Some days are better than other days

That $15B probably ends up as economic stimulus … at least, I’d like to tell myself that.

No, Maria, we are not doomed. Many on both the “left” and the “right” see that the US, the UK, etc. have become more authoritarian, “limited access” societies and are willing to work to reverse this trend.

Maria don’t be too depressed, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and all that sort of stuff.

Russell Brand is a case in point. He has a terrific intellect, is a very good writer, is psychologically very perceptive, and has that unusual intuition of crowd attention that only really smart one-man standups earn. He is someone to watch, because he’s got the chops to keep putting it together. Perhaps a great cultural critic. Let’s hope it doesn’t go to his head, because we will all be the better for having him.

It is indeed remarkable how all the places inhabited by the super-rich (Kensington, Mayfair, much of Geneva, the XVI arrondissement …) are really crushingly dull. At least little of real value will be lost when we burn them down.

I’ll watch that this morning. He was great on Desert Island Discs, and that Guardian essay when Thatcher died was stunning. I feel that I must have been missing something. I’m not worried about becoming a great social/cultural critic going to his head — seems to have gone through that phase. I just hope he’s mentally well.

And, as Adrian Mitchell used to say, when the revolution comes it will be as much like our theories as a parallelogram is like a hippopotamus. I remind myself of that whenever I think we are on the slide (which is most of the time). Oh, but: I just surveyed my 19 freshman on various questions, including whether they think the government should support same-sex marriage. 18 for, 1 against. Go back 20 years — or 10 years — and ask the same question to the same kinds of kids.

I just surveyed my 19 freshman on various questions, including whether they think the government should support same-sex marriage. 18 for, 1 against. Go back 20 years — or 10 years — and ask the same question to the same kinds of kids.

As a data point… When I was a student back in the late 80s I was depressed that literally every trainee teacher I talked to was in favour of Section 28. I assume a lot of them ended up as teachers, but change happened anyway.

For that matter, the papers kept complaining that Young People These Days were self-involved and apolitical right up to the student protests of 2010 and the Occupy movements.

he reminded GQ that its main sponsor, Hugo Boss, used to do a nice line in Nazi uniforms

Which doesn’t actually set it apart from a lot of the rest of the fashion industry. Hugo Boss did SS uniforms, Coco Chanel was a nasty little traitor who shacked up with the SS and tried to profit from the Holocaust. L’Oreal was a safe hiding place for other French collaborators after the war. etc, etc.

“Brand doesn’t need alcohol to put his foot in his mouth so he covers up by talking about “power structures” and professes to be shocked, shocked to discover that awards ceremonies are phony occasions and that people have selfish motives in attending them. So why’d he accept? Oh, right, “I was advised it would be good publicity.” What a shock that it wasn’t. Or, maybe it was? … Altogether a nasty, snobbish, unfunny piece.”

That strikes me as a pretty uncharitable reading Hal.

@ajay, quite right South Ken, with the Museum of Natural History and the V&A should be spared, I was thinking more about the area around Kensington High Street. Should have mentioned Knightsbridge too, and Surrey.

Sorry, MPAVictoria, (@ 18), maybe it’s just one of those days for me, too. Brand’s message (his “brand”?), advertised freely in the Guardian, seems to be just this: “I have to play the game but I’m really an ordinary bloke, even sensitive underneath, and too honest to be taken in by all the fakery.” Next time let him be really brave, decline the invitation and shut up.

Also Monaco. Personally I’d pay the damn taxes. More than worth it not to live in Monaco.

I am a bit with Hal here. I thought the Brand piece was well-written, made good points, gave a nice insight. I really liked it. And at the same time, it felt like a smart guy doing PR damage control. Pissed off the sponsors anyway, better get some creds for it.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being manipulated, by a master in the art. That deserves some grudging respect anyway.

Norwegian Guy:

‘There is a lot more to it than just digging a hole in the ground, including thought and innovation.’

Well, yes, sure. I think the relevant questions are a) how much of thought and innovation came from the Sultan’s playboy brother, and b) have the engineers doing the thinking and innovating made a ‘fortune’?

@Norwegian Guy

There is a lot more to it than just digging a hole in the ground, including thought and innovation.

Not for the Sultan of Brunei’s brother, though. He’s just living off of the royalties that state and private oil companies pay to extract oil from his land/waters. It’s quite literally rent-seeking.

@Steve Williams

b) have the engineers doing the thinking and innovating made a ‘fortune’?

They’re probably been paid quite well. Petroleum Engineering is one of the highest paid engineering professions out there right, and even many of the ancillary jobs pay quite well. At least anecdotally, I knew people who did the whole “expat working on foreign oil fields” thing and were paid quite well.

Sold out. Yeah. Got such a high price for it, too, whatever it was. We’re nothing if not a collective, mud man. I did my time. Happy to give give all those folks with a spring still left in their step their shot. No regrets.

Oppression of minorities by those in the majority *is* democracy, or at least democracy tends to devolve in that direction. There is no sense in which a white male denigrating a Muslim female in a Western country is undemocratic, per se.

Ultimately this matters. The great social democracies were mostly built in very homogenous places (e.g. Scandinavia) or in way that were exclusionary of certain groups (e.g. explicit racial segregation in the New Deal). As that basic orientation changed, via integration or immigration (which capital usually supports more than labor… not all labor politics is based on solidarity), support for social democracy started slipping. The fissures expand during economic downturns. Henry’s recent Aeon article, in many respects, speaks to related issues.

There is an opportunity here. The social democracy model was never as cosmopolitan as it claimed to be. It often depended upon provincialism or the strength of national identity. It excluded almost the entire non-Western world. As it comes under pressure, in many respects by the rise of what used to be called the Global South, there are ways to push for a more cosmopolitan solution. “Losing” could thus be beneficial in the long run. It’ll be messy, and a clear model is yet to be developed, but global solidarity could profit from the erosion of local social democracy. It is atrocious for white men (or anyone) to abuse Muslim women in London, but the fact that Muslim women are walking London’s streets at all is, in some respects, a marker of progress.

Then again, maybe not. As Titus Andronicus (the band) recently put, “It’s still us against them, and they’re winning.” But I’m more hopeful.

“our crowd”? Brand is an extremely wealthy member of their crowd. You don’t stop being a worthless parasite just because you’re funny.

Back in the 60s, when, as the saying goes, a dollar was worth something, iirc Life or a magazine like it did a spread on Ike and Tina Turners new Hollywood home.
As one wag put it, i didn’t know you could spend 100,000$ at Woolworths (kids – translation would be, I didn’t know you spend 500,000$ at walmart)

Kindred @38: Oppression of minorities by those in the majority *is* democracy

Depends. Remember that the fundamental law of a democratic society is its constitution. If the constitution is democratically adopted, and prohibits oppression of minorities, then majority decisions that contravene the constitution are not democratically valid — the majority has already ratified an overriding law against what it now proposes to do. Of course, the majority (or a supermajority, if that’s what the majority that ratified the constitution agreed to) can alter the constitution, making oppression of minorities permissible. Rights in any society, after all, are just what democratic majorities (or supermajorities) say they are. They don’t have an independent existence.

What the fuck? In more normal times the United States would be engaged in a military campaign against Syria and we wouldn’t be a few months away from a historical expansion of healthcare, paltry though it might be by international standards but revolutionary nevertheless.

Nicholas Lemann has a review in the NY Review of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson which emphasizes the dread that pervaded the 1930’s. I remember visiting the New York Museum of Modern Art and being struck by the bleakness of the art of the era, its dark, muted colors, brown and black. For all its faults, at least our times are not like that.

bad Jim, don’t know you’re age, but I’ve recently been musing upon a photograph of my mother and her sister in the Bronx, in the 1920’s, in a building that zillow and truillo (sp?) are advertising as for sale, so I get to view even the fireplace my mother grew up with (she had no pictures of that kind of detail) and also to contemplate the changes in the neighborhood. (Really: between google maps and realtors’ penchant for pictures: there’s a world!)

I feel a bit like I am gradually joining my mother, and my father, too. Unto others, the future. Not a sad feeling. Resigned? Yes. Also hopeful, perhaps because my mother and aunt are so full of youth and energy and hope in that Bronx 1920’s picture in front of a building that still stands today, in a rough but energetic neighborhood (as it was, in a different way, in the 1920’s).

I recently used Google street view to wander around the first place I lived, just outside Washington, D.C. I last visited it ten years ago, and although the experience of walking around and aiming the viewer are not much alike, the two had enough in common that I had to concede they were approximating the same reality.

My mother’s father was a Swedish immigrant with an eighth-grade education who made sure both his daughters got college educations. He, of course, called me “Yimmy.”

I don’t have the sunniest view of humanity’s future, but I don’t think our immediate prospects are as grim as those my grandparents faced — depression, fascism, world war. These weren’t fantasies, they were in the daily paper and the newsreels, the formerly comfortable shared reality turning rapidly into a worldwide nightmare.

(What’s that you say, Lassie? Antibiotics aren’t working any more? The modern world is coming to an end? Good dog!)

It’s nearly impossible to remember just how bad things used to be. That said, I’m grateful that my parents worried much less about the safety of their children than parents do today. I used to walk to school alone; we spent a lot of time in the woods, outside adult supervision, and this was thought unexceptionable. Later, my mother had a job, I was what was elsewhere described as a latchkey kid, except that we didn’t lock our door, because we had a very difficult German Shepherd.

Also, 1940s Britain consisted of Scotland and Wales (neither of which were especially culturally homogenous) as well as England, and (for example) Scots in England were an active focus for resentment.

I’m surprised the argument that post war social democracy required (amongst other things) a high level of ‘cultural’ homogenity (and was by extension quite exclusionary) is receiving so much pushback. Isnt that part of the consensus on the post war order?
I was reading back through the Sheri Berman seminar just now, and that point seems to come up a lot

Here, for example, is Berman:

“A few of the commenters raised questions about my notion that social democracy has an inherently communitarian nature—and here again I will stand my ground. You may not like it, it may smack of nationalism or exclusivism, but the fact is that if you want an order based on social solidarity and the priority of social goods over individual interests, some basic sense of fellow feeling is required to get that order into place and keep it politically sustainable. So long as nation-states remain the basic form of political organization in the world, moreover, such fellow feeling will have to be fostered within national borders. Social democrats who can’t accept and deal with this will just end up ceding ground politically to the radical right and various populists, who will step in to supply the communitarian cravings that publics continue to display.”

Every socio-economic system is surely going to be built around excluding someone, in the case of post war social Democracy it was by empowering the native male working class to the detriment of women, foreigners (or those classified as foreign) and anyone outside the norm. (the system itself was built on quite conservative foundations)
I think I agree with Kindred’s point, as well, that a working class Glaswegian getting publicly called on sectarian and racist rhetoric is, to my eyes, a sign of *some* progress. Not enough, but some

I know I might be missing the point here, so I’m open to that

It’s not that the left has “lost”, it’s just picked a battle and largely won it, without realising exactly what the territory was and that this involved abandoning other battles.

The battlefield largely won is identity politics and anti-discrimination. It’s not over yet, and there’s still substantial resistance holed up in many areas, but the battle for control over what is and is not “acceptable” in public life has been won. Obvious racism and sexism is grounds for destroying a career in public life, grounds for firing people from many jobs.

What has not been won is the “hearts and minds” of the “occupation” phase. People still think these things, mutter about them when they feel it won’t be stuck to them later. And people who have no credibility to lose in public life (such as your Glaswegian above) still say them. From his point of view, the world looks down on him anyway, why should he care about one more negative opinion?

The battlefield that has largely been abandoned is economic and class issues. Unfortunately this was too cluttered with fighting the last war, undergraduate Marxists still hoping for the revolution. That became untenable in 1989 and has yet to be replaced with anything as compelling or coherent. People are reduced to arguing with libertarians, which gives a quick shot of moral righteousness but achieves little. We’ve not even managed to marshal an argument against continuing privatisation of public services.

Then there is the question of solidarity. Ronan’s quote of Berman above is very apt. People like to know what the boundaries of their community are, like to have a sense of the “normal”, and share most solidarity with those like themselves. The US has an extreme version of anti-solidarity where people vote against healthcare and a functioning state largely out of spite towards poor black people; a similar effect is, I think, slowly rising in the UK, the Netherlands and other places.

If you want to be on the “side” of the disadvantaged in the UK you’ll have to find a way to be on the side of that Glaswegian man. Otherwise, to him, you’re just another elite keeping him down.

I cant really speak to whether it made things worse for ‘women, foreigners etc’ (Im willing to accept it probably didnt to any great extent) but wouldnt the question be ‘did its collapse make things better?’ Could the progress that has happened in those areas (debatable sure) have taken place within the post war order? (I know those changes began *during* it..)

“I just don’t think that a prerequisite to that solidarity is having a monoracial, monoconfessional population”

I agree, though thats now. From my (limited) reading of it though (and Im open to correction) it did matter. It certainly mattered on race, even in Britain. Even my most chippy nationalist side wouldnt argue, for example, that the way the Irish were received in Britian during that period was comparable to the way those from the West Indies, Bangladesh etc were. So race did (and does I think) matter
I’m just saying Im sceptical of some of the praise the post war consensus receives, not saying that you cant create some similar order now in the context of the world we now live in.

Strands in this thread remind me of a poem by Grace Paley, quoted below. This version is from New and Collected Poems, 1992. I searched for a link but couldn’t find this exact version online, and I like this one better than the one I did find. (The poem is untitled.)

*****

If you have acquired a taste for happiness
it’s very hard to do without
so you try jollity for awhile
jokes
and
merriment

Song is one of the famous methods
for continuing or entrenching
happiness

Here is another example of ordinary joy:
the gathering together of comrades
in disagreement and resolution
followed by determined action

Still the face of life will change
partly because of those miserable scratches it makes
on its own aging surface
Then
happiness

in the risky busy labor of Repair the World
after which for the unsated there will surely be
talking all night dances in schoolrooms and kitchens
and sometimes
love

of happinesses the most famous of all

I just returned from a weekend at Madeleine Pickens’ ginormous ranch in Nevada, where she is trying to save wild horses that the BLM has let languish. Madeline, the erstwhile wife of kabillionaire T. Boone, probably isn’t sickeningly rich any more but she still has plenty of scratch. Point being, there is some goodness and altruism within the .1 %…

I cant really speak to whether it made things worse for ‘women, foreigners etc’ (Im willing to accept it probably didnt to any great extent) but wouldnt the question be ‘did its collapse make things better?’ Could the progress that has happened in those areas (debatable sure) have taken place within the post war order?

There are a lot of questions here that are difficult to answer. Looking at the issue of women’s rights in particular:
did British women’s lot improve under postwar social democracy in, say, 1945-75? Pretty much unquestionably, in lots of ways. And a lot of those ways would have been exactly the same ways in which men’s lot improved. Lots more British women in 1975 had running water than in 1945. Lots more British men had running water too. Should we be ignoring that as an example of progress for women?

Did their lot improve more than in 1915-1945? Or in 1975-2005? That’s a much more difficult question to answer. I mean, in 1918-28 they got the vote, which is generally thought to be a pretty massive deal. Does that count for 100 Improvement Points and, say, no-fault divorce count for 25?

And even more tricky is: would the improvements in 1975-2005 have been possible under postwar social democracy? Were they, in fact, the result of a process that started back then and kept rolling on, regardless of what happened after ’75?
But then you have to look further back, and note that women’s rights and situtations improved in 1915-45 as well…

I’m just saying Im sceptical of some of the praise the post war consensus receives

In Britain it was so enormously better than what came before at every level, that this seems like pointless contrarianism. Were things perfect? No. Were they better than the 30s, or the pre WWI period. God yes… And lots of the rights you’re talking about were possible because of the post 45 consensus in Britain. Women suddenly got treatement for pregnancy related problems. HUGE DEAL. Kids got educated, even women. They got access to better food, healthcare, housing. Without a mass of educated, and independent women would the 1970s have happened in the UK? Would minorities have been able to push back in the same way if they were struggling to survive in tenaments with no access to education.

The push back on the social democracy in Britain didn’t happen in earnest until the 1980s, but which point the battle had been won – winning the war was simply a matter of demographics. And to bring this back to Russell Brand. That war was partly won by light entertainment in the UK.

“The push back on the social democracy in Britain didn’t happen in earnest until the 1980s, but which point the battle had been won – winning the war was simply a matter of demographics. And to bring this back to Russell Brand. That war was partly won by light entertainment in the UK.”

I can’t work out what you mean by “demographics”, and which side you think light entertainment was / is on? Light entertainment in 2013 has some nasty regressive edges to it.

‘In Britain it was so enormously better than what came before at every level, that this seems like pointless contrarianism.’ (Cian, 65)
The only people with any idea of what the prewar was like that I’ve seen attack the postwar (criticizing it for falling short of its potential and promise is not the same) have been reactionaries and fascists. (Plus the occasional Deep Green who regards humanity as vermin.)

@68 I didn’t want to bring that up, but..

Long-time lurker here. It takes a lot to draw a comment from me, but some of the comments about social democracy (54, 56) have me pulling my hair out with frustration.

The notion that a level of nationalism and/or cultural homogeneity is necessary for social democracy just doesn’t cut it. In fact, as an Australian, I find it unfathomable. For example, the Australia that introduced introduced unemployment benefits in (IIRC) the early ’70s was very much an immigrant society containing people from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds.

More importantly, why is it that some white Glaswegian yob is allowed to stand in for the entire working class? Framing progressives as being out of touch with the opinions of “the masses” is common right-wing rhetorical strategy, and not the sort of thing I expect to see regurgitated at a site like CT. It’s also demonstrably false. For instance, re: the American example in 56, IIRC most Americans, when polled, say they are in favour of single-payer healthcare (or whatever it’s called). They don’t have it because their political system is *insufficiently democratic*, not because social progress is incompatible with democracy.

I find this kind of thinking is increasingly widespread among educated people, and it troubles me greatly. After the recent Australian election, friends were blaming ‘the bogans’ for the election of our new right-wing PM, despite the fact that the Liberal-National base has always been the wealthy, rural voters and the blue rinse set.

I can’t work out what you mean by “demographics”, and which side you think light entertainment was / is on? Light entertainment in 2013 has some nasty regressive edges to it.

The old bigots died. The young of the 80s, who were less bigoted are now middle aged. The young of today who are even less bigoted (at least towards gays) are in their 20s. This is how societal shifts happen.

Light entertainment in 2013 is way less regressive than light entertainment in the 60s and 70s, but that wasn’t my point.

There’s been a normalizing affect as more and more obviously gay people (first closeted, but clearly queer – now openly queer) appeared on TV, pop music, film, soaps etc. It’s not the only thing, but it helped changed the culture in numerous ways.

Looking through this thread, there seems to be a lot of wilful misreading of the OP going on. Why are so many people so despondent, so despairing, when, by historical standards, many/most people in the ‘West’ are doing so well?

Well (and isn’t it interesting that when discussing things like this one reaches, almost automatically, for religious language?), ‘Man does not live by bread alone’. Which is simply true. Man is a specific kind of ape, yes, but unusually for apes, ‘Man’ uses myth, symbol, argument, debate, ritual, to define ‘him’self, to a far greater extent than other apes. And this has a direct impact on ‘his’ consciousness. And so while the statistics about longer lifespans, higher incomes, and better dental care are all welcome, they kinda miss the point. Man lives in the material world, but he (sic) doesn’t just live in the material world. Man has consciousness to a much greater extent than is normal amongst apes, which means, amongst other things, ‘he’ has consciousness of the future, of History.

And this is the key point. Since the modern Left began, roughly just before the French Revolution, what has distinguished it from previous political movements is the ‘historical sense’, and the sense that ‘we are moving ‘forward’ in time towards some future state that will be different from our own. And it was the Left’s contribution to political thought to state that this did not have to mean ‘differently bad’. Instead it was (for the first time, more or less) considered to be possible that we were moving forward to a new state where life might be more or less radically improved for the vast majority of people. It was not for nothing that people on the left were and are called ‘progressives’.

And this is why comparisons between ourselves and our ancestors solely and purely in terms of our material advantages over them don’t capture the whole picture.

“Also hopeful, perhaps because my mother and aunt are so full of youth and energy and hopein that Bronx 1920′s picture in front of a building that still stands today”.

As late as the 1920s, this dream was still alive, and not just amongst intellectuals either, but amongst ordinary working people. Sure the First World War gave it a bad knock, but it also led to the Russian Revolution, fantasies about which gave hope to ordinary working people in the interwar period. And of course World War 2, with the terror bombing, and the Holocaust, and Hiroshima etc, gave an even bigger knock to the idea of (left wing) ‘progress’. But, quickly after that we had the ’45 Labour Government in the UK, and, later on, the rise of strong, powerful Communist parties (in, for example, Italy and France) a wave of decolonisation, the defeat of the Americans in Vietnam, Nixon proclaiming ‘we are all Keynesians now’….straws in the wind, certainly. But as late as the early 1980s, real, serious, sensible people still believed that the radical Left’s dream of radical and fundamental transformation of the social and political sphere was possible.

Things started to go into reverse, seriously, with the Thatcher and Reagan victories. Thereafter the defeats for the Left came thick and fast. The defeat of the miner’s strike, the collapse of organised, political Communism in both Western and Eastern Europe, the acceptance by national liberation movements of the dictates of the IMF….even the very partial move back to the Left in the 1990s was very much a poisoned chalice with both Clinton and Blair being more concerned with slowing down (and in their later terms, not even that) the move towards neoliberalism, rather than reversing it.

Nowadays, hardly anyone serious believes in the dream that animated so many serious people for 2 centuries. It now seems to be almost inconceivable that the future might be anything except capitalist. ‘Progress’ seemed to stop in (roughly) 1983. And since 9/11 we have seen, if anything, the arrow of time move backwards, with torture (!) being effectively legalised, with gunboat diplomacy (of the sort we thought had been banished forever from the rule book of civilised nations) being practiced, and with global surveillance networks of almost unparalleled scope and power being instituted, and with democratic institutions rotting away from the inside.

So, yeh, if you are white, male, heterosexual, Christian (preferably Protestant) or secular , if you live in the ‘West’, and if you have a well paid secure job in academia, government or (the upper echelons of) business, yeah life is pretty good. Probably better than at any time in history. And I am sure you have access to excellent dental care. But ‘what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’

“but instead I’ll just counter that nobody takes more bathroom time than adolescent males, nobody.”

Sure how else could we have made the time to do some serious thinking.. : )

Everything goes into the blog, everything. Even the act of love.

Oops. Timing, like ripeness, is all. I posted with reference to godoggo@81, not @82!

Hidari, I’m sorry, but you bring Matthew Arnold to mind:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar

Its disappearance is something in which I can rejoice, and I no more lament the withering away of communism than the replacement of psychoanalysis with more effective methods of treatment. The modern age, though it falls short of our hopes, is in most respects an improvement over the conditions my parents and their parents endured (please bear in mind that I’m rather old, so I’m including two world wars and a pandemic). Progress has been pretty spotty for Americans, but few who are not white males would prefer the conditions prevalent in the 1950’s.

It’s true that we no longer have the promise of an all-encompassing ideal leading us into the future, and find ourselves instead chopping our way through an endless thicket of obstacles, but, really, wasn’t it always thus?

@81

Always a special day when your bathroom grows up and becomes a blog ; )

few who are not white males would prefer the conditions prevalent in the 1950′s

Amen to that.

In case anybody is a little curious but not enough to google, #82 is a quote, with one word changed, from Inside Mr. Enderby, which I read in Borocay long before I had the misfortune of any of y’all’s acquaintance.

The funny part of this is that a Muslim woman walking around in a veil is the moral equivalent of white men parading around in full Nazi dress uniform. I suppose it can all be permitted under our everything goes culture and legal regime, but one should not engage in the double blindness of not even seeing the nikab for the political statement it is.
The paradox of all this being, as Hitchens correctly pointed out, that the English Left should be the branch of English political thought the most engaged in social opposition to Islamic norms and practices. The fact that it is not speaks to what is wrong in our political culture today.

The funny part of this is that a Muslim woman walking around in a veil is the moral equivalent of white men parading around in full Nazi dress uniform.

LOL, because veiled Muslim women recently ran a lot of concentration camps or what?