Monthly Archives: July 2017

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mohandas Gandhi is said to have answered that it would be a good idea. Debate about liberal democracy in the Trump era is suffused with similar pessimism about Western achievement, bordering on self-damaging despair. The liberal mix of capitalism and democracy is denounced for yielding social inequality, cronyist kleptocracy and sheer governmental incompetence failings that opened the door to Donald Trumps dispiriting presidency and that may be entrenched by it in turn. In the wake of the recent Group of 20 summit, some went so far as to claim that the chief threat to Americans was not from the aggressively illiberal despots of Russia, North Korea, China or the Islamic theocracies. Rather, it was from Trump which is to say, from the perverse fruit of our own system. The enemy is us.

This intellectual bandwagon needs to be stopped. Liberalism faces two challenges on the one hand, external enemies; on the other, an internal crisis of self-confidence and it is time we all acknowledged that the external threat is more severe. However bad Trump may be, he is not Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. And although it is true that liberalism faces an internal crisis Ive done my bit to contribute to the alarmism it is worth remembering how liberalism got started two centuries ago.

As Edmund Fawcett has argued in his magisterial history of liberalism, the creed originated as a set of principles for managing bewildering change. For most of human history, economic growth and social evolution proceeded at a snails pace, but between 1776 and the first decades of the 19th century, revolutions both political and industrial caused everything to speed up. Liberalism skeptical of central power, respectful of diverse beliefs, comfortable with vigorous disagreement offered a means of handling the resulting tumult. If headlong technological and economic dislocation made political conflict unavoidable, humanity needed a way to contain it, civilize it a way to hang on to timeless standards of humanity while providing an escape valve for argument and change.

Seen in this light, todays technological and economic convulsions the part-time jobs of the gig economy, the menacing shadow of the robots are not signs that the liberal system is in crisis. To the contrary, they are signs that liberalism is more essential than ever. We are in the midst of another industrial revolution, which will create winners and losers and bitter political arguments and Trump is testament to that. Liberalism will not end these conflicts; only absolutist doctrines create political silence. But liberalism will set the rules of the game that allow the conflict to be managed. For now, Trump is expressing the frustration of a part of the country, but liberal checks and rules of process are containing the impact.

In its long history of facilitating clamorous argument, liberalism has succumbed, unsurprisingly, to repeated neuroses. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev boasted of the superiority of state-directed industrialization, telling a group of Westerners, we will bury you; some in the West made the mistake of believing him, especially when the Soviet Union launched the first-ever space satellite the following year. In the 1960s, U.S. democracy was rocked by political assassinations, violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and a bubbling up of radical challenges to the system. Amid the stagflation of the 1970s, a business school dean sounded a warning about an end-to-Western-capitalism syndrome; and no less a figure than the U.S. president lectured the nation on its moral turpitude. All these episodes generated existential crises, just as Trump today leads people to doubt the resilience of our system. But pessimists should note that liberalism emerged robustly from those moments of self-doubt.

Whats more, pessimists should remember that, if a few dice had settled differently, the current conversation would be completely different. Absent strong proof to the contrary, Trumps election must be accepted as legitimate, but a small swing in a few places would have put the status quo candidate in the White House. Similarly, Britains Brexit referendum was decided 52 to 48 percent; and a recent poll suggested that the voters now have doubts. In France, to cite a contrary example, the ambitious liberal Emmanuel Macron was lucky to face a bevy of weak opponents, and France was even luckier that Macron emerged out of nowhere, clad in white. The point is that political outcomes often hinge on quirks of fortune. None of these events should be interpreted as durable signals that liberalism is either moribund or resurgent.

Finally, it pays to remember that the two disasters that discredited the liberal establishment the 2008 financial crisis and the Iraq War were not errors that flowed from liberalism itself. There was nothing liberal about taxpayer backstops for private financial risk-taking, nor about the failure to temper the objective of Iraqi regime change with a sober calculation of available resources. These episodes do hold lessons for our democracy avoid cronyism, avoid hubris but they absolutely do not show that liberalism is wanting. To the contrary, liberalism arose during the first industrial revolution. We need it to navigate the second industrial revolution as it roils around us now.

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The crisis of confidence that's roiling liberalism - The Washington Post - Washington Post

It's not just a penchant for larrikin humour that explains former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett's comment that he's so disillusioned by the Liberal Party under Malcolm Turnbull he wants to drink whisky before 9 am.

A creeping chill threatens to paralyse a Party already in crisis. According to one Liberal insider, the position is "unsustainable."

What he means is that a Liberal Party led by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is so riven by attacks from Turnbull's predecessor, Tony Abbott, and Turnbull's flat-lining in the polls, there will be a major eruption by Christmas.

If this scenario is born out, the "never again" mantra about another change in the Liberal Party leadership will metastasise into "here we go again."

There are no current plans to topple Turnbull, but plenty of "hypothetical" discussions. Two names that crop up are long-time Party deputy and Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, as leader, and Health Minister, and Victorian MP, Greg Hunt, as Bishop's deputy.

Neither have expressed interest privately or publicly in such a scenario. So at this stage it is no more than talk.

Moreover, Party insiders acknowledge any significant improvement in Turnbull's opinion poll standing over coming months would result in leadership spill talk disappearing as quickly as a Scotch down a thirsty gullet.

But these conversations re-surfaced among Liberal MPs and Party supporters after Malcolm Turnbull's recent London speech. This sparked internal unrest because it included a shaman-like invoking of the name of the Party's founder, Sir Robert Menzies, to support Turnbull's position as a centrist.

The unrest is likely to become pointed during a special NSW Liberal Party "Futures Convention" to be held in Rosehill, Sydney, from July 21-23. It will debate a right wing push to "democratise" pre-selections. This originated in the electorate held by the man Turnbull bulldozed out of the prime ministership Tony Abbott.

The Warringah motion calls for pre-selections in "open" federal and state seats that is, electorates without a sitting Liberal MP, or where he/she is retiring to be done with full plebiscites of Party members.

Through its proximity to Mr Abbott, this push has been identified as a key element in the destabilising proxy war between Abbott and Turnbull. The complication is that Turnbull has also backed the reform bandwagon, with the significant caveat that he will not, in the end, necessarily back the motion from Abbott's Warringah Federal Electorate Council (FEC).

A more likely prospect is a series of 20 motions which in effect support plebiscites, but where respective Federal Electorate Councils (FEC) set the rules governing the conduct of those plebiscites. These will be put to the special State Council meeting by the successful Fox Valley branch of the NSW Liberal Party which lies in the seat of Berowra, held by a leading NSW Liberal moderate, Julian Leeser.

But even if the Fox Valley approach wins through it will not be a comfortable experience for Malcolm Turnbull who will be addressing the "Futures Convention" next Saturday morning. One interested attendee will be Peter King, the onetime Liberal MP for Wentworth until Turnbull toppled him in the mother of all Liberal Party pre-selection battles in 2003.

Mr King also mouths the mantra of Party reform, and is not re-entering federal politics. He has put his own motion forward for the special NSW Liberal Party Convention, but expects the Warringah motion, or the one identified with Tony Abbott, to win through.

No matter which motion emerges from the NSW Liberal Party "Futures Convention", the paradox is that the catalyst for this latest instability is a speech by Turnbull which, despite the spin by opponents, contained nothing exceptional, surprising, original, or even overtly provocative.

Turnbull pointed out that when Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party in 1944, he "went to great pains not to call his new political party ... conservative, but rather the Liberal Party, which he firmly anchored in the centre of Australian politics."

"He wanted to stand apart from the big money, business establishment politics of traditional conservative parties of the right, as well as from the socialist tradition of the Australian Labour Party, the political wing of the union movement," Mr Turnbull said when receiving the Disraeli Prize from the influential conservative London think tank, the Policy Exchange.

"The sensible centre was the place to be. It remains the place to be."

Turnbull's London comments broadly accord with the views reflected in a 70-page report prepared for Menzies in 1944 as a political road-map for his new Liberal Party. It was written by the economic adviser to the powerful Institute of Public Affairs, Charles Kemp, father of David Kemp, Education Minister and Environment Minister in the Howard Liberal government.

Called Looking Forward, Charles Kemp's report was, writes Menzies' biographer Allan Martin, "a businessman's argument about the virtues of free enterprise". It was "not hostile to the state, but demanded agreed lines between when governments should attempt to thrust themselves forward and where they were being intrusive. What was essential, it said, was a kind of middle way."

Seventy-three years after Menzies founded the Liberal Party on the basis of that Institute of Public Affairs report, the current head of the IPA, John Roskam, says the "issue is what is his [Turnbull's] definition of what the progressive centre means." He answers that Turnbull's interpretation of the term "centre" means "bigger government" and an "excuse for higher taxes and bigger regulations."

The Turnbull government's economic policy stance contrasts with "everything he said he was going to do before becoming Prime Minister. He spoke about the evils of the mining tax. Now he is embracing something worse than that and that is the bank tax."

"That's how I see it," says Roskam

Historian Ian Hancock, who has written biographies of former Liberal prime minister John Gorton and former Liberal Attorney General Tom Hughes (father of Lucy Turnbull) points out that while Malcolm Turnbull refers to the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in his speech, "he never defines them. "

"He's like all Libs he's going back to Menzies and treating his statements as some kind of Holy Grail. But Menzies delivered" he was Prime Minister for a record 16 and a half years "because he was a pragmatist, not a philosopher."

"Menzies was never consistent" so "various factions of the Liberal Party can find support in various phrases."

Asked if Menzies would like Turnbull, Hancock replied: "If he was in a good mood he would probably say: 'Good luck to him'. He would probably approve that [Turnbull] is someone with a high background and appears to rise above everybody else."

Turnbull is, like Menzies was, a "loner, with few friends in politics. If Menzies was being honest he would probably have a degree of sympathy with someone who people on the backbench didn't like. That's something that Menzies went through himself," Hancock said.

But there are differences. Menzies was a social conservative; Turnbull is more liberal, and has supported same-sex marriage. Above all, Menzies was a devoted monarchist "I did but see her passing by, but I will love her till I die," he once intoned to Queen Elizabeth in a speech in Canberra.

Malcolm Turnbull is, or was, Australia's Mr Republic.

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Malcolm Turnbull's Liberal party feels a dread chill - The Australian Financial Review

Editors Note: The following piece originally appeared in City Journal. It is reprinted here with permission.

Since early June, when voters in Georgias sixth congressional district rubbed yet more salt in their 2016 election wounds, Democratic pols and sages have been pondering why, as Ohio congressman Tim Ryan put it, our brand is worse than Trump. Thats a low bar, given the presidents nearly subterranean approval ratings, but so far the blue party has mostly been turning to an inside-the-box set of policy and political memes: jobs programs, talk of a mutiny against House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, and better marketing or, in Ryans words, branding of the Democratic message.

Whats missing from this list is the most important and most challenging item of all: solving the liberal deplorable problem. The white working class that hoisted Donald Trump to an unexpected victory may not always admire the man, but they know that he doesnt hate people like me, in the pollsters common formulation. And they have good reason to think that Democrats, particularly coastal and media types, do hate them: Consider Frank Richs snide and oft-cited article, No Sympathy for the Hillbilly. Its possible that white working-class voters would back a party filled with people who see them as racists and misogynists, with bad values and worse taste, because they all want to raise taxes on Goldman Sachs executives, but it seems a risky bet.

So its worth noting that a few prominent liberal writers have been venturing out of the partisan bunker and calling attention to the deplorable issue over the past few months. In late May, for instance, progressive stalwart Michael Tomasky, former editor of Guardian America and now of Democracy, published an article frankly titled Elitism is Liberalisms Biggest Problem in the New Republic. The West Virginia native called the chasm between elite liberals and middle America...liberalisms biggest problem. The issue has nothing to do with policy, Tomasky writes. Its about different sensibilities; bridging the gulf is on us, not them. To most conservatives, Tomaskys depiction of Middle Americans will seem cringingly obvious. The group tends to be churchgoers (Not temple. Church), they dont think and talk politics from morning till night, and, yes, theyre flag-waving patriots. Mother Jones columnist Kevin Drum, an influential though occasionally heterodox liberal, seconded the argument.

A more complex analysis of liberal elitism comes from Joan Williams, a feminist law professor whose best-known previous book is Unbending Gender. In White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, Williams takes her fellow liberal professionals to the woodshed for their indifference to the hard-knock realities of working-class life and for their blindness to the shortcomings of their own cosmopolitan preferences. Married to the Harvard-educated son of a working-class family, Williams is astute about the wide disparities between liberal and white-working-class notions of the meaning of work, family, community, and country. One of her proposals for solving class cluelessness is a conservative favorite: reviving civics education.

A final recent example of deplorable-dtente comes from Atlantic columnist Peter Beinarts How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration. Noting that the unofficial open-borders philosophy of the Democratic party is far more radical than the restrictionist immigration policy it espoused just a few decades ago, the former New Republic editor acknowledges that there is more than nativist bigotry behind white-working-class immigration concerns. He concedes that mass immigration may have worked to the disadvantage of blue-collar America by lowering wages for low-skilled workers and undermining social cohesion. Beinart concludes by dusting off a concept that liberals currently hate: assimilation. Liberals should be celebrating Americas diversity less, and its unity more, he writes.

These writers are engaging in healthy critical self-reflection, but in the course of describing the Democrats class dilemma, the liberal truth-tellers unwittingly show why a solution lies out of reach. They understate Democrats entanglement with the identity-politics left, a group devoted to a narrative of American iniquity. Identity politics appeals to its core constituents through grievance and resentment, particularly toward white men. Consider some reactions to centrist Democrat John Ossoffs defeat in Georgias sixth district. Maybe instead of trying to convince hateful white people, Dems should convince our base ppl of color, women to turn out, feminist writer and Cosmopolitan political columnist Jill Filopovic tweeted afterward. At some point we have to be willing to say that yes, lots of conservative voters are hateful and willing to embrace bigots. Insightful as she is, even Williams assumes that all criticisms of the immigration status quo can be chalked up to fear of brown people.

No Democrat on the scene today possesses the Lincolnesque political skills to persuade liberal voters to give up their assumptions of white deplorability, endorse assimilation, or back traditional civics education. In the current environment, a Democratic civics curriculum would teach that American institutions are vehicles for the transmission of white supremacy and sexism, hardly a route to social cohesion. As for assimilation, Hispanic and bilingual-education advocacy organizations would threaten a revolt and theyd only be the first to sound the alarm.

Appeasing deplorables may yet prove unnecessary, though. Democrats strategy of awaiting inevitable demographic change in the electorate, combined with the hope that Trump and the Republican Congress will commit major unforced errors, may allow the party to regain control of the country without making any concessions to the large portion of the U.S. population whom they appear to despise.

READ MORE: A Democratic Blind Spot on Culture The Democrats Resistance Temptation Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Shrinking Democratis Brand

Kay S. Hymowitzis aCity Journalcontributing editor, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author ofThe New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back.

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Can Democrats Make Nice with the 'Deplorables'? - National Review

Seven years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Chinas most famous political prisoner has died, locked away under the heavily guarded watch of the Chinese state. The New York Times:

Liu Xiaobo, the renegade Chinese intellectual who kept vigil on Tiananmen Square in 1989 to protect protesters from encroaching soldiers, promoted a pro-democracy charter that brought him an 11-year prison sentence and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize of 2010 while locked away, died on Thursday. He was 61. []

The Chinese government revealed he had liver cancer in late June only after it was virtually beyond treatment. Officially, Mr. Liu gained medical parole. But even as he faced death, he was kept silenced and under guard in a hospital in northeastern China, still a captive of the authoritarian controls that he had fought for decades.

As Bill Bishop points out in hisSinocism newsletter, Lius death will be difficult for even Beijings most dedicated apologists to spin. The last Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to be effectively killed by his own government was Carl Ossietsky, in Germany in 1938, Bishop notes. Does Xi care that the the likely precedent here for Beijing will be pre-World War II Nazi Germany?

Another question follows from that one: will the Wests newfound defenders of Xi Jinping care that the man they have anointed in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as the champion of the liberal world order drove a courageous dissident to his death? Or will they persist in the delusion that Xi is a liberal darling, content to overlook his human rights abuses so long as he delivers rhetorical paeans to globalization and needles Trump on the world stage?

Sadly, the answer is not clear. Many in the West have already proven easy marks as Xi has tried to reinvent himself as a principled defender of international values. All it took was a single speech at Davos for the plaudits to pour in: China has become the global grown-up, claimed the front cover of The Economist.Beijing would now be seen as the linchpin of global economic stability, raved Bessma Momani in Newsweek,while Trumps America [would] no longer play the role of enforcing the liberal rules and norms the country once coveted and benefited from.Susan Shirk, a former China hand in the Clinton administration, perhaps went the furthest in singing Xis praises toThe Guardian:

Lets lavish praise on them I think it was super-smart of Xi Jinping to go to Davos and give the speech More credit to him, really. []

I believe the United States actually has sponsored Chinas emergence as a constructive global power not just allowed it but really, actively encouraged it and I dont see anything bad about that. The only bad thing is that the United States is not just sitting by the sidelines, but actively subverting [the status quo].

Liu Xiaobos death should be a sobering reminder that this kind of thinking is nonsense. China is a dictatorship and a revisionist power, not a defender of liberal values or a responsible stakeholder. As the world pays tribute to Lius brave legacy of speaking truth to powerand his family remains under house arrest in China, unable to speak outacknowledging that reality is the very least we can do.

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Xi Jinping, New Defender of Liberal Order, Lets Chinese Dissident Die - The American Interest