When in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine I addressed the discussion of German--and Japanese--"rearmament," I argued that some seemed to have an exaggerated sense of the significance of those countries' governments' announced increases in defense spending and other policy changes, for a number of reasons. One was the fact that the remilitarization of both countries began even before they regained sovereignty from their occupiers after the Second World War, and traveled most of the way to being not just relatively large military powers (as the Federal Republic of Germany had become no later than the mid-1960s), but "normal" ones disposing of their forces in the same manner as other nations, with Germany's allies' relaxation of their earlier treaty-imposed restrictions on the country's rearmament, and the German courts' reinterpretation of the constitution, long since giving Germany a pretty free hand to send its forces around the world on combat assignment (as seen in the fact of German soldiers fighting from Mali to Afghanistan). Another reason was that given the state of the German armed forces in 2022, the sums of money then being talked about, and how very, very good militaries and defense ministries can be at making a very, very large sum of money go absolutely no way at all, the boosts to German defense spending would plausibly not translate to great changes in the size or capabilities of German forces relative to what they had been before.
Three years on I see no reason to change that assessment--and indeed every reason to stand by it, because the publicly available information shows just how little change there has been in Germany's position these past three years, with this reaffirmed by how German policymakers in the grip of aspirations to weltpolitik are demanding way, way bigger changes. Instead of talking about working toward boosting defense spending to 2 percent of GDP with a "one-off" supplement helping the process along the way Olaf Scholz did in February 2022, now, amid much talk of "Whatever it takes!" the minimum figure they have in mind is 3 percent, while they discuss exempting defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the Holy Debt Brake, and talk of a €500 billion "special fund" (five times the supplement of 2022) for "infrastructure" (perhaps a redress of genuine need bolstering higher defense spending through its enabling of industry and stimulus to the economy, but easily imagined as a vehicle for more direct funding of military objectives). They also make explicit calls for conscription to enable the mobilization of a vastly enlarged force. (Germany's military reserve, like that of pretty much every European country, dwindled to nothing after the Cold War, so that even fully mobilized it does not raise the size of German forces amount to much more than 200,000. But the document published by the now parliament-dominating CDU/CSU calls for Germany to, with reserves mobilized, have over 500,000 at Berlin's disposal.)
Meanwhile, German European Commission President Ursula von Leyden is calling for a broader European effort on such lines, her ReArm Europe plan not only calling for a 1.5 percent of GDP boost in European defense spending by the member states (which would see Germany going well above the 3 percent of GDP mark as a spender), but also proposing a new "instrument" for defense investment capable of loaning €150 billion and the use of the EU's own budget, the previously proposed Savings and Investment Bank, and the existing EU member-stated owned European Investment Bank (EIB) to support such efforts. (Indeed, the EIB has already sent a letter to those member state governments proposing policy changes "allow[ing] investments into non-lethal defence products, provid[ing] unlimited loans to the defence industry . . . and measures to motivate commercial banks to follow suit in lending cash to the defence industry.")
Considering the implications of that German policymakers could expect not only to benefit from the direct policy alterations that have EU institutions providing direct support for its defense investments, cooperation with other countries better able to contribute to joint efforts because of the greater sums on the table, and other synergies that might follow from such a situation. Showing every sign of (once more) fancying themselves the "taskmasters of Europe" (Herfried Münkler only said what they were thinking, and how they behaved toward nations like Greece) they evidently expect to lead the combination--to which degree may be indicated by how the German army has worked to "integrate" five brigades from Romania, Czechia and the Netherlands (in the last case, three brigades amounting to pretty much the whole Dutch army's fighting strength) into its army's divisions.
In contrast with the proposals of three years ago all this looks much, much more significant--if it is actually acted upon. Still, if with these proposals Europe's political elite certainly make clear their extreme enthusiasm for remilitarizing and rearming, I see no evidence whatsoever of comparable enthusiasm on the part of the European public for the project. Quite the contrary, that public has been increasingly hostile to their governments' dragging them into one increasingly costly "forever" war after another, just as they have been enraged by those governments' refusing to do much about their economic problems, the environment, and much, much else affecting their daily lives, and indeed going into reverse on anything that could be deemed a solution. (Indeed, the idea of repurposing unused funds for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic's disruptions for rearmament seems entirely symbolic of how the elites think here--and discomfort with the idea a hint of how the public actually feels.)
Of course, as the policy record shows governments have pressed ahead with their preferences in complete contempt of voters' opinions, and often complete contempt of their constitutions as well. (Such is their version of the "democracy" and "rule of law" for which they claim to stand.) However, as governments raise taxes and cut services and inflict added inflation on publics already battered by decades of neoliberalism (all of that borrowing and government demand seems likely to have unpleasant consequences in a context of profound deindustrialization, structurally higher energy prices, lingering and painful inflationary shocks, and governments ferocious in their enmity toward social protections)--and gets rougher with labor and with dissent (and it's pretty damn rough now)--and sends draft cards to its young people as it demands their "sacrifice" of freedom, self and even life itself for the sake of objects they do not support and against which they indeed protested--those elites may find the going less smooth than they imagined in this way, as it may in so many others.
Monday, March 10, 2025
Reflections on the German Federal Election of 2025
The early election in Germany this year seems to me to warrant comment as reflective of the broader trend of electoral politics across the Western world. This may most obviously be the case in how as has already been seen in Italy and France, where the party system has long been more mutable (perhaps because it is so fragmented), but also to a lesser degree in more concentrated and stable British politics (where the vote for the Conservatives collapsed in 2024, and Reform UK surged), Germany likewise seeing support for the traditional parties collapse, with the far right the principal beneficiary.
In discussion of the matter I have seen the historical background was almost always less than sketchy, partly I think because there is less in the way of handy comprehensive tabulations of historical election results for the Federal Republic (anything like the excellent publication from the House of Commons' Library unavailable). Still, it seems to me that a look at this is key to giving us more than a superficial picture of the situation, and it does not take too much work to cobble together at least a rough image of the past. According to the data I have found the Federal Republic saw its two traditionally leading parties together claim 60 percent of the vote in that first election in 1949, a higher 74 percent in 1953, 81 percent in 1957, at which point one can regard these dynamics as having established the norm for the next several decades. In the nine Federal elections held over the 1957-1987 period the two parties together claimed a consistent 81 to 91 percent (on average, 86 percent) of the vote--a formidable share indeed, leaving less than a fifth, often much less, to all the third-parties combined (like the Free Democrats, or from 1980 forward, the Greens).
However, that position was eroding by the 1990s, with the two big parties claiming just 77 percent of the vote in the four elections of the 1990-2002 period, and then trending more sharply downward from 2005 on. Seeing the two big parties claim 69 percent of the vote in 2005 (their lowest since that first election in 1949), and 57 percent in 2009 (the lowest ever since the Republic's founding), after a limited resurgence in 2013 (to a still relatively low 67 percent), the downward trend continued to new lows in the three elections since, with the figure 53 percent in 2017, just under 50 percent (49.8 percent) in 2021, and finally, under 45 percent (44.9 percent) in 2025, scarcely half the norm for the 1957-1987 period. That last election saw the Conservatives, even as the "number one" party, with a near-record low share of the vote (28.5 percent, second only to their share in 2021, as against the 41-50 percent they managed in every election in 1953-1998, the 38 percent they at least averaged in 2002-2013, and the 33 percent they got in 2017), while the Social Democrats had their absolute worst performance since the Republic's start. Their mere 16 percent of the vote is to be compared with their second-worst of 20 percent in 2017, their 23 percent average in 2009-2021, and before that their share of 32-45 percent, and average of 38 percent, in 1957-2005--as well as, of course, the 21 percent that has seen the far-right party the Alternative for Germany replace them in the number two spot.
As the numbers presented here imply the decline of the two leading parties was a decades-long matter. It would seem that the reunification of Germany played its part here by shifting the electoral landscape (whether due to legacies of the German Democratic Republic, the combination of shock capitalism and swaggering right-wing nationalism that left many former East Germans traumatized for decades, or some mix of both), paving the way for and in respects (the relative poverty and general feeling of "second class"-citizenship in eastern Germany) intensifying those factors that have so much shaken party systems elsewhere--reaction against the commitment of all the major parties to neoliberalism, which worsened significantly with the onset of the Great Recession and all that has come after it, and opposition to war. This points to the extent to one of the most significant features of that collapse, namely the way in which opposition to neoliberalism and war, consistently translates to votes for parties which deliver more neoliberalism and more war, not least by way of those far-right parties that members of the "Fourth Estate."
Of course, the mainstream of the commentariat cannot be expected to point to, let alone puzzle out, what such a situation says about voters' range of "choice"--just as they do not consider how, even were one to accord der kulturkampf more weight in electoral politics than it actually has, in Alternative for Germany's Alice Weidel, a choice of leader who resides outside the country where she is an office-holders with her Sri Lankan (female) partner as leader of a German far-right party, makes a mockery of the pretensions of those who take a conventional view of the culture war. After all, incongruous as the situation may seem to them, it is less so to those who take the reminder that not only has identity politics been advantageous to the right in its diverting attention from class, and creating divisions and resentments of which the right has taken full advantage; or that such politics have often been reconcilable with many a right-wing imperative, not least in the economic arena ("market populism," "woke capitalism"), but even the geopolitical-military arena; but that the anti-universalistic, nationalist tendency of such politics has enabled identity politics to be pressed into the explicit service in highly pointed fashion, as seen in the phenomena of "feminationalism" and "homonationalism," in which purported respect for the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ is openly presented as a justification for racist hostility or religious discrimination toward selected minorities, immigrants and foreign countries, a game that Ms. Weidel has, of course, personally played. In the process one is reminded by the possibility of such accommodation of what the right's priorities truly are--and that useful as cultural traditionalism has often been to the champion of status quos and reaction, in the end with elites, even more than with working people "It's the Economy, stupid," first, last and always (after all, what else makes them elites in today's world?), with the vehement denials of their courtiers only ever underlining the matter.
In discussion of the matter I have seen the historical background was almost always less than sketchy, partly I think because there is less in the way of handy comprehensive tabulations of historical election results for the Federal Republic (anything like the excellent publication from the House of Commons' Library unavailable). Still, it seems to me that a look at this is key to giving us more than a superficial picture of the situation, and it does not take too much work to cobble together at least a rough image of the past. According to the data I have found the Federal Republic saw its two traditionally leading parties together claim 60 percent of the vote in that first election in 1949, a higher 74 percent in 1953, 81 percent in 1957, at which point one can regard these dynamics as having established the norm for the next several decades. In the nine Federal elections held over the 1957-1987 period the two parties together claimed a consistent 81 to 91 percent (on average, 86 percent) of the vote--a formidable share indeed, leaving less than a fifth, often much less, to all the third-parties combined (like the Free Democrats, or from 1980 forward, the Greens).
However, that position was eroding by the 1990s, with the two big parties claiming just 77 percent of the vote in the four elections of the 1990-2002 period, and then trending more sharply downward from 2005 on. Seeing the two big parties claim 69 percent of the vote in 2005 (their lowest since that first election in 1949), and 57 percent in 2009 (the lowest ever since the Republic's founding), after a limited resurgence in 2013 (to a still relatively low 67 percent), the downward trend continued to new lows in the three elections since, with the figure 53 percent in 2017, just under 50 percent (49.8 percent) in 2021, and finally, under 45 percent (44.9 percent) in 2025, scarcely half the norm for the 1957-1987 period. That last election saw the Conservatives, even as the "number one" party, with a near-record low share of the vote (28.5 percent, second only to their share in 2021, as against the 41-50 percent they managed in every election in 1953-1998, the 38 percent they at least averaged in 2002-2013, and the 33 percent they got in 2017), while the Social Democrats had their absolute worst performance since the Republic's start. Their mere 16 percent of the vote is to be compared with their second-worst of 20 percent in 2017, their 23 percent average in 2009-2021, and before that their share of 32-45 percent, and average of 38 percent, in 1957-2005--as well as, of course, the 21 percent that has seen the far-right party the Alternative for Germany replace them in the number two spot.
As the numbers presented here imply the decline of the two leading parties was a decades-long matter. It would seem that the reunification of Germany played its part here by shifting the electoral landscape (whether due to legacies of the German Democratic Republic, the combination of shock capitalism and swaggering right-wing nationalism that left many former East Germans traumatized for decades, or some mix of both), paving the way for and in respects (the relative poverty and general feeling of "second class"-citizenship in eastern Germany) intensifying those factors that have so much shaken party systems elsewhere--reaction against the commitment of all the major parties to neoliberalism, which worsened significantly with the onset of the Great Recession and all that has come after it, and opposition to war. This points to the extent to one of the most significant features of that collapse, namely the way in which opposition to neoliberalism and war, consistently translates to votes for parties which deliver more neoliberalism and more war, not least by way of those far-right parties that members of the "Fourth Estate."
Of course, the mainstream of the commentariat cannot be expected to point to, let alone puzzle out, what such a situation says about voters' range of "choice"--just as they do not consider how, even were one to accord der kulturkampf more weight in electoral politics than it actually has, in Alternative for Germany's Alice Weidel, a choice of leader who resides outside the country where she is an office-holders with her Sri Lankan (female) partner as leader of a German far-right party, makes a mockery of the pretensions of those who take a conventional view of the culture war. After all, incongruous as the situation may seem to them, it is less so to those who take the reminder that not only has identity politics been advantageous to the right in its diverting attention from class, and creating divisions and resentments of which the right has taken full advantage; or that such politics have often been reconcilable with many a right-wing imperative, not least in the economic arena ("market populism," "woke capitalism"), but even the geopolitical-military arena; but that the anti-universalistic, nationalist tendency of such politics has enabled identity politics to be pressed into the explicit service in highly pointed fashion, as seen in the phenomena of "feminationalism" and "homonationalism," in which purported respect for the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ is openly presented as a justification for racist hostility or religious discrimination toward selected minorities, immigrants and foreign countries, a game that Ms. Weidel has, of course, personally played. In the process one is reminded by the possibility of such accommodation of what the right's priorities truly are--and that useful as cultural traditionalism has often been to the champion of status quos and reaction, in the end with elites, even more than with working people "It's the Economy, stupid," first, last and always (after all, what else makes them elites in today's world?), with the vehement denials of their courtiers only ever underlining the matter.
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
Did China Really Fly a Sixth-Generation Fighter Last Month?
The portion of the news media attentive to defense affairs and aviation technology has since late December buzzed with talk about the public flight of what is apparently a prototype of a new Chinese combat aircraft. Identified as the Chengdu J-36 by Western observers, many rushed to speak of it as a sixth-generation fighter.
But is it really a sixth-generation fighter? Given the differing, and changing, understanding of the term, what would that even mean, anyway? Back circa 2010 when talk of sixth-generation fighters was really getting going in a public way there were particular expectations for those planes, identifying the sixth generation of jet fighter with optionally manned hypersonic fighter jets capable of changing shape in flight and armed with directed-energy weapons--expectations which have proven profoundly unrealistic given the far slower pace of the development of the relevant technologies, such that more recent discussion has had much more modest expectations with regard to the technological difference between them and their fifth-generation predecessors. Indeed, it seemed to me that by "sixth-generation" what the analysts meant were more usefully describable as "fifth-generation-plus," fifth-generation jets with some modifications enhancing their abilities beyond the baseline for that generation but falling short of a true shift to some subsequent generation. (For example, it seemed we might end up with fifth-generation jets that were not "optionally manned," but provided "AI" copilots that meaningfully relieved the pilot's workload.)
Considering what we know of the J-36 do we have something that can be considered even "fifth-generation-plus?" Let us go with what seems most clearly established about the plane, namely its shape--that it is, as Rick Joe explains over at The Diplomat, a "double delta tailless flying wing planform, with a rather voluminous and blended fuselage," a 20 meter wingspan, and a length that may be up to 26 meters, with its dimensions suggesting a weight that may exceed 50 tons.
None of those traits are obviously "next-generation," or even obviously fifth-generation-plus, and nor are the smaller, more argued-over features. The plane has a visible cockpit, perhaps designed to accommodate two crew seated side by side, so while one cannot rule out its being highly automated, one cannot claim that it is so on the basis of what we can see. The plane has "low observable" features, like the aforementioned flying wing shape, the internal storage of weapons (until recently, also associated with strike aircraft rather than fighters), and the design of the intakes and the exhaust system--but again these do not warrant characterization as "next-generational." The result is that claims for this plane as "sixth-generation" smack of hype. Indeed, it is not clear the plane is even a fighter at all. The flying wing design, the dimensions and weight, the use of three engines rather than two to power the whole because of that weight, even the possible tandem seating in the cockpit; the apparent optimization of the plane for "range, internal volume, and high-altitude as well as high-speed performance" as Joe has it, with subsonic agility a relatively low priority; and the fact that at this moment we have no evidence whatsoever of its actually being equipped for air-to-air combat; has me wondering whether the plane is a "fighter" rather than a strike aircraft, a mistake people have made before in regard to radical new aircraft designs. (Those who remember the F-117 Nighthawk will recall how people initially thought that "stealth fighter" was a fighter when in fact it was a strike aircraft, and a "fighter" only in the sense that the plane was designed for tactical rather than strategic use. Those who remember the F-111 Aardvark will remember, too, how that plane was originally intended to be a fighter, but partly because of its sheer size and weight ended up filling a strike role instead.)
Altogether we may simply be looking at an advanced but essentially current-generation strike aircraft--a view some have already taken, as Joe acknowledges in his article. However, he also suggests that if the plane looks strike aircraft-ish, it may be that in an age of increasingly beyond visual range and system-of-systems-based combat strike aircraft-ish designs optimized for persistence and capacity may make more sense than nimble dogfighters in the air superiority/dominance. He even goes so far as to speak of the term "fighter" as becoming anachronistic in this new age of air-to-air combat. I do not wholly rule out that possibility--but considering it remember that past generations of defense planners thought such a moment was at hand too, as we saw when in the 1950s we started getting fighter jet designs which eschewed maneuvering and gunnery in favor of long-range sensors and missiles, like the F-4 Phantom--and the decision quickly discovered to have been a mistake, the technology for all that proving to "just not be there yet," so that they incorporated guns into later models of the aircraft, pilots learned to dogfight again, and the next generation designs placed a high stress on maneuverability (as we saw with the fourth-generation F-15 and F-16, the fifth-generation F-22). If that is not the case, however, and Joe is right about what air combat will mean, then we still have grounds to not speak of this plane as a sixth-generation fighter--because rather than a new generation of the Meteors and P-80s and Me-262 we saw at the end of World War II what we are getting is the first generation of something else.
But is it really a sixth-generation fighter? Given the differing, and changing, understanding of the term, what would that even mean, anyway? Back circa 2010 when talk of sixth-generation fighters was really getting going in a public way there were particular expectations for those planes, identifying the sixth generation of jet fighter with optionally manned hypersonic fighter jets capable of changing shape in flight and armed with directed-energy weapons--expectations which have proven profoundly unrealistic given the far slower pace of the development of the relevant technologies, such that more recent discussion has had much more modest expectations with regard to the technological difference between them and their fifth-generation predecessors. Indeed, it seemed to me that by "sixth-generation" what the analysts meant were more usefully describable as "fifth-generation-plus," fifth-generation jets with some modifications enhancing their abilities beyond the baseline for that generation but falling short of a true shift to some subsequent generation. (For example, it seemed we might end up with fifth-generation jets that were not "optionally manned," but provided "AI" copilots that meaningfully relieved the pilot's workload.)
Considering what we know of the J-36 do we have something that can be considered even "fifth-generation-plus?" Let us go with what seems most clearly established about the plane, namely its shape--that it is, as Rick Joe explains over at The Diplomat, a "double delta tailless flying wing planform, with a rather voluminous and blended fuselage," a 20 meter wingspan, and a length that may be up to 26 meters, with its dimensions suggesting a weight that may exceed 50 tons.
None of those traits are obviously "next-generation," or even obviously fifth-generation-plus, and nor are the smaller, more argued-over features. The plane has a visible cockpit, perhaps designed to accommodate two crew seated side by side, so while one cannot rule out its being highly automated, one cannot claim that it is so on the basis of what we can see. The plane has "low observable" features, like the aforementioned flying wing shape, the internal storage of weapons (until recently, also associated with strike aircraft rather than fighters), and the design of the intakes and the exhaust system--but again these do not warrant characterization as "next-generational." The result is that claims for this plane as "sixth-generation" smack of hype. Indeed, it is not clear the plane is even a fighter at all. The flying wing design, the dimensions and weight, the use of three engines rather than two to power the whole because of that weight, even the possible tandem seating in the cockpit; the apparent optimization of the plane for "range, internal volume, and high-altitude as well as high-speed performance" as Joe has it, with subsonic agility a relatively low priority; and the fact that at this moment we have no evidence whatsoever of its actually being equipped for air-to-air combat; has me wondering whether the plane is a "fighter" rather than a strike aircraft, a mistake people have made before in regard to radical new aircraft designs. (Those who remember the F-117 Nighthawk will recall how people initially thought that "stealth fighter" was a fighter when in fact it was a strike aircraft, and a "fighter" only in the sense that the plane was designed for tactical rather than strategic use. Those who remember the F-111 Aardvark will remember, too, how that plane was originally intended to be a fighter, but partly because of its sheer size and weight ended up filling a strike role instead.)
Altogether we may simply be looking at an advanced but essentially current-generation strike aircraft--a view some have already taken, as Joe acknowledges in his article. However, he also suggests that if the plane looks strike aircraft-ish, it may be that in an age of increasingly beyond visual range and system-of-systems-based combat strike aircraft-ish designs optimized for persistence and capacity may make more sense than nimble dogfighters in the air superiority/dominance. He even goes so far as to speak of the term "fighter" as becoming anachronistic in this new age of air-to-air combat. I do not wholly rule out that possibility--but considering it remember that past generations of defense planners thought such a moment was at hand too, as we saw when in the 1950s we started getting fighter jet designs which eschewed maneuvering and gunnery in favor of long-range sensors and missiles, like the F-4 Phantom--and the decision quickly discovered to have been a mistake, the technology for all that proving to "just not be there yet," so that they incorporated guns into later models of the aircraft, pilots learned to dogfight again, and the next generation designs placed a high stress on maneuverability (as we saw with the fourth-generation F-15 and F-16, the fifth-generation F-22). If that is not the case, however, and Joe is right about what air combat will mean, then we still have grounds to not speak of this plane as a sixth-generation fighter--because rather than a new generation of the Meteors and P-80s and Me-262 we saw at the end of World War II what we are getting is the first generation of something else.
What Do They Mean When They Tell Us the Economy Was "Good?"
Part of the narrative to which the "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" crowd is sticking in regard to the U.S. national election of 2024 is that the economy was in fact "good" before and at the time of the election, and that as a result either economic discontents had no part in the election's outcome (never mind the polls indicating how many of those aggrieved over inflation voted Republican), or that the public had been deceived about the reality of the economy's performance.
I have already argued for the falsity of this position. But even having done so it seems worth saying something more of how those in the media commonly attempted to argue that position to the broader public, namely by citing a handful of statistics. To cite two of the most important they reported unemployment at 4 percent, and inflation falling toward the 2 percent level. Conventionally regarding these as excellent numbers even in ordinary times, never mind in the wake of the historic shocks of recent years (the COVID-19 pandemic immediately spiking unemployment, and spiking inflation as well in later but more prolonged fashion), they said "See? No problem. So what have you got to be so glum about?"
In doing so they overlooked all that those who calculated these numbers did not even presume to represent. In speaking of unemployment they speak of "U-3" unemployment normally--just one of six ways of measuring employment reported every month, while giving no thought to the still other ways of considering the extent of unemployment, like examination of the percentage of people who have dropped out of the labor force. (The reality is that as of November 2024 the Labor Force Participation Rate was just 62.5 percent, still not recovered to its pre-pandemic level of 63.3 percent at the start of 2020--and the 66 percent it was before the Great Recession that, I remind you, never truly ended.) It certainly does not account for, for example, the college graduates who have a job but are "underemployed" in the sense of taking a job not requiring their expensively bought credentials, and paying them less (a far more common problem than most seem realize, and not only for those who picked the supposedly "wrong" majors).
Just as is the case with the talk about unemployment, those who talk about inflation tend to go by one specific measure, the Consumer Price Index--which certainly has its uses, but at the same time fails to account for a very great deal. It does not include food and fuel, for example, and dealing with them indirectly fails to fully capture rises in the price of housing or health insurance, which have not incidentally consistently outpaced official inflation measures. There is a tendency, too, to overlook subtler aspects of these matters. Consider, for instance, how rises in food prices hit low-income persons who cannot switch to "cheaper" brands because they already buy what is cheapest--and the fact that inflation tends to raise the prices of the lowest-cost items more than the average (because the margins here are slighter than with many more expensive products, making producers quicker to pass on higher costs to the consumer).
When one considers all this it is easy to see how supposedly "good" numbers do not necessarily seem so, all as one should remember that the Talking Heads' consideration of the economy is very, very short-term, telling us how things stood this month, this quarter, at most this year. In reality people's perceptions of their well-being are not shaped simply by how well-off they are at the moment, especially when long-term trends are at work--as is the case with those prices for many necessities relative to incomes. Consider how, for example, between 1973 and 2023 the median house price rose about twice as fast as the Consumer Price Index overall (the CPI going up by a factor of 6.9, the median house price by a factor of 13.3 over the same period)--a far from insignificant difference after all that time, and from the standpoint of most people's incomes, which did not do much more than keep pace with the CPI over the long term, all as, again, all this had parallels in other areas, like health insurance and education and the price of a car (in a country which expects anyone who wants to have a job to be able to drive there!). When they have experienced that long deterioration of their purchasing power with its associated stresses, amplified by the recent spiking of prices in the wake of the pandemic, a single quarter or single year of stability in the relation of incomes to prices is just not going to make that much difference (not that they got it). Indeed, Alan Greenspan himself made the point in Congressional testimony in the '90s when discussing the lack of upward pressure on wages amid what the Talking Heads (as superficial and dishonest then as they are now) told the public were "boom times" for them--observing that the American worker, made insecure by painful past experience, went on being so, giving rise to talk of "Traumatized Worker Syndrome" (all as, with a further generation's hindsight, the trauma would seem to have been just beginning).
Considering all this the discrepancy between the lived experience of the public and what their media tells them about their lived experience is appalling--and if the public has often believed the media rather than reality that has often been because drawing conclusions about that reality from the data was sufficiently beyond them that they could be deceived. The prices they pay at the grocery store have been another matter, however--with the results we have seen in public sentiment about the economy, no matter how much the "experts" clutter up the editorial pages of papers of record telling them their experience of being worse off is "all in their mind."
I have already argued for the falsity of this position. But even having done so it seems worth saying something more of how those in the media commonly attempted to argue that position to the broader public, namely by citing a handful of statistics. To cite two of the most important they reported unemployment at 4 percent, and inflation falling toward the 2 percent level. Conventionally regarding these as excellent numbers even in ordinary times, never mind in the wake of the historic shocks of recent years (the COVID-19 pandemic immediately spiking unemployment, and spiking inflation as well in later but more prolonged fashion), they said "See? No problem. So what have you got to be so glum about?"
In doing so they overlooked all that those who calculated these numbers did not even presume to represent. In speaking of unemployment they speak of "U-3" unemployment normally--just one of six ways of measuring employment reported every month, while giving no thought to the still other ways of considering the extent of unemployment, like examination of the percentage of people who have dropped out of the labor force. (The reality is that as of November 2024 the Labor Force Participation Rate was just 62.5 percent, still not recovered to its pre-pandemic level of 63.3 percent at the start of 2020--and the 66 percent it was before the Great Recession that, I remind you, never truly ended.) It certainly does not account for, for example, the college graduates who have a job but are "underemployed" in the sense of taking a job not requiring their expensively bought credentials, and paying them less (a far more common problem than most seem realize, and not only for those who picked the supposedly "wrong" majors).
Just as is the case with the talk about unemployment, those who talk about inflation tend to go by one specific measure, the Consumer Price Index--which certainly has its uses, but at the same time fails to account for a very great deal. It does not include food and fuel, for example, and dealing with them indirectly fails to fully capture rises in the price of housing or health insurance, which have not incidentally consistently outpaced official inflation measures. There is a tendency, too, to overlook subtler aspects of these matters. Consider, for instance, how rises in food prices hit low-income persons who cannot switch to "cheaper" brands because they already buy what is cheapest--and the fact that inflation tends to raise the prices of the lowest-cost items more than the average (because the margins here are slighter than with many more expensive products, making producers quicker to pass on higher costs to the consumer).
When one considers all this it is easy to see how supposedly "good" numbers do not necessarily seem so, all as one should remember that the Talking Heads' consideration of the economy is very, very short-term, telling us how things stood this month, this quarter, at most this year. In reality people's perceptions of their well-being are not shaped simply by how well-off they are at the moment, especially when long-term trends are at work--as is the case with those prices for many necessities relative to incomes. Consider how, for example, between 1973 and 2023 the median house price rose about twice as fast as the Consumer Price Index overall (the CPI going up by a factor of 6.9, the median house price by a factor of 13.3 over the same period)--a far from insignificant difference after all that time, and from the standpoint of most people's incomes, which did not do much more than keep pace with the CPI over the long term, all as, again, all this had parallels in other areas, like health insurance and education and the price of a car (in a country which expects anyone who wants to have a job to be able to drive there!). When they have experienced that long deterioration of their purchasing power with its associated stresses, amplified by the recent spiking of prices in the wake of the pandemic, a single quarter or single year of stability in the relation of incomes to prices is just not going to make that much difference (not that they got it). Indeed, Alan Greenspan himself made the point in Congressional testimony in the '90s when discussing the lack of upward pressure on wages amid what the Talking Heads (as superficial and dishonest then as they are now) told the public were "boom times" for them--observing that the American worker, made insecure by painful past experience, went on being so, giving rise to talk of "Traumatized Worker Syndrome" (all as, with a further generation's hindsight, the trauma would seem to have been just beginning).
Considering all this the discrepancy between the lived experience of the public and what their media tells them about their lived experience is appalling--and if the public has often believed the media rather than reality that has often been because drawing conclusions about that reality from the data was sufficiently beyond them that they could be deceived. The prices they pay at the grocery store have been another matter, however--with the results we have seen in public sentiment about the economy, no matter how much the "experts" clutter up the editorial pages of papers of record telling them their experience of being worse off is "all in their mind."
The Supposed "Eclecticism" of the American Voter
In the wake of an election many in the commentariat took as a shock and a revelation (everything's a revelation when you don't know much) we have seen an outpouring of analysis purporting to tell us What It All Meant. The election is certainly worth analyzing--but the bulk of the analysis is, alas, not worthwhile, just the usual garbage generated by media-Establishment "experts."
Of course, it is possible to learn something even by picking through garbage. The vehement insistence of many that "It Isn't the Economy, Stupid," in its way reminds us that it really is the economy, while it also makes clear that the commentariat which had no interest in acknowledging the fact that it was the economy, stupid, before the election still has no interest in acknowledging that it was the economy, stupid, after the election, with the same going for the political elite whom they so happily serve as, to use a politer term than they deserve, courtiers.
One can likewise learn something picking through that more specific garbage the commentariat speak and write about the "eclecticism" of the American voter. Basically they are shocked, shocked I tells ya, that if one were to consider the electorate as a whole one would find that the electorate dislikes both economic neoliberalism and identity politics (which, to be clear, refers not to principled opposition to bigotry as such, but rather the "nationalistic" attitude exemplified by the grasping and vindictive "weaponizaton" of race and gender for self-advancement deployed by all sides in the culture wars).
They also present this "insight" as challenging our conventional thinking in terms of "right" and "left."
In reality the fact that the electorate as a whole has disliked both neoliberalism and identity politics is no revelation to anyone, even the commentariat. It is also the reality that it does not show the meaninglessness of right and left, however much those making the comment may be eager to persuade us (yet again) that the old political spectrum is meaningless. After all, certainly if we are speaking of the major parties in America, there has never been a left to speak of among them save in the sense of the existence of people who are to the "left" of the avowed right, which however convenient some find it confuses rather than illuminates give the meanings of those terms. Using as a basis for judgment the political spectrum as conventionally understood by educated observers (e.g. people who cracked open a book once in their lives and not the talking heads we see on the screen, or smiling smugly from the photos accompanying their columns in "papers of record") what we have had instead has been the right, and the center--with the center itself highly conservative. This is why the center so readily embraced neoliberalism, such policy a truly "bipartisan" affair. At the same time the identity politics, even those identity politics they pass off as progressive because they are the identity politics of traditionally marginalized groups, have ALWAYS BEEN NON-LEFTIST and indeed EXTREMELY ANTI-LEFTIST FROM THE START, and that not as a bug but as a feature. (Identity politics is just another example of the long use of nationalism to deflect or suppress concern for democracy and for social class, already old when the postmodernists came on the scene and did their bit for this game, and indeed were appreciated for their contributions to the Cold War by some the West's own foremost Cold Warriors as "Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals.")
The acknowledgment of the public's sentiments is one to which the intelligent observer of the political scene may do well to pay attention because it won't last long--for just as the commentators have done before when they observed this they will drop it down the Memory Hole again, the reality simply too unacceptable to an elite whose commitment to neoliberalism and kulturkampf is unshaken and unshakeable, even as the world, in the view of anyone at all capable of processing the reality as the globalization that Thomas Friedman treated as being as unchangeable and beneficent as the rising of the sun is being shredded in an age of trade war, and trade war looks like a potential prelude to shooting war that in the view of some may have already begun.
Of course, it is possible to learn something even by picking through garbage. The vehement insistence of many that "It Isn't the Economy, Stupid," in its way reminds us that it really is the economy, while it also makes clear that the commentariat which had no interest in acknowledging the fact that it was the economy, stupid, before the election still has no interest in acknowledging that it was the economy, stupid, after the election, with the same going for the political elite whom they so happily serve as, to use a politer term than they deserve, courtiers.
One can likewise learn something picking through that more specific garbage the commentariat speak and write about the "eclecticism" of the American voter. Basically they are shocked, shocked I tells ya, that if one were to consider the electorate as a whole one would find that the electorate dislikes both economic neoliberalism and identity politics (which, to be clear, refers not to principled opposition to bigotry as such, but rather the "nationalistic" attitude exemplified by the grasping and vindictive "weaponizaton" of race and gender for self-advancement deployed by all sides in the culture wars).
They also present this "insight" as challenging our conventional thinking in terms of "right" and "left."
In reality the fact that the electorate as a whole has disliked both neoliberalism and identity politics is no revelation to anyone, even the commentariat. It is also the reality that it does not show the meaninglessness of right and left, however much those making the comment may be eager to persuade us (yet again) that the old political spectrum is meaningless. After all, certainly if we are speaking of the major parties in America, there has never been a left to speak of among them save in the sense of the existence of people who are to the "left" of the avowed right, which however convenient some find it confuses rather than illuminates give the meanings of those terms. Using as a basis for judgment the political spectrum as conventionally understood by educated observers (e.g. people who cracked open a book once in their lives and not the talking heads we see on the screen, or smiling smugly from the photos accompanying their columns in "papers of record") what we have had instead has been the right, and the center--with the center itself highly conservative. This is why the center so readily embraced neoliberalism, such policy a truly "bipartisan" affair. At the same time the identity politics, even those identity politics they pass off as progressive because they are the identity politics of traditionally marginalized groups, have ALWAYS BEEN NON-LEFTIST and indeed EXTREMELY ANTI-LEFTIST FROM THE START, and that not as a bug but as a feature. (Identity politics is just another example of the long use of nationalism to deflect or suppress concern for democracy and for social class, already old when the postmodernists came on the scene and did their bit for this game, and indeed were appreciated for their contributions to the Cold War by some the West's own foremost Cold Warriors as "Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals.")
The acknowledgment of the public's sentiments is one to which the intelligent observer of the political scene may do well to pay attention because it won't last long--for just as the commentators have done before when they observed this they will drop it down the Memory Hole again, the reality simply too unacceptable to an elite whose commitment to neoliberalism and kulturkampf is unshaken and unshakeable, even as the world, in the view of anyone at all capable of processing the reality as the globalization that Thomas Friedman treated as being as unchangeable and beneficent as the rising of the sun is being shredded in an age of trade war, and trade war looks like a potential prelude to shooting war that in the view of some may have already begun.
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Remembering Thomas Frank's "American Psyche"
Thomas Frank wrote "That we are a nation divided is an almost universal lament of this bitter election year," then went on to observe that "we," by which he meant the commentariat, "know for sure the answer isn't class" and "rule that uncomfortable subject out from the start," instead certain that the matter must be culture, culture, not class, with the "red state-blue state" divide the favorite suspect and constant point of reference.
Frank wrote all this two decades ago, but it is still the song sung by the centrist "Establishment" commentator today, a reminder of how after the events of the last twenty years (a historic financial crash, the metastasizing of the country's wars, pandemic, the resurgence of great power confrontation, the profound deepening of the ecological crisis, the ascent of the far right) their conventional wisdom has not changed one iota, to their absolute discredit. Indeed, one can argue that their extreme refusal to countenance any "uncomfortable" ideas that call into question their complacent idiocies played its part in making the past two decades of American and world history the train wreck they have been.
Still, if their ideas about this matter did not change--if we still hear ceaselessly of "division," and "culture, not class," and "red states and blue states"--there is at least one thing that I can say seems to me different from how things stood in 2004. This is that Thomas Frank wrote that comment in an article for the New York Times--a newspaper far less likely to give Frank or anyone like him a platform these days as it boosts ever more openly far right commentators, all as Mr. Frank seems to be regarded as ever less admissible by the gatekeepers of Big Media broadly pushing the same line, as you are reminded should you look at its content.* Doing that these days you are far, far more likely to read about a soccer coach who just so happens to have the same name as Frank--while it seems telling that Frank's most conspicuous appearance in the print media in years would seem to be an interview not with any outfit comparable to the Times (or even The Guardian or Harper's, for which he used to write), but with Jacobin back in February.
* In the wake of Trump's victory at the polls (which came after I wrote this post) the Times deigned to publish Frank once more. You may read the item here.
Frank wrote all this two decades ago, but it is still the song sung by the centrist "Establishment" commentator today, a reminder of how after the events of the last twenty years (a historic financial crash, the metastasizing of the country's wars, pandemic, the resurgence of great power confrontation, the profound deepening of the ecological crisis, the ascent of the far right) their conventional wisdom has not changed one iota, to their absolute discredit. Indeed, one can argue that their extreme refusal to countenance any "uncomfortable" ideas that call into question their complacent idiocies played its part in making the past two decades of American and world history the train wreck they have been.
Still, if their ideas about this matter did not change--if we still hear ceaselessly of "division," and "culture, not class," and "red states and blue states"--there is at least one thing that I can say seems to me different from how things stood in 2004. This is that Thomas Frank wrote that comment in an article for the New York Times--a newspaper far less likely to give Frank or anyone like him a platform these days as it boosts ever more openly far right commentators, all as Mr. Frank seems to be regarded as ever less admissible by the gatekeepers of Big Media broadly pushing the same line, as you are reminded should you look at its content.* Doing that these days you are far, far more likely to read about a soccer coach who just so happens to have the same name as Frank--while it seems telling that Frank's most conspicuous appearance in the print media in years would seem to be an interview not with any outfit comparable to the Times (or even The Guardian or Harper's, for which he used to write), but with Jacobin back in February.
* In the wake of Trump's victory at the polls (which came after I wrote this post) the Times deigned to publish Frank once more. You may read the item here.
The Stories Elites Tell Themselves About the World
A New York Times story about the response of then-President of the United States Barack Obama himself in the wake of Donald Trump's victory at the polls in 2016 reported that Obama "had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and . . . promoted an empty cosmopolitanism that made many people feel left behind," and wondered aloud among his aides that "'Maybe we pushed too far . . . Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.'"
Whether it was an accurate account of President Obama's reaction or not it would seem telling that at least in the story he thought the vote was about "people . . . want[ing] to fall back into their tribe," and that this was what the Times reported--reflexively seeing the note of revolt in so many persons voting for Trump as a matter of cultural discontent rather than of economic discontent, with the issue "liberal" cosmopolitanism rather than the neoliberal economics promoted by "liberal" and "conservative" alike for four decades. Never popular and increasingly bankrupt, that neoliberalism, which eviscerated the industrial base, gutted public services and protective regulations, left Americans' incomes in freefall relative to the cost of living, and, as Arthur Schlesinger put it when writing of the monetary policy of Andrew Jackson's day that all too closely paralleled that of the neoliberal era, generally left them "the victims of baffling and malevolent economic forces which they could not profit by," was plausibly what really made much of the American public "feel left behind."
That Obama himself--Obama, who after promising the public he would stand against those "baffling and malevolent economic forces" on the campaign trail behaved as a staunch neoliberal in office, be the issue the financial crisis and its fallout, the reform of health care, energy-climate policy, or anything else--might in spite of his conduct of the immediately preceding eight years have in an unguarded moment actually shown himself to have been thinking this speaks to the depth of the preference of the elite Obama derived from and represents for regarding politics as a matter of cultural divisions than of class divisions, or "values" rather than "interests."
Thus does the American punditry prefer to speak of the "culture war" pitting religiosity against secularism, see the country as torn between states which are "Blue" or "Red," or even claim to "discover" that America is really nine or eleven or some other number of "nations" whose differences of culture are the key to understanding the country's political life--and amid it all see opposition to "globalization" less as a matter of reaction by those injured or made insecure by it against its economic inequities than a System that in the age of robotized factories producing Lexus luxury automobiles, some want to "hold on to their olive trees" (as Thomas Friedman wrote, and as Obama's statement suggested in its less imagistic way).
All this is underlined by how they do speak of "class" on those occasions when they dare to do so at all, preferring to treat this, too, as a cultural matter, stress "education" and consumption choices over property, income, wealth (such that for many, as Thomas Frank put it, "the word 'elite' refers . . . to someone who likes books"); bind up class with regionalism, as in discussion of "coastal" or "big-city" elites as against the presumed non-elite of the interior, rural areas and so forth, or with race as in rhetoric about the "White working class" (as if working people were not the great majority in every ethnic group); and speak of "classism" as if it were analogous to prejudices of ethnicity or gender ("racism," "sexism," etc.) rather than class being a matter of the fundamental structure of society itself, with all that means for understanding anything about society at all.
The result is about what you would expect, the Establishment "expert" centrists so fawn over apt to understand little or nothing about these matters, and after opening their unsightly yaps leave the minds of those who heed them even more muddled than they were before, such that it would have been better had they never said anything at all.
Whether it was an accurate account of President Obama's reaction or not it would seem telling that at least in the story he thought the vote was about "people . . . want[ing] to fall back into their tribe," and that this was what the Times reported--reflexively seeing the note of revolt in so many persons voting for Trump as a matter of cultural discontent rather than of economic discontent, with the issue "liberal" cosmopolitanism rather than the neoliberal economics promoted by "liberal" and "conservative" alike for four decades. Never popular and increasingly bankrupt, that neoliberalism, which eviscerated the industrial base, gutted public services and protective regulations, left Americans' incomes in freefall relative to the cost of living, and, as Arthur Schlesinger put it when writing of the monetary policy of Andrew Jackson's day that all too closely paralleled that of the neoliberal era, generally left them "the victims of baffling and malevolent economic forces which they could not profit by," was plausibly what really made much of the American public "feel left behind."
That Obama himself--Obama, who after promising the public he would stand against those "baffling and malevolent economic forces" on the campaign trail behaved as a staunch neoliberal in office, be the issue the financial crisis and its fallout, the reform of health care, energy-climate policy, or anything else--might in spite of his conduct of the immediately preceding eight years have in an unguarded moment actually shown himself to have been thinking this speaks to the depth of the preference of the elite Obama derived from and represents for regarding politics as a matter of cultural divisions than of class divisions, or "values" rather than "interests."
Thus does the American punditry prefer to speak of the "culture war" pitting religiosity against secularism, see the country as torn between states which are "Blue" or "Red," or even claim to "discover" that America is really nine or eleven or some other number of "nations" whose differences of culture are the key to understanding the country's political life--and amid it all see opposition to "globalization" less as a matter of reaction by those injured or made insecure by it against its economic inequities than a System that in the age of robotized factories producing Lexus luxury automobiles, some want to "hold on to their olive trees" (as Thomas Friedman wrote, and as Obama's statement suggested in its less imagistic way).
All this is underlined by how they do speak of "class" on those occasions when they dare to do so at all, preferring to treat this, too, as a cultural matter, stress "education" and consumption choices over property, income, wealth (such that for many, as Thomas Frank put it, "the word 'elite' refers . . . to someone who likes books"); bind up class with regionalism, as in discussion of "coastal" or "big-city" elites as against the presumed non-elite of the interior, rural areas and so forth, or with race as in rhetoric about the "White working class" (as if working people were not the great majority in every ethnic group); and speak of "classism" as if it were analogous to prejudices of ethnicity or gender ("racism," "sexism," etc.) rather than class being a matter of the fundamental structure of society itself, with all that means for understanding anything about society at all.
The result is about what you would expect, the Establishment "expert" centrists so fawn over apt to understand little or nothing about these matters, and after opening their unsightly yaps leave the minds of those who heed them even more muddled than they were before, such that it would have been better had they never said anything at all.
Europe's Failures: A Few Thoughts
In the 2020s the prospects of the European Union (EU) seem a long way from what its advocates and sympathizers and even its opponents thought it was a generation ago (when, for example, the anti-EU crowd in Britain hated the entity, but thought anything like Brexit just a fantasy, however much they longed for it). The change arguably comes down to three ways in which the EU's foundations proved wholly inadequate for the ambitions held for it, namely
1. The building up of the institution on the basis of short-term elite interest, and even that rather unevenly, the elites of the more powerful countries advantaged against those from poorer countries. Thus the EU produced a trade, fiscal and currency regime which gave German exporters access to the vast European market, the benefit of the cheaper labor just over their border in Eastern Europe, and the help of (in relation to their products) an undervalued currency that made for that much more competitiveness in the global market, producing Germany the export giant, and indeed the way a "greater Germany" in the economic sense has come to be the core of the Union. Other members of the Union, however, have not done nearly so well, Germany's gain often their loss (Germany is a champion exporter in part because it outcompetes them, while Germany does that in part because the German government has sacrificed the social rights of the German worker on the altar of "competitiveness" in the Hartz reforms and other policy changes, and with them their share in any gains, as the rising inequality in the country testifies. Meanwhile, looking even beyond the distribution of immediate costs and benefits, what about when just keeping the arrangement some found so congenial going required more than what German industrialists have found congenial in the short term? The European Union was not prepared for that.
2. The practical limits to Europe's expansion in the resulting conditions. Especially in light of that stress on short-term elite interests, with some elites more elite than others, one could expect expansion to stop where really big, deep, long-term thinking was required to make it happen—with one result the failure to incorporate the great bulk of the old "East bloc" and especially the former Soviet Union, with only Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (6 million people altogether) in the EU, and Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and especially Russia (almost 200 million people) outside it. The result is that in spite of the fall of the Iron Curtain and three decades of existence what is called the "European Union" actually encompasses a mere two-fifths of the territory of the European continent, containing a mere three-fifths of that continent's people, with little prospect of its being extended any time soon.
3. The economic situation of Europe along with the rest of the world in an era of profound global downturn, with which European elites were ill-equipped to deal. It can seem symbolic that the European Economic Community's first round of expansion came in 1973, the year widely associated with the end of the post-war boom, and the epoch of weaker growth that followed; that the European Community became the European Union in 1993, amid a deep global recession; that, barring the entry of Croatia, the EU reached its limits with the inductions of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, the year in which a long-developing financial crisis came to a head and plunged the world into a recession from which it never truly recovered, such that it can seem as if Japan's "lost decades" became the norm for the industrialized world, with all that meant for Europe's own prospects.
One may question whether in anything like the world we live in the European Union could have developed in any other way. The relevant negotiations were between countries very different in development and interests, very unequal in size and power, and just as unequal internally with all that meant for the line they took. Reflecting this economic integration ranked at the top of the list of priorities of the elites of the participating countries, rather than democracy, equality or social concern, with many not at all sorry to see economic decisions about such fundamental matters as government spending or monetary policy made by bodies less accountable to their electorates, and imposing limits on what national governments could do--while as they went about it they proved no more "enlightened" in their understanding of their self-interest than their counterparts elsewhere (the delusions of their silly admirers just that). Subsequently, whether one attributes the fact to the weakness of those countries' economies under their pre-1989 regimes, or the chaotic and destructive character of the reform process their leaders undertook afterward, Eastern Europe was in a far weaker state than many of those who had hoped for really continent-wide union had thought it would be in the 1990s, with all that meant for their integration into Europe, and what they would add to it if they were integrated. (There was, too, the sheer size and potential power of the Russian Federation even when taken as a single state, and as those familiar at all with geopolitics know full well, the implications of a Russo-German combination in any form for those anxious about the balance of power in the world.) Meanwhile the period generally saw slow growth, and frequent crisis, which Europe's neoliberalism-minded elite met with, again, orthodoxy, most notoriously in the post-Great Recession sovereign debt crisis. (Indeed, if Europe has done less poorly in relative terms than the sneering of committed Europe-bashers about "Eurosclerosis" implies it has still quite sufficed to pose no end of troubles from the standpoint of profits, employment, taxes, budgets and debt--all as Europe has abided by the neoliberal trend rather than trying to "buck" it, arguably to its disadvantage, both where its economic performance and its political attractiveness have been concerned.)
All of this meant that the EU was institutionally underdeveloped--as in its having a currency union without also having a "transfer union," with all the inherent instability of such a combination. It meant that Europe had a far narrower base of power, quantitatively and qualitatively (compare the EU that exists now with one that had managed to integrate the European members of the former Soviet Union, with their 200 million people, their natural resource wealth, and in particular Russia's technological specialties and military capacities), while rather than its tensions being dissolved, or sublimated, within a Europe concerned with getting on rather than nationalistic feuds and power politics, the EU's eastern frontier was that much more a scene of potential conflict (with far and away the most dramatic instance the conflicts that now have Russia and Ukraine fighting the biggest conventional war on European soil since 1945). It meant that if German business did well, at least for a time, deindustrialized, on the whole West European states got poorer and the East European states which had been allowed into the club saw their aspirations to solidly First World productivity and living standards disappointed amid shock that tested the institution's viability, and proved as unflattering to its independence as it had been unflattering toward the independence of its members (the U.S. Federal Reserve bailing out the EU's banks with $10 trillion in loans amid the Great Recession). And especially with Europe identified with elite interests and policies which hurt working people, and ruled out those policies that might help them (for instance, a freer hand in the fiscal arena), that the European project failed to acquire a popular base--all as those looking to play what is often euphemistically called the "populist" card very easily pointed to Europe as the cause of their discontents, and won election after election by it in circumstances promising little but the continuation of the EU's stagnation and slow unraveling that has characterized its recent history. In fairness, ruptures like what we saw with Britain seem unlikely to recur any time soon. (Britain's long aloofness from the continent and physical insularity, and the way its size, financialization and apparent other options for association seemed to give it alternatives, are not shared by any other EU member, all as even then it has been a close-run, rancorous, widely regretted thing, unlikely to encourage imitation.) Still, it is highly plausible that the situation will still prevent further expansion and consolidation, while complicating any attempts at national or EU-wide solutions to the continent's larger and more pressing problems--all as my guess is that in spite of visions of a peace-and-prosperity-minded EU coming together for the sake of security in the wake of the war in Ukraine, the fact that the conflict has been hugely unpopular with many of the EU's various publics, and produced significant divergences in policy between its member governments, will only add to Europe's difficulties in forming a "more perfect union," not facilitate its surmounting them.
1. The building up of the institution on the basis of short-term elite interest, and even that rather unevenly, the elites of the more powerful countries advantaged against those from poorer countries. Thus the EU produced a trade, fiscal and currency regime which gave German exporters access to the vast European market, the benefit of the cheaper labor just over their border in Eastern Europe, and the help of (in relation to their products) an undervalued currency that made for that much more competitiveness in the global market, producing Germany the export giant, and indeed the way a "greater Germany" in the economic sense has come to be the core of the Union. Other members of the Union, however, have not done nearly so well, Germany's gain often their loss (Germany is a champion exporter in part because it outcompetes them, while Germany does that in part because the German government has sacrificed the social rights of the German worker on the altar of "competitiveness" in the Hartz reforms and other policy changes, and with them their share in any gains, as the rising inequality in the country testifies. Meanwhile, looking even beyond the distribution of immediate costs and benefits, what about when just keeping the arrangement some found so congenial going required more than what German industrialists have found congenial in the short term? The European Union was not prepared for that.
2. The practical limits to Europe's expansion in the resulting conditions. Especially in light of that stress on short-term elite interests, with some elites more elite than others, one could expect expansion to stop where really big, deep, long-term thinking was required to make it happen—with one result the failure to incorporate the great bulk of the old "East bloc" and especially the former Soviet Union, with only Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (6 million people altogether) in the EU, and Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and especially Russia (almost 200 million people) outside it. The result is that in spite of the fall of the Iron Curtain and three decades of existence what is called the "European Union" actually encompasses a mere two-fifths of the territory of the European continent, containing a mere three-fifths of that continent's people, with little prospect of its being extended any time soon.
3. The economic situation of Europe along with the rest of the world in an era of profound global downturn, with which European elites were ill-equipped to deal. It can seem symbolic that the European Economic Community's first round of expansion came in 1973, the year widely associated with the end of the post-war boom, and the epoch of weaker growth that followed; that the European Community became the European Union in 1993, amid a deep global recession; that, barring the entry of Croatia, the EU reached its limits with the inductions of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, the year in which a long-developing financial crisis came to a head and plunged the world into a recession from which it never truly recovered, such that it can seem as if Japan's "lost decades" became the norm for the industrialized world, with all that meant for Europe's own prospects.
One may question whether in anything like the world we live in the European Union could have developed in any other way. The relevant negotiations were between countries very different in development and interests, very unequal in size and power, and just as unequal internally with all that meant for the line they took. Reflecting this economic integration ranked at the top of the list of priorities of the elites of the participating countries, rather than democracy, equality or social concern, with many not at all sorry to see economic decisions about such fundamental matters as government spending or monetary policy made by bodies less accountable to their electorates, and imposing limits on what national governments could do--while as they went about it they proved no more "enlightened" in their understanding of their self-interest than their counterparts elsewhere (the delusions of their silly admirers just that). Subsequently, whether one attributes the fact to the weakness of those countries' economies under their pre-1989 regimes, or the chaotic and destructive character of the reform process their leaders undertook afterward, Eastern Europe was in a far weaker state than many of those who had hoped for really continent-wide union had thought it would be in the 1990s, with all that meant for their integration into Europe, and what they would add to it if they were integrated. (There was, too, the sheer size and potential power of the Russian Federation even when taken as a single state, and as those familiar at all with geopolitics know full well, the implications of a Russo-German combination in any form for those anxious about the balance of power in the world.) Meanwhile the period generally saw slow growth, and frequent crisis, which Europe's neoliberalism-minded elite met with, again, orthodoxy, most notoriously in the post-Great Recession sovereign debt crisis. (Indeed, if Europe has done less poorly in relative terms than the sneering of committed Europe-bashers about "Eurosclerosis" implies it has still quite sufficed to pose no end of troubles from the standpoint of profits, employment, taxes, budgets and debt--all as Europe has abided by the neoliberal trend rather than trying to "buck" it, arguably to its disadvantage, both where its economic performance and its political attractiveness have been concerned.)
All of this meant that the EU was institutionally underdeveloped--as in its having a currency union without also having a "transfer union," with all the inherent instability of such a combination. It meant that Europe had a far narrower base of power, quantitatively and qualitatively (compare the EU that exists now with one that had managed to integrate the European members of the former Soviet Union, with their 200 million people, their natural resource wealth, and in particular Russia's technological specialties and military capacities), while rather than its tensions being dissolved, or sublimated, within a Europe concerned with getting on rather than nationalistic feuds and power politics, the EU's eastern frontier was that much more a scene of potential conflict (with far and away the most dramatic instance the conflicts that now have Russia and Ukraine fighting the biggest conventional war on European soil since 1945). It meant that if German business did well, at least for a time, deindustrialized, on the whole West European states got poorer and the East European states which had been allowed into the club saw their aspirations to solidly First World productivity and living standards disappointed amid shock that tested the institution's viability, and proved as unflattering to its independence as it had been unflattering toward the independence of its members (the U.S. Federal Reserve bailing out the EU's banks with $10 trillion in loans amid the Great Recession). And especially with Europe identified with elite interests and policies which hurt working people, and ruled out those policies that might help them (for instance, a freer hand in the fiscal arena), that the European project failed to acquire a popular base--all as those looking to play what is often euphemistically called the "populist" card very easily pointed to Europe as the cause of their discontents, and won election after election by it in circumstances promising little but the continuation of the EU's stagnation and slow unraveling that has characterized its recent history. In fairness, ruptures like what we saw with Britain seem unlikely to recur any time soon. (Britain's long aloofness from the continent and physical insularity, and the way its size, financialization and apparent other options for association seemed to give it alternatives, are not shared by any other EU member, all as even then it has been a close-run, rancorous, widely regretted thing, unlikely to encourage imitation.) Still, it is highly plausible that the situation will still prevent further expansion and consolidation, while complicating any attempts at national or EU-wide solutions to the continent's larger and more pressing problems--all as my guess is that in spite of visions of a peace-and-prosperity-minded EU coming together for the sake of security in the wake of the war in Ukraine, the fact that the conflict has been hugely unpopular with many of the EU's various publics, and produced significant divergences in policy between its member governments, will only add to Europe's difficulties in forming a "more perfect union," not facilitate its surmounting them.
"It's Still the Economy, Stupid"--and Don't You Ever Forget It
"It's The Economy, Stupid" was a cliché of the 1992 presidential election.
By contrast the different ways in which "pundits" expressed the thought, questioning of the idea that "It's the Economy, Stupid," usually by playing off of the four word phrase attributed to James Carville (like "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"), became a cliché of the 2024 election. (We saw this in the New York Times, and the Financial Times, and The New Republic, and the Guardian, and Salon, and I am sure many, many other fora.)
That it was not the economy, stupid, was a comforting thought for those who hoped to see the Democratic Party do well. After all, they were incumbents in a situation in which the economy was not doing well, which meant that its being about the economy was to their disadvantage--the more in as the Democratic Party had dispelled a great many illusions about itself since 1992, perhaps usefully explained through reference to that longtime stalwart of the post-war Democratic Party, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. As he explained it, in America "Big Business" government is the default mode of government--an unsustainable default, in that Big Business government eventually makes a mess of things, eventually producing an overwhelming pressure for reform that acts as a necessary, periodic, corrective. So far as conventional wisdom went it was the Democratic Party's function to be the vehicle of such reform--a function the party bosses never had much enthusiasm for, and which they increasingly kicked to the curb from the 1970s on with the ascent of Charles Peters' "neo-liberals," and indeed the election of a member of that group, Bill Clinton, who made the Democratic Party a party of neoliberalism in the more widely used economic sense of that term, a course from which it has not deviated (not with Gore, not with Obama, not with Hillary Clinton, not with Biden, not with Harris), in spite of the public's consistent, increasing, undeniable hostility to that line and its results (the mess that got bigger and bigger because reform never came), which played its part in costing them election after election (the midterms of 1994 that ushered in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America-armed Republican Revolution, in 2000, in the midterms of 2010, in 2016).
Indeed, the Democratic Party and its supporters were eager to see the election be about anything else, as they showed again and again--for instance, in the Times' Michelle Goldberg gleefully looking forward to the Fifth of November as a Day of Feminist Wrath in which "women's fury," far too long "underestimated," would drive a mighty Blue tide across the land—the Democratic Party and its supporters apparently oblivious to the fact that they were doing what the Republicans had done in 1992, counting on the culture war in hard economic times, to the same result, losing by several million votes, as even many who were genuinely furious over abortion rights voted for Trump, because It's Still the Economy, Stupid--with those who suggested otherwise earning the sobriquet "Stupid" in an even more than usually blatant and inarguable way than is the case for the Order of the Brass Check.
By contrast the different ways in which "pundits" expressed the thought, questioning of the idea that "It's the Economy, Stupid," usually by playing off of the four word phrase attributed to James Carville (like "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"), became a cliché of the 2024 election. (We saw this in the New York Times, and the Financial Times, and The New Republic, and the Guardian, and Salon, and I am sure many, many other fora.)
That it was not the economy, stupid, was a comforting thought for those who hoped to see the Democratic Party do well. After all, they were incumbents in a situation in which the economy was not doing well, which meant that its being about the economy was to their disadvantage--the more in as the Democratic Party had dispelled a great many illusions about itself since 1992, perhaps usefully explained through reference to that longtime stalwart of the post-war Democratic Party, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. As he explained it, in America "Big Business" government is the default mode of government--an unsustainable default, in that Big Business government eventually makes a mess of things, eventually producing an overwhelming pressure for reform that acts as a necessary, periodic, corrective. So far as conventional wisdom went it was the Democratic Party's function to be the vehicle of such reform--a function the party bosses never had much enthusiasm for, and which they increasingly kicked to the curb from the 1970s on with the ascent of Charles Peters' "neo-liberals," and indeed the election of a member of that group, Bill Clinton, who made the Democratic Party a party of neoliberalism in the more widely used economic sense of that term, a course from which it has not deviated (not with Gore, not with Obama, not with Hillary Clinton, not with Biden, not with Harris), in spite of the public's consistent, increasing, undeniable hostility to that line and its results (the mess that got bigger and bigger because reform never came), which played its part in costing them election after election (the midterms of 1994 that ushered in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America-armed Republican Revolution, in 2000, in the midterms of 2010, in 2016).
Indeed, the Democratic Party and its supporters were eager to see the election be about anything else, as they showed again and again--for instance, in the Times' Michelle Goldberg gleefully looking forward to the Fifth of November as a Day of Feminist Wrath in which "women's fury," far too long "underestimated," would drive a mighty Blue tide across the land—the Democratic Party and its supporters apparently oblivious to the fact that they were doing what the Republicans had done in 1992, counting on the culture war in hard economic times, to the same result, losing by several million votes, as even many who were genuinely furious over abortion rights voted for Trump, because It's Still the Economy, Stupid--with those who suggested otherwise earning the sobriquet "Stupid" in an even more than usually blatant and inarguable way than is the case for the Order of the Brass Check.
Was the "Economy" Really Doing So Well Under Biden?
Before and after the recent election Establishment commentators claimed that the U.S. economy was performing splendidly, insisting that inflation is falling, unemployment low, growth robust, and the stock market "booming." Yet anyone with a scintilla of understanding of these matters knows how all of this can have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual condition of the vast majority of the country, and how it has rightly become cynical about them. The official inflation numbers have long been suspect in the eyes of the public--with the same going for unemployment. (Consider how before the pandemic we had many years of "full employment" that were on close inspection anything but.) "Growth," which is automatically overstated whenever inflation is understated, has long been a matter of paper profits in an ever-more hollowed-out economy, with the same going for the stock market, the dubious benefits of all of which accrue to the super-rich and not working people, whose disadvantage is often registered in a rising Dow Jones Average. (A company announces layoffs, and its stock will rise high. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that hiring is slow, and the Average shoots up.)
Certainly it ignores the way that the long-term decline in the ability of working people to afford the essentials of life, like housing, has continued painfully these past years. Back in the 1960s the median-priced home went for the equivalent of three to four years of the median male income. By the 2010s it was more like seven to eight years, and in 2022 it hit nine years. Only a complete idiot would characterize this as a situation bespeaking unexampled prosperity for the public, the more in as the trend has been similar with other essentials, from the price of a car (used as well as new), to the price of health insurance, to the price of college tuition. It does not sweeten the deal that those supposedly enjoying this era of "low unemployment" have experienced it as an era of high underemployment, not least for college graduates, with, contrary to the STEM fetishists and those sneering at the victims of the student debt racket who love painting its sufferers as fools who got "useless" humanities degrees (the number of these has in fact fallen sharply in recent years), the underemployed very frequently people with "practical," occupationally-oriented degrees. (Did you know that a year after graduation 1 in 4 engineering majors lacks employment in their field, and the picture just gets worse from there? Indeed, the practical business major is no better off than the humanities degree holders.)
It ignores, too, the fact that, as Michael Roberts has explained, "[t]he headline GDP [Gross Domestic Product growth] rate" that is the basis for the talk of robust growth, "is driven by healthcare services, which really measure the rising cost of health insurance," with a little help from those extra defense outlays for the wars being waged abroad (hardly the form of consumption Americans equate with higher living standards!)--all as inventories of unsold goods are piling up, with the last fact the easier to understand when one remembers that, as Ruchir Sharma admitted in the Financial Times the day before the election, the gap between the spending of the top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent has become "the widest . . . on record," the richest consumers spending, the others having less and less leeway to do so given all the ways in which they are hard-pressed--and of course, not getting any relief from the rising stock prices, because they do not own stock.
Still, for all that the talking heads have persisted in telling the public "You've never had it so good"--and afterward, apparently not caring in the slightest that the public disbelieved what they have to say not because it was deluded, but because it was less deluded than the "experts" for whom centrists so snarlingly demand absolute deference . Of course, considering the experts as deluded one is left with the problem of determining in just which way they happened to be so deluded--whether they were deluded about what the public could be got to believe about the economy, or deluded about the state of the economy itself. The second possibility cannot be ruled out--or the dangers associated with that slighted.
Certainly it ignores the way that the long-term decline in the ability of working people to afford the essentials of life, like housing, has continued painfully these past years. Back in the 1960s the median-priced home went for the equivalent of three to four years of the median male income. By the 2010s it was more like seven to eight years, and in 2022 it hit nine years. Only a complete idiot would characterize this as a situation bespeaking unexampled prosperity for the public, the more in as the trend has been similar with other essentials, from the price of a car (used as well as new), to the price of health insurance, to the price of college tuition. It does not sweeten the deal that those supposedly enjoying this era of "low unemployment" have experienced it as an era of high underemployment, not least for college graduates, with, contrary to the STEM fetishists and those sneering at the victims of the student debt racket who love painting its sufferers as fools who got "useless" humanities degrees (the number of these has in fact fallen sharply in recent years), the underemployed very frequently people with "practical," occupationally-oriented degrees. (Did you know that a year after graduation 1 in 4 engineering majors lacks employment in their field, and the picture just gets worse from there? Indeed, the practical business major is no better off than the humanities degree holders.)
It ignores, too, the fact that, as Michael Roberts has explained, "[t]he headline GDP [Gross Domestic Product growth] rate" that is the basis for the talk of robust growth, "is driven by healthcare services, which really measure the rising cost of health insurance," with a little help from those extra defense outlays for the wars being waged abroad (hardly the form of consumption Americans equate with higher living standards!)--all as inventories of unsold goods are piling up, with the last fact the easier to understand when one remembers that, as Ruchir Sharma admitted in the Financial Times the day before the election, the gap between the spending of the top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent has become "the widest . . . on record," the richest consumers spending, the others having less and less leeway to do so given all the ways in which they are hard-pressed--and of course, not getting any relief from the rising stock prices, because they do not own stock.
Still, for all that the talking heads have persisted in telling the public "You've never had it so good"--and afterward, apparently not caring in the slightest that the public disbelieved what they have to say not because it was deluded, but because it was less deluded than the "experts" for whom centrists so snarlingly demand absolute deference . Of course, considering the experts as deluded one is left with the problem of determining in just which way they happened to be so deluded--whether they were deluded about what the public could be got to believe about the economy, or deluded about the state of the economy itself. The second possibility cannot be ruled out--or the dangers associated with that slighted.
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