An Ill Omen

Uh-oh.  This indicates that Trump may win:

As Sam Rosenfeld tweeted last week, "There must be some mistake, didn't John Oliver EVISCERATE  #Brexit on Sunday? I assumed they would just cancel the vote entirely after that."

It's not all that relevant, but I've never really taken to John Oliver.  He seems like the liberal/progressive version of Rush Limbaugh that liberals/progressives have long dreamed of.  He may be more factually accurate than Limbaugh, I haven't bothered to check, but that's not really the appeal of such people, is it?  It's the gladiatorial spectacle with the audience howling, cheering, and turning thumbs down on their guy's opponent; the advantage to TV commentary is that the opponent doesn't even know he's down and has been EVISCERATED.  Unfortunately, Brexit voters didn't realize that they should have just stayed home that day.

I worry sometimes that I'm getting old, because the use of "fuck" by trendies like Oliver annoys me.  As a teenager I would have been thrilled by it.  But my objection is that throwing the word into every other sentence doesn't make your argument any stronger.  (This would come as news to Brexit voters as well, I imagine.)  Since Oliver supposedly traffics in fact and logic in contrast to the conservatives he owns, destroys and eviscerates, and smacks down, his spittle-flecked expletives should be unnecessary.  But it's hard to be a supergenius in a world full of idiots.

When I clicked through to the article itself, I noticed something that I think is significant.  The author of the article says that Oliver "compared both British leaders to Donald Trump, noting their similarities for lying, bombast and nativism."  The reference is to Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, and Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party.

“Basically, it seems like whoever the next U.K. prime minister is going to be, whether it’s [former London mayor] Boris Johnson or a racist tea kettle, they are going to be in for a rough few years, because once they invoke what’s known as Article 50, they’ll have just two years to negotiate their withdrawal and future relationship with the EU,” explained Oliver. “On top of which, they’ll have to settle outstanding bills with the EU, hammer out new trade bills with dozens of countries, sift through thousands of EU regulations and decide which ones to keep, and figure out how migration will work—and all the while, lives hang in the balance.”

Now, "leaders" wasn't Oliver's word, but I realized that Oliver was overlooking something.  Farage is the leader of a marginal political party; Johnson is a celebrity politician and journalist who campaigned for Brexit.  But there's a lot more to political leadership in England than these two, and most of the elites, both Tory and Labour, including Jeremy Corbyn, urged voters to vote for Remain rather than Leave.  The outcome of the referendum was a shock to them, and if nothing else was a salutary lesson to believers in media brainwashing that the masses aren't as easy to brainwash as the media hope. 

My point is that Oliver sided here with the same rotten elites who've done so much harm over the past several decades, the centrists and neoliberals whose policies led to the economic crash of 2008, to endless and escalating wars that waste trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and there's less and less space in the middle.  In the US, such elites were blindsided by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who in different ways have shown just how little legitimacy the respectable political, business, and media leaders have anymore.  The 2016  Presidential campaign was supposed to pit Hillary Clinton against Jeb Bush, but Trump and Sanders threw a monkeywrench into that assumption.  The respective party hierarchies have done their best to block these rebellions, with more success in Sanders's case; Trump, a wealthy celebrity and media star, was aided by the media who couldn't resist giving him vast amounts of free publicity.  And the reaction among the self-styled meritocracy has been panic.  Brexit just threw fuel on the fire.

True, Trump's campaign, like Brexit, has been fueled by racism and bigotry, but then so has Clinton's (if more genteelly), and now that Sanders and other great liberal hopes like Alan Grayson have embraced "no fly no buy" -- as a response to the Orlando massacre, it's not likely that a Democratic victory in November will be any better for religious and racial minorities than a Trump victory -- or indeed, than Obama's victories were.  But Clinton will be nicer about it.  No embarrassing vulgarity (or less of it, anyway), but Muslims and Mexicans and blacks will be quietly harassed and silenced and jailed and deported and (especially outside our borders) killed.  It's been profoundly dispiriting to see so many liberals and leftists join with the Right in revealing their contempt for civil liberties and due process, but I'd rather know than not know.  Amanda Marcotte claims that the Dems are just pretending to support "no fly no buy" in order to embarrass the Republicans, which I might find more persuasive if 1) Bernie Sanders hadn't supported it months before Orlando and 2) if Democrats like Diane Feinstein didn't have such a record of indifference to civil liberties and due process, dating back to the Bush II regime and beyond.  Like so many liberals, Marcotte thinks that the Democratic leadership is playing eleven-dimensonal chess with the Republicans, instead of with their base. 

It's the panic among liberals and centrists that has been most revealing, I think.  Look at Oliver's rant for a sympomatic example, a sort of lefty Brit-accented equivalent to Limbaugh or Trump fearmongering.  But the stock markets' reaction to the result of the vote hardly counts as a liberal let alone Left phenomenon, nor as a humanitarian response to racist tribalism.  The economist Dean Baker just pointed out against a New York Times Op-ed that "a high stock market is not an economic good. It is a distributional measure. It means that the owners of stock have more claim on society’s income. There is very little direct relationship between the stock market’s value and investment. (In the US, the investment share of GDP peaked in the late 1970s, when the stock market was in the doldrums.)"  Stock speculators don't care whether "lives hang in the balance"; their interests are at odds with those of most people, and it's a great mistake to see the Dow Jones and other indices as readouts of economic health -- except insofar as falling stock prices are used as an excuse for making most people suffer.

A good article at the Intercept pointed out that, contrary to the alarmism of the respectable mainstream opinion makers, an actual exit of the UK from the EU wasn't going to happen soon -- if ever.  In the first place, the referendum wasn't binding, and made nothing happen by itself:

... as the legal blogger David Allen Green has explained clearly, the measure Britons just voted for “was an advisory not a mandatory referendum,” meaning that it is not legally binding on the government. No matter who the prime minister is, he or she is not required by the outcome to trigger Article 50. And, despite what senior figures in the EU and its other states might say, there is no way for them to force the U.K. to invoke Article 50.

What all this means in practice is that, while it would be political suicide for any leader to try to avoid acting to satisfy the popular will expressed at the ballot box, there is some wiggle room for a new government to try to find a compromise arrangement that would satisfy a larger share of the population than just the slim majority of voters who demanded separation.

In the second place,

Then there is also the fact that, as Matthew Parris notes in a column on the bizarre politics of what comes next in London’s Times, “About 160 of the 650 MPs elected last year want Britain to leave the EU. The overwhelming majority of Westminster MPs believes that leaving would be a mistake. Many believe it would be a very grave mistake. Not a few believe it would be calamitous.” Because of that, Parris observes, “Our experiment in direct democracy is hurtling towards our tradition of representative democracy like some giant asteroid towards a moon.”

Given that a two-thirds majority of the current Parliament opposes leaving the EU, Parris suggested, a new general election next year was almost inevitable, further delaying even the start of the process.

With most of Parliament opposed to Brexit, a mere non-binding referendum isn't going to have the final word.  But what infuriates respectable opinion leaders is the thoughtcrime, and the rejection of their benign guidance.

Richard Seymour, who apparently was as surprised by the outcome as anyone, has written some useful pieces on Brexit.  He doesn't scant the role of racism and bigotry that motivated Leave, but:

There is a lot of finger-wagging on Twitter and elsewhere about how the exit voters have just triggered economic self-destruction. House prices will fall, savings will be diminished, the pound will weaken, jobs will dry up. Well, that's all true. Except. Not everyone benefits from the insane property market. Not everyone has savings. Not everyone benefits, as the City does, from a strong pound. Manufacturing has suffered from that priority. Large parts of the country have been haemorrhaging jobs for years. 'The economy' is not a neutral terrain experienced by everyone in exactly the same way. And some of the votes, coming in core Labour areas, not necessarily strongly racist areas at first glance, indicate that. So people have voted against an economy that wasn't working to their benefit. (That doesn't mean the practical alternative will not be worse. I suspect it will be a great deal worse.)

The vindictive anticipation with which so many liberals (e.g., this guy, and see some of the reactions quoted here) have greeted Brexit reminds me of the liberals I know who've expressed hope that the government of North Korea would collapse, cheerfully indifferent to the vast human cost of such a development; and North Korea isn't even close to being a democracy despite its name: its citizens don't have the responsibility for their repressive government that Americans or Brits have.  A similar hope evidently motivates many Trump supporters, to say nothing of those who hope for a meteor strike to settle our hash.  It's worth stressing that it was a "slim majority" that voted Leave; those crowing over the cataclysm to come seem to be ignoring that cost to the many millions of people who'll suffer as Britannia sinks beneath the waves.  Not that I'm at all surprised.  "Lives hang in the balance" is a gloat, not a warning.  There's considerable racism and "tribalism" in the liberal response to Brexit and Trump: those who made the wrong choices are Others, not like Us.

Thirty-Two Flavors, All of Them Vanilla

One of Glenn Greenwald's commenters linked to this 2008 article from The American Scholar, which is worth reading all the way through.  It's a very good account of the limitations, and as the writer calls them, disadvantages of an elite education.  I agree with most of what he says, but he stumbles usefully at a couple of points.  First:

I have a friend who went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically mediocre public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid people. Some people are smart in the elite-college way, some are smart in other ways, and some aren’t smart at all. It should be embarrassing not to know how to talk to any of them, if only because talking to people is the only real way of knowing them. 

 It took me a moment to disentangle what Deresiewicz was saying here.  At first he thought that going to an Ivy League college "teaches you to relate to stupid people", but of course he meant that going to "a typically mediocre public high school" teaches you that.  (Mediocrity would be typical, just by definition.)  But I must differ with him.  Of course there are stupid people outside the Ivy League, but there are plenty of them inside it too.  I'm not just talking about people like George W. Bush, who is lazy and ignorant but not stupid.  I'm talking about the elites who surrounded and enabled him, the neocons and technocrats, who with competence and even brilliance nearly destroyed the world economy and guided the US and its cronies into some horribly destructive wars -- just as their predecessors a half-century ago conducted the Cold War and numerous wars, small and large, that did no good at all to anyone except to ruling elites.

Deresiewicz is aware of this, to some extent.

For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend ... The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.

 It's worth recalling here the experience of a working-class boy who attended another elite school: Raymond Williams, the son of a Welsh railroad worker, earned a scholarship to Cambridge University in 1939.  Later in life he wrote about what he saw there.

The class which has dominated Cambridge is given to describing itself as well-mannered, polite, sensitive. It continually contrasts itself favourably with the rougher and coarser others. When it turns to the arts, it congratulates itself, overtly, on its taste and its sensibility; speaks of its poise and tone. If I then say that what I found was an extraordinarily coarse, pushing, name-ridden group, I shall be told that I am showing class-feeling, class-envy, class-resentment. That I showed class-feeling is not in any doubt. All I would insist on is that nobody fortunate enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people. All I did not know then was how cold that class is. That comes with experience [What I Came to Say (Hutchinson Radius, 1989), p. 6].

Another lesson to be learned from Williams's experience is that this isn't new.  Again, Deresiewicz admits as much.

I taught a class several years ago on the literature of friendship. One day we were discussing Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, which follows a group of friends from childhood to middle age. In high school, one of them falls in love with another boy. He thinks, “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.” A pretty good description of an elite college campus, including the part about never being allowed to feel alone.

The Waves was published in 1931, and is based partly on Woolf's (male) contemporaries, who attended elite British schools a century ago.  Things may be worse now, though I think that's debatable, but they haven't changed fundamentally.

These quibbles (and I should also notice that Deresiewicz buys into the myth of grade inflation) don't detract from the overall worth of Deresiewicz' essay.  It's best if you balance it against the perspective of people like Raymond Williams or Noam Chomsky, who view elite institutions with a much more jaundiced eye.  Deresiewicz is criticizing them from a humanities point of view: hey, management and leadership aren't the only important things -- what about introspection and the life of the mind?  Which is perfectly valid, but I don't think it goes quite deep enough; but I'm impressed that he went as deeply as he did.

The Full Political Gamut From A to B

A right-wing acquaintance of mine on Facebook posted a link to this blog post at the Telegraph's website. Fortunately I'm well inured by now to the absurdities of the right-wing media, or I might well have spluttered cola all over my keyboard when I read the title -- "Even America's liberal elites concede that Obama's presidency is crumbling" -- and I don't need cola in my keyboard again.

The post was inspired by an article in the Washington Post, which could only look like a liberal newspaper to someone like my acquaintance: someone to the right of Ronald Reagan, who I once heard lamenting that he'd liked Reagan until he was bought out by the corporations. (Since GE acquired Reagan in the early 1950s, I have often wondered what time frame my acquaintance thought he was talking about.) True, the Post is an elite paper, one of our national Newspapers of Record along with the New York Times, and as the writer allows, it is

usually viewed by conservatives as a flagship of the liberal establishment inside the Beltway. The fact The Post is reporting that not only could Republicans sweep the House of Representatives this November, but may even take the Senate as well, is a reflection of just how far the mainstream, overwhelmingly left-of-centre US media has moved in the last month towards acknowledging the scale of the crisis facing the White House.

The whole idea of the "liberal establishment inside the Beltway" is risible, to say nothing of "the mainstream, overwhelmingly left-of-centre US media". Like the Times, the Post always loved and enabled Bush and his wars, and always cautions Democratic Presidents to 'move to the center', i.e. to the right, the farther right the better. It would be comical to watch the Republican establishment pretending that they aren't "inside the Beltway" if the Democratic establishment didn't do it too.

Nor do I see how fretting about likely Republican gains in November constitutes some sort of apostasy for liberals. Is the idea that loyal liberals / Democrats are supposed to chant "We're Number One!" while ignoring little problems like Obama's dropping poll numbers and the growing disenchantment of much of his non-corporate base? If some unmistakably right-wing media outlet -- the National Review, Fox News -- had worried about possible Republican losses in November 2008, would that be a sign that right-of-center US media elites were conceding that Bush's presidency was crumbling, and what would that signify? Would it perhaps indicate that Bush should move "toward the center," i.e. to the left, the farther the better? Not a chance.

I presume the idea is that Obama's and the Democrats' troubles are somehow a vindication of the Bush regime and the right-wing bipartisanship that collapsed the US economy, which led to the disastrous electoral defeat of 2008 and Obama's shining honeymoon with people who believed that he was really going to break with the failures of the past. This only shows that the US Right, like my acquaintance, are as far out of touch with reality as ever -- much like the Democrats, but then, they're part of the American Right. I've noticed that American liberals are dropping the "reality-based" self-identification they adopted during the Bush years, and that's a good thing, because they aren't and never were much more in touch with reality than American conservatives. (Who also like to think of themselves as tough-minded realists.)

Obama's popularity has tended to drop when he acted like a Republican (that is, most of the time). The obsessions of the elite media (cutting the deficit, for example) do not, by and large, concern most Americans much, but that's hardly a surprise, since the elite media reflect elite concerns. I've quoted Noam Chomsky on this before: when the elite media speak of "special interests," they mean the vast majority of Americans, and when they speak of "the national interest" they mean corporate and political elites. What surprises me is how altruistically a non-elite small business owner like my right-wing acquaintance identifies with the interests of the elites. It's very big of him; I'm just not large-minded enough to worry about the welfare of Wall Street, corporate CEOs, and the national Party organizations.

Another thing Chomsky has said is that the function of the "liberal" media is to draw a line beyond which debate may not go. The Washington Post and the New York Times do represent the leftward extreme of respectable, responsible, "sober" (as my acquaintance would call it) political debate in these United States. Beyond that demarcation line there be dragons and cameleopards. So, everybody, brace yourself for a typically claustrophobic campaign season.