Hype about artificial intelligence has been cyclical in the past. The pattern typically saw some cause for expectations that the big moment everyone has been waiting for--the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence of genuinely human-caliber, and all it betokens--is really, finally, at hand make excitement about the technology surge, and then when this proved not to be the case the excitement collapse, "AI spring" followed by "AI winter," though usually not for very long because, the grip of artificial intelligence on the imaginations of so many being what it is, some new development soon enough prompts a resurgence of excitement and the return of spring. Thus the ebullience of the "tech"-obsessed '90s and the forecasts of Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and company produced a great wave of such excitement, which, as the predictions failed to come to pass in the '00s, waned. However, progress in neural network design, and promises about the uses to which it might be put, like the production of self-driving cars, prompted a new surge of interest in the mid-'10s. Of course, those expectations were disappointed in their turn, leading to declining interest by decade's end, but then the pandemic's disruptions reminded the cloistered idiots of the board rooms far removed from where the economic rubber meets the road just how much the structures of everyday life rely on lots and lots of boring, tiring, physical labor that hasn't been automated, while they were excited again by the chatbots that, at least one set of scientists said may have been the real thing, artificial general intelligence--in a crude and incomplete form, but nevertheless, the moment in its way having already arrived . . . as the idiots of the media seized on every cliché they could to fan the hype.
The result has been an historic investment in artificial intelligence evident in ways from the level of individual firms and even individual fortunes (Tesla's being valued more than all the really major automakers combined, the chip maker NVIDIA becoming the world's first $4 trillion company, Larry Ellison's buyout of OpenAI making the valuation of his fortune leap a hundred billion dollars in one day), but also at the level of the stock market as a whole, as shown by the "Buffet Indicator" (the ratio of the market capitalization of all the publicly traded companies in the U.S. to the Gross Domestic Product of the country). Simply for comparison purposes, at the height of the dot-com boom of the '90s, when the capitalization of the U.S. stock market had been growing on average 20 percent a year for five years it stood at about 150 percent. Today the Buffet Indicator stands at 220 percent.
Of course, the Indicator's standing much above 100 percent usually means an overheated market full of overvalued firms. So did it prove to be the case when the dot-com boom was revealed as a dot-com bubble that burst just after the turn of the century, all as, if one assumes the principle holds good, barring the Technological Singularity being very, very near (read: a lot nearer than even the stubbornly never-admitting-he's-wrong Kurzweil said it was at last check) an even more painful correction is coming. In either case the consequences are incalculable. Should it be the case that in this era in which we have so often seen smoke without fire (for all the self-important talk about INNOVATION! today's neoliberal economy is far better at generating hype than progress) the Electronic Herd prove to have made their very large bet correctly (for once!) then we may be looking at the unleashing of enormous technological potentials. I say potentials because one cannot be sure of precisely what they will actually be, or what one should never overlook, what people will actually do with them--a matter which is most certainly political, however much a great many persons would like to ignore the fact. (Indeed, we get so much Frankenstein complex crapola in our science fiction because it is far, far safer to point to the danger of an imaginary machine developing a mind and will of its own than the actual danger posed by the minds and wills of the very real people who control the machines in the world in which we happen to live.) Moreover, it has to be admitted that recent experience does not instill in any intelligent person great confidence in the practicalities of how our political-economic model presently works realizing those potentials for the benefit of all, with the Internet a case in point. The oligarchs of Silicon Valley who falsely take credit for having invented all of the technology in their garages but actually deserve credit mainly for having taken what had already been invented and thoroughly enshittifying it seem almost certain to be the owners and controllers of the hardware and software of any imminent artificial intelligence revolution, while these have already expressed some very dark--frankly, dystopian--intentions regarding it indeed.
However, should this prove to be another case of the same old neoliberal crap writ even larger than before (not least with regard to ultra-loose monetary policy fueling speculative madness as the engine of the economy in their gotta-keep-the-roulette-wheels-spinning way until it can't anymore and the bubble bursts) and the investors (just as they did every previous time) prove to have bet incorrectly then it is hard to imagine our not looking at a massive destruction of values--perhaps on an epoch-making scale. Indeed, according to a recent study by the British-based research firm MacroStrategy Partnership, that 220 percent of U.S. GDP represented by the Buffet Indicator bespeaks a bubble seventeen times as big as that New Economy bubble of the '90s, and four times as big as the real estate bubble that burst in '07. One can thus very easily imagine there being close at hand something much, much worse than what the world faced in '07--which, contrary to the stupid mainstream media narrative about the matter that made it seem like a speedbump we all got over together (yay!) really was an epoch-making event, dealing the world economy a blow from which it never recovered as the euphemistically called "Great Recession" went on and on (it was not just Japan but the world that saw a lost decade turn into a lost generation, with outside China per capita Gross World Product today pretty much where it was in the 1970s), with the consequences of the catastrophe--and one should not forget, the manner in which what pass for world "leaders" addressed that catastrophe they did so much to make happen--including the stalling out and fraying of the once-seemingly "like the rising of the sun" progress of globalization, the ascent of the far right all over the world, and the resurgence of great power warfare that already has Europe "not at peace" with Russia as the bloodbath in Ukraine nears the end of its fourth year, and once again under German leadership Europe rearms for a contest with the colossus to its east. A far vaster crash hitting a U.S. economy looking much more vulnerable than it was in 2007 (from the Federal debt load to the Federal Reserve's asset portfolio to the standing of the U.S. dollar to the ability of America's working people to stand a shock things are in just about every way different from what they were two decades ago, just about all of them for the worse), at the center of a world economic and political order that likewise look even more decrepit than they did two decades ago, one would not be wrong to shudder at the thought. They would also not be wrong to retch in advance at the way that the professional economists will demonstrate their worthlessness by dutifully sniveling that no one could have seen it coming, and the financial community wheel out its favorite spokesperson to tell us "It was all black swans, see?" as middlebrows beguiled by the imagery in which he wraps up his banalities of cheap epistemological nihilism nod their empty heads--never mind the reality that a great number of people saw it coming and said so but were ignored completely by those who held all the power and disclaimed all the responsibility, supported by their lickspittles in the Mainstream Media's platforming only the "right" views as they snarl at anyone who points out such inconvenient truths as a Know-Nothing piece of scum fighting the "war on experts" with "fake news." However, rather than wallowing in doomism (and contempt for those responsible for it) one would do better to think very, very hard about how the world might do better this time because of the sheer direness of the consequences if it doesn't.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
The Privilege of Turning off Your Telescreen
People love to talk about George Orwell. Far more than have ever read Orwell, going by a certain poll of a few years ago--with the fact of the poll's reliance on self-reporting, and the rapid decay of what little propensity to read books rather than speak of them had still remained in the years since the poll, suggesting the actuality today is even worse. Meanwhile it seems that few of those who actually have read him did so closely or completely--a testimony not only to the falling standard of literacy (so evident among our commentariat, whose "Good Schools" failed miserably in imparting to them a "Good Education") but the ideological blinders of three-quarters of a century. After all, even if at the time he wrote his most famous book George Orwell still espoused socialist ideas intellectually way deep down he had gone over to that mix of muddle, pessimism and psycho-babble that became the sine qua non of critical respectability in the twentieth century, which made it the easier for the fiercest of anti-socialists to appropriate him and his work for his cause as they interpreted him to the public.
Naturally the book's readers fail to note that the horror of Oceania had its roots in a privileged layer's determination to defend their privilege at all costs by maintaining a situation of inequality in which they ruled over a mass mired in an ignorance and squalor in spite of the fact that humanity had acquired the means with which to liberate itself from those evils. Indeed, in the book-within-a-book that is the extract from Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism Orwell spells this out for us explicitly. But the blinders mean that no amount of explicitness can make the point with them. Rather those who do read the book seem to remember, besides the idea that all the repugnance they see is what they are supposed to picture when they hear the word "socialism," the more concrete and physical means utilized by the oppressors to maintain their control, like the surveillance equipment--including the TV that watches you back, the "telescreen." In Orwell's nightmare world only the privileged of the Inner Party had the right to turn those screens off for even a little while. Alas, the salience of this detail became more obvious to the public at a point after they had come to have their "telescreens" on at all times, much of the time by choice, as they quickly forgot that there had been any other way to live--all as, of course, the rulers of our particular dystopia made it as difficult as possible to choose not to be online all the time, not only because of the nuts and bolts of the structures of everyday life, but the design of our computer software itself. You can't set up a computer today using the latest operating systems, or use many of the features of a computer which has been set up, even where they don't actually require Internet access, without an active Internet connection--and of course information flowing from your computer as well as to it, with, indeed, the ever-growing amount of surveillance a major reason for the increasingly complex and buggy and controlling character of the software, and the need for costlier and more powerful computers to run it.
Of course, defenders of the situation will tell you that you have choices--but only up to a point, the more in as acting meaningfully on them requires a good deal more alertness and determination than most computers possess. Yes, you can monkey about in the Registry Editor to block a few of the eyes of the Argus watching you--if you are prepared to take the risk of crashing your computer, which most people aren't. And if at a more modest level computer users can withdraw all those Permissions, well, it's plainly obvious that the scum who design these things make this as hard as possible, not just by making the granting of the Permissions the default setting, but placing the relevant Permissions unintuitively and inconveniently within your options menu, and forcing you to check or uncheck as many boxes on as many different pages as possible by making you reject each and every single one separately rather than denying the lot (No, you can't "create a 3-D map of my surroundings," no, you can't "track my hands"), any and all of which might just so happen to revert to the default the next time an update is forced upon them (Oopsie!), such that the user will have to be attentive to the Permissions staying revoked, and be ready to go through the whole damn thing all over again. It's too much for most people, who resign themselves to the telescreen being on at all times, and those on the other end of the Internet connection seeing everything they do the way that Big Tech considers to be its Divine Right, a pretension that the protected-but-unbound elite generally approve. After all, what Big Tech gets, Big Brother can also ask a generally very willing Big Tech to hand over--all as Big Tech's brass check recipients in the Mainstream Media treat this as a non-issue, and at every turn encourage the public to think that way, keeping it instead obsessed with such stupidities as the private lives of people who do not even know they exist, and the small change of status politics, while sneering at anyone who raises the matter. Thus did it happen that when The Circle hit theaters the claqueurs did their assigned job and sneered at it--all as certain vulgarian Silicon Valley oligarchs today make it very clear that they see its form of electronic tyranny not as satire but as a manual for keeping the lower orders they regard as put on this Earth to serve them and receive their scorn "on their best behavior."
Naturally the book's readers fail to note that the horror of Oceania had its roots in a privileged layer's determination to defend their privilege at all costs by maintaining a situation of inequality in which they ruled over a mass mired in an ignorance and squalor in spite of the fact that humanity had acquired the means with which to liberate itself from those evils. Indeed, in the book-within-a-book that is the extract from Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism Orwell spells this out for us explicitly. But the blinders mean that no amount of explicitness can make the point with them. Rather those who do read the book seem to remember, besides the idea that all the repugnance they see is what they are supposed to picture when they hear the word "socialism," the more concrete and physical means utilized by the oppressors to maintain their control, like the surveillance equipment--including the TV that watches you back, the "telescreen." In Orwell's nightmare world only the privileged of the Inner Party had the right to turn those screens off for even a little while. Alas, the salience of this detail became more obvious to the public at a point after they had come to have their "telescreens" on at all times, much of the time by choice, as they quickly forgot that there had been any other way to live--all as, of course, the rulers of our particular dystopia made it as difficult as possible to choose not to be online all the time, not only because of the nuts and bolts of the structures of everyday life, but the design of our computer software itself. You can't set up a computer today using the latest operating systems, or use many of the features of a computer which has been set up, even where they don't actually require Internet access, without an active Internet connection--and of course information flowing from your computer as well as to it, with, indeed, the ever-growing amount of surveillance a major reason for the increasingly complex and buggy and controlling character of the software, and the need for costlier and more powerful computers to run it.
Of course, defenders of the situation will tell you that you have choices--but only up to a point, the more in as acting meaningfully on them requires a good deal more alertness and determination than most computers possess. Yes, you can monkey about in the Registry Editor to block a few of the eyes of the Argus watching you--if you are prepared to take the risk of crashing your computer, which most people aren't. And if at a more modest level computer users can withdraw all those Permissions, well, it's plainly obvious that the scum who design these things make this as hard as possible, not just by making the granting of the Permissions the default setting, but placing the relevant Permissions unintuitively and inconveniently within your options menu, and forcing you to check or uncheck as many boxes on as many different pages as possible by making you reject each and every single one separately rather than denying the lot (No, you can't "create a 3-D map of my surroundings," no, you can't "track my hands"), any and all of which might just so happen to revert to the default the next time an update is forced upon them (Oopsie!), such that the user will have to be attentive to the Permissions staying revoked, and be ready to go through the whole damn thing all over again. It's too much for most people, who resign themselves to the telescreen being on at all times, and those on the other end of the Internet connection seeing everything they do the way that Big Tech considers to be its Divine Right, a pretension that the protected-but-unbound elite generally approve. After all, what Big Tech gets, Big Brother can also ask a generally very willing Big Tech to hand over--all as Big Tech's brass check recipients in the Mainstream Media treat this as a non-issue, and at every turn encourage the public to think that way, keeping it instead obsessed with such stupidities as the private lives of people who do not even know they exist, and the small change of status politics, while sneering at anyone who raises the matter. Thus did it happen that when The Circle hit theaters the claqueurs did their assigned job and sneered at it--all as certain vulgarian Silicon Valley oligarchs today make it very clear that they see its form of electronic tyranny not as satire but as a manual for keeping the lower orders they regard as put on this Earth to serve them and receive their scorn "on their best behavior."
The Dead Dream of Democratizing the Means of Communication
While the rhetoric of the Internet as a great democratizer was everywhere in the market populism-dominated 1990s, and remained widespread many years after (with Mark Zuckerberg's vulgar PR hacks turning the revolutions of 2011 into a moment for corporate self-promotion) all this is little heard today. After all, in this age of advanced enshittification of the Internet of which anyone at all online is all too aware NO ONE WOULD BUY IT--all as our lobotomized media's remembrance of things past is invariably very selective as, while it makes a point of keeping certain national wounds permanently open for the sake of raison d'etat (like keeping a critical mass of the public frothing with fury to sustain support for illiberal, authoritarian, militarist, racist policies), it drops what is not serviceable to such raison down the Memory Hole, with those promises of yesteryear certainly that. After all, a reminder of the Internet we were promised would just make people even more furious with the Internet we actually got, where we are endlessly surveilled by Authority, endlessly lied to and manipulated by its spokespersons, endlessly exploited for money by those Authority serves, and yet left on our own to cope with the ever-worsening danger from cyber-criminals and their ilk ("Personal responsibility!" they tell us as we wonder just why it's legal for private companies to go around collecting and trafficking our most private personal information), the public bound but unprotected as the monopolists of Big Tech and the security state are the extreme opposite in a world where, just as in that book by Orwell that people love to cite but never read, it is becoming a mark of privilege to be able to turn off the telescreen.
Not only in hindsight but even at the time the contrast between the promise and the reality was fairly predictable. Even were one to overlook the essential naiveté of the view that technological change might somehow automatically bring "power to the people!" discredited so many, many times over the years, the truth is that the Internet was never very promising as a genuinely democratic medium, the interface more suggestive of broadcast than detailed interactivity, and the vastness and sprawl and mess of the web all but insuring gatekeeping that privileges the deep-pocketed and established in every way, all as no attempt at protecting the public was to be expected in a neoliberal-neoconservative milieu of corporate power run amok and a security state gone mad--and more than a few understood that at the time. The problem was not that they didn't speak up, but that their every utterance of the truth was drowned out by a thousand shouts of the lie--much as remains the case today, the cynicism about Big Tech pervasive and growing, but really meaningful discussion unlikely to be seen anywhere near the major platforms, whose staff as dutifully as ever earn their brass checks by making sure of that.
Still, people do talk about the disappointment. Many of them discuss how those who took the promise at all seriously and invested in it--the blogger or self-published book author attempting to speak directly to the world over the heads of the Big Media gatekeepers, for example--generally found themselves walking down a boulevard of broken dreams, as the elitist trash of the media-industrial complex and the middlebrow mediocrities who let it do their thinking for them bathed in the tears of the disappointed hopefuls. However, there is also the disappointment of the way that the Internet looked like a source of salvation in other ways of more than purely private significance. The combination of privatization, deregulation, creditism, financialization that saw the country's economy concentrated in ever fewer hands were making the already suffocatingly narrow and constrained bounds of what could be aired, or published only more so, and generally dumber in the process, as was all too evident across contemporary life from the servility of the brass check-collectors before the powerful in the news outlets, to the vapid trash on our bestseller lists, to an academic life increasingly characterized by arguments over the latter-day equivalents of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It seemed to some that the Internet might somehow afford some space in which to do better than that. Of course, that didn't happen either, couldn't have as things were, with the feared consequences, as what passes for our intellectual and cultural life has gone on getting more decrepit--enough so that some of the gatekeepers themselves seem to be openly worried by the situation, but without the slightest readiness to consider that they may have themselves had a part in that. Their kind never do, ever convinced that all the things amiss in the world are the fault of those they look upon as their inferiors, for in their warped world no one may ever attribute any of the responsibility to those who have all the power.
Not only in hindsight but even at the time the contrast between the promise and the reality was fairly predictable. Even were one to overlook the essential naiveté of the view that technological change might somehow automatically bring "power to the people!" discredited so many, many times over the years, the truth is that the Internet was never very promising as a genuinely democratic medium, the interface more suggestive of broadcast than detailed interactivity, and the vastness and sprawl and mess of the web all but insuring gatekeeping that privileges the deep-pocketed and established in every way, all as no attempt at protecting the public was to be expected in a neoliberal-neoconservative milieu of corporate power run amok and a security state gone mad--and more than a few understood that at the time. The problem was not that they didn't speak up, but that their every utterance of the truth was drowned out by a thousand shouts of the lie--much as remains the case today, the cynicism about Big Tech pervasive and growing, but really meaningful discussion unlikely to be seen anywhere near the major platforms, whose staff as dutifully as ever earn their brass checks by making sure of that.
Still, people do talk about the disappointment. Many of them discuss how those who took the promise at all seriously and invested in it--the blogger or self-published book author attempting to speak directly to the world over the heads of the Big Media gatekeepers, for example--generally found themselves walking down a boulevard of broken dreams, as the elitist trash of the media-industrial complex and the middlebrow mediocrities who let it do their thinking for them bathed in the tears of the disappointed hopefuls. However, there is also the disappointment of the way that the Internet looked like a source of salvation in other ways of more than purely private significance. The combination of privatization, deregulation, creditism, financialization that saw the country's economy concentrated in ever fewer hands were making the already suffocatingly narrow and constrained bounds of what could be aired, or published only more so, and generally dumber in the process, as was all too evident across contemporary life from the servility of the brass check-collectors before the powerful in the news outlets, to the vapid trash on our bestseller lists, to an academic life increasingly characterized by arguments over the latter-day equivalents of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It seemed to some that the Internet might somehow afford some space in which to do better than that. Of course, that didn't happen either, couldn't have as things were, with the feared consequences, as what passes for our intellectual and cultural life has gone on getting more decrepit--enough so that some of the gatekeepers themselves seem to be openly worried by the situation, but without the slightest readiness to consider that they may have themselves had a part in that. Their kind never do, ever convinced that all the things amiss in the world are the fault of those they look upon as their inferiors, for in their warped world no one may ever attribute any of the responsibility to those who have all the power.
Saturday, September 20, 2025
On Germany's Armor Orders
At this stage of things it is difficult to say very much about the Russo-Ukrainian War now dragging into its fourth year. The plain and simple truth of the matter is that an ongoing war, with its "fog," secrecy and deception, is a far harder thing to analyze than a past one in even the best of circumstances--and these are not the best of circumstances. Everything that has happened in this conflict has made it very clear that those experts with any sort of platform from which one can address the broad public have been profoundly lacking in insight. They did not understand either Russia or Ukraine, not just their armed forces, but also their economies and their societies and what they would and would not be able to bear up under the strains of a war like this one. (Remember how for almost three years now Russia has been on the verge of totally running out of ammunition, but it just never happened? How one side or the other has always been about to collapse, but here they still are, fighting?) But then where "Establishment expert" is concerned (and it is this which the media gives us) the accent is on the Establishment part, not the expert part, all as having understanding to impart to the public is not likely to be a requirement of their job. To go by the results that would seem to be giving the public the "mushroom treatment," which is the real "skill set" of these "experts," and a not uncommon mission for them, which they consistently fulfill with zeal.
Still, at this stage of the war it does seem possible to say some things about what has been observable on the battlefield, not least the way that it has become a much more hazardous environment for even the most modern battle tanks, and for massed ground forces of any type, largely thanks to its rendering transparent and dense with loitering, guided, munitions in the age of the small drone. Indeed, that age of armored-mechanized warfare that was supposed to have been clearly underway with the panzers of the opening battles of the Second World War can seem to have come to a close as rather than World War II what we see is World War I in a war zone where fortifications and artillery and attrition prevail, and advance seems to rely on the kind of tactics the Germans' stormtroopers were demonstrating in that earlier conflict's last phase--if using modern motorcycles and All-Terrain Vehicles in the process.
Looking at all this one may imagine that what we have seen in Ukraine would give governments looking to reconstitute their military forces pause in regard to just how they would go about the task---whether old-line mechanized forces would really be the right thing for the situation. However, from what I can tell they have given the German government no such pause as it has, depending on which source one consults, ordered somewhere between 7,500 and 9,500 armored fighting vehicles, truly colossal numbers by the standards of the post-Cold War era, including a thousand of those Leopard 2 tanks that the Ukrainians have already proven to be very vulnerable (and unreliable) in the existing battlefield conditions. It also seems striking that as the German government placed these same orders it has made only comparatively paltry orders for artillery systems--all as drones do not seem to have been much on its mind (unlike the British, whose recent Strategic Defence Review, for all its lack of substance, did highlight the drone, with a soldier holding a little drone actually the image on the review's cover).
What could the German government's planners be thinking here?
One plausible explanation is that Germany's analysts and planners are less impressed by the events in Ukraine than others. Perhaps they think that the threat from the drone can be neutralized--with it seeming far from irrelevant that they have placed so much stress on purchasing Skyguard anti-drone systems (the makers are promising a new version which uses not cannon shells but laser beams), while also trusting to the adaptation of Active Protection Systems to keep armor viable in the face of the drone threat. And in turn with big armored forces still viable, that they can avoid the World War I-type trenches-and-big guns stalemate, which, frankly, military planners prefer not to think about, the hope of cheap, swift victory always springing eternal with them, even as it is always disappointed. (Yes, the thrust through the Ardennes seemed to deliver miraculous results during the Battle of France--but one should not forget that that time the enemy practically held the door open, while being so eager to surrender that they can seem to have planned this from the start. And that afterwards, with France defeated, Germany found it had not won the war, because there was no real plan for what to do about a Britain that continued to fight on afterward.)
The result is that one would not be unreasonable in thinking that there is a lot of self-deception on their part, encouraged by at least two factors. One is the way that those radical successors to the tank people talked about so much at the turn of the century (Future Combat Systems-style systems-of-systems and Starship Troopers-style armored infantry, both of which would be handy in the current drone-filled battlespace with its premium on dispersal and agility) have simply not come close to materializing a quarter of a century on. (What was futuristic then is still futuristic now.) The other is that reality of commercial life that the consumer is not king, but endlessly pressed to buy what business wants them to buy. Compared with the German government, for example, investing in cheap drones or figuring out how to equip a large infantry force for the battlefield (buy a bunch of motorcycles and ATVs?), ten thousand tanks and other armored fighting vehicles make for a lot of corporate welfare, which, one should never forget, is a big part of what defense spending has been about in the modern era.
Still, at this stage of the war it does seem possible to say some things about what has been observable on the battlefield, not least the way that it has become a much more hazardous environment for even the most modern battle tanks, and for massed ground forces of any type, largely thanks to its rendering transparent and dense with loitering, guided, munitions in the age of the small drone. Indeed, that age of armored-mechanized warfare that was supposed to have been clearly underway with the panzers of the opening battles of the Second World War can seem to have come to a close as rather than World War II what we see is World War I in a war zone where fortifications and artillery and attrition prevail, and advance seems to rely on the kind of tactics the Germans' stormtroopers were demonstrating in that earlier conflict's last phase--if using modern motorcycles and All-Terrain Vehicles in the process.
Looking at all this one may imagine that what we have seen in Ukraine would give governments looking to reconstitute their military forces pause in regard to just how they would go about the task---whether old-line mechanized forces would really be the right thing for the situation. However, from what I can tell they have given the German government no such pause as it has, depending on which source one consults, ordered somewhere between 7,500 and 9,500 armored fighting vehicles, truly colossal numbers by the standards of the post-Cold War era, including a thousand of those Leopard 2 tanks that the Ukrainians have already proven to be very vulnerable (and unreliable) in the existing battlefield conditions. It also seems striking that as the German government placed these same orders it has made only comparatively paltry orders for artillery systems--all as drones do not seem to have been much on its mind (unlike the British, whose recent Strategic Defence Review, for all its lack of substance, did highlight the drone, with a soldier holding a little drone actually the image on the review's cover).
What could the German government's planners be thinking here?
One plausible explanation is that Germany's analysts and planners are less impressed by the events in Ukraine than others. Perhaps they think that the threat from the drone can be neutralized--with it seeming far from irrelevant that they have placed so much stress on purchasing Skyguard anti-drone systems (the makers are promising a new version which uses not cannon shells but laser beams), while also trusting to the adaptation of Active Protection Systems to keep armor viable in the face of the drone threat. And in turn with big armored forces still viable, that they can avoid the World War I-type trenches-and-big guns stalemate, which, frankly, military planners prefer not to think about, the hope of cheap, swift victory always springing eternal with them, even as it is always disappointed. (Yes, the thrust through the Ardennes seemed to deliver miraculous results during the Battle of France--but one should not forget that that time the enemy practically held the door open, while being so eager to surrender that they can seem to have planned this from the start. And that afterwards, with France defeated, Germany found it had not won the war, because there was no real plan for what to do about a Britain that continued to fight on afterward.)
The result is that one would not be unreasonable in thinking that there is a lot of self-deception on their part, encouraged by at least two factors. One is the way that those radical successors to the tank people talked about so much at the turn of the century (Future Combat Systems-style systems-of-systems and Starship Troopers-style armored infantry, both of which would be handy in the current drone-filled battlespace with its premium on dispersal and agility) have simply not come close to materializing a quarter of a century on. (What was futuristic then is still futuristic now.) The other is that reality of commercial life that the consumer is not king, but endlessly pressed to buy what business wants them to buy. Compared with the German government, for example, investing in cheap drones or figuring out how to equip a large infantry force for the battlefield (buy a bunch of motorcycles and ATVs?), ten thousand tanks and other armored fighting vehicles make for a lot of corporate welfare, which, one should never forget, is a big part of what defense spending has been about in the modern era.
Thursday, September 18, 2025
What's That in Poor Years?
We live in an exceedingly unequal society which has long shown the trend of its life to be toward more and not less inequality, all as those who hold power are more openly contemptuous of doing anything to redress inequality than they have been in a very long time. Naturally those whose task it is to justify their ways to the public spend a lot of time trivializing that inequality's significance in the public mind. One common argument they make to this end holds that the poor aren't badly off materially, really. Only their pride suffers because "society" has placed less value on their contributions than, for example, that of such "geniuses" and "entrepreneurs" as Jeffrey Epstein and Elizabeth Holmes and the titans of shareholder activism--for where would the world be without them to LEAD!
However, contrary to this exceedingly stupid story so beloved by the psycho-babble addicts the reality is that the poor do suffer from much more than feeling "less than" (bad enough as that is), and not only psychically but materially. For contrary to what idiots who talk about a "knowledge economy" would have us believe we still live in a thoroughly material world where a great deal of old-fashioned toil is what keeps the world going round, physically tiring, dangerous, dirty, body-destroying work little relieved by the technological stagnation that has been the real legacy of our "entrepreneurs," excelling as they do not at the technological INNOVATION! they keep talking up, just the technological hype that endlessly proves to be all smoke and no fire. All as, of course, that same order of things has meant that those sneered-at working people bear the brunt of an economic situation in which the markets where they are required to meet their everyday needs for housing, health care and everything else are organized not around their demands as the "consumer is king" propaganda has it, but those of the rentiers and speculators who are the true kings here--all as, when these decide that for the moment the toil of said working folks is not required, the latter are thrown upon a social safety net said kings are eroding to nothing in the name of defending the Makers from the Takers (working people, of course, being in the second category unlike Epstein, Holmes, et. al.).
Especially when faced with these particular circumstances it is easy to imagine that life's tolls will mount up faster for the have-nots than for the haves, that they will indeed age faster and die earlier--perhaps by a significant margin. And as it happens the scientific data testifying to the correctness of this expectation seems increasingly abundant, and much of it formidable. However, it also seems that a scientifically-based or scientist-endorsed "big picture" view is elusive, certainly if one equates such a picture with, for example, an estimate of how much more quickly the poor age, or how much "older" the latter are likely to be physically or mentally at a given point in their lives when compared with the better-off. Certainly the layperson who sifts the research can feel that the researchers are looking at lots and lots of trees without seriously trying to describe the forest--while the explanation that this is just a matter of scientists being rigorous in handling the data will not do. After all, said scientists are operating in a field where hucksterism and quackery run rampant, as one sees in the media's breathlessly reporting dubious results ("Studies show . . .") ever seized upon for the sake of selling half-baked diet and fitness plans. Rather the motivation would seem to be the politics of the matter, and specifically political squeamishness about scientists flatly telling "the poors" that "You're aging faster than the rich, you'll be old beyond your years at every stage of your life, and you'll die sooner."
Still, going by the studies I have seen I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that the gap between those who may be judged relatively poor and the relatively well-off numerous enough to be statistically measurable for the benefit of a study--not the super-rich with their weirdo Wellness-to-keep-us-alive-until-immortality-comes-along schemes but people we would probably think of as "middle class"--plausibly have the former aging ten percent faster than the latter. Now think about what that means in concrete terms. At the age of 62 the poorer man is apt to be physically and mentally functioning more like his better-off peer will at 68. At 67 he is likely to be functioning more like the other man will at 74--all as, less able to retire than his wealthier peer, he endures the greater discomfort of continuing in that job, starting with hauling himself out of bed to, perhaps, endure a long commute aboard an overcrowded bus such as his better-off peer would never have deigned to ride even in the years when their health and strength was at its peak. When he is actually 74 . . . well, at this rate he probably won't make it to 74.
None of this is obscure, but it is unpublicized by those who receive their brass checks for having made us, for example, think about Sydney Sweeney's political affiliation instead. Even so, I suspect that working people understand the reality all too well.
However, contrary to this exceedingly stupid story so beloved by the psycho-babble addicts the reality is that the poor do suffer from much more than feeling "less than" (bad enough as that is), and not only psychically but materially. For contrary to what idiots who talk about a "knowledge economy" would have us believe we still live in a thoroughly material world where a great deal of old-fashioned toil is what keeps the world going round, physically tiring, dangerous, dirty, body-destroying work little relieved by the technological stagnation that has been the real legacy of our "entrepreneurs," excelling as they do not at the technological INNOVATION! they keep talking up, just the technological hype that endlessly proves to be all smoke and no fire. All as, of course, that same order of things has meant that those sneered-at working people bear the brunt of an economic situation in which the markets where they are required to meet their everyday needs for housing, health care and everything else are organized not around their demands as the "consumer is king" propaganda has it, but those of the rentiers and speculators who are the true kings here--all as, when these decide that for the moment the toil of said working folks is not required, the latter are thrown upon a social safety net said kings are eroding to nothing in the name of defending the Makers from the Takers (working people, of course, being in the second category unlike Epstein, Holmes, et. al.).
Especially when faced with these particular circumstances it is easy to imagine that life's tolls will mount up faster for the have-nots than for the haves, that they will indeed age faster and die earlier--perhaps by a significant margin. And as it happens the scientific data testifying to the correctness of this expectation seems increasingly abundant, and much of it formidable. However, it also seems that a scientifically-based or scientist-endorsed "big picture" view is elusive, certainly if one equates such a picture with, for example, an estimate of how much more quickly the poor age, or how much "older" the latter are likely to be physically or mentally at a given point in their lives when compared with the better-off. Certainly the layperson who sifts the research can feel that the researchers are looking at lots and lots of trees without seriously trying to describe the forest--while the explanation that this is just a matter of scientists being rigorous in handling the data will not do. After all, said scientists are operating in a field where hucksterism and quackery run rampant, as one sees in the media's breathlessly reporting dubious results ("Studies show . . .") ever seized upon for the sake of selling half-baked diet and fitness plans. Rather the motivation would seem to be the politics of the matter, and specifically political squeamishness about scientists flatly telling "the poors" that "You're aging faster than the rich, you'll be old beyond your years at every stage of your life, and you'll die sooner."
Still, going by the studies I have seen I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that the gap between those who may be judged relatively poor and the relatively well-off numerous enough to be statistically measurable for the benefit of a study--not the super-rich with their weirdo Wellness-to-keep-us-alive-until-immortality-comes-along schemes but people we would probably think of as "middle class"--plausibly have the former aging ten percent faster than the latter. Now think about what that means in concrete terms. At the age of 62 the poorer man is apt to be physically and mentally functioning more like his better-off peer will at 68. At 67 he is likely to be functioning more like the other man will at 74--all as, less able to retire than his wealthier peer, he endures the greater discomfort of continuing in that job, starting with hauling himself out of bed to, perhaps, endure a long commute aboard an overcrowded bus such as his better-off peer would never have deigned to ride even in the years when their health and strength was at its peak. When he is actually 74 . . . well, at this rate he probably won't make it to 74.
None of this is obscure, but it is unpublicized by those who receive their brass checks for having made us, for example, think about Sydney Sweeney's political affiliation instead. Even so, I suspect that working people understand the reality all too well.
Writing About Neoliberalism: Some Thoughts
Some years ago certain members of the commentariat began attacking the meaningfulness of the word "neoliberal" as a descriptor of economic policy, insisting it was an empty epithet. Initially seeming to me a very strange claim given that its use had long been established by that point it quickly became apparent that this was really an attack against those who criticized the economic policies of figures like Hillary Clinton or Britain's Blairites and preferred to them those of a Bernie Sanders, or a Jeremy Corbyn--a piece of bad faith hippie-punching by centrist political hacks who would likely never have dared attempt such against opponents who had a mainstream platform from which to fight back. Like Jonathan Chait. And Washington Monthly (of course) politics editor Bill Scher. And Nick Cohen (given space for the last in the Guardian, a reminder of where that paper really stands on the issues).
Still, considering the rancor it did seem to me that if they were false charges made in bad faith by political hacks users of the term were not invulnerable to it because of how theorists of the concept had explicated it in the past. Certainly such figures as a David Harvey, one of the principal popularizers of the concept, had provided a good deal of insight, not least in his important book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, reading which one understands that this was a particular program rooted in certain ideas and offering particular prescriptions (market fundamentalism, commending to the public deregulation and privatization, etc.) that, picked up and advanced as part of a right-wing political counter-offensive, changed economic life all over the world in significant ways, and in the process changed much else as well (not least in bringing about the postmodern "cultural condition" to which he had previously devoted a book). All the same, if getting much right there is much else that the conventional, short, explanation of the matter does not capture (many of those who explain neoliberalism miss or fail to properly stress the financialization that is fundamental to it, or to acknowledge, let alone reconcile, the libertarian and anti-statist theory and rhetoric with the reality of the massive state role in the model, e.g. less welfare for humans but more for corporations)--imperfections of which the centrists denying the concept's usefulness made the most. As this suggested broadly comprehensive explication of the concept and its various dimensions in a way that could really and truly be treated as a touchstone for those discussing the subject was scarce, in part because much of the work that would have enabled this seemed to have gone undone. Academics approaching the records of particular governments, or the functioning of economies, tended to write a lot about a very little, rather than vice-versa, in that way reflective of academic life encouraging and rewarding not those who deal with the basics on which everything else rests (like clear, strong and illuminating definitions), but those who do not worry overmuch about such matters as they set about specializing minutely, the more in as the appearance of rigor all too often counts for more than the reality. This is reflective, too, of how due to those same priorities, even after the specialists may have done very good work, few much concern themselves with "what it all means," as we can only hope to understand when someone bothers to try to produce a useful big picture from it--all as, I suspect, academics, perhaps not unnaturally for people who set store by ideas, tended to overrate the significance of these as against hard facts of power and material results in telling the story (looking too much at the musings of would-be philosophes, of whom they too often tend to be in awe, and too little at what the money men hoped to get).
To be entirely fair I do not know that the relevant scholars did a worse job with neoliberalism than they did anything else (these are, again, failures pervading the whole world of scholarship today), but these failures mattered the more precisely because the commentariat has been so hostile to their findings (such that, for example, those who criticized neoliberalism as neoliberalism had to defend their reasoning much more carefully than, for example, the Anti-Communist bashing that model). That encouraged me to try to work things out for myself--searching after a definition and description that would better account for just how contradiction-riddled (frankly, dishonest) the neoliberal Agenda was, and how the result did not go according to plan, but still represented a meaningful departure from what came before that could meaningfully be identified as neoliberalism. This extended to my examining the record of many "neoliberal" politicians in a comprehensive way (specifically Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) to see whether their records did indeed correspond to the neoliberal line. It also extended to developing a conception of how the neoliberal model works in some detail and how neoliberalism was distinguishable not just from what I called "Keynesian Fordism," but at the same time also from mere classical liberalism, or financialization for that matter; and empirically testing that model against the available statistical data using such metrics as investment, assets, trade, profits, central government-to-GDP ratios and much else to develop a picture of how policymakers and investors and the forces they unleashed restructured the U.S. economy in particular during the neoliberal era. It extended, too, to my using this understanding of neoliberalism to examine particular facets of the matter, like what neoliberalism has meant for the expectations and reality of technological innovation, and even the ways in which working people are living their lives (or finding themselves unable to do so).
To make a long story short I concluded that, yes, neoliberalism, complex as it may be, is indeed a sound, strong, useful concept for describing the economic thinking, policymaking, economic history of the last half century; that one can justly refer to the governments of the United States and Britain of this period as having been neoliberal governments, whose policies produced a distinct economic model, with great, varied, ubiquitous consequence extending into the cultural sphere. I don't know that I convinced anyone else of all this, but then I don't know that that was a realistic prospect. Again, those in the mainstream who put down the concept were doing so in bad faith, all as those who did find the concept useful didn't need convincing, as at any rate all this was probably a bit over the heads of the public, which online rarely looks at such things as working papers of any kind, let alone about such subjects as these. Still, even after many years of researching, thinking, revising as I researched and thought again I stand by the body of work I produced, and the position to which it led me, which is infinitely more than can be said for the brass check earners who fill up the opinion pages in the newspapers, magazines, wire services, news channels and web sites that command a totally unwarranted respect from people of conventional mind--all as it seems to me that a real understanding of neoliberalism is growing only more important as we try to make sense of where the world is headed now.
Still, considering the rancor it did seem to me that if they were false charges made in bad faith by political hacks users of the term were not invulnerable to it because of how theorists of the concept had explicated it in the past. Certainly such figures as a David Harvey, one of the principal popularizers of the concept, had provided a good deal of insight, not least in his important book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, reading which one understands that this was a particular program rooted in certain ideas and offering particular prescriptions (market fundamentalism, commending to the public deregulation and privatization, etc.) that, picked up and advanced as part of a right-wing political counter-offensive, changed economic life all over the world in significant ways, and in the process changed much else as well (not least in bringing about the postmodern "cultural condition" to which he had previously devoted a book). All the same, if getting much right there is much else that the conventional, short, explanation of the matter does not capture (many of those who explain neoliberalism miss or fail to properly stress the financialization that is fundamental to it, or to acknowledge, let alone reconcile, the libertarian and anti-statist theory and rhetoric with the reality of the massive state role in the model, e.g. less welfare for humans but more for corporations)--imperfections of which the centrists denying the concept's usefulness made the most. As this suggested broadly comprehensive explication of the concept and its various dimensions in a way that could really and truly be treated as a touchstone for those discussing the subject was scarce, in part because much of the work that would have enabled this seemed to have gone undone. Academics approaching the records of particular governments, or the functioning of economies, tended to write a lot about a very little, rather than vice-versa, in that way reflective of academic life encouraging and rewarding not those who deal with the basics on which everything else rests (like clear, strong and illuminating definitions), but those who do not worry overmuch about such matters as they set about specializing minutely, the more in as the appearance of rigor all too often counts for more than the reality. This is reflective, too, of how due to those same priorities, even after the specialists may have done very good work, few much concern themselves with "what it all means," as we can only hope to understand when someone bothers to try to produce a useful big picture from it--all as, I suspect, academics, perhaps not unnaturally for people who set store by ideas, tended to overrate the significance of these as against hard facts of power and material results in telling the story (looking too much at the musings of would-be philosophes, of whom they too often tend to be in awe, and too little at what the money men hoped to get).
To be entirely fair I do not know that the relevant scholars did a worse job with neoliberalism than they did anything else (these are, again, failures pervading the whole world of scholarship today), but these failures mattered the more precisely because the commentariat has been so hostile to their findings (such that, for example, those who criticized neoliberalism as neoliberalism had to defend their reasoning much more carefully than, for example, the Anti-Communist bashing that model). That encouraged me to try to work things out for myself--searching after a definition and description that would better account for just how contradiction-riddled (frankly, dishonest) the neoliberal Agenda was, and how the result did not go according to plan, but still represented a meaningful departure from what came before that could meaningfully be identified as neoliberalism. This extended to my examining the record of many "neoliberal" politicians in a comprehensive way (specifically Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) to see whether their records did indeed correspond to the neoliberal line. It also extended to developing a conception of how the neoliberal model works in some detail and how neoliberalism was distinguishable not just from what I called "Keynesian Fordism," but at the same time also from mere classical liberalism, or financialization for that matter; and empirically testing that model against the available statistical data using such metrics as investment, assets, trade, profits, central government-to-GDP ratios and much else to develop a picture of how policymakers and investors and the forces they unleashed restructured the U.S. economy in particular during the neoliberal era. It extended, too, to my using this understanding of neoliberalism to examine particular facets of the matter, like what neoliberalism has meant for the expectations and reality of technological innovation, and even the ways in which working people are living their lives (or finding themselves unable to do so).
To make a long story short I concluded that, yes, neoliberalism, complex as it may be, is indeed a sound, strong, useful concept for describing the economic thinking, policymaking, economic history of the last half century; that one can justly refer to the governments of the United States and Britain of this period as having been neoliberal governments, whose policies produced a distinct economic model, with great, varied, ubiquitous consequence extending into the cultural sphere. I don't know that I convinced anyone else of all this, but then I don't know that that was a realistic prospect. Again, those in the mainstream who put down the concept were doing so in bad faith, all as those who did find the concept useful didn't need convincing, as at any rate all this was probably a bit over the heads of the public, which online rarely looks at such things as working papers of any kind, let alone about such subjects as these. Still, even after many years of researching, thinking, revising as I researched and thought again I stand by the body of work I produced, and the position to which it led me, which is infinitely more than can be said for the brass check earners who fill up the opinion pages in the newspapers, magazines, wire services, news channels and web sites that command a totally unwarranted respect from people of conventional mind--all as it seems to me that a real understanding of neoliberalism is growing only more important as we try to make sense of where the world is headed now.
Not Just Thatcher, But Reagan
Recently reading the details of the German government's euphemistically named "Growth Booster" (read: big giveaway to business and the rich in the name of supply-side theory that was never really anything else) I found myself thinking not so much of Margaret Thatcher as Ronald Reagan, and not just because Friedrich Merz of Blackrock's plan also prominently features an accelerated depreciation schedule. There was also the way in which the tax cuts were combined with not just plans for social spending cuts (of which we are now starting to hear significantly details), but plans to drastically raise defense spending, which is much more Reagan than Thatcher if one is looking for precedents. After all, foreign policy hard-liner that Thatcher was, her government was anything but open-handed with the British armed forces--her deficit hawkishness more than a pose to that extent, at least.
The fact that European governments like those of the ultra-Establishment Merz are embracing bigger defense budget alongside the usual "Robin Hood in reverse" of robbing the poor to give to the rich via the usual tax and spending cuts seems worthy of remark. If continental politicians have long hoped to be their country's Thatcher, their hoping to be its Reagan is something newer, with the case of that other pillar of the European project, France, telling. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, if not without his pretensions on the international stage, was more concerned with economic reforms on the home front. By contrast the current French President, Emmanuel Macron, seems to look to the more international affairs-minded Reagan--and to go by certain of his rhetoric, that subsequent Republican President, Bush II, as well--as a model here. In this as in so many other ways it would seem that European policymakers, who were never so different in outlook from their American counterparts as those who bought into silly fantasies (or desperate dreams) of a more enlightened European elite pursuing a more enlightened path seemed prepared to believe, have been growing more brazen about that as they press harder to get more American-style policies, not only where hardcore neoliberalism at home is concerned, but the more "muscular" foreign policy they have for so long wanted. So much so that the governments of the Dutch and Czechs are apparently quite happy to turn their armies into franchises if not reserves of the successor of the World War II Wehrmacht that has now come under the control of a government headed by a profoundly uncouth yet also treacherous Chancellor whose ascent to office on an historically slight vote testifying to his lack of any genuine popular mandate has not inhibited him about going for broke pursuing an Agenda that most certainly includes arming for confrontation with "the East." Meanwhile in France, where the heirs of the "Better Hitler Than Blum" crowd are as close to (re)taking power as they have ever been since the fall of the Vichy regime, the present occupant of the Élysée Palace strives not to be outdone in plundering the public for the sake of turning what, Marianne tells us, is described by the French army's own officers as "an army of majorettes" into a more credible fighting force, also means to outdo Merz in aggressiveness about sending that force eastward as he calls for a "coalition of the willing" to be led by himself, of course--possibly to an even greater disaster than the world got the last time a President used that language.
Of course, all this is not going over well with the European publics. The German public, whose vote for Merz's party was, again, very low (less than a quarter of the electorate voted for Merz and his party), seems easily dividable into that part of it which never trusted him to begin with (likely, a great majority of the 76 percent of the German electorate that did not vote for him), and that part of it which feels betrayed by him (some 73 percent of Germans already feeling that way as he assumed office, with his subsequent performance not improving that, only 1 in 5 Germans seeing him as trustworthy), as pretty much all of that public detests him (his approval rating standing at a dismal 29 percent last month).
Of course, all this does not get the press it ought to in the States, but if anything American coverage of France may be even more muddled due to how, in contrast with Merz, whose lavish expenditures on styling and makeup seem to have not added to his charm in their eyes (he is Mr. Vain!), the American press fawns over Emmanuel Macron--with in particular a significant part of the identity politics-mad American commentariat so consumed with ecstasies over the "handsome" and "powerful" (middle-aged) man being married to a woman old enough to be his (senior citizen) mother (much more to their taste than the not-so-handsome Sarkozy's capping off his rise to the top by marrying '90s glory days of the supermodel supermodel Carla Bruni right in the Palace, cuz it's good to be the king!). Too much consumed with ecstasies over his "unconventional" began-with-a-Lifetime-Channel-movie-of-the-week marriage to spare much thought to his policies, and the opinion of his electorate about those policies--not least as reflected in his string of failed Prime Ministers, to which (the still less handsome?) Francois Bayrou has just been added by a no confidence vote prompted by the aggressiveness of his particular grab after the pocketbooks and social rights of France's working people. Still, the fact remains that anyone even minimally informed about the situation should need no introduction to his troubles that way. (After all, even the American press couldn't completely ignore the upheaval of 2023.) Especially as the hard realities of what it will take to not just fund, but man, the Not-So-New-Model-Armies of the European Establishment's militaristic dreams (make no mistake, they are inching back toward conscription) Europe's "leaders" will not be able to expect that pompous lectures about defense being "the greatest public benefit of all" will suffice to make the plebs rally to their standards.
The fact that European governments like those of the ultra-Establishment Merz are embracing bigger defense budget alongside the usual "Robin Hood in reverse" of robbing the poor to give to the rich via the usual tax and spending cuts seems worthy of remark. If continental politicians have long hoped to be their country's Thatcher, their hoping to be its Reagan is something newer, with the case of that other pillar of the European project, France, telling. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, if not without his pretensions on the international stage, was more concerned with economic reforms on the home front. By contrast the current French President, Emmanuel Macron, seems to look to the more international affairs-minded Reagan--and to go by certain of his rhetoric, that subsequent Republican President, Bush II, as well--as a model here. In this as in so many other ways it would seem that European policymakers, who were never so different in outlook from their American counterparts as those who bought into silly fantasies (or desperate dreams) of a more enlightened European elite pursuing a more enlightened path seemed prepared to believe, have been growing more brazen about that as they press harder to get more American-style policies, not only where hardcore neoliberalism at home is concerned, but the more "muscular" foreign policy they have for so long wanted. So much so that the governments of the Dutch and Czechs are apparently quite happy to turn their armies into franchises if not reserves of the successor of the World War II Wehrmacht that has now come under the control of a government headed by a profoundly uncouth yet also treacherous Chancellor whose ascent to office on an historically slight vote testifying to his lack of any genuine popular mandate has not inhibited him about going for broke pursuing an Agenda that most certainly includes arming for confrontation with "the East." Meanwhile in France, where the heirs of the "Better Hitler Than Blum" crowd are as close to (re)taking power as they have ever been since the fall of the Vichy regime, the present occupant of the Élysée Palace strives not to be outdone in plundering the public for the sake of turning what, Marianne tells us, is described by the French army's own officers as "an army of majorettes" into a more credible fighting force, also means to outdo Merz in aggressiveness about sending that force eastward as he calls for a "coalition of the willing" to be led by himself, of course--possibly to an even greater disaster than the world got the last time a President used that language.
Of course, all this is not going over well with the European publics. The German public, whose vote for Merz's party was, again, very low (less than a quarter of the electorate voted for Merz and his party), seems easily dividable into that part of it which never trusted him to begin with (likely, a great majority of the 76 percent of the German electorate that did not vote for him), and that part of it which feels betrayed by him (some 73 percent of Germans already feeling that way as he assumed office, with his subsequent performance not improving that, only 1 in 5 Germans seeing him as trustworthy), as pretty much all of that public detests him (his approval rating standing at a dismal 29 percent last month).
Of course, all this does not get the press it ought to in the States, but if anything American coverage of France may be even more muddled due to how, in contrast with Merz, whose lavish expenditures on styling and makeup seem to have not added to his charm in their eyes (he is Mr. Vain!), the American press fawns over Emmanuel Macron--with in particular a significant part of the identity politics-mad American commentariat so consumed with ecstasies over the "handsome" and "powerful" (middle-aged) man being married to a woman old enough to be his (senior citizen) mother (much more to their taste than the not-so-handsome Sarkozy's capping off his rise to the top by marrying '90s glory days of the supermodel supermodel Carla Bruni right in the Palace, cuz it's good to be the king!). Too much consumed with ecstasies over his "unconventional" began-with-a-Lifetime-Channel-movie-of-the-week marriage to spare much thought to his policies, and the opinion of his electorate about those policies--not least as reflected in his string of failed Prime Ministers, to which (the still less handsome?) Francois Bayrou has just been added by a no confidence vote prompted by the aggressiveness of his particular grab after the pocketbooks and social rights of France's working people. Still, the fact remains that anyone even minimally informed about the situation should need no introduction to his troubles that way. (After all, even the American press couldn't completely ignore the upheaval of 2023.) Especially as the hard realities of what it will take to not just fund, but man, the Not-So-New-Model-Armies of the European Establishment's militaristic dreams (make no mistake, they are inching back toward conscription) Europe's "leaders" will not be able to expect that pompous lectures about defense being "the greatest public benefit of all" will suffice to make the plebs rally to their standards.
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Germany's Rearmament Program: August 2025 Update
Back in 2022 remarking Germany's announced infusion of cash into its armed forces I acknowledged the magnitude of the expenditure, which at a stroke made Germany a candidate for the rank of the world's third highest-spending military power. However, I also argued that the sums being talked about (2 percent+ of GDP for defense bolstered by a hundred billion euro "one-off") would not result in a very much larger or more capable German military force given inflation, the country's industrial troubles, the fluctuating exchange ranges relevant to the imports clearly part of the program (like F-35 fighters), the long neglected problems of those forces (like their reportedly unlivable barracks) and of course the extremely high cost of military power, even before the way one gets into the excellence of governments and military-industrial complexes at making a lot of money go a very short away.
I do not seem to have been wrong about that, with this underlined by how three years later Germany, militarily scarcely different from what it was before the grandiose claims of "Zeitenwende," the country joined the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in committing to a far higher target. This saw them abandon the 2 percent of GDP for defense that was the old target in favor of a defense (and "defense- and security-related") outlay of 5 percent, with at least 3.5 percent going to "core" defense, by 2035. More aggressive still Germany's government has pledged to realize the 3.5 percent+ goal not by 2035 but by 2029, with the broad program facilitated by the earlier amendment of the constitution to exclude defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the "debt brake," and parliament's creation of a half trillion euro "infrastructure fund" also exempt from said brake, some months earlier.
It is also the case that this aggressive, drastic, fiscally enabled enlargement of German defense spending has been accompanied by what was absent in the wake of the Zeitenwende, specific targets for the enlargement of the forces, and massive orders of new equipment. The current plan seems to be to enlarge the German armed forces' standing component from 180,000 to 250,000+ personnel (a 40 percent increase) and the reserves from 60,000 to 200,000 (more than tripling reserves that had, like those everywhere else in Europe, been cut nearly to nothing in the wake of the Cold War reorientation to rapid-response and less conventional missions in faraway places), with the result a fully mobilized force not in the quarter-million but the half-million range. Meanwhile the German government is reportedly ordering as many as 1,000 new Leopard 2 tanks (as against the three hundred or so it now has) and 6,500-8,500 Boxer and Patria armored fighting vehicles, implying a fully mobilized mechanized force many times Germany's current force in size. A much more substantial project than anything discussed three years ago it seems fair to say that Germany has not undertaken anything to compare with this since the founding of the Bundeswehr. And of course this does not include the reality of the "Framework Nation Concept" which has turned the Dutch army's brigades into "plug-and-play" elements (insertable into German divisions), with Czechia and Romania partly ventured on this course, which would potentially mean still larger forces under German "leadership."
All in all this situation seems a reminder of how when the issue is the social needs of the public, or something else to which elites are indifferent or even hostile Authority wails about balanced budgets, admonishes the hungry and homeless to be respectful of vested interest, offers homilies about "politics as the art of the possible," and warns them that those (rightly) contemptuous of its do-nothingism and desirous of actually solving a problem are crazy people fleeing from freedom into totalitarianism who will make an Orwellian hell of the world should they get their way. But when it's something elites care about suddenly the politicians become "men of action." Not very intelligent, competent, men of action, but men of action all the same, with all this underlined by how that amendment instituting the debt brake came along back in 2009, right after the Great Recession when Berlin was intent on austerity in the face of '30s-like crisis and everything else be damned, as we saw with German bridges collapsing--but didn't seem so important when events presented them a new chance for weltpolitik and corporate welfare.
Still, in spite of themselves the program will take many years to realize, with reversal not impossible. The geopolitical situation, the economic situation (Germany is not in a great way here, all as military Keynesianism, which ain't what it used to be, may not help much), may well throw some surprises at them in these coming years. Besides, the words "On time and on budget" simply don't exist in the vocabulary of contractors, with the military-industrial complex-types second to none here. Meanwhile, though you would never know it from the media cheerleading ("Who are the heirs of Julius Streicher?"), it is very probable that this program is much less popular with the public than the chattering classes. This is all the more the case as, as the collapse of the vote for the traditional leading parties shows, Germany's political Establishment is just as despised and mistrusted by its electorate as its counterparts elsewhere, career corporate lawyer and former Blackrock Germany board member Chancellor Merz is already warning the public that his warfare state requires sacrifice of the already austerity-battered welfare state, while the German government realizing its ambitious military manpower goals on a purely voluntary basis seems like pure fantasy. Aside from the aversion to militarism on the part of the German public generally, and its disinterest in military confrontation with Russia particularly, the well of manpower on which it can draw is more limited than one may guess from the size of its population, for where fertility and age structure are concerned Germany is practically in the same boat as Japan, such that having the kind of mobilizable force they want means a very high proportion of military-age German youth putting the best years of their lives into "service." If the German government really is staying the course on this one, conscription is returning to the country, and before very long--with this obvious enough that I would imagine (not that the media will rush to report it) a great many German young people are already thinking about how to avoid the draft, as the more activism-minded among them consider the prospects for a new campaign. In fairness, Germany's government seems less and less inclined to let democratic niceties stand in the way of its goals, but this too may mean surprises in store.
I do not seem to have been wrong about that, with this underlined by how three years later Germany, militarily scarcely different from what it was before the grandiose claims of "Zeitenwende," the country joined the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in committing to a far higher target. This saw them abandon the 2 percent of GDP for defense that was the old target in favor of a defense (and "defense- and security-related") outlay of 5 percent, with at least 3.5 percent going to "core" defense, by 2035. More aggressive still Germany's government has pledged to realize the 3.5 percent+ goal not by 2035 but by 2029, with the broad program facilitated by the earlier amendment of the constitution to exclude defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the "debt brake," and parliament's creation of a half trillion euro "infrastructure fund" also exempt from said brake, some months earlier.
It is also the case that this aggressive, drastic, fiscally enabled enlargement of German defense spending has been accompanied by what was absent in the wake of the Zeitenwende, specific targets for the enlargement of the forces, and massive orders of new equipment. The current plan seems to be to enlarge the German armed forces' standing component from 180,000 to 250,000+ personnel (a 40 percent increase) and the reserves from 60,000 to 200,000 (more than tripling reserves that had, like those everywhere else in Europe, been cut nearly to nothing in the wake of the Cold War reorientation to rapid-response and less conventional missions in faraway places), with the result a fully mobilized force not in the quarter-million but the half-million range. Meanwhile the German government is reportedly ordering as many as 1,000 new Leopard 2 tanks (as against the three hundred or so it now has) and 6,500-8,500 Boxer and Patria armored fighting vehicles, implying a fully mobilized mechanized force many times Germany's current force in size. A much more substantial project than anything discussed three years ago it seems fair to say that Germany has not undertaken anything to compare with this since the founding of the Bundeswehr. And of course this does not include the reality of the "Framework Nation Concept" which has turned the Dutch army's brigades into "plug-and-play" elements (insertable into German divisions), with Czechia and Romania partly ventured on this course, which would potentially mean still larger forces under German "leadership."
All in all this situation seems a reminder of how when the issue is the social needs of the public, or something else to which elites are indifferent or even hostile Authority wails about balanced budgets, admonishes the hungry and homeless to be respectful of vested interest, offers homilies about "politics as the art of the possible," and warns them that those (rightly) contemptuous of its do-nothingism and desirous of actually solving a problem are crazy people fleeing from freedom into totalitarianism who will make an Orwellian hell of the world should they get their way. But when it's something elites care about suddenly the politicians become "men of action." Not very intelligent, competent, men of action, but men of action all the same, with all this underlined by how that amendment instituting the debt brake came along back in 2009, right after the Great Recession when Berlin was intent on austerity in the face of '30s-like crisis and everything else be damned, as we saw with German bridges collapsing--but didn't seem so important when events presented them a new chance for weltpolitik and corporate welfare.
Still, in spite of themselves the program will take many years to realize, with reversal not impossible. The geopolitical situation, the economic situation (Germany is not in a great way here, all as military Keynesianism, which ain't what it used to be, may not help much), may well throw some surprises at them in these coming years. Besides, the words "On time and on budget" simply don't exist in the vocabulary of contractors, with the military-industrial complex-types second to none here. Meanwhile, though you would never know it from the media cheerleading ("Who are the heirs of Julius Streicher?"), it is very probable that this program is much less popular with the public than the chattering classes. This is all the more the case as, as the collapse of the vote for the traditional leading parties shows, Germany's political Establishment is just as despised and mistrusted by its electorate as its counterparts elsewhere, career corporate lawyer and former Blackrock Germany board member Chancellor Merz is already warning the public that his warfare state requires sacrifice of the already austerity-battered welfare state, while the German government realizing its ambitious military manpower goals on a purely voluntary basis seems like pure fantasy. Aside from the aversion to militarism on the part of the German public generally, and its disinterest in military confrontation with Russia particularly, the well of manpower on which it can draw is more limited than one may guess from the size of its population, for where fertility and age structure are concerned Germany is practically in the same boat as Japan, such that having the kind of mobilizable force they want means a very high proportion of military-age German youth putting the best years of their lives into "service." If the German government really is staying the course on this one, conscription is returning to the country, and before very long--with this obvious enough that I would imagine (not that the media will rush to report it) a great many German young people are already thinking about how to avoid the draft, as the more activism-minded among them consider the prospects for a new campaign. In fairness, Germany's government seems less and less inclined to let democratic niceties stand in the way of its goals, but this too may mean surprises in store.
Of Neoliberalism's Contradictions--and the Democratic Party's
First encountering the Roosevelt Institute report titled "The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism: The Longing for an Alternative Order and the Future of Multiracial Democracy in an Age of Authoritarianism" I was intrigued by its promise of a comprehensive treatment of the implications of neoliberalism at a cultural level--precisely because really rigorous work on neoliberalism is so scarce and so potentially valuable for those interested in the subject, with this going double for the realm of cultural studies (floopy postmodernism having had its deeply unhealthy effect on such work). And initially the report appeared quite interesting, with its discussion of neoliberalism's ultra-conformism and insecurity's encouragement of atomization, alienation, isolation, "self-commodification," and self-blame in those who have problems, and its categorization of responses by individuals to neoliberalism's stresses and failures in a quasi-Mertonian way (describing, alongside those who do seek the sense of community the system deprives them of in some fashion, not always with happy result, the rugged individualism of "strivers, self-help and wellness" culture, "dropouts," and "rebellion").
However, after the opening what I saw quickly became much less satisfactory. It seemed that the authors of the report bought uncritically into the moral panic about the manosphere turning a generation of young men into ultra-rightists. More troubling still was the report's authors insistence that the "left" (by which the authors unambiguously meant the Democratic Party, itself a troubling sign of where this was going) had, amid wide public backlash against neoliberalism, tried to compete with the right in the area of policy with progressive offerings, but been defeated by a right which outfought it successfully on the terrain of culture.
This turned reality on its head. The reality is that the Democratic Party NEVER OFFERED THE PUBLIC ANY ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM. Quite the contrary, it has been steadfastly loyal to the neoliberal model--while it was the Republicans who offered challenge to it, challenge from the right, challenge that a progressive would not be expected to find either sincere in intent or convincing in its policy proposals, but challenge nonetheless, as the party's presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went on singing neoliberalism in 2016 and her Republican rival Donald Trump promised economic nationalism, with the pattern broadly repeated in 2020 and 2024. (Underlining this is how those members of the Democratic Party who did run as progressives saw the party bosses fight them harder than ever they fought against the Republicans--per the norm for politicians who are not the "left," liberal or any other such thing, but conservative centrists for whom the left is the Main Enemy.) Meanwhile, far from neglecting culture the Democratic Party leaned very heavily into the culture wars, and above all identity politics, as they campaigned--forgetting, or simply refusing to remember, "That It's The Economy, Stupid," something Trump's campaign did not, consistently promising to do what the Democratic Party had not (again, whatever progressives may make of those promises).
In short, this was not a matter of leftists, in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash, running on a policy-minded platform of political change and being defeated by rightists running on cultural appeals, but rather the center in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash running on a platform of upholding that neoliberal status quo the public rejected against rightists running against that status quo on nationalistic grounds, all as the center tried and failed to leverage culture war in its favor with identity politics. And the folks from the Institute writing as if this were not the case in tones that no one can imagine the matter to have been any other way give the impression of describing events in an alternate universe--though of course they are speaking to this universe, the point of giving us a narrative Orwellian in its drop-it-down-the-Memory-Hole remoteness from reality their justifying what they argue as the answer, embrace of the "Politics is Downstream From Culture" view, providing cover for a party seeking to compete on that territory as it offers the public the warmed-over supply siderism of the "Abundance" Agenda as the solution to its material woes, and reminds everyone once again that it isn't looking to defeat the Republicans at the polls, just make sure the progressives in or out of the party don't get a chance to get into a game they win just by making sure the hippies lose.
However, after the opening what I saw quickly became much less satisfactory. It seemed that the authors of the report bought uncritically into the moral panic about the manosphere turning a generation of young men into ultra-rightists. More troubling still was the report's authors insistence that the "left" (by which the authors unambiguously meant the Democratic Party, itself a troubling sign of where this was going) had, amid wide public backlash against neoliberalism, tried to compete with the right in the area of policy with progressive offerings, but been defeated by a right which outfought it successfully on the terrain of culture.
This turned reality on its head. The reality is that the Democratic Party NEVER OFFERED THE PUBLIC ANY ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM. Quite the contrary, it has been steadfastly loyal to the neoliberal model--while it was the Republicans who offered challenge to it, challenge from the right, challenge that a progressive would not be expected to find either sincere in intent or convincing in its policy proposals, but challenge nonetheless, as the party's presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went on singing neoliberalism in 2016 and her Republican rival Donald Trump promised economic nationalism, with the pattern broadly repeated in 2020 and 2024. (Underlining this is how those members of the Democratic Party who did run as progressives saw the party bosses fight them harder than ever they fought against the Republicans--per the norm for politicians who are not the "left," liberal or any other such thing, but conservative centrists for whom the left is the Main Enemy.) Meanwhile, far from neglecting culture the Democratic Party leaned very heavily into the culture wars, and above all identity politics, as they campaigned--forgetting, or simply refusing to remember, "That It's The Economy, Stupid," something Trump's campaign did not, consistently promising to do what the Democratic Party had not (again, whatever progressives may make of those promises).
In short, this was not a matter of leftists, in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash, running on a policy-minded platform of political change and being defeated by rightists running on cultural appeals, but rather the center in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash running on a platform of upholding that neoliberal status quo the public rejected against rightists running against that status quo on nationalistic grounds, all as the center tried and failed to leverage culture war in its favor with identity politics. And the folks from the Institute writing as if this were not the case in tones that no one can imagine the matter to have been any other way give the impression of describing events in an alternate universe--though of course they are speaking to this universe, the point of giving us a narrative Orwellian in its drop-it-down-the-Memory-Hole remoteness from reality their justifying what they argue as the answer, embrace of the "Politics is Downstream From Culture" view, providing cover for a party seeking to compete on that territory as it offers the public the warmed-over supply siderism of the "Abundance" Agenda as the solution to its material woes, and reminds everyone once again that it isn't looking to defeat the Republicans at the polls, just make sure the progressives in or out of the party don't get a chance to get into a game they win just by making sure the hippies lose.
Monday, March 10, 2025
Revisiting German Rearmament in 2025
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.
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.
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, namely the collapse of support for the traditional parties, with the far right the principal beneficiary. (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 fragmented and mutable, 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.)
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 House of Commons Library’s excellent research briefing UK Election Statistics unavailable). Still, it seems to me that a look at this is key to giving us more than a superficial picture of the situation, while it does not take too much work to cobble together at least a rough image of the past. According to the data the two parties that have dominated the Federal Republic's elections (the Christian Democrat-Christian Social Union combination, and the Social Democrats) together claimed 60 percent of the vote in that first election in 1949, a higher 74 percent in 1953 and 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, the near-two party duopoly 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 the figure 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), that 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 Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union, 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. Getting a mere 16 percent of the vote, this compares badly even with their second-worst vote 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" euphemistically call "populist."
Of course, the mainstream of the commentariat cannot be expected to point to, let alone puzzle out, what such a situation says about voters' real range of "choice"--just as they do not consider how, even were one to accord der kulturkampf the weight in electoral politics that elites would like it to have with the voters, Alternative for Germany's being led by a politician who resides outside the country where she is an office-holder 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. By contrast those who know full well that identity politics has been hugely advantageous to the right in its diverting public attention away from class toward "culture," and creating divisions and resentments of which the right has taken full advantage; that such politics have often been reconcilable with many a right-wing imperative on the more material issues, not least in the economic arena ("market populism," "woke capitalism"), but also the geopolitical-military arena; and indeed, 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 "femonationalism" and "homonationalism," in which 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; are not confused at all. For these the possibility, and actuality, of such accommodation is a reminder of the right's real priorities--and the fact that useful as cultural traditionalism has often been to the champion of status quos and of 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 House of Commons Library’s excellent research briefing UK Election Statistics unavailable). Still, it seems to me that a look at this is key to giving us more than a superficial picture of the situation, while it does not take too much work to cobble together at least a rough image of the past. According to the data the two parties that have dominated the Federal Republic's elections (the Christian Democrat-Christian Social Union combination, and the Social Democrats) together claimed 60 percent of the vote in that first election in 1949, a higher 74 percent in 1953 and 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, the near-two party duopoly 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 the figure 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), that 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 Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union, 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. Getting a mere 16 percent of the vote, this compares badly even with their second-worst vote 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" euphemistically call "populist."
Of course, the mainstream of the commentariat cannot be expected to point to, let alone puzzle out, what such a situation says about voters' real range of "choice"--just as they do not consider how, even were one to accord der kulturkampf the weight in electoral politics that elites would like it to have with the voters, Alternative for Germany's being led by a politician who resides outside the country where she is an office-holder 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. By contrast those who know full well that identity politics has been hugely advantageous to the right in its diverting public attention away from class toward "culture," and creating divisions and resentments of which the right has taken full advantage; that such politics have often been reconcilable with many a right-wing imperative on the more material issues, not least in the economic arena ("market populism," "woke capitalism"), but also the geopolitical-military arena; and indeed, 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 "femonationalism" and "homonationalism," in which 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; are not confused at all. For these the possibility, and actuality, of such accommodation is a reminder of the right's real priorities--and the fact that useful as cultural traditionalism has often been to the champion of status quos and of 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.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
.jpg){kind=link}