Politics

L’année qui a mis fin à une époque ?

Dec 21, 2016 Javier Solana

MADRID – Alors que 2016 tire à sa fin, les perspectives de 2017 sont enveloppées de mystère. La tension monte au Proche-Orient et des mouvements populistes surgissent en Europe et aux États-Unis.

Au Proche-Orient, le conflit tragique de la Syrie s’éternise, malgré plusieurs vaines tentatives de rapprochement, qui ont été marquées par le désaccord fondamental sur le rôle futur du président syrien Bachar el-Assad dans un éventuel processus de paix ou de transition politique. Depuis lors, cette dernière semaine, les troupes du gouvernement syrien, aidées par la Russie et de l’Iran, ont reconquis presque la totalité d’Alep — autrefois la plus grande ville de la Syrie, maintenant complètement dévastée par la guerre.

La priorité mondiale pour l’année qui vient doit être de réaliser la paix en Syrie, ce qui nécessitera une étroite coopération régionale et internationale. Le 27 décembre, l’Iran, la Russie et la Turquie tiendront une réunion tripartite à Moscou pour décider d’une solution politique au conflit syrien. Cette réunion, si elle a lieu, sera probablement éclipsée par les retombées de l’assassinat de l’ambassadeur de la Russie en Turquie. Mais il n’y a rien de plus surprenant que ce sont ces parties prenantes, et non les États-Unis et l’Union européenne, qui sont en voie de négocier un tel accord.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 23 Comments on this article

Rolf Wasén Dec 24, 2016

It is quite unlikely that our world leaders will achieve their goals of reducing the tensions in the Middle East and halting what they call 'populist movements ´ in the west unless they rethink and get into a bit more sober mode of thought. So far not much indicates that. EU is not foreign to ´populistic activities´ and US involvement into Middle East affairs has been not very far from a disaster. Solana's article has the merit of making this clear for us.
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Rolf Wasén Dec 24, 2016

It is quite unlikely that our world leaders will achieve their goals of reducing the tensions in the Middle East and halting what they call 'populist movements ´ in the west unless they rethink and get into a bit more soberer mode of thought. So far not much indicates that. EU is not foreign to ´populistic activities´ and US involvement into Middle East affairs have been not very far from a disaster. Solana's article has the merit of making this clear for us.
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j. von Hettlingen Dec 23, 2016

Javier Solana says 2016 has been an annus horribilis for the West that might end "an epoch" of liberal democracy. In his view the outlook for 2017 looks grim. Nobody knows how the Middle East develops, with Russia backing the Assad regime in Syria. Equally uncertain is the outcome of next year's elections in France, Germany, where anti-EU populist parties seek to gain power. More unpredictable is the US going to be under Trump.
Syria lies in ruins, and the Syrians can no longer decide over their country's future, because it has become an occupied and divided land. The Assad regime needs foreign military presence to secure the areas it has recaptured. While the human pain is immeasurable - with half a million deaths and millions displaced - the destruction of a people's heritage is irretrievable. Once the social fabric is destroyed, it won't be easily replaced. The meeting of Iran, Russia, and Turkey on December 27 in Moscow to seek a political solution for the conflict, is doomed to fail, because neither Syria nor its opposition have a say. That the EU and the US are being excluded shouldn't come as a surprise, because Russia wants to demonstrate that it is the new master of the Middle East.
Solana, having served as EU foreign policy chief and head of NATO, worries about Europe's future. Britons had voted to leave the EU in the June referendum, and Theresa May's government is torn between various options in negotiating with the EU. A soft Brexit is her goal, while the EU is unlikely to budge from free movement of EU citizens in exchange for Britain's access to its single market.
The general elections in France and Germany will decide whether the European project still has a future, as the two are its founding members. In both countries mainstream parties face the surge of populists, who seek to spread nativism and economic nationalism. They are anti-establishment, rejecting globalisation and seeing the EU as undemocratic. They scapegoat migrants, blaming them for their grievances - loss of jobs and dwindling living standards.
Concerns about Trump's temperament and competence are justified. His presidency is "full of unknowns." If he makes good on his campagin pledges, he will upend commitments, agreements and treaties the US had signed decades ago with its allies. This would spell an end of Pax Americana and plunge the world into chaos. The current global order has secured economic and political stability since the end of World War II.
Trump has also filled his cabinet with plutocrats and former army chiefs. Instead of draining the "swamp" that he had promised his anti-establishment supporters to do, he will sink into it. The US-EU relations may no longer be a priority for Trump, once he and Putin mend fences. He will leave NATO and the EU to their devices, which now forces Europe to beef up its own defence. It suits Putin, as he has always seen these institutions in Brussels as a thorn in his side. Fortunately Trump wouldn't be able to rescind the Paris climate agreement and the nuclear agreement with Iran, because they are multilateral deals that the US signed together with other world players, who have no appetite to dance to his tune.
Surrounded by cronies and dubious advisers, Trump will fall out with his own party, and make many enemies abroad. He doesn't have the political acumen of Putin and Xi Jinping to run the country the way it should be run. He will set an example that populists are good at energising supporters, but have little substance to be taken seriously as competent leaders. It remains to be seen, if relations between the EU and the US will "remain strong." Certainly the basics of "mutual respect for democracy, freedom, and human rights" aren't part of Trump's DNA.
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Peter Schaeffer Dec 23, 2016

The Wages of Merkelism, and the Death of Europe by Michael Walsh

"That Merkel — like all the politically correct liberals across the European Union who have brought Europe to its present low estate — could not see this coming speaks to the tyranny of cultural Marxism that imposed itself on the nation-states of Europe in the form of the EU: a form of compulsive national suicide, preached as the logical consequence of guilt over World War II and imposed using the stick of “racism” with which to beat a gullible public.

Until now, Germany has suffered relatively little blowback to the willful blindness of its leaders: a suicide bombing here, a mass shooting there, a machete attack. Even the rape and murder of Maria Ladenburger in Freiburg by an Afghan “minor” “migrant” could not wake the country from its torpor.

And now comes Berlin. The site of the attack — the plaza near the famous Ku’damm (the main street of the former West Berlin) and a stone’s throw from the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial chuch — demolished during the war but left to stand as a ruined memento mori of the war’s devastation — now becomes a new memorial to a new war: a war that must be prosecuted with the same zeal and finality that rid the world of Nazi Germany in 1945. For the world now faces an even more worrisome, atavistic, and implacable foe that must be destroyed if western culture is to survive without fear or compromise."

Read the whole thing
- M M Dec 23, 2016
  
  Peter, you're to blame for not being so explicit and for not warning us about the eminent attack in Berlin.
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Peter Schaeffer Dec 23, 2016

How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen

Those in power see people at the bottom as aliens whose bizarre emotions they must try to manage.

By PEGGY NOONAN Aug. 11, 2016

This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist.

Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration. Last summer when Europe was engulfed with increasing waves of migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, Ms. Merkel, moving unilaterally, announced that Germany would take in an astounding 800,000. Naturally this was taken as an invitation, and more than a million came. The result has been widespread public furor over crime, cultural dissimilation and fears of terrorism. From such a sturdy, grounded character as Ms. Merkel the decision was puzzling—uncharacteristically romantic about people, how they live their lives, and history itself, which is more charnel house than settlement house.

Ms. Merkel’s acquaintance sighed and agreed. It’s one thing to be overwhelmed by an unexpected force, quite another to invite your invaders in! But, the acquaintance said, he believed the chancellor was operating in pursuit of ideals. As the daughter of a Lutheran minister, someone who grew up in East Germany, Ms. Merkel would have natural sympathy for those who feel marginalized and displaced. Moreover she is attempting to provide a kind of counter-statement, in the 21st century, to Germany’s great sin of the 20th. The historical stain of Nazism, the murder and abuse of the minority, will be followed by the moral triumph of open arms toward the dispossessed. That’s what’s driving it, said the acquaintance.

It was as good an explanation as I’d heard. But there was a fundamental problem with the decision that you can see rippling now throughout the West. Ms. Merkel had put the entire burden of a huge cultural change not on herself and those like her but on regular people who live closer to the edge, who do not have the resources to meet the burden, who have no particular protection or money or connections. Ms. Merkel, her cabinet and government, the media and cultural apparatus that lauded her decision were not in the least affected by it and likely never would be.

Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street—that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending—because nobody cares about them enough to stop it.

The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.”

And so the great separating incident at Cologne last New Year’s, and the hundreds of sexual assaults by mostly young migrant men who were brought up in societies where women are veiled—who think they should be veiled—and who chose to see women in short skirts and high heels as asking for it.
Cologne of course was followed by other crimes.

The journalist Chris Caldwell reports in the Weekly Standard on Ms. Merkel’s statement a few weeks ago, in which she told Germans that history was asking them to “master the flip side, the shadow side, of all the positive effects of globalization.”

Caldwell: “This was the chancellor’s . . . way of acknowledging that various newcomers to the national household had begun to attack and kill her voters at an alarming rate.” Soon after her remarks, more horrific crimes followed, including in Munich (nine killed in a McDonald’s) Reutlingen (a knife attack) and Ansbach (a suicide bomber).

The larger point is that this is something we are seeing all over, the top detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling.

On Wall Street, where they used to make statesmen, they now barely make citizens. CEOs are consumed with short-term thinking, stock prices, quarterly profits. They don’t really believe that they have to be involved with “America” now; they see their job as thinking globally and meeting shareholder expectations.

In Silicon Valley the idea of “the national interest” is not much discussed. They adhere to higher, more abstract, more global values. They’re not about America, they’re about . . . well, I suppose they’d say the future.

In Hollywood the wealthy protect their own children from cultural decay, from the sick images they create for all the screens, but they don’t mind if poor, unparented children from broken-up families get those messages and, in the way of things, act on them down the road.

From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.

In Manhattan, my little island off the continent, I see the children of the global business elite marry each other and settle in London or New York or Mumbai. They send their children to the same schools and are alert to all class markers. And those elites, of Mumbai and Manhattan, do not often identify with, or see a connection to or an obligation toward, the rough, struggling people who live at the bottom in their countries. In fact, they fear them, and often devise ways, when home, of not having their wealth and worldly success fully noticed.

Affluence detaches, power adds distance to experience. I don’t have it fully right in my mind but something big is happening here with this division between the leaders and the led. It is very much a feature of our age. But it is odd that our elites have abandoned or are abandoning the idea that they belong to a country, that they have ties that bring responsibilities, that they should feel loyalty to their people or, at the very least, a grounded respect.

I close with a story that I haven’t seen in the mainstream press. This week the Daily Caller’s Peter Hasson reported that recent Syrian refugees being resettled in Virginia, were sent to the state’s poorest communities. Data from the State Department showed that almost all Virginia’s refugees since October “have been placed in towns with lower incomes and higher poverty rates, hours away from the wealthy suburbs outside of Washington, D.C.” Of 121 refugees, 112 were placed in communities at least 100 miles from the nation’s capital. The suburban counties of Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington—among the wealthiest in the nation, and home to high concentrations of those who create, and populate, government and the media—have received only nine refugees.

Some of the detachment isn’t unconscious. Some of it is sheer and clever self-protection. At least on some level they can take care of their own.
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Peter Schaeffer Dec 23, 2016

Some quotes from Ann Coulter, telling the truth about this election

“Americans who make $20,000 a year are made fun of by Samantha Bee for going to Wal-Mart.

These are all people who will knife one another in the back to get their kids into $50,000-a-year all-white preschools. But they think they’re less racist than other Americans because of their pleasant interactions with Rosa when she comes to clean.

In the modern Democratic Party, out-of-work coal miners are constantly denounced for their “privilege” by half-black girls at Yale — who wouldn’t have gotten in without the black half and who will be paid a quarter-million dollars as the “diversity coordinator” at some Fortune 500 corporation. ”

“This is why the snowflakes are smashing windows, beating up Trump supporters and calling for the assassination of Trump and the rape of his wife. If you’ve ever wondered how France’s Reign of Terror happened, observe the anti-Trump protests — the main result of which is to convince people who had misgivings about voting for Trump that they did the right thing..

Read it all.
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Peter Schaeffer Dec 23, 2016

The elite’s Marie Antoinette moment

Right response is to focus on the financial sector and inequality

Wolfgang Münchau

Some revolutions could have been avoided if the old guard had only refrained from provocation. There is no proof of a “let them eat cake” incident. But this is the kind of thing Marie Antoinette could have said. It rings true. The Bourbons were hard to beat as the quintessential out-of-touch establishment.

They have competition now.

Our global liberal democratic establishment is behaving in much the same way. At a time when Britain has voted to leave the EU, when Donald Trump has been elected US president, and Marine Le Pen is marching towards the Elysée Palace, we — the gatekeepers of the global liberal order — keep on doubling down.

The campaign by Tony Blair, former UK prime minister, to undo Brexit is probably the quaintest example of all. A more serious incident was the forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility in the UK, which said last week that Brexit would have severe economic consequences. Coming only a few months after the economics profession discredited itself with a doomy forecast about the consequences of Brexit, this is an astonishing reminder of the inadequacy of economic forecasting models.

Read it all...
- Jan Czaja Dec 23, 2016
  
  Couldn't agree more Peter. Yet they still have their heads up you know where and continue to write these articles lamenting how they just don't understand what's happening around them and why isn't "the rabble" listening to their wisdom.
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Peter Schaeffer Dec 23, 2016

Uniquely Talented: Only the Democrats Could Have Lost to Trump
Posted on November 24, 2016 by Fred Reed

A great uproar goes forth from the enemies of the Trump Beast, with much gnashing of hair and pulling of teeth. He will be a terrible President, they say, and they may well be right. There are ominous signs, particularly as regards foreign policy, and he seems radically incoherent and contradictory. Interestingly, his critics have no slight idea why he won. The reason is obvious: He won because everybody was campaigning for him, in particular the media, Hillary, Black Lives Matter, Obama, Democrats, and far leftists. Everybody worked for Trump. He couldn’t lose.

The election was a referendum on Marie Antoinette’s court. It was the revolt of the unnoticed downtrodden, the financially sinking, the working classes rising against privileged snots–but it was engineered by the elites. The glittering elect of course did not say “working class,” this being a loaded phrase redolent of Marxism and of the Democratic Party of five decades back before it became a royal court. They spoke instead of disgruntled white men, racists, homophobes, sexists, and the Islamonauseated–phobic, I meant.

The rich and powerful are on display in Washington, white, well paid, secure, above average in intelligence, often from Oberlin, Amherst, Swarthmore, Yale. The better sorts of schools, you know. They cluster in Washington’s posh barrios of Bethesda, Upper Connecticut, Cap Hill, and Great Falls. They drink together and talk to each other and believe that they must be right because everyone they know agrees with them.

Theirs is not a personal arrogance–they are nice people and you would like them–but an arrogance of class. Since nobody tells them they they are either arrogant or a class, they do not know. Since everybody around them lives at a high standard, it does not occur to them that they they live at a high standard. They exist in a small mental box.

They do not know that that in the bleak down-scale strip development of Jeff Davis Highway, a half-hour away, reeking of exhaust and blowing with trash, an aged veteran on crutches lives in a dismal residential motel. Every mourning he hobbles to Dixie Lee’s Diner–I forget its actual name–for a cheap breakfast because it is all he has. Or ever will. He is waiting to die. The elite don’t know, and wouldn’t care.

The upper crust are also moral frauds, though they do not know this either. Nice liberals to the roots of their teeth, in principle they believe that we should all love each other, and they hate anyone who doesn’t. In practice they approximate George Wallace. Ask when they last went to the ghetto for dinner, whether they have ever been in a restaurant with a majority black clientele, whether they would send their precious children to the public schools of New York. Ask whether they have a blue-collar friend.

The privileged worked hard for Trump. Every time they described his people as uneducated white males, implicit dregs, they drove votes to Donald. And they so described the working class unceasingly.

It made him President. Good, bad, or indifferent, it is how he got in.

The privileged denigrated all whites unlike themselves. Then Hillary made her “deplorables” speech, confirming her contempt for half of America–those uneducated, shapeless, dull-witted proles in Flyover Land, obese, farting and belching, swilling Bud, watching NASCAR for god’s sake in awful trailers. And why not not sneer at them? Why did Hillary need their votes? Did not Rachel Maddow love her?

For Trump it was gold, pure gold. If he had written her speech, he could not have come up with a better line to destroy her. It was the purest product of the establishment’s hubris. She did it to herself. Sweet.

It made him President.

Black Lives Matter also did yeoman work for the Donald. As they and snowflake Brown Shirts and excited millennials blocked highways and beat Trump’s supporters and shut down rallies, and vandalized cars, and of course looted, they presumably thought they were working against the Trump Monster. Not a chance. Out there in the uncharted barbarian lands between Manhattan and Hollywood, in dark primeval forests where Cro-Magnons are still a rarity, people were sick of lawlessness, and of an establishment that tolerated it. It produced more votes, perhaps not for Trump or even against Hillary but against the class that she represented.

Immigration. Here Hillary and Obama did great work for Donald. As Obama frantically brought in as many “refugees” as possible from everywhere, anywhere that might not be compatible with the people upon whom he would force them, Hillary promised to import huge numbers of Muslims. It was luminously stupid politics, but politically she was luminously stupid, so it fit.

It is why she is not President.

She knew that the backward peoples of Flyover Land ought to want hundreds of thousands of Somalis and Pakistanis and who-knew-what to live with, and if they didn’t, she would force them and it didn’t matter because she had big donors and everybody in the media loved her.

However incoherent and ignorant Trump was, the Establishment was determined to elect him. Elect him it did.

Then there is the insularity of the privileged. Its extent is hard to grasp. It worked mightily for the new President. Hillary has probably never been in a Legion hall with, god, that kind of people; if she had, she might be President. Instead she set a trotline for big donors and hung with the rich. They told her, didn’t they, that she couldn’t lose.

These, like her, knew nothing of the lives of most Americans. Has Bill Kristol hitchhiked in the chill of three a.m. on a secondary road in Appalachia, total wealth twenty-five dollars, hoping sparse traffic would get him to Roanoke? I am accepting bets. I doubt that Katie Couric, or any of the babbling bubble heads, has ever worked in a truck stop or gas station for minimum wage, if that. How many have ever baited a hook, had a paper route, or had to decide between a warm coat with winter coming on or paying the cable?

This is why Trump took them by such surprise. They were dealing with a country they had never seen. And didn’t like. Lord only knows what kind of President Trump will make (unless God also is wondering, which I find plausible) but he had the country figured out. Which is positively weird, given that he is a filthy rich New Yorker.

And the media. These too did great work for our new President. All the corporate outlets were furiously against him, apparently assuming that their opprobrium would crush the upstart. Were they not CBS and NBC and the Washington Post, respected news outlets that people would believe and trust?

Well, no, actually.

And so the talking heads chuckled and sneered and utterly underestimated and got handed their ass. They should have registered as lobbyists for the Donald.

The newsies did not understand that they were widely hated. Their obvious slant, often approaching verticality, looked like (and was) hostility to anyone who was willing to consider Trump. The common sentiment in Flyover Land became, “If these bastards don’t like Donald, he must be OK.”

They made him President.

It reminds me of when Bob Brown started Soldier of Fortune magazine, purporting to be a rag for, oh horror, squeak, mercenary soldiers. The media fell into convulsions denouncing him, cough, splutter, how could…. And with every denunciation, circulation went up. Ol’ Bob, he just smile.

But the talking heads couldn’t figure it out. Did they not all agree with each other? Did not all of America hate what they hated?

Well, ah…heh. Urg.

So when he slapped down Megyn Kelly of Fox News, the talking heads exploded with delighted horror. Trump had just screwed himself with women, who would vote en bloc for Hillary. Whatever minute chance he might have had was now dead. Chortle, chortle.

Actual results: 42% of women, and 53% of white women, voted for…oops, ah…Trump.

Why? An obvious hypothesis is that women think for themselves, and did. Perhaps they thought Megyn, an abrasive plastic Barbie who probably gets more daily maintenance than a 747, was…an abrasive Baribie….

Trump could say to them, to Hillary, the media, the Insular Good, to BLM and the Snowflakes, “Thank you, thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
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Peter Schaeffer Dec 23, 2016

The fantasy worldview of the cosmopolitan elite racked up a body count of 12 in a Berlin Christmas market. The delusional rule of Europe's Marie Antoinette's is cratering. It is the end of an Epoch. Not a moment too soon.
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Paul Daley Dec 23, 2016

It seems to be more the end of an interlude than the end of an era. The West needs to come to terms with Russia, and to use the model that emerges as a pattern for engagement with China. The Brexit negotiations can actually be useful in that regard in taking a first cut at a relationship that both restricts and enables exchanges of goods, capital people and technology.
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M M Dec 23, 2016

Planet Earth has survived, earthquakes, tsunamis (of all sorts), famine, diseases, wars, conflicts, the self inflicted damage called "AUSTERITY"... It will survive Trump and the more than certain uncertainities.
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Stephen Morris Dec 22, 2016

We are indeed witnessing the end of an epoch, but not - I suspect - in the sense that Javier Solana means. What we're witnessing is the end of the Modern Era. We are witnessing the end of the "Century of the Common Man and Woman". We are witnessing the "refeudalisation" of society.

If in years to come some robotic historian comes to chronicle the end of the human race, they might look to the "Modern Era" - culminating in the 20th Century, the Century of the Common Man and Woman - as a bizarre anomaly.

It is easy to forget that the Modern Era with its Modern Era values of egalitarianism, democratisation and national self-determination is . . . well . . . modern! It hasn’t been around for very long.

It is easy to forget that when viewed with proper perspective, human history up until the time of the Modern Era was a story of aggressively narcissistic, machiavellian psychopaths competing (sometimes collaborating) to attain positions of power, then using that power to dominate and brutalise their fellow human beings. We know from the historical record that these rulers showed no remorse in wasting the lives of thousands - even millions - of people they regarded as “their” Subjects.

That is the norm. That is the “base case” for human behaviour.

In that behaviour, psychopathic rulers were abetted by “sycophants” - typically timid, less dominant males - who sought to promote their own survival and reproductive prospects by allying themselves with the dominant males. Articulate sycophants often provided the “theology” of elite rule, constructing elaborate justifications for the privilege of their patrons.

In pre-modern times the ability of psychopathic elites to dominate and brutalise others was limited by:

a) the need to preserve a sufficiently large labour force to provide the raw mechanical energy to support their regimes; and

b) the limited capacity of individual human beings to kill each other, and therefore by the need to recruit and reward a circle of allies (a “praetorian guard”) which could carry out such enforcement.

Now, if that long-standing behaviour seemed to change in the Modern Era it was NOT because the psychopaths woke up one morning and said, “Oh my God!! Is that the time!? Is it the Modern Era already? Quick. We’d better start enacting social reforms!”

Human psychology has not evolved. Evolution operates over a much longer time frame. The psychopaths (and their sycophant supporters) have not gone away.

All that happened in the Modern Era was a temporary change in the environment: the demands of the industrial economy meant that it was expedient – for a time – for the rulers to make limited concessions to their Subjects.

The industrial state required the training of large numbers of Subjects to operate the complex – but not fully automated – machinery of industrial production. Having had so much invested in their training, Subjects acquired value and their bargaining power relative to their rulers improved. In the extreme, they could withdraw their labour and quickly impose greater costs on the owners of capital than they themselves suffered.

Under such conditions, the optimal strategy for rulers (and only after they had tried violent suppression and found it ineffective!) was to make certain limited concession to their Subjects. Thus we had the quintessential ideals of the Modern Era, culminating in the 20th century:

a) egalitarianism, the ideal that all people are entitled to the same basic opportunities irrespective of their ancestry;

b) democratisation, the ideal that Subjects are entitled to have some say in how they are governed; and

c) national self-determination, the ideal that self-identifying communities are allowed to choose for themselves how they will govern themselves.

If there was one ideal that characterised the 20th century it was surely that of national self-determination: from the first shots fired by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in July 1914, through Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, through the post World War II era of decolonisation, through the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and right back to Sarajevo and the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Given the opportunity, like-minded communities like to govern themselves.

But none of these concessions meant that the psychopaths had gone away. And there was never anything to say that the conditions of industrial production would last forever.

What we are witnessing now is an elite response to the post-industrial world of AI and robotics.

No longer are large numbers of Subjects required to run complex but not fully automated machinery. Now it is small numbers of very highly trained technicians required to manage the robotic workforce. Small in number, they can easily be bought off. Better still, they can effectively be reduced to the status of indentured workers through the weapon of crippling student debt. They dare not rebel for fear of their debts being called in.

As for the rest of humanity, they are now redundant or soon will be. Their rulers no longer need them. And those the earlier concessions are - as the saying goes - “inoperative”.

To be sure, the masses may get employment of a kind, especially in providing personal services. But it will be employment in the “Uber Economy”, the “Gig Economy”, of savage competition between workers with all economic rent flowing to the owners of the monopolistic market platforms.

And the New Elite are responding precisely as one would expect an aggressively narcissistic, self-serving elite to respond. They are relentlessly winding back any concessions hitherto made, while their sycophant economic theologians are busy justifying it all as being for the “Greater Good”.

Inequality is quickly returning to its historical norm, as Piketty has documented. Piketty’s U-shaped graphs show inequality of wealth in the most developed countries declining into the mid 20th century then rising steadily again. It’s the past century that was the anomaly. We are returning to a “feudal” state in which property is owned by the magnates and almost everyone else is reduced to the status of dependent serf.

Where conventional property has proved insufficient, the Elite have invented novel forms of “intellectual property” to expand the scope of private ownership.

As for democratisation, in most countries it never developed beyond “elective” government dominated by elite parties. Moneyed interests and pressure groups found it a trivial exercise to subvert that. Campaign bribery and the revolving door of jobs-for-the-boys ensure that the interests of politicians and senior bureaucrats remain aligned with those of the elite.

This past year has seen an outbreak of rebellion, but it’s unlikely to last.

In the wake of Brexit and the Trump rebellion, there is now open talk in elite circles on whether it is appropriate to allow “obviously ignorant” people to vote on critical issues. “They’re not college educated, you know.”

There is now open talk in elite circles on whether those who “receive more in government benefits than they pay in tax” should be allowed to vote at all. Oddly, there is no suggestion that those monopolists who receive more in economic rent than they pay in tax, or those lobbyists who receive more in government contracts than they pay in tax, or those too-big-to-fail bankers who receive more in bail-outs than they pay in tax, should be similarly disenfranchised.

Remember that the universal adult franchise is modern. In most countries it’s barely a century old. There is nothing to say that the Elite won’t campaign to remove it again. Or effectively subvert it by making it difficult for lesser mortals to enrol. Or re-jig the electoral system to ensure that minor parties have no hope of election.

And even if minor parties and “outsiders” do get to be elected, they usually prove to be a disappointment. Those attracted to politics are inevitably those who yearn to exercise power. Look at the 2010 election in Britain, where the Liberal Democrats were given a once-in-a-century opportunity to reform Britain’s voting system and introduce proportional representation. Nick Clegg threw it all away in return for the chance to be Deputy Prime Minister for five years.

Likewise in the US, those who threw in their lot with Donald Trump out of sheer desperation for an alternative may not have long to wait before suffering the pangs of disappointment.

In any event, the Elite are entrenching their gains by taking ever more critical decisions out of the hands of elective government altogether: the privatisation of strategic monopolies, essential services and critical databases means that elected politicians are forced negotiate with private magnates on terms dictated by the private magnates.

And finally there is national self-determination which has been eroded by the growth of undemocratic, opaque and unaccountable “neo-empires” like the EU, and so-called “trade” agreements which have less to do with trade and more to do with signing away sovereign powers to unaccountable committees of elite business interests.

Organisations like the EU may be created with the best of intentions, but no sooner do they come into existence than an “iron law of megalomania” takes hold. They begin to attract those self-same narcissistic, machiavellian individuals who are drawn to the prospect of exercising dominion over millions of other human beings. As with any empire, the Subjects soon end up suffering in the pursuit of some “greater good”. Witness the economically counter-productive brutality inflicted on Greece. Witness the “Lost Generation” of unemployed European youth sacrificed to the Eurozone fantasy.

Now, like Elites throughout history the post-modern Elite seek to weave a cloak of virtue to conceal the nakedness of their self-interest. Their theologians devise all manner of mellifluous apologia.

Elite theologians love to talk in honeyed terms about the “end of borders”, but do not be deceived. They don’t really intend to abolish borders. All they are really doing is replacing “national borders” (over which the mass of ordinary citizens might have had some control) with “private borders”: elite private property.

The Elite do not intend to rub shoulders with the plebs. They retreat to their private mansions, their private country estates, their private campuses, their private gated communities, all surrounded by private borders marked with “KEEP OUT. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted!” signs.

The Elite do not intend to stand, crushed cheek-to-sweaty-cheek with the prols on inadequate and overcrowded public transport. They whizz from their private mansions to their private offices on roads which have been tolled or “road-priced” or "congestion-charged" out of the reach of the masses. It’s like the Zil Lanes of old Soviet Moscow but justified nowadays by deference to that Great God, “Efficiency”.

And from behind their private borders the Elite sermonise piously on the supposed intolerance of those outside! Hypocrites blind to their own hypocrisy.

On all fronts the trend is the same: the alienation of public rights - over which the citizens used to have some say - to elite private interests.

And if all of that sounds depressing, it may be only the beginning.

Unless there is some spectacular change, at some point the Elite may decide that the continued existence of masses of redundant and increasingly disgruntled human beings is a threat to their own security.

In this past year we have seen the Chinese unveil lethal weaponised robotic “security guards” with rudimentary artificial intelligence that can be used to control “anti-social” elements. In the US we saw the first remote execution of a suspected criminal by a police robot.

If this does not send a chill down your spine, you’ve not been paying attention. The technology of robotic “pacification” is indifferent to Good and Bad. Not only do the Elite not need workers. They no longer require humans for their Praetorian Guard.

Now, some might be inclined to dismiss this as “conspiracy theory”. But here’s the thing: there is no conspiracy. There’s nothing underhand going on. There are no secrets. All this is happening in plain sight. One merely needs to look about and then remember that human psychology has not evolved.

There has always existed within the human population a small proportion of individuals who are not like the rest of us. They are aggressively narcissistic, machiavellian, possibly psychopathic, with a strong appetite for attaining power and dominating others. They may not always be apparent. One of the defining characteristics of psychopathy is “superficial charm”. The psychopath knows more about you than you know about yourself. He or she knows exactly which buttons to press to gain your confidence, your trust, even your admiration.

Had it been possible to establish genuine Democracy with the right of recall, veto, initiative and referendum there might have been some hope for the rest of the human race, some hope of effectively controlling these people. That is why elite theologians universally abhor genuine Democracy in favour of the corrupt system of “elective” government: elective government which perversely attracts the most undesirable narcissists.

Elective government provides no safeguards. It will prove no barrier to containing the psychopaths once the cost of pacification falls as a result of robotics.

You don’t need to be Einstein to see how this game must play itself out.

For most people it’s not going to be a happy ending.

The Holocaust is approaching.
- Stephen Morris Dec 23, 2016
  
  "Now, some might be inclined to dismiss this as 'conspiracy theory'. But here’s the thing: there is no conspiracy. There’s nothing underhand going on. There are no secrets. All this is happening in plain sight. One merely needs to look about and then remember that human psychology has not evolved."
  
  The human race did not sleepwalk in World War I. That war - like wars before it - was begun by ambitious politicians who thought (wrongly as it turned for some of them) that the cost would be borne by other (lesser) people. As Churchill confided to Violet Asquith on 22 February 1915:
  
  "I think a curse should rest on me - because I LOVE this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment - & yet - I CAN"T help it - I enjoy every second of it."
  
  The one country that did manage to avoid war while all around were consumed was - of course - the only democratic country in Europe: Switzerland.
  
  People empowered by Democracy - true Democracy, not the corrupt system of elective government - may defend themselves but they don't vote for aggressive war.
  
  Wars are made by politicians for other people to die in.
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- Curtis Carpenter Dec 22, 2016
  
  An interesting essay Stephen, and worth the read. But I'd offer two suggested lines of thought for your consideration.
  
  1) You assume that someone or some group is in charge and calling the shots (psychopaths, "the elite") But another possibility is that the geopolitical/economic system has become somehow autonomous and is calling its OWN shots quite apart from any specific human interventions. To paraphrase Emerson, events may be in the saddle and riding mankind, rather than the other way 'round. We know of self-organizing systems at a small small scale: we may all be about to become victims of a self-organizing system that has emerged at a very large one. Some argue that this is how WW1 came about -- mankind "sleep-walked" into the war.
  
  2) The idea of a "conspiracy of the elites" would have to be far too broad, in my view, to be realistic, even if "the elite" were identified in concrete, specific "name names" terms. One of "the elite" -- with some actual credibility, not an Alec Jones or a Breitbart-like hack -- would have spilled the beans by now.
  
  We long to believe that human agency is in control in some conscious way, because the other possibility is just too horrible to think about. But there are multiple ways that your holocaust may indeed happen -- not by the action of any select group of "elites," but by each one of us making our own small contribution to it.
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Curtis Carpenter Dec 22, 2016

Building trust between "great powers" is certainly important, but the more difficult and important problem I think lies in rebuilding the trust of the people in their own governments. For a good example of the problem, note how few people seem to trust their own governments to negotiate trade agreements favorable to their individual interests.

As to the end of an epoch -- Rome has not yet fallen, but we find that the barbarians aren't at the gates: they are instead living right next door(and have been for years).
- Henk Crop Dec 23, 2016
  
  Curtis
  I fully agree. It is the gap beween the Elite (Government, Press, Institutions ) and the people. In the US they did not expect mr. Trump to win and in Europe they did not expect Brexit.
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jagjeet sinha Dec 22, 2016

INTERLUDES IN A 500 YEAR EPOCH
Spain joined THE EUROPEAN UNION in the 1980s.
Not sure whether 30+ years qualifies to be termed Epoch.
Even France and Germany have been together with The Anglosphere only since 1945.
Not sure whether 40+ extra years is enough to classify the period as an Epoch.
The First Brexit in 1534 was followed by the extraordinary Genius of Great Britain in creating The Anglosphere.
Nearly 500 years later, The Anglosphere is not only The World's Economic Epicentre.
It remains the One Guarantee in an Age of Uncertainty - twice in the last century it was the Only Salvation.
It remains the Final Destination of millions of Migrants from Europe principally - unable to find salvation within the EU.
The Anglosphere Age is The Epoch - Spanish/French/German partnerships are merely interludes in a 500 year Epoch.
- jagjeet sinha Dec 27, 2016
  
  ETERNITY OF THE TRINITY
  Anarchy is never an Alternative.
  The Anglosphere is Globally Inclusive - One Island in Europe, One Island in Asia, A SubContinent in America.
  The Challengers require Global Inclusiveness - Europe Asia America is The Trinity.
  China Russia India Arabia Europe individually not yet as Globally Inclusive.
  But of course, you are right - HISTORY is witness to The Rise and Fall of several empires.
  Eternity never the monopoly of any Empire - only The Trinity is Infinity.
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- Ariel Tejera Dec 25, 2016
  
  Maybe the full 500 year "epoch" will indeed change if the new victors (of the current turmoil) wish to write history in a different way ...
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Armin Schmidt Dec 21, 2016

From my POV too an epoch ended. Moral idealism in the west is in recession. And existential subgroup liberation is booming. There are solid reasons for this trend change. And there are solid reasons for fearing this trend change: its historic track record.
There is more detail from this perspective in my account's bio.
Therein I tried for a rule of thumb to separate the necessary from the destructive, and a bridging vision into a time when moral idealism gains importance again.
I am sorry for repeating myself, I am pushed by desperation and pulled by mission.
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https://prosyn.org/QPhKasPfr

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