Best of the Week #7

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As a continuation from last week’s post, I thought recommending fewer posts but analysing them in more detail would be a good idea. Today I have selected an interview with David French, a columnist for the American conservative National Review magazine, about Trump and the general state of the Republican Party. https://www.vox.com/2017/7/13/15958230/donald-trump-jr-russia-collusion-republican-party-david-french

French is remarkably honest here. He admits that the rise of Trump is largely due to the failings of the Republican base. The start of the interview mentions how Republican senators have been disproportionately cautious in their views on Trump’s collusion with the Russians; French concedes that were it Hillary Clinton accused of collusion with a foreign power, Republicans would be nowhere near as tepid. French is scathing in his critique of how the Republican Party failed to stand up to Trump- partly by underestimating him during the primaries, but particularly by using him as a means to advance legislation once he was inaugurated. However, French is without hope. He believes young Republicans are especially anti-Trump and anti-authoritarian, so a genuinely conservative candidate will have a chance, if nothing else, due to demographics. But for now, Trump has taken over the Republican Party, which is why and how most Republicans still express confidence in him.

I appreciate French’s critique here. It isn’t easy to go to a liberal website to attack the party you have supported your whole life. French understands that Trump is fundamentally immoral in his  political and personal conduct, and isn’t willing to overlook that for the sake of advancing a few conservative goals. French even goes as far as to believe that the short term victories Republicans will make now will come at the expense of future electability. By associating conservatism with Trump, Republicans will tarnish their brand as the various scandals of the Trump presidency come to light.

Having said that, even as a conservative, French’s condemnation of Trump doesn’t go far enough. He fails to acknowledge the role Evangelical Christianity played in Trump’s rise and continued popularity amongst Republicans. Prominent Evangelicals like Pat Robertson have given their full support to Trump. Moreover, Trump selected Mike Pence to boost his popularity amongst Evangelicals. Nor does French admit Trump’s appeal to the instinctive nationalism of most Republican voters. The ‘America First’ rhetoric of the Trump campaign may have appeared bellicose and protectionist to Republican elites. But to ordinary Republicans, it was music to their ears. Equally, Republican politicians are far more pro immigration than their voters, which is one of the reasons Trump, as the most anti immigration candidate, won the primary. Part of the problem with the Republican Party is that most Republicans don’t adhere to what French would consider conservatism. Instead, they believe in a crude form of nationalism. It doesn’t matter to them how much the government spends, it is who the government looks out for. Most Republicans believe the internationalist outlook of both Democrats like Bill Clinton and Obama, and also Republicans like Bush and McCain, was somehow a betrayal of ordinary Americans. This explains Trump’s anti foreign interventionism, but also his aversion to free trade and mass immigration.

French has fallen victim to the American two party system. Under a proportional voting method, French could set up a genuinely conservative movement, and gain a considerable amount of support that would be reflected in the number of seats the party would win. But in a two party system, the likes of French have no choice but to win the Republican Party back from the Trump supporters. Considering that Trump’s ideology is more in touch with ordinary Republicans than the likes of Rubio or Kasich, an anti-authoritarian Republican Party that can appeal to young people is very unlikely to materialise.

The interview itself is quite long, but I would strongly recommend reading the whole thing. Ultimately I lean to the left on most issues of American politics, and so cannot concur with everything French says. But it is good to read views from the other side on occasion, particularly when they are being as frank as David French is here.

The ignorance cannot be exaggerated

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In a poll 35% of Americans thought Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act were different policies or didn’t know if they were the same or different. (New York Times)

Few Americans are accurately informed about what is going on politically at home or abroad. They are told Obamacare is “bad” and should be scrapped, but are quite supportive of the Affordable Care act that offers help to people with pre-existing conditions and healthcare to their young sons and daughters. These are people who are not taught about the Constitution, and have little knowledge of American history. We are told that few people read newspapers any more, on line or not;  those who keep up with events increasingly rely on social media, and we know how reliable that is. I don’t think you can have a democracy if the population is ignorant and doesn’t care. But, of course, we don’t have a democracy; we now have rule by oligarchy, and a frightening number of people don’t know what “oligarchy” means, nor do they seem to care.

The America we thought we knew no longer exists.

(Reading this through again I thought  ” for heavens sake find something cheerful to say!  The daily drumbeat of bad news makes one want to tune out completely, and we have a duty not to do that”).

The pitfalls of social media.

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As I mentioned on last week’s Best of the Week, life in the modern world is a constant bombardment of information. Part of this is intellectual information like news stories, books, or if you’re still in education, lessons- things which are good for you but can be nonetheless hard to remember. But another aspect of information bombardment is social information, constantly and efficiently delivered to us via a myriad of electronic devices.

As a society, we convince ourselves that we need to be constantly informed of our friends’ various activities. If an associate has been on holiday, entered into a new relationship or passed their driving test, we must know as soon as possible. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with mild curiosity. The problem arises when we spend inordinate amounts of time being concerned about the lives of others, when we really ought to be principally concerned with those immediately around us, not the hundreds of people we see online.

One of the problems of social media is that is misrepresents what people’s lives are really like. You generally only see the good aspects of life: weddings, parties, the birth of a new child, graduation ceremonies. The other parts of life- funerals, divorces, the ending of friendships- are seldom prominently displayed online. This gives the impression that your friends are all having wonderful lives, which may make you feel more inadequate about your own. It’s no surprise that social media has contributed to people feeling increasingly depressed and insecure. In some extreme cases, girls will have a radical makeover in order to make their online pictures prettier. More common is the feeling that if your posts did not get as many positive reactions as the posts of your friends, you are unpopular or a social outcast.

Social media can thus often regress into a crude popularity contest. Although there is no explicit competition, people feel the need to increase their online presence. At school, some people would try to add as many friends onto their Facebook profile as possible, even if they barely knew the people they were adding. As with all competitions, there are winners and losers. The winners will get a temporary happiness, believing that their relatively high online status means they are a better person. But such happiness is fleeting. Partly because the desire for a greater following is largely insatiable. All of a sudden, having 200 followers on Instagram isn’t enough, you have to have 300. For the most part, there is no end point where people are satisfied with the degree to which their online activity is felt.

However, for the losers from the social media competition, the whole affair  often makes them miserable. Like the winners, they may also spend large amounts of time on social media. The difference is that there is no reward for them. Their social media activities feel more like chores than a form of entertainment. A classic example is journalists, who nowadays are more or less required to be on Twitter. They may post links to the fantastic journalism they write on Twitter, only to be disheartened when their following pales in comparison to a superfluous celebrity or model.

That is my biggest problem with social media. It largely rewards those who ought not to be rewarded, and ignores those whose work ought to be given greater recognition. Celebrity gossip and the private lives of the rich and famous get a vast amount of attention. Meanwhile, the plight of the world’s most vulnerable goes largely ignored, except for perhaps some left wing activist saying how much they care. Meaningful, insightful and unique analysis of the world we live in is scarce. There is hardly any attention paid to science, even as science has done so much to improve our lives. Academic figures, researchers and analysts are cast aside, perhaps because their work is seen as stuffy, dull, or incomprehensible. Instead, talentless musicians, pointless famous figures and idiotic politicians (Trump, Boris Johnson) steal the limelight. Bellicose nonsense fills the social media news feeds, while the real issues remain unknown.

Perhaps this isn’t the fault of social media, which after all, is only a tool with no agency of its own. At the end of the day, social media is only a reflection of how broken our society has become. It reflects our obsession with image, particularly the image of women- one of the biggest manifestations of misogyny of our age. It shows how wilfully ignorant we all are, preferring idle gossip to truly relevant information. Often the anonymity of social media shows the brutal side of human nature, with cyber-bullying, ‘trolling’ and violently prejudice views presenting themselves all too often. It is far easier to make a racist remark behind the safety of a computer screen, than to be racist to a person’s face.

I think the only solution to all this is to decrease the prominence social media enjoys in the modern world.  The stigma against the non-use of social media must end. Especially for young people, no one should be described as ‘weird’ or even ‘different’ for not being on a particular platform. Those who choose to use social media should use it less often, and not as a substitute for proper sources of information. Part of the reason for the decline of journalism is that social media is gaining popularity as a source of news at the expense of professional news sites. Not only does this decrease the quality of information, it also makes it less balanced. Instead of people reading a variety of viewpoints, people increasingly only read viewpoints that concur with their own. Newspapers must regain the significance they once had, even if it means us all paying more money.

Having said that, I’m a strong believer in personal responsibility, including how you conduct yourself online. If you choose to waste your time arguing with strangers on Twitter, that may be very unfortunate. But at the end of the day it is your decision, and you will suffer the consequences. We cannot blame social media companies for our misuse of their products. Instead, a fundamental culture shift is required. Social media’s users should value talent, intelligence and moderation, and shun the frivolous, the attention-seeking and the belligerent. Epicurus was no loner. But he valued meaningful and intimate conversation. He would have viewed the vile cacophony of modern social media with total disapproval.

Best of the Week #6

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First of all, I must apologise for posting this late. I’ve had a very busy weekend, so tiring in fact that I fell asleep that 9pm Sunday evening, just as I was about to start writing this. I’ll post my usual commentary later today as well.

I wanted to use this week’s Best of the Week to outline my views on the university tuition fees debate. As I outline in my summary on the views of young people in Britain (http://hanrott.com/blog/the-mood-of-young-people-in-britain/), most young people are left wing, particularly when it’s in their economic interests to be so. Thus, it should come as no surprise that most of them want tuition fees abolished and government spending on higher education increased.

The classic conservative objection to the abolition of fees is succinctly argued by Katy Balls (https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/jeremy-corbyn-talking-uneducated-nonsense-tuition-fees/). She points out that contrary to the predictions of tuition fee opponents, working class students are applying to university in ever-higher numbers. But because most students who go to university are still middle class, abolishing tuition fees would essentially be a middle class subsidy, not a redistribution of wealth the way socialists often claim it to be. Moreover, Scotland has abolished tuition fees, and working class Scots are actually less likely to attend university than their English counterparts.

For Jonn Elledge, the class dimension of tuition fee policy is beside the point. (http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2017/07/maybe-scrapping-tuition-fees-would-be-regressive-perhaps-we-should-do-it). What matters is that public policy over the last two decades, but particularly since 2010, has overwhelmingly favoured the elderly. The generosity of pensions and other benefits for the retired has increased. Meanwhile, young people have borne the brunt of austerity, the tripling of tuition fees being one of many such examples. It doesn’t help that young people are naturally disadvantaged economically anyway, because they don’t own as many assets, don’t have as much in savings, earn less and are more likely to be unemployed. So abolishing tuition fees wouldn’t reduce the inequality between the classes, but we should do it anyway because it would reduce the inequality between the generations. It’s worth nothing that generational inequality manifested itself in the 2017 general election, where age was a far more reliable predictor of voting intention than class: middle class young people voted Labour, working class elderly people voted Conservative.

I find myself largely agreeing with Balls  here. I accept the conservative argument that abolishing tuition fees would be a middle class subsidy. I also accept that British universities may be more expensive than their European competitors- which often don’t charge tuition fees at all- but they are also a lot better. I don’t want to fall into the trap of demanding as much government funding as possible for my own interests. If we all did that, the country would be bankrupt. So I accept that given the reality of limited resources, it makes sense to use public expenditure as progressively as possible, not shower more money to those that don’t need it.

Having said that, the logical conclusion of the conservative argument would be not to subsidise universities at all. If spending money on students amounts to a middle class subsidy, then why not cut higher education spending even further? After all, shouldn’t those that benefit from a service pay for it? Of course, we can all see that this argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Virtually everyone accepts a compromise between making education affordable enough for both individual students and wider society. So if we are going to spend money on higher education, the money should be targeted at lower income students. The Educational Maintenance Allowance, a grant to help poor students with their living costs, should be reintroduced. There should also be more scholarships for talented young people from working class backgrounds. I also accept that the poorest students should be exempt from paying tuition fees.

On a visceral level, Elledge’s point about the need to rectify generational inequality resonates. As young person myself, I understand the levels of disillusionment and hopelessness amongst my generation. But where I disagree with him is that I don’t think young people would be happier if only the government gave them more money. What young people really resent are the lack of opportunities available. Making university a viable option for the poorest students is certainly a crucial aspect of expanding opportunity, but it is not the whole answer. Instead of increasing spending on middle class students, the government should invest more in other forms of tertiary education- apprenticeships, vocational qualifications, training programmes. Under all of these proposals, anyone good enough to go to university will be able to, regardless of their income. Middle class students would be paying for something that would result in higher earnings later in life, addressing conservative concerns of excessive government spending. At the same time, working class students would have more opportunities than ever before. If they decided to go to university, it would be more affordable than it currently is. If they decided against it, there would be more investment in alternative career paths.

The American police – and guns – are out of control

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From Peter Gardner, Blawith, Cumbria, UK

“Carrie Arnold describes the scale of gun-related deaths in the US (6 May, p 22). Not only is it horrific, it is ridiculous and unnecessary.  The finger of blame usually points at the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which, according to gun defenders, enshrines the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. But this is at best a misunderstanding, at worst a deliberate misrepresentation that ignores the full wording of that amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
That right is clearly not absolute; it is conditional. Indeed, John Paul Stevens, an associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1975 to 2010, suggested the addition of five words to the amendment: “when serving in the militia”. Until a sufficient body of concerned US citizens and politicians come to accept this conditional interpretation, the senseless slaughter will continue.”

Meanwhile, police are frightened and, as a result, are trigger happy. Some are maybe racist, but mostly the shooting is sign of fear and nervousness It takes the slightest suspicion to elicit gunfire from them. One has to admire one thing – their aim. They can sure fire straight – at teenagers, young black men, anyone who looks Hispanic or Moslem, or just isn’t old and white – who knows. If you are in America and encounter a firearms incident, throw yourself on the ground, arms straight down and still by your side, don’t make the slightest move. The fact that you are a free citizen will not make any difference if a police officer sees as much as a sudden movement.

This is what the. twisted reading of the Constitution has wrought – mayhem on the streets, and elderly ladies carrying loaded pistols in their pocket books. I don’t know whether the people who advocate for all these guns, including lawyers and politicians, personally make money out of the sordid trade, but the effect is the same whether they do or not – mostly innocent people gunned down in the street, either by drug lords or police. It is not only stupid to allow people to have military weapons and ammunition, it is, in my opinion, immoral. The death rate is equivalent to a full scale international war, with civilians the only casualties. Epicurus would put us all down as totally bonkers.