mandates. Conspiracy theories have also proved a conduit to even more ideologically extreme far-right groups. Neo-fascists see the crisis as an opportunity to accelerate social tensions and broaden support for their hardline positions.

This is not to say that anti-vaccine beliefs are exclusively the province of the right wing, as there are liberals and leftists who have made badly informed and paranoid statements about them too. But practices like monetising disinformation online and organising street protests have most generally been used by the Right.

Anti-vaccine street protests may often involve only small numbers of demonstrators, but they have been characterised by angry tactics such as direct confrontation with police, brandishing nooses and burning effigies of politicians and medical establishment figures whom the protesters see as conspiring to steal their freedom.

Conspiracy beliefs are constantly in flux, but they have followed a general pattern since the introduction of global quarantines in early 2020. Their supporters believe that Covid-19 is either manufactured or not a serious disease. According to this logic, it was introduced by sinister elites trying to increase their power through fear. In turn, vaccines are considered harmful and claimed to cause other illnesses, while also being used as a cover for expanding state surveillance. Its a heady mix of colliding, contradictory and connected beliefs.

Anti-vaccine beliefs often have anti-authoritarian and anti-systemic elements. Politicians and public health experts are depicted as out-of-touch elitists, and the actions of pharmaceutical companies are questioned because they are believed to be deliberately spreading dangerous and untested vaccines for profit.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsically right-wing about a healthy suspicion of the powerful. Drug companies do indeed act in ways that prioritise profit over human health, with some using their political influence to ensure monopolies on vaccines. Additionally, some politicians have used Covid-19 for self-enrichment, as evidenced by the personal protective equipment tender corruption in South Africa.

But the right wing is not interested in cogent, evidence-based critiques. Instead, anti-vaccine sentiments are defined by a mythic sense of belief, the adherents of which are an elite of individuals who have become aware of the existence of a somehow invisible and yet also ubiquitous new world order.

This supposed new world order is using vaccine mandates to impose a totalitarian, global dictatorship. It is simultaneously capitalist and communist. For example, Bill Gates is seen as both a profit-seeking oligarch and a radical who is trying to abolish private property.

In stark contrast, anti-mask demagogues such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsanaro are imagined as populist democrats who are resisting sinister elite plots.

Anti-vaccine believers argue that by refusing to be inoculated, they are asserting their own individual freedom and refusing consent to illegitimate authority. But this clearly omits how Covid-19 is a public health crisis and that mass vaccinations are vital to restoring any semblance of pre-2020 normality. By refusing to vaccinate, they are aggressively denying freedom to others and condemning the world to more miserable years of masks and lockdowns.

Adherents of the anti-vaccine movement are themselves helping to sustain a crisis that they claim does not exist. Unsurprisingly, these beliefs often overlap with climate change denial, which itself is perceived as another elite plot.

Anti-vaccine beliefs have a widespread appeal across right-wing politics. In South Africa, it has been embraced by conservative Black Christians and figures in the conspiracist wing of the radical economic transformation kleptocrat faction of the ANC. But, they have also been adopted by outright white supremacists like Steve Hofmeyer and alt-right cartoonist Jerm.

Despite their substantial differences, what unites them is how they belong to what political theorist Roger Griffin calls the populist radical right. Their politics is highly reactionary and driven by a deep sense of mistrust of political and economic elites. They are the authentic people, the legitimate expression of popular democracy. But their definition of the people is highly constrained and based on a bigoted fear of outsiders and difference.

Again, given daily revelations of political and economic corruption and misrule, this mistrust is understandable. But the populist right has no interest in reforming or solving social problems, let alone radically changing the material miseries caused by capitalism and authoritarian state power. Instead, they have focused on scapegoating and denial.

The media conversation on vaccine conspiracy beliefs has been dominated by the question of public education and how to get people to suspend vaccine hesitancy for the social good. In a pandemic, this social outreach is vitally important. But it can occlude how hardline anti-vaccine groups are not really interested in facts or debate their beliefs are primarily emotional, giving expression to deep-seated desires, fear and dangerous levels of anger.

Rather, they are attached to an image of themselves as freedom fighters, engaged in an operatic struggle with nefarious forces of control. They are awake, we sleep. Throughout history, times of plague and crisis have sparked political and religious movements fuelled by similar beliefs.

This sense of looming disaster existed well before the shock of Covid-19. The continuing crises of capitalism, extreme inequality and social hardship and environmental disaster fuel a very tangible sense of pre-apocalyptic fear.

The last period of such sustained global economic hardship and political turmoil was in the 1930s. In that crisis, political organisations like the Nazis based their propoganda on elaborate conspiracy theories about the hidden hand behind both Germany and capitalisms failings. Notably, the Nazis were a relatively fringe organisation until the Great Depression shifted the political landscape in their favour.

Despite substantial evidence that neo-fascists have gained a foothold in the anti-vaccine world, they often frame medical doctors as the real Nazis. And while they share the 20th-century far rights penchant for embracing pseudoscience and fabricating bizarre political fantasies, they are far more individualistic.

Far-right movements of the last century were rooted in extreme nationalism, and much of their appeal was based on a politics of mass collectivity. Faced with the alienation and dislocation of capitalist modernity, fascists offered what philosopher Erich Fromm called an escape from freedom by promising a new world of blood and honour, freed from the burden of personal choice.

In direct contrast, anti-vaccine groups are almost pathologically obsessed with individual freedom. They see no distinction between public health measures and extreme state terror and violence. But they have no interest in protesting against actual civil liberty abuses that have taken place during lockdowns, such as the murder of unarmed civilians by soldiers and the police during the first hard lockdown in South Africa in 2020.

Instead, their vision of freedom is completely solipsistic and disconnected from any kind of social good. Anti-vaccine groups are not protesting because they believe they can overthrow the medical elite they say is ruining the world. Instead, they use demonstrations as a chance to vent personal frustrations and demand that they can get back to shopping without masks.

They believe that all the social and economic crises of today are just hype and demand to be returned to a state of blissful, atomised consumerism. Such extreme narcissism reflects the neoliberal culture that has globally dominated the last half-century.

It has inculcated a harsh world-view that sees society as a battlefield on which there can be no middle ground between the social good and individual freedom. It is the world seen through the darkened windows of a fuel-guzzling SUV and everyone else is either an enemy or a mark to be exploited.

Like a religious cult albeit without a central, domineering leader the anti-vaccine movement combines an often contradictory mix of apocalyptic paranoia and irrationalist denial of scientific reality. Its adherents rage against some aspects of the social system, such as the pharmaceutical companies, but politically support authoritarian capitalism and ultra-nationalism.

Anti-vaccine ideology is dangerous because it connects feral consumerist narcissism with deeply reactionary political organising. It is imperative to understand how these movements think and operate because, if the last century is any guide, we should expect mass right-wing politics to flourish in the declining economic and social conditions of the 2020s.

Chaos, fear, social divisions and a general sense of collapse are historically the radical rights greatest allies, making the late capitalist derangement of the anti-vaccine movement a harbinger of potentially even more extreme political cults in the near future.

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