Saturday Commentary and Review #106
Liberal Interventionists Running Victory Laps, Post-War Prosperity Blip, US Expats Flood Mexico, Rise of Fall of the IDW, Collapse of Scottish Clan System
If you build a system that benefits your interests, you will do the best you possibly can to preserve it, perpetuate it, and possibly expand it. If you convince yourself of its inherent goodness and righteousness, you have a religious conviction. If you can mix material self-interest and firm religious conviction, “holy war” occupies a prominent place on your menu.
With the failure of Russia to deliver the coup de grace to the US proxy forces in Ukraine, jihad is back on the menu for liberal interventionists in America. Francis Fukuyama has busied himself with running victory laps on Twitter, as Tehran deals with insurgency and cross-border raids, China deals with COVID protests, and Ukrainian forces continue to hold out against a Russia that calmly proceeds to degrade their capacities to fight back. The worst of the “expert class” are drawing bad conclusions once again; they are convinced that they have been right all along and that everyone else has been wrong. It’s not their ideas that were bad, it was only certain parts of their execution. REAL LIBERAL INTERVENTIONISM HAS NOT BEEN TRIED!
As the Biden Regime continues to stabilize the USA internally, this decade will also see more efforts to revert to the globalist mean: a coming #unBrexit is in the cards, all it will take is a few politicians with “courage”, for one. The bureaucrats in Brussels (and in national parties like the Greens in Germany) are conspiring to blast open the doors to allow in millions of more migrants. The populist challenge has been fended off, in the eyes of the experts, and now it’s time to get back to business. Part of this business is the maintenance and expansion of US hegemony in the name of liberal democracy, and George Packer is here for it.
Beneath the restrainers’ views lies a shared hostility to what they often call “liberal elites”—the policy makers and plugged-in experts and pundits who never listened, and whom they despise for continuing to see America as a benevolent power. How could anyone still believe that fairy tale? For restrainers on the right, liberal zeal threatens national sovereignty and traditional values around the world and at home. For those on the left, democracy is the pretty lie that hides the brutality of capitalism and imperialism. These views are at bottom antithetical: The right wants more national power without international rules, and the left wants the nation-state to disappear. But the two sides have made a temporary marriage at what they see as liberalism’s sickbed.
It is much, much easier to defend a system when it does not attack your own values and does not result in your material dispossession while promising you a worse future.
They give neither Russia nor Ukraine any agency—only the U.S. drives history. The war is not about Putin’s fantasy of a restored empire, or Ukraine’s determination to remain an independent democracy. It’s simply one move of a long game in which America is the aggressive player, Russia a threatened opponent capable of being restored to reason, and Ukraine a hapless pawn. Putin was only reacting to NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders.
None of this analysis held up. The NATO alliance has always remained a defensive one, posing no military threat to the Russian Federation, never seriously considering Ukrainian membership, and guilty of no historic betrayal, either, as the Johns Hopkins historian M. E. Sarotte shows in Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate. The book argues that both superpowers squandered the chance for cooperation after the Cold War, but it refutes the Russian claim that expansion broke an explicit American promise to advance NATO “not one inch eastward.” In any case, Putin had offered an entirely different justification on the eve of the invasion: Ukraine was part of Russia. Ukraine didn’t exist.
Packer does nothing here but reiterate half-truths and lies. There is no way whatsoever that Russia would have ever tolerated Ukraine in NATO, which is why this war was inevitable. NATO attacked both (rump) Yugoslavia and Libya, neither of which were defensive conflicts. And yes, the USA did break its promise re: NATO expansion.
This restraint is not a hard-won prudence in the face of tragic facts. It’s a doctrinaire refusal, by people living in the safety and comfort of the West, to believe in liberal values that depend on American support. The restrainers can’t accept that politics leaves no one clean, and that the most probable alternative to U.S. hegemony is not international peace and justice but worse hegemons. They can’t face the reality that force never disappears from the world; it simply changes hands.
Liberal democracy requires not traditional liberal tolerance of the views and beliefs of others, but in rigid, ideological conformity. So says Packer.
Now watch this:
But we should pause before closing the book on the post-9/11 years and never listening to the restrainers again. The war has kindled hope, at times bordering on triumphalism, for a renewal of liberal democracy, not just as a guide to foreign policy but as a mission at home. In September, the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama told The Washington Post, “If Ukraine is able to defeat Russia, the demonstration effect is going to be really tremendous. It’s going to have domestic political consequences inside every democracy that’s threatened by one of these populist parties … I do think that we could recover a little bit of the spirit of 1989. Ukraine could trigger something like that in the United States and Europe.”
Imagining that a Ukrainian victory would have a decisive effect on the internal politics of Western democracies is unwarranted exuberance. Illiberal populism continues to thrive in countries whose governments support Ukraine—Poland, the U.K., France, Italy, Sweden.
It really is a jihad. It’s not enough for Ukraine to win, it must be followed up by the cleansing of politics that are distasteful to US elites even among its own allies, and even if it takes soft regime change. Packer and his ilk are ‘fundies’, and they simply do not see it in themselves.
In 1989 it was possible to believe that Europe would lead the way toward a more integrated, cosmopolitan world under an American security umbrella; it was easy to discount the force of nationalism. That ceased to be true a long time ago, as Fukuyama knows: It’s the subject of his latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents. He argues persuasively that liberalism—individual freedom, equal rights, rule of law, consent of the governed, open markets, scientific rationalism—is in retreat around the world, not because of “a fundamental weakness in the doctrine,” but because of “the way that liberalism has evolved over the last couple of generations.” The causes of its decline run deep: globalization, rapid technological change, inequality, mass migration, institutional sclerosis, failures of leadership. In the past few decades, an exaggerated emphasis on freedom has driven polarization in democracies, including ours: radical egalitarianism on the left, reactionary authoritarianism on the right. Both forms of illiberalism seek to forge group identities—exclusive, intolerant ones, steeped in resentment—to replace the national identities that have become corroded in an era of globalization.
Fukuyama believes that liberalism can recover and thrive again through “a sense of moderation,” by toning down its individualistic extremes—sensible advice, but not exactly an antidote to a global crisis that has reached even Sweden. When writers like Fukuyama and Robert Kagan—in his 2018 book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World—call for liberalism’s renewal, they often assume its self-evident appeal.
Reflecting the views of their fellow liberal centrists in matters outside of foreign policy, these liberal interventionists feel that liberalism has gone too far and only needs to be scaled back somewhat, so that they can RETVRN to its still-visible golden age.
Russia’s war has demonstrated that a decent world isn’t possible without liberalism, and liberalism can’t thrive without U.S. engagement.
Only the USA can make things good. These people are religious fanatics.
I often think about how the Black Death ushered in an age of relative prosperity as the tightening of the labour pool in Europe meant that the lower classes could charge more for their work in the fields on behalf of the nobility. It took a cataclysm of historical proportions to make life better for those at the bottom end…….at least for those that survived.
The history of Europe for centuries was guided by the conflict between Church and Polity, with the Church coming out on the losing side. The Industrial Revolution gave birth to a new conflict, that between the industrialist and the noble, with the former winning out through the sheer application of capital. This new conflict left the poor poor, and in many cases even poorer. C’est la vie.
It would take another cataclysm for the life of the working man (and now, woman) to see their fortunes rise: two world wars. Cory Doctorow explains how the latest 30 Years War gave birth to 30 years of social mobility that has now hit a dead end in the West.
It took the two World Wars —a generation-long orgy of wealth-destruction — to weaken the power of the ruling class to such a low ebb that it could no longer drown the centuries-long dream of mobility and egalitarianism.
After the wars, the rich countries of the world were remade.
Rich countries instituted ambitious social safety networks: universal secondary education, increased access to tertiary education, home ownership subsidies (in the US) and public housing (most other rich nations), free healthcare for elderly and poor people (in the US) or for everyone (other rich nations).
Unions became common, and as productivity improved, wages rose. Struggles for gender justice expanded beyond a campaign for votes for wealthy white women and into universal sufferage. Civil rights struggles on racial, gender and sexual orientation lines came to the fore, and formed alliances with one another, and with anti-colonial movements in the global south.
The world changed. These were the trente glorieuses — the thirty glorious years where you could dream of a better life for your children. My father, a refugee born to refugees, went on to earn a doctorate and a comfortable middle-class living with a solid union pension. My mother, child of a working class eldest son of 10 who quit school at 12 to support his family, became the first person in her family to complete university, also earned a doctorate, and went on to a comfortable middle-class living, too. Today, they are both healthy, vigorous, and active in their mid-seventies: debt-free, owners of their home, with the guarantee of free medical care and a comfortable dotage.
Historically speaking, their lives were exceptional. They came from peasant farmers and impoverished, pogrom-haunted refugees. Historically speaking, their lot should have been largely indistinguishable from their parents, and my lot indistinguishable from theirs.
Abnormality:
The thirty glorious years were abnormal. The normal course of modern history was stasis. Primogeniture —the practice of confining inheritances to the eldest son — ensured that the number of wealthy families remained relatively static and that great fortunes remained intact over centuries.
It ensured, in other words, that people worked for them. That we worked for them.
The thirty glorious years upended all that. Working people made claims on the wealth of their societies, and demanded the same economic freedoms that their social “betters” had enjoyed for as long as anyone could remember.
For those experiencing upward social mobility, these were indeed glorious years. The benefits of the welfare state weren’t evenly distributed; many key drivers of mobility were racially segregated, but nearly everyone living in a rich country could make some claim on post-war prosperity.
Capital’s rebound:
In his landmark Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty and his grad students trace the world’s capital flow for 300 years, showing (among other things) that when the wealth of the richest 10 percent of us crosses a threshold, this capital class gains the ability to command political outcomes: they can turn their wealth into pro-wealth policies, which make them wealthier, and gives them more control over our policies.
Once that inequality tipping-point is reached, society grows inexorably more unequal and more unfair, as our rules change not merely to favor the rich, but to disfavor the poor (think of how, after the 2008 financial crisis, deep-pocketed banks got full bailouts and paid millions in bonuses the executives that had brought them to the brink of ruin, and then embarked upon a corporate crime-spree of fraudulent foreclosures that saw them stealing houses from working people with impunity).
This unfairness is destabilizing. It’s easy to find people who’ll fight to overturn systems that are grossly, persistently, obviously unfair. This is sometimes demonized as “populism,” but why should people line up to defend a system that obviously doesn’t give a damn about them?
According to Piketty, capitalism always leads to rich people running the show, and that always leads to the follies of the wealthy few taking precedence over the material needs of the majority, which eventually leads to some kind of collapse, wherein wealth is destroyed and a space opens for a new society.
As we’ve all asked in the past, why support a system that no longer promises you a better future? The follow up question is: just how long can such a system persist? This is one reason why so many are negative regarding the prospects of the USA and the West as a whole.
“Love it or leave it!” was the common American refrain leveled at left-wingers during the Cold War, especially when it came to the war in Vietnam. It is easy to conflate regime with patria, but it is more often than not a mistake to do so.
There is a long history of American living abroad, dissatisfied with conditions at home. A cultural expat community formed in France during the Interwar Period, for example. More recent examples include colonies of Americans in the Caribbean, in Southeast Asia, and in London too. Despite persistent threats, an American colony of political dissidents in Canada never seems to materialize.
The reasons for moving away from the USA are many, and quite a few of you have expressed interest in me writing about life away from (North) America. It doesn’t even have to get that far; more and more Americans are choosing to settle in neighbouring Mexico:
As life gets prohibitively expensive for many people living in the US (and other rich countries), relatively cheaper countries like Mexico are becoming increasingly attractive. But for local people the costs are growing.
Between January and September of 2022, Mexico issued 8,412 Temporary Resident Cards (TRT) to US residents, 85% more than in the first three quarters of 2019, according to a Mexican government migration report. Many are choosing to live in Mexico City. Such rapid growth rates have not been seen since comparable data became available in 2010. The number of Americans receiving permanent residency during that period has also risen sharply (48%), to 5,418.
But this may be just a fraction of the real number of American expats choosing to settle in Mexico. As the Mexican government has said for years, the number of Americans moving to its shores is likely far greater than the official figures suggest. According to data from the Ministry of Tourism (Sectur), over 10 million US citizens arrived as visitors through September this year, 24% more than in the same period of 2019. However, the Mexican authorities do not know exactly how many of those chose to stay.
A Growing Trend
In 2020, the US State Department estimated that 1.5 million USians were living in Mexico, more than double the number a decade earlier. That was before Usians began moving to Mexico at an even faster pace.
But why are so many choosing to move across the Southern border in the first place?
One reason is that it is remarkably easy. Mexico is at most a four- or five-hour flight away from most US cities. It has also been one of the most welcoming countries since the COVID-19 pandemic began, having implemented fewer COVID-19 travel restrictions than just about any other country on the American continent. Nor has it introduced vaccine passports. This has made it particularly attractive to digital nomads looking for affordable destinations with few COVID-19 restrictions.
Mexico is also remarkably cheap, as long as you are earning dollars, euros or some other hardish currency.
“Obviously, if you can earn in dollars and spend in pesos, you can triple your income,” Marko Ayling, a content creator and writer living in Mexico City told El País. “And that is very attractive to a lot of people who have the luxury of being able to work remotely.”
Unlike Mexicans in the United States, Americans can work in Mexico for up to six consecutive months on their tourist visas as long as they are paid from overseas. And, although technically not allowed, many choose to return to the US for a short period, then return to Mexico and renew their six-month period in the country, and that way continue working.
But it is not just Americans that are opting to live in Mexico. In fact, Mexico is apparently now the preferred destination for those moving abroad, beating off the likes of Indonesia, Vietnam, and even the popular expat hub Thailand. That’s according to this year’s edition of Expat Insider, an annual report published by InterNations, an expat community founded in 2007 that has been gathering data on expat/rich migrant flows and experiences for more than a decade.
Mexico is welcoming these new expats:
There is no doubt that security remains the primordial issue in Mexico, as it does in many other Latin American countries. Although the number of people dying in the war on and for drugs has ebbed slightly in the past two years, the country still boasts some of the highest homicide rates on the planet, with Zamora de Hidalgo at 196 per 100,000 people, Zacatecas at 107, and Tijuana at 103. Also, regions that were traditionally relatively safe, such as Puebla or Quintana Roo, have recently been caught up in the spiral of violence.
But for the most part, the danger zones are in small pockets of states close to the US border, where most of the drugs are trafficked, or parts of the Sierra Madre Occidental, where many of the drugs are grown. They are not, as the US travel alerts suggest, uniformly sweeping across states.
Another common misconception is that Mexico City, being one of the largest conurbations in the world, must also be one of the most dangerous places in Mexico. Yet in reality, Mexico City has largely escaped the worst of the cartel violence, for a slew of reasons outlined in a recent article by British expat journalist Ion Grillo. They include the fact that while the drug gangs have a presence in the capital, they do not control it:
[W]hile the mobsters are certainly here, they do not operate as they do in their strongholds. Mexico City is not a strategic turf to produce drugs (like in the Sierra Madre), or to traffic drugs to the United States (like on the border).
In Culiacán, gangsters exert an immense control of their territory, with lookouts on every corner and gunmen lurking in safehouses. In the capital, however, Sinaloa operators can disappear into the urban sprawl. It’s more a place to make deals, meet with contacts in the federal government, and launder money.
There’s also talk of a pax-mafiosi in the capital, an agreement between the big narcos not to fight here. I haven’t heard this straight from the mouth of crime figures, but this is possible, even perhaps as an informal understanding that they do business and not go to war like back in Tijuana.
Another factor is that Mexico is a heavily centralized country and all the federal agencies are here, along with the bulk of the governing class of politicians and heads of big business. These powers-that-be don’t want a mess on their own doorstep. The federal forces won’t allow a convoy of a hundred hitmen to blaze up Insurgentes avenue like they get away with doing in Zacatecas.
The extensive use of cameras and the mobilization of one of the largest unified city police forces in Latin America have also helped to keep a check on the violence. As Grillo documents, not only is Mexico City one of the less dangerous cities in Mexico; it is getting safer and is already less dangerous than some US cities:
The Mexico City [murder rates] don’t refer to the whole urban sprawl of 22 million but to the official capital district, now called CDMX, which has about 9.2 million people. The Mexican government keeps a database of the murder numbers from police and prosecutor records, and there is another database from morgues and death certificates.
The police count recorded a peak of 1597 murder victims here in 2018, dropping to 1006 last year. That gives Mexico City a murder per capita rate of about 10.9 per 100,000 in 2021. This year the number has dropped further still.
Comparing the 2021 figures, Mexico City still has a higher murder rate than New York (which had about 5.7 homicides per 100,000), but it is lower than Portland (12.9), Dallas (14.6) or Minneapolis (22.1).
The most murderous U.S. cities include Baltimore (57.5) and St Louis (65.3), which have extremely high levels considering the wealth and power of the United States.
Both Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (aka AMLO) and Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, who is hotly tipped to succeed AMLO in 2024, have seized on this success to try to attract yet more visitors and expats to the city.
“How much we have advanced on the issue of security,” said AMLO in a recent daily press conference. “Because of this, thousands of foreigners have arrived to live in Mexico City…They are welcome.”
On the downside:
But not everybody is so thrilled. As many national and international newspapers have reported in recent months, the continuous arrival of digital nomads from the US, the EU and other rich economies is making life more expensive in Mexico City neighborhoods such as La Condesa and La Roma, as well as in Guadalajara, Puerto Vallarta, San Miguel de Allende and Oaxaca.
In the verdant and unusually walkable barrio of La Condesa, a popular spot among well-heeled foreigners, apartment rents surged by 32% between January and June alone, according to a report from real estate marketplace Propiedades.com.
As many locals complain, living in Mexico may seem incredibly cheap to the new arrivals but only because they’re getting paid in dollars, euros or some other relatively hard currency. For those paying in pesos life is getting more and more expensive as the digital nomads drive local rents and prices vertiginously higher. For local landlords and real estate investors, the pickings are rich.
“What is happening is the people who can no longer to afford to live in the cities of their own countries end up moving to where they can afford to live,” Sandra Valenzuela, a Mexico City-based activist and artist, told El País. “In the end, it is a problem that is moving as the people move.”
Migrate to the USA to find work. Make money and leave the USA (where you can then work remotely for an American company). Human flows resemble those of capital in a globalist world.
When Bari Weiss wrote about the “Intellectual Dark Web”, it struck me as nerds playing world saviours and presented as superheroes. Of course it wasn’t real, and of course what wasn’t real wouldn’t last.
Ben Sixsmith takes a humourous look at how such a wide umbrella would inevitably lead to everyone involved getting soaked in the silliness of it all.
On the one hand, for example, the “IDW” included the dissident sociologist Marvin Marverson, who had achieved some notoriety for refusing to accept that someone who weighs 500lbs could be in perfect health, and was now promoting a fusion of the world’s major faiths that he called Hinjuslamanity. On the other, it included the popular author and alleged cardiologist Mark Freeman, who had published bestselling “new atheist” books like The Case Against Religion, Why Are You Still Religious? and My God, You Have to be Dumb to be Religious.
Arguably, elements of the Intellectual Dark Web had not been especially interested in intellectual inquiry in the first place. Interviewer Tim Levin built an audience with his YouTube show Levin the Left — which was based around the virtues of free speech. He interviewed journalists about free speech, politicians about free speech, YouTubers about free speech, plumbers about free speech and proctologists about free speech. One time, in a telling interview with the chemist Clem Isst, conversation turned to Periodic Law. Levin’s face turned bright purple, there was a hard cut and he and Isst were suddenly discussing why the left are so often the real racists.
A certain amount of egotism was also prevalent in the sphere. Academic Sad Gaad was annoyed not to be included in Weiss’s piece and published a series of blogposts with titles such as “Exclusionary Dynamics and Dissident Spaces” and “Why Isn’t Anyone Paying Attention to Me?”.
Other members of the Intellectual Dark Web included the pioneering Twitter user Ben Cantor. No one quite knew what Cantor did and didn’t do but he built quite an audience with his apparently allusive posts about “tribindividualism” and “the podcast revolution”.
Fractures in the “IDW” first developed around their different attitudes towards President Donald Trump. Mark Freeman took the view that Trump was a black hole of evil, sucking in the souls of men and spitting them out in lies, and hatred, and greed. Levin, on the other hand, was of the opinion that he was a wonderful man who should stay in the White House for 1000 years. Somehow, finding a reasonable and moderate compromise between these different positions proved challenging.
We end this week’s Substack with a look at the collapse of the Scottish clan system:
The origins of the clans vary, often claiming mythological founders that reinforced their status and glorified notions of their origins, such as Clan Campbell, that claimed they had descended from Diarmid O’Dyna, a demigod, son of Donn, and one of the Fianna in the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology.
The progenitors of clans can rarely be authenticated further back than the 11th century, and a continuity of lineage in most cases cannot be found until the 13th or 14th centuries. Some clans also have an ethnicity from outside of Scotland, such as Norman, Anglo-Norman, Flemish and Norse origins.
For centuries the clans ruled over their kingdoms with relative autonomy, however, in 1493, James IV confiscated the Lordship of the Isles from the MacDonalds, bringing a period of unrest and rebellions against the Scottish crown.
To solidify his position, James decreed the ‘Slaughter under trust’ law in 1587 and required disputes to be settled by the Crown. The first recorded use of the law was in 1588, where Lachlan Maclean was prosecuted for the murder of members of the MacDonald clan.
With the union of the Scottish and English crowns under James VI and I in 1603, the kingdoms of Scotland and England were still individual sovereign states, with their own parliaments, judiciaries, and laws, though both were ruled by James in personal union.
James VI also had an uneasy relationship with the clans and moved to dismantle Clan MacGregor for the killing of members of the state-backed Clan Colquhoun, ruling that the name MacGregor should be “altogether abolished” and forcing all MacGregors to renounce their name under pain of death.
James also issued the Statutes of Iona, a series of provisions to bring the Scottish Highlands and Islands under state control. The provisions required that Highland Scottish clan Chiefs send their heirs to Lowland Scotland to be educated in English-speaking Protestant schools.
I find this stuff absolutely fascinating.
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The most striking thesis for calling "demented" the radical left-wing intellighenzia is that nobody complained or tried to change course when they saw clearly the birth of the final project of Liberalism; the fusion between technocratic liberalism, Neo-Conservatism and Feminism, creating the ultimate monster. Not only they did nothing, they actively supported people that only 20 years ago where lambasted as the "Enemy".
Or they are demented or simply they are foxes and moles inside the Western system, ready to dismantle it in the next decades. Probably the first.