Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Mishra on Rousseau

What makes Rousseau and his self-described ‘history of the human heart,’ so astonishingly germane and eerily resonant is that, unlike his fellow eighteenth-century writers, he described the quintessential inner experience of modernity for most people: the uprooted outsider in the commercial metropolis, aspiring for a place in it, and struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection.

He never ceased to speak out of his own intensely personal experience of fear, confusion, loneliness and loss — spiritual ordeals today experienced millions of times over around the world. Holderlin, one of Rousseau’s many distinguished German devotees, wrote in his ode to the Genovan, ‘You’ve heard and understood the strangers’ voice / Interpreted their soul.’ Rousseau connects easily with the strangers to modernity, who feel scorned and despised by its brilliant but apparently exclusive realm. His books were the biggest best-sellers of the eighteenth century, and we still return to them today because they explore dark emotions stirring in the hearts of strangers rather than the workings of abstract reason. They reveal human beings as subject to conflicting impulses rather than as rational individuals pursuing their self-interest.

Take for instance his epistolary novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), whose socially outcast protagonist Saint-Preux is exactly the author’s own age. He arrives in glittering Paris to find in it ‘many masks but no human faces.’ Everyone is tyrannized by the fear of other people’s opinion. The airs of politeness conceal a lack of fidelity and trust. Survival in the crowd seems guaranteed by conformity to the views and opinions of whichever sectarian group one belongs to. The elites engage meanwhile in their own factional battles and presume to think on behalf of everyone else. The general moral law is one of obedience and conformity to the rules of the rich and powerful. Such a society where social bonds are defined by a dependence on other people’s opinion and competitive private ambition is a place devoid of any possibility of individual freedom. It is a city of valets, ‘the most degraded of men’ whose sense of impotence breeds wickedness — in children, in servants, in writers and the nobility.

Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. p. 90-1

Russia’s threshold for nuclear weapon use

Christopher Chivvis has an article in The Guardian about the danger of escalation to the use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine crisis:

There are possible other paths toward further escalation, but they all eventually lead toward the nuclear threshold. Scores of war games carried out by the United States and its allies in the wake of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine make it clear that Putin would probably use a nuclear weapon if he concludes that his regime is threatened. It is hard to know exactly what turn of events would scare him enough to cross the nuclear threshold. Certainly a large Nato army entering Russian territory would be enough. But what if events in Ukraine loosened his grip on power at home? Indeed, achieving regime change in Russia indirectly by making Putin lose in Ukraine seems to be the logic behind some of those who are pushing for escalation today.

Moving across the nuclear threshold wouldn’t necessarily mean an immediate, full-force nuclear exchange – in other words, global thermonuclear war. But it would be an extremely dangerous, watershed event in world history.

The nuclear option that has been most frequently discussed in the past few days involves Russia using a small nuclear weapon (a “non-strategic nuclear weapon”) against a specific military target in Ukraine. Such a strike might have a military purpose, such as destroying an airfield or other military target, but it would mainly be aimed at demonstrating the will to use nuclear weapons, or “escalating to de-escalate”, and scaring the west into backing down.

Some analysts have questioned Russia’s ability to actually carry out such an operation, given its lack of practice. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only or even the most likely option available to the Kremlin. Based on war games I ran in the wake of Putin’s 2014 invasion, a more likely option would be a sudden nuclear test or a high-altitude nuclear detonation that damages the electrical grid over a major Ukrainian or even Nato city. Think of an explosion that makes the lights go out over Oslo.

Those war games indicated that the best US response to this kind of attack would be first to demonstrate US resolve with a response in kind, aimed at a target of similar value, followed by restraint and diplomatic efforts to de-escalate. In most games, Russia still responds with a second nuclear attack, but in the games that go “well”, the United States and Russia manage to de-escalate after that, although only in circumstances where both sides have clear political off-ramps and lines of communication between Moscow and Washington have remained open. In all the other games, the world is basically destroyed.

The more elevated the crisis, the greater the risks of misunderstandings and panicked decisions.

350.org, fossil fuel divestment, and the campaign in a box

From a social movement perspective, one of the most interesting things about 350.org’s fossil fuel divestment campaign is how they have proliferated the strategy among (often newly formed) independent groups.

One mechanism has been written documents. Bill McKibben told me that reading the Carbon Tracker Initiative’s 2011 report “Unburnable Carbon: Are the World’s Financial Markets Carrying a Carbon Bubble?” was part of what prompted him and Naomi Klein to start promoting fossil fuel divestment. One of the main ways he got attention for the idea was his 2012 Rolling Stone article: “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”

350.org also undertook a “Do the Math” tour in 2012, visiting 21 cities in part to seed divestment campaigns.

350.org and other NGOs that worked to proliferate fossil fuel divestment held convergences for university divestment organizers at Swarthmore College (where Swarthmore Mountain Justice had first tried using divestment against mountaintop removal coal mining) in 2013, as well as in San Francisco and Montreal in 2014.

There are also written materials on setting up and advancing campaigns. A campus guide was released in 2012 and a trainers’ handbook in 2013. There has also been a similar document on their gofossilfree website since 2016.

I won’t get into analysis of the implications of this approach to organizing here, but I was prompted to write this because I have found the “campaign in a box” idea strangely undocumented online, despite how I thought it was a widely discussed feature of the movement.

Putin’s war in Ukraine and nuclear energy

Theoretically, nuclear fission could play a big role in providing energy-rich lifestyles to people around the world without climate change.

At the same time, there are severe economic, social, and political headwinds to even maintaining existing capacity, much less building more.

Now, I fear that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will add further causes for concern. Ukraine has four nuclear plants and 15 operating reactors — any of which could be damaged intentionally or unintentionally by combat, or which could experience a station blackout if the electricity grid goes down.

Russia’s actions are calling into question longstanding assumptions about global stability. If conflict will again be a feature of life in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia then potentially nuclear operators who already have public acceptance and cost competitiveness against other forms of energy generation as major concerns will have another reason to be wary of reactors. If an incident actually occurs at a Ukrainian nuclear facility, those public and elite concerns will be far more salient.

Should Elizabeth II end the monarchy?

An impression that I can’t shake the more I learn about the personal histories of people in the British royal family is that it has mostly been awful for them, and they might benefit as much as anyone from the abolition of the institution.

That makes this argument from Polly Toynbee more plausible: Clearly Britain loses more than it gains from the monarchy. Let us be brave and end it.

The only real argument I perceive for maintaining the institution is the idea that it’s a source of unifying stability within U.K. or Canadian or Commonwealth society. It’s the old argument against the French revolution: that things hallowed by tradition have an importance understood in culture more than it could be expressed in explicit rational argument, and that those seeking to design their institutions of government from whole cloth through rationality risk veering into tyrannical violence and social breakdown.

Arguably it’s an institution that can’t maintain its dignity in the absence of deference from the press, politicians, and the public. When society’s institutions are willing to reveal rather than conceal their weaknesses (I remember the character Charles saying something snotty in some docu-drama about not intending to be the first Price of Wales without a mistress) then their ordinariness transcends the high social status conferred on them by tradition and precedent.

Canada’s climate change record

I have rarely seen such a concise and numerically-backed summary of Canada’s climate change policy outcomes than this one from Steve Easterbrook’s blog in 2016:

Several things jump out at me from this chart. First, the complete failure to implement policies that would have allowed us to meet any of these targets. The dip in emissions from 2008-2010, which looked promising for a while, was due to the financial crisis and economic downturn, rather than any actual climate policy. Second, the similar slope of the line to each target, which represents the expected rate of decline from when the target was proposed to when it ought to be attained. At no point has there been any attempt to make up lost ground after each failed target. Finally, in terms of absolute greenhouse gas emissions, each target is worse than the previous ones. Shifting the baseline from 1990 to 2005 masks much of this, and shows that successive governments are more interested in optics than serious action on climate change.

At no point has Canada ever adopted science-based targets capable of delivering on its commitment to keep warming below 2°C.

In my July 2021 letter to Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson I defined the term “gapology” as: “the process going back to the Chrétien era of setting a GHG reduction target for political reasons and then performing economic analyses to compare potential mitigation measures and the GHG reductions expected to accompany them against the political target, always finding a gap in which some further action would be required.”

Trudeau’s net zero promise is an extension and reiteration of the gapology strategy: safely pushing accountability for meeting the target to long beyond his own time in office.

Related:

Open thread: Identity politics

Back in September, The Economist devoted a week’s letters page to responses to their article “How did American ‘wokeness’ jump from elite schools to everyday life?“.

A couple make particularly interesting points:

Your warning on the dangers of wokeism would leave many of the old thinkers on the left turning in their graves. The stunt pulled by the illiberal left is their assertion that they are the champions of the marginalised. I do not doubt many are sincere, just as the leaders of the Catholic church were sincere in the Inquisition. Religious fundamentalists of all sorts are sincere. But thinking you know best does not qualify for making a better world. Unless you are willing to debate your ideas openly, you are by definition an authoritarian conservative.

The modern-day book-banners, no-platformers, deniers of free speech and opponents of universalism in the name of identity politics are not of the left, the liberal left or even the New Left of the 1960s. As a student in the 1960s, I marched to demand free speech, the end of the war on Vietnam and civil rights. We were condemned as communists and beaten if unlucky to be near a police baton. Voltaire and John Stuart Mill inspired us. This is what Eric Hobsbawm, a British Marxist, had to say on identity politics:

The political project of the left is universalist, it is for all human beings… It isn’t liberty for shareholders or blacks, but for everybody… It is not fraternity only for old Etonians or gays, but for everybody. And identity politics is essentially not for everybody but for members of a specific group.

The Economist has got the ball rolling in the right direction.

Tor Hundloe

Emeritus professor

University of Queensland

Brisbane, Australia

I would quibble that people unwilling to publicly debate ideas could have any non-pluralistic political ideology, from authoritarian conservatism to authoritarian communism.

The second touches on something I have personally experienced in activist meetings:

One thinks of Michael Macy’s sociology experiments illustrating how, when faced with an illogical group consensus, individuals tend to publicly agree and even condemn dissenters, while privately expressing concern.

Unsupported theories, such as those of the illiberal left, that have taken root in societies require brave individuals to break the cycle and express their disagreement, regardless of the condemnation. But someone else can go first.

Anonymous

New York

I have the sense that most people make most decisions impulsively or intuitively, and the in-the-moment feeling of going along with consensus seems like it will always be more agreeable than the feeling of friction or tension with those around you. The trouble with decisions made intuitively is that they are often based on superficial consideration of a small amount of readily available and emotive data.

Political coalition building and Canada’s antivax blockades

Emma Jackson has an interesting article on the mega-libertarian “Freedom Convoy” protests and what they reveal about coalition building:

Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a lot that the anti-mandate movement is getting right from an organizing and movement-building perspective.

For starters, in stark contrast to the Left, the past few days have revealed how much better the Right is at meeting people where they’re at.

Instead of building an insular movement restricted to people who agree with each other 93 per cent of the time, the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views. It’s why the Freedom Convoy isn’t just being ardently defended by white supremacists on Rebel News, but also by anti-vaccine Green Party supporters in the inboxes of mainstream environmental organizations.

…

Insularity has prevented the left from reaching the mainstream. We have an opportunity to examine our tendency to build organizations that feel more like exclusive clubs for the “already woke,” than they do welcoming spaces for political education and transformation where people feel deeply valued and needed.

Jonathan Smucker reminds us: “Politics is not a clubhouse. Politics is messy. It is meeting everyday people where they are. It’s not an enclave. It’s not being the enlightened, ‘super‑woke’ people together, learning a special vocabulary, shaking our heads and wagging our finger at all these backward other people. That is a manifestation of the same social elitism that is actively structured by neoliberal society. Instead, politics needs to be woven into the fabric of all of our lives.”

Jackson is aspiring to a populist progressive movement that advances the whole left-wing agenda of economic redistribution, racial justice, further corporate regulation, and so on. I am more interested in the politics of building a consensus around fossil fuel abolition to avoid catastrophic climate change, in which agreement on other issues isn’t a prerequisite for legitimate participation. I think that will have to be comprised of people who broadly disagree about many political issues, but who nonetheless accept that maintaining the planetary stability which is the foundation of all political projects must be prioritized. A fired-up, more inclusive movement which still advocates for the entire progressive shopping list won’t do that, and arguably feeds polarization with the idea that only a new progressive society can fight climate change. Instead, it needs to become an issue where the voters who elect the mainstream centre-right and cente-left parties that form governments will demand rapid and substantial action, and not be placated about promises that someone else will solve the problem by a ‘net zero’ 2050.

Restoring and sustaining a democratic politics that can confront the challenge of climate change requires cultivating a politically influence branch of the conservative movement which respects empirical evidence instead of choosing what to believe based on their ideology. I don’t think anyone can see the path from here to there (and events like these trucker blockades are strengthening the fantasist wing), but I think it must involve a retreat from maximilist positions and arguments that one group’s entire political agenda must be implemented as the only way forward.

Related:

Linkages between universities and the fossil fuel industry in Singapore

A group from Singapore called Students for a Fossil Free Future has a new report: “Fossil-Fuelled Universities: A Call for Universities to End Links with the Fossil Fuel Industry.”

There is also a summary.

They found linkages between the fossil fuel industry and universities in terms of endowments; board members; donations; professorships and fellowships; scholarships, bursaries, and student awards; on-campus career events; and industry-linked professional programmes.

The transnational nature of the climate change activist movement

One challenge in the dissertation process has been repeated entreaties to only talk about Canadian campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) campaigns, not those in the US and UK.

I think Karen Litfin’s 2005 article “Advocacy Coalitions Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Globalization and Canadian Climate Change Policy” may be helpful for making my case that divestment is a transnational movement and that more is lost than gained by imposing national borders on its analysis. Litfin argues that “the twin phenomena of economic globalization and the internationalization of environmental affairs are blurring the distinction between some policy subsystems and the international arena.” I would argue that this is especially true for climate change activism, for several reasons. The politics of climate change are inherently bound up in international relations, since unilateral actions can’t solve the problem in the absence of cooperation between states. Furthermore, in North America the highly integrated energy systems — and the everpresent concern about Canadian economic competitiveness compared to the US — contributes to the transnationalization of climate politics, as do influences between ideologically similar political parties in both countries.

In addition, the strategies of broker organizations which have promoted divestment — including 350.org, the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, the US Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network, Canada’s Divest Canada Coalition, and the UK’s People & Planet — are based around providing a “campaign in a box” with coordinated objectives, branding, and messaging. Since the CFFD movement is focused on non-government actors, governments and national policy environments have a secondary importance for the movement.