London Bridge on November 25, 2017

The Trump administration will escalate attacks on universities in particular and on expertise in general. Trump is setting up an autocratic executive branch, and as Masha Gessen observes, “Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy.”  Trump continuously imposes the problem not simply of arranging a mutual recognition of expertise and democracy but of avoiding the destruction of both.

How are the targets of Trump’s autocracy campaign supposed to respond?  Reactive self-defense won’t work. Another paradigm has to be constructed piece by piece. 

 

This post continues my effort to think through the relation between U.S. politics and knowledge.  Politics seems to me to have become a knowledge sink. In the U.S., a good way to win in politics is to glorify the refusal of knowledge.  Trump is especially good at glorifying knowledge’s destruction as a triumph of the will.

 

Democrats tend to hate this, whether they went to college or not. But they haven’t figured out how to expose or weaken it.  They are also haunted by one famous reference to the issue.

 

During her 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton made a snotty remark about half of Trump’s voters that allowed the Republicans to move the clock back to George Wallace time. 

 

Clinton was speaking at a fundraiser on September 9^th when this happened:

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

 

She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”

 

Republicans turned the deplorables line into a permanent symbol of the reverse bigotry of educated elites.  Hillary Clinton became the icon of the professional-managerial elite that looks down on ordinary Americans and feels entitled to force puberty blockers on their children and make them say Latinx.

 

The twinned idea is that billionaires, private equity kings, and tech lords are not elites but powerful defenders of regular people. They prove this with their hostility to transgender people and civil service employees. The deplorables narrative equates right-wing positions with triumphant wealth and heartland Main Street.

 

I felt no love for Clinton’s policy positions.  However, when you put both halves of her statement together, was Clinton actually wrong about MAGA? 

 

She was saying that MAGA voters were a mix of the desperate who wanted a change candidate and the bigoted who after eight years of a Black First Family wanted a white candidate to ride to the rescue.  These days, there’s widespread agreement that Trump voters are a mix of the two positions. 

 

Many have pointed out that Trump voters weren’t getting dogwhistle racism but the explicit kind.  This was even more true in 2024.  At his big final rally at Madison Square Garden, the comedian Tony Hutchcliffe famously said, “there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson remarked that Kamala Harris is “just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” He was echoing Trump’s own refrain of calling her “slow,” and a “low IQ person.”

 

As far as I know, the media never found a Trump voter who said, “I just love his tariff policy, but I can’t vote for him now because he keeps calling the Black woman ‘low-IQ.’ It takes a special kind of pocketbook voter to support a racist oligarch for his supposed economic populism.  Trump has tens of millions of them. Hillary Clinton was making this same point.

 

In his 2024 election debrief, Keith Boykin said, “Let’s be real. Trump doesn’t represent policy. He represents cultural resentment against the changing America.”  Boykin doesn’t call MAGA voters deplorables, but he’s making this same point. 

 

There’s social psychological research that backs this up. The book Authoritarian Nightmare appeared during Trump’s 2020 campaign.  Former Nixon counsel John Dean partnered with social psychologist Bob Altemeyer to tie Trump partisans to high scores on an instrument that generates a Right-Wing Authoritarian (RWA) scale.  It has been in use since the 1970s. 

 

Dean and Altemeyer were able to combine this scale with a Monmouth University Polling Institute survey of Trump voters. Their conclusion is memorable. 

The verdicts are in. (1) Donald Trump’s supporters are, as a group, highly authoritarian compared to most Americans. (2) They are also highly prejudiced compared to most Americans. (3) You can explain the prejudice in Trump’s supporters almost entirely by their authoritarianism. (4) Authoritarianism is a strongly organized set of attitudes in America that will prove very difficult to reduce and control. . . . The pillars of Trump’s base, white evangelicals and white undereducated males are highly authoritarian and prejudiced. . . . The connections among prejudice, authoritarianism and support for Donald Trump are so strong that no other independent factor can be as important in supporting his re-election. There just is not much left to be explained, which is a highly unusual situation in the social sciences, but that is where the data have taken us. Ask a very complicated question: Who are Trump’s staunch supporters? Get a very simple answer: Prejudiced authoritarians, and a few others.( Dean and Altemeyer 2020, 224–25).

 

My point is not so much that Hillary was right, or that MAGA voters are deplorable, or that tens of millions of Trump voters willingly jumped into Trump’s basket of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia.  

 

My points are, first, that some large percentage of Trump voters vote on the basis of bias, fake knowledge, destroyed knowledge, persecution mania, or epistemic violence. 

Second, authoritarianism validates false knowledge as true knowledge simply because its source is the leader. It prevents learning, both individually and collectively.

 

And third, most of the media –and the left—treat their positions as authentic working-class consciousness rather than as what they are, bullshit that undermines of the possibility of political knowledge. 

 

I find this free pass massively patronizing of Trump voters. Most are legitimately angry about housing costs, food prices, et al., and are statistically almost as likely as Democrats to think corporate America has too much power. Yet they have perverse, backward ideas about how to fix real problems, nearly all of which will make the problems worse while enabling the persecution of millions of people. And yet most pundits, policy wonks, and Democratic politicians do not hold them to the same standards of political thinking that the rest of us have to live by at work, at home, in public meetings, or on the bus ride every single day.

 

This inhibition is an artifact of the right’s teplorables Taboo. “If you think my racist or sexist or stupid economic position is wrong, that’s the same as saying I’m a deplorable, which makes you elitist and wrong and out of touch with regular people.”  Instead of being mercilessly critiqued--not for who they are but for what they think, Trump voters are often granted carte blanche authenticity and legitimacy.  A lot of commentators are scared not to.  The deplorable taboo immunizes the Trump voter from criticism and from ordinary self-reflection.

 

I’m not saying the left should match Trump’s insult politics and call Trumpers too dumb to live, to name the URL of my first blog 20 years ago. These are some of my relatives we’re talking about.

 

But I am saying we should use the teacher’s approach to the knowledge gulf teachers face every day. Respect for and dialogue with the person, relentless dispute of their bad or lacking information and their bad and destructive ideas. And the building of a public ethos that expects this. 

 

It’s the age-old “love the sinner, hate the sin.” Clinton may have sounded more like “hate the sinner”—and the sinner is often subject to overt coercion.  But Democrats have paid enough for the condescension in her remark. The left now has to be fully in the business of contesting terrible Trumper thought. 

 

If we don’t do this full-scale attack on Trumpian epistemology starting with the most popular parts, the left will fail in its renewed post-election efforts to speak directly to the real concerns of the American working class.  

I particularly like Hasan Piker’s version, blocked quoted here, and Faiz Shakir’s version. But all this getting real won’t change anything unless we address the underlying knowledge crisis. Their fake knowledge needs to be engaged, attacked, replaced and its foundations exposed. 

If we don't do this, we will also fail in the ongoing effort to replace oligarchic governance with complex systems to deal with our polycrises.  

 

Trump revives the Republican's ancient roots as the party of the small businessman who might soon become a platform mogul—Joe the plumber, the mattress store owner who builds a national franchise, Elon Musk. The key feature of this type is direct and absolute rule over their company, then generalized to the entire society. You don’t need Hitler for this kind of authoritarian sovereignty as a way of managing systems. This is standard practice for  the American CEO.

 

Democrats have become the party of the well-educated and also of public spending on knowledge economy infrastructure.  The Democrats are wrong about many things—their entire foreign policy needs to be burned to the ground—but they are right about the fact that only complex systems and distributed authority have any chance of dealing with climate change, monopoly, inequality, racism, public health, housing, and the other scourges that are unraveling U.S. society.  

To get any of this, a new paradigm for collective action needs to be built, and it’s going to require the replacement of Trumpian (anti) knowledge structures.

 

Academia will also need to enter the fight. In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about universities, (bad) democratic higher ed policy and MAGA voters.

POLITICAL EDUCATION FAILS UNLESS IT’S CONTINUOUS

 

‘The Democrats don't campaign year round in the same way that Republicans do on key issues and they do have a massive communication problem. That could potentially be solved by having a more robust ecosystem and more collaboration with even the likes of yourself and maybe even someone like myself as well.

 

‘And they need to always be on. They need to always be counter messaging against the anti-immigration sentiment. I went back and looked at my commentary from February of 2021, when the story of the Customs and Border Patrol Haitian migrants getting whipped by horseback, Customs and Border Patrol people, officers was in the news.

 

‘And I remember talking about how the Republicans are going to keep hitting the immigrants are doing crime note over and over again, because that's the one thing that they have. And it's built around a complete falsehood that undocumented migrants are responsible for incredible amounts of crime. It's not correct.

 

‘There is no data to suggest this. The data actually shows the exact opposite. Undocumented migrants are your neighbors, they contribute to the economy in very meaningful ways, and they very rarely take anything in return.

 

‘Why is the Democratic Party not pushing this counter-narrative? And they never did. Instead of pushing that counter-narrative, which is based in truth and talk about how undocumented migrants are responsible for less crime per capita than natural born US citizens are, or that fentanyl being trafficked across the US borders are actually not coming in the knapsack of an otherwise law-abiding abuela, but instead, it's coming from regular points of entry trafficked by American citizens.

 

‘90% of the people that are being apprehended for chemical compounds necessary for fentanyl or direct drugs that they're trafficking across the border are American citizens. This does not track with the narrative that people believe, because the narrative is dominated by the right on this issue. They should have been counter-messaging against that.’

 

SOURCE: Hasan Piker, Pod Save America

UNITED STATES’S DISASTROUS INFANT AND MATERNAL DEATH RATES

 

 

SOURCE: Commonwealth Fund via Adam Tooze, Chartbook

 

STUDENT DEBTORS COULD SEE HOPES VANISH UNDER TRUMP

 

'While DeVos isn’t returning in the second term, Trump’s new selection for education secretary, former Small Business Administration head and WWE executive Linda McMahon, is a Trump loyalist who could be expected to carry out his wishes.

“Trump’s campaign rhetoric on higher education and subsequent pick for secretary of education serves as a massive threat to working-class student debtors trying to make ends meet every month,” said Brewington. “But most borrowers don’t need to speculate what will come—they remember the systemic failures of the first Trump administration, from sweeping improper PSLF and IDR denials to resisting court-mandated relief for defrauded borrowers.”

 

‘Around 45 million Americans owe some amount of student loan debt, with a national average balance of $35,210. With 50 percent of student loan debt coming from grad school, there’s an assumption that debt relief would primarily benefit higher-income graduates. But a 2022 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that women and people of color are more likely to owe student loan debt and at higher balances, with Black women owing the highest average balance at $11,000.

 

‘The average loan balance also varies by state or territory, with Washington, D.C., having the highest average balance at over $54,000. During the 2019-2020 school year, 17 percent of Black students had to borrow at least $50,000 to complete their undergraduate studies, compared to 10 percent of white students and 7 percent of Hispanic students. . . .’

 

‘Republicans have opposed multiple attempts by the Biden administration to expand student debt relief, going well beyond the mass debt relief program that the Supreme Court struck down in 2023. Earlier this year, Republican attorneys general filed lawsuits challenging the legality of programs like the SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education) Plan, an income-driven repayment (IDR) plan meant to lower monthly payments and offer loan forgiveness after at least ten years of repayment (or more depending on the loan type and amount).

 

'Project 2025 also calls for the elimination of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which offers complete debt forgiveness for borrowers who have worked for the government or a nonprofit organization for at least ten years. The authors of the document argue that PSLF unfairly favors public-sector over private-sector employment. 

 

‘PSLF, signed into law in 2007, was dysfunctional prior to the Biden administration, with Trump’s first-term education secretary Betsy DeVos approving just a tiny sliver of those who applied for debt forgiveness. The Biden administration fixed the program, and by this October, over one million borrowers had PSLF loans canceled.

‘But Trump’s return could mean that promises made on PSLF could simply be broken, with government or nonprofit workers who played by the rules on the expectation of debt relief denied cancellation and thrown into chaos. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House could attempt to end PSLF for new entrants.’

 

SOURCE: Jane Ekere, The American Prospect

 

THE NEW DEMOCRATIC ALLEGIANCE OF AFFLUENT AMERICANS

 

SOURCE: Sam Zacker, Perspectives on Politics

 

HOW CANCEL CULTURE PANICS ATE THE WORLD

 

‘The gambit of Stanford literature professor Adrian Daub’s clarifying new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global, is the contention that, in fact, we don’t really know what “cancel culture” is. Moreover, the very fact that we think we do sustains it. Like every moral panic, cancel culture skirmishes thrive on contradictory impulses: incuriosity regarding accuracy coupled with intense, even prurient interest in perceived violations of norms; presumptive familiarity cut with historical amnesia. Before we have even read the latest cancel culture narrative, we already know the roles, the sides, and where we stand. Yet still we find ourselves consuming each one as the baleful harbinger of something new, strange, and profoundly threatening to the integrity of the polity.

 

‘What is cancel culture? Daub offers a working definition with three main elements: (1) the actual existence of new social practices, especially online, that some commentators find scary or confusing; (2) the claim that these practices are “part of a broad cultural shift”; (3) the notion that a “culture of left-wing censoriousness actively drives social fracture.”

 

‘Only (1) designates a “culture” in the sense of a set of signifying social practices, whereas (2) and (3) do not designate things people say and do not constitute “cancellation” so much as the way other people talk about those things. Daub’s critical intervention is to shift our attention from (1), the substance of the anecdotes, to (2) and (3), the ways these anecdotes are narrated, circulated, and put to political work. From cancel culture, to cancel culture discourse, to cancel culture panic. Or: from a complaint about a sandwich, to the mass media that amplifies it, to the political projects that make use of it.

 

‘Daub’s book, then, is not another entry in a series of sober critiques of cancel culture such as Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind, or Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke. Rather, these books are themselves artifacts of the discourse Daub examines. . . .

 

‘While plenty of cancel culture anecdotes are drawn from the media, the entertainment industry, and from the publishing world, most are set “on campus.” The “Morality Gap” speech helps us understand why: Reagan demonstrated canny insight into the peculiar capacity of the imagined campus to organize collective political anxieties. For one thing, youth alone makes college students effective avatars for the imminent future of the polity. For another, higher education is an important organ for class reproduction and class mobility. When told in a way that taps both of these connotations, an anecdote about the ostensibly degraded social mores at a flagship state school like Berkeley can be transformed into a foreboding glimpse at not just a university in turmoil, but an America careening toward disaster. At a moment of greatly expanded access to higher education by women, minorities, and the working class, Reagan projected anxieties about generational transfer and demographic changes onto campus life, casting college students as available objects of concern and condescension from adults whose very seniority guaranteed their relative maturity, sobriety, rationality, and pragmatism. . . .’

 

‘In France, the rising population of immigrants from former French colonies in the Middle East and North Africa since at least 1989 has been framed in the media as a direct threat to the social cohesion and cultural integrity of the secularist republic. Those who criticize this reaction to postcolonial demographic change as racist or Islamophobic are, according to many French commentators, speaking a distinctively American language of “le wokisme.” Thus, cancel culture discourse serves a distinctively French political project by yoking one French majoritarian panic (about Muslims) to a separate claim that French debate is being distorted by socially “fractious” ideas about race and colonialism from without. These ideas originate, supposedly, not from Francophone intellectuals like Frantz Fanon or Aimé Césaire, but rather from American campuses.

 

‘Caring overmuch about what American college students are supposedly doing and saying—and even more importantly, what they are allegedly not allowing to be done or said—is, Daub finds, a global pastime.’

 

THEY SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT A LITTLE HARDER AND MORE CLEARLY

 

'They played the victims, and it was easy to have no sympathy for them because they had little sympathy for anyone else. When I listened to Trump fans talk about “them” and “they”—how “they” wanted something for nothing nowadays—the subtext, the code, was lazy people of color and immigrants who wanted everything for free. Yet we were supposed to have sympathy for white men who weren’t changing with the times. They wanted to work, didn’t want handouts, were hungry for the meritocracy, in their parlance. But that was bullshit. They were nostalgic for privilege, the days when an uneducated white man got a job over a better-educated Black man; they wanted to be let go by police for traffic violations in a world when Black men were too often gunned down for the same; they longed for a world in which a thousand small barriers existed that boosted them and blocked everyone else. They wanted massive farming subsidies and all kinds of handouts and preferential treatment. They pined for a time when billions of Indians and Chinese, Brazilians and Indonesians—the whole rest of the world—were living in abject poverty with scant education and Americans and Europeans were the only people who designed things and built them. But the world wasn’t like that anymore. China was no longer peasants in Mao suits harvesting night soil, but hundreds of millions of hypereducated, focused people living in vast cities of steel and glass. Ditto Mumbai and Saigon and Jakarta and Bangkok. Men like James Mayhall and Gale Roberts and Rick Frazier had stiff competition; now they were the peasants. I liked to imagine the shocking slap of taking them through Shanghai or Gurgaon near Delhi or for a ride on Bangkok’s sleek Skytrain. If they wanted urban Black people to lift themselves out of the ghetto by their clichéd American bootstraps, why couldn’t they do the same? Instead of just watching their towns get destroyed by highway bypasses and chain stores, they should have stood up and done something about it. They should have finished high school and they should have found some way to further their education. They should have thought a little harder and more clearly about their Unions and voting for Republicans who wanted to break them, and they should have understood that the Affordable Care Act was a step toward giving them more access to health care. They should have voted against people who promised to lower their taxes and weakened the public institutions—the schools, the libraries, the infrastructure, the preparedness for pandemics—that made their lives better and offered them a social safety net. They should have read the damn newspaper every day. If they could afford cable TV, they could afford a digital subscription to a newspaper and keep up with the news. The real news. The truth. And they should have been offended and even insulted listening to people like Rush Limbaugh. There was really no excuse for the way millions of people had lost their basic critical-thinking skills and couldn’t separate the fake from the real. But they [couldn’t], and they hadn’t known any better and now they could feel the effects, a malaise, and when that big man in his blue suit stood up and said he alone could fix it, they bought it all.'

 

SOURCE: Carl Hoffman, Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump's MAGA Rallies  (2020), pp 222-24. 

 

A NEW HOUSING AFFORDABILITY CRISIS NEXT YEAR?

 

 

SOURCE: Peter Berezin, Twitter

 

THE TRADITION OF SCAPEGOATING EXPERTS 

 

‘The advice of experts in the physical sciences, however suspect many of these experts may be, is accepted as indispensable.  Expertise in the social sciences, on the other hand, may be rejected as gratuitous and foolish, if not ominous. One Congressman objected in these words to including the social sciences in the National Science Foundation:  . . . ‘The average American does not want some expert running round prying into his life and his personal affairs and deciding for him how he should live.’ . . .[E]xperts were irritating enough in the time of F.D.R., when they seemed to have free access to the White House while the President kept the politicians at arm’s length.  The situation has grown worse in the age of the cold war, when matters of the highest public interest are susceptible to judgment only by specialists. All this is the more maddening, as Edward Shils, has pointed out, in a populistic culture which has always set a premium on government by the common man and through the common judgment and which believes deeply in the sacred character of publicity.  The citizen cannot cease to need or to be at the mercy of experts, but he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed professor. . . and by applauding the politicians as they pursue the subversive teacher, the suspect scientist, or the allegedly treacherous foreign-policy advisor.’

 

SOURCE: Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Random House, 1963), 36-37.

 

 

THE GAP BETWEEN UNIVERSITY RESEARCH AND SOCIAL IMPACT

 

‘Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, at different paces in different parts of the world, universities went from being purely institutions of instruction to institutions that also engaged in advanced research. In the United States, where this process went the furthest, the fastest, it was shaped substantially by one man: Vannevar Bush, President of MIT and special scientific advisor to President Roosevelt during WWII. Bush was appropriately excited by the strides made by American science during the war, and wanted the party to continue after the war was over only with one difference: instead of giving scientists untold billions and placing them under military control as was the case for the Manhattan Project, Bush thought the correct path forward was for the government to give scientists untold billions and then leave them alone to make their own decisions about how the money should be spent. That’s not quite how things panned out, but there is no question that the system of curiosity-driven research that emerged gave an awful lot of power to individual researchers and left universities as mere intermediaries for funding. Or, as a colleague sometimes puts it, with respect to research missions, universities are simply holding companies for the research agendas of individual professors.

 

‘And let’s face it, this worked well for many decades. The scientific output of universities working under this model has been amazing (see my interview with David Baker on global science from a few weeks ago). And it didn’t require universities to take on a particularly dirigiste role with respect to the faculty. In some ways, quite the opposite. It was during this period after all that a professor challenged then-Columbia President Eisenhower with the immortal words: “we faculty are not employees of the university…we are the university.” So as far as anyone could tell, the public could just dump money on scholars working in hubs and good things would happen.

 

‘Somewhere over the past few decades, though, the mission of universities changed. Instead of being asked to provide research, they were asked to promote local economic growth, or provide solutions to “grand challenges” or sustainable development goals. And these were challenges that universities took on—gladly for the most part. “Look!” they said to themselves, “Society wants our knowledge/help/advice, we get to show how useful we are, and then people will love us and give us even more money.” And trust me, this is happening All. Over. The. World. Oh sure, the details vary a bit by place in terms of whether the push is more on institutions to push local economic growth or to help deliver social progress, and the extent to which this obligation is imposed on institutions and to what extent they embrace it on their own…but the trend is universal, unmistakable. 

 

‘Except (how can I put this?) I am fairly sure that the lessons institutions learned with respect to growing research outputs do not translate well into these new missions. . . .’

 

‘None of this has escaped the notice of governments. They were mostly quite enthusiastic about the idea of universities as community resources, places that in effect apply brain power on-demand to various types of social and economic problems and are getting frustrated that jazz-based universities can’t deliver. Despite promises to the contrary, old-style universities simply aren’t set up to deliver the promised results, leaving an expectations gap that is souring relations with that subset of governments that don’t view higher education as the enemy in the first place.

 

‘And this, in turn, is contributing to a widespread recession in vibes around universities: simply put, they are not liked and admired the way they used to be.’

 

SOURCE: Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates 

Notre Dame de Paris on December 3, 2024

WHEN THE CALL TO STRIKE COMES FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS

 

“All sites closed in Lille, the alarm ringing in Evry, a suspension of classes in Nice... Everywhere, in red and black letters, the slogan is displayed on the buildings: ‘Universities in danger’. At the call of France Universités, an association which brings together heads of establishment, the universities are mobilizing each in their own way, Tuesday December 3, to mark their ‘refusal to see themselves condemned to degrade the quality of their training.

 

“While the finance bill for 2025 shows a budget for higher education and research at half mast – an increase of 89 million euros, but a decrease in constant euros – the time must be to ‘take of conscience’ of a reality on the ground that the public authorities pretend to ignore, according to the association. Already on Thursday, November 21, around thirty university presidents converged on foot towards the Ministry of Higher Education, and invited themselves to the office of the minister, Patrick Hetzel.

 

“In a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, Friday November 29, which Le Monde obtained, France Universités now calls for ‘personal arbitration’ on the part of Michel Barnier so that the French university can respond to the ambition of the country’” [N.B. Barnier has now been forced to resign by a no confidence vote in the National Assembly.]

 

“Expressing its “anger”, the association specifies that “the meeting with [Patrick Hetzel] did not dispel the fears resulting from an unprecedented situation of a shift towards a very degraded functioning of the universities”. Eighty percent of them will be in deficit by the end of 2024 and ‘projections show that the situation will be worse in 2025,’ warns France Universités.”

 

SOURCE: Soazig Le Nevé, Le Monde.

 

 

THE KNOWLEDGE CRISIS WAS INVENTED BY ST. PAUL

 

“His book is certainly timely. As he notes, there are certain epochs, and surely we are slap bang in the middle of one, when “evident truth” is cast aside in favour of all manner of imbecile imaginings. “Mesmerised crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumours trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.” There, encapsulated in a sentence, is the predicament we face in our present-day social and political lives. . . .”

 

“At the heart of the book is an invigorating excursus on St Paul, the founding father of the most consequential and, some would contend, most pernicious religious cult the world has known. Lilla knows his man: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the history of western populism – spiritual and political – began with Paul.’ He is ‘the cultured despiser of culture’, ‘a learned fanatic of the highest order.’ who ‘held up as spiritual models innocent children, uneducated workmen, and lambs with vacant eyes, forever enshrining reverse snobbery as a Christian virtue.’ If the next resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is in need of a patron saint, surely Paul is the one:

 

“’For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent … If any man among you seems to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.’”

 

SOURCE, John Banville, review of Mark Lilla, The Observer

 

A TALE OF TWO AMERICAS: HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN TRUMP-WON V. HARRIS-WON STATES

 

 

SOURCE: The Intellectualist, X

 

CRYPTO ADVOCATE PAUL ATKINS PICKED AS SEC CHAIR BY DONALD TRUMP

 

“Donald Trump has nominated cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to chair the US Securities and Exchange Commission, drawing cheers from across the finance industry as it hopes for a more favourable regulatory climate under the incoming administration.

 

“’Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations,’ Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. Atkins ‘also recognises that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.’ . . .”

 

“In another significant move for business, the president-elect also nominated Gail Slater, a top aide to vice-president-elect JD Vance, to head the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.

 

“The finance industry has had a fractious relationship with the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who has pursued a broad rulemaking agenda and tough enforcement stance, clamping down on traditional Wall Street players as well as cryptocurrency businesses.

 

“Gensler targeted many of the biggest crypto companies with lawsuits and declined to craft rules for digital assets, arguing many tokens were securities and that existing laws were sufficiently clear. He branded the sector a “wild west” rife with fraud and investor risk.”

 

SOURCE: Stefania Palma, Financial Times

 

UK UNCOVERS VAST CRYPTO LAUNDERING SCHEME FOR GANGSTERS AND RUSSIAN SPIES

 

“A UK-led operation has uncovered a multibillion-dollar money laundering scheme run out of London, Moscow and Dubai that enabled Russian spies and European drug traffickers to evade sanctions using cryptocurrency.

 

“The UK’s National Crime Agency said on Wednesday that its ‘Operation Destabilise’ investigation centred on two companies — Smart and TGR — that acted as a financial hub for cash-rich global criminals and sanctioned individuals relying on cryptocurrency outside the banking system.

 

“The NCA said the network had been used by clients including the Kinahan cartel, Irish cocaine traffickers linked to numerous contract killings, as well as funding ransomware groups, and ‘Russian espionage operations’ from late 2022 to summer 2023.

 

“The illicit network, operating across more than 30 countries, illustrates the growing interaction between hostile states and organised criminals as economic sanctions have forced countries such as Russia to find new ways of operating in the west. The case also shows the increasing use of cryptocurrencies by those cut off from the global banking system.

 

“Rob Jones, director-general of operations at the NCA, said the investigation ‘is the most significant money laundering operation’ that the NCA had ever undertaken.

 

“’It targets . . . a laundromat that brings together at scale street cash and cryptocurrency,’ he said. It ‘takes you from McMafia, through to Narcos, through to le Carré, where you have espionage, where you have transnational organised crime and you have elite Russian-speaking money launderers and cybercriminals.’

 

“The network used couriers to collect physical cash from criminals in one country such as the UK in exchange for cryptocurrency, with Tether the most favoured. The cash would then be laundered through companies and the equivalent value made available in other countries.

 

“This two-way, mutually beneficial trade meant that cash rich cocaine kingpins simultaneously helped Russian cyber criminals and elites to launder stolen crypto and access cash while evading western sanctions.”

 

SOURCE: Miles Johnson and Suzi Ring, Financial Times

 

OVERSHOOTING WITH DONALD TRUMP  

 

 

SOURCE: Simon Evans, X

 

ANY RETURN FROM THE ASSET ECONOMY?

 

“One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according not just to conventional statistical measures (such as GDP or life expectancy) but also to the preferred measures of the governing party. What would those measures be? Since George Osborne, who made debt and deficit reduction his central economic goals, departed the Treasury it has been difficult to know what kind of future Tory governments have been aiming at, or how we’d know if we were to arrive in it. Real wages have stagnated, no higher today than when the Cameron-led coalition first came to power in 2010, while the scant growth in GDP since then has been largely an effect of high immigration – GDP per capita has barely risen. The national debt, which Osborne elevated to the indicator par excellence, climbed above 100 per cent of GDP last year, up from around 65 per cent in 2010. Business investment and trade in goods have both collapsed as a consequence of Brexit.

 

“House prices, however, have risen handsomely, up from an average of £170,000 in 2010 to £280,000 today (or, for Londoners, £280,000 to £500,000). More than a decade of the lowest interest rates in the Bank of England’s history – driven even lower than they might have been by multiple rounds of quantitative easing – converted torrents of cheap credit into asset price appreciation, for those fortunate enough to benefit. By withdrawing demand from the economy (through reduced public spending) and forcing the Bank of England to hold interest rates down (to stave off deflation), Osborne ensured that Britain became the textbook example of an ‘asset economy’, in which collective and productive progress is sacrificed for capital gains. This has produced an eerie temporality: society stands still, while certain households seem to pull away magically from others.”

 

“Between 1974 and 2007, Britain’s average rate of productivity growth (the clearest gauge of prosperity) was more than 2 per cent per year; since then, it has been less than 0.5 per cent per year. We shouldn’t underestimate how much of the political economy of the 2010-24 era – with its zero-sum conflicts over the public purse, rising in-work poverty, highest tax burden since 1945 and increasing influence of inherited assets – stems from the inability to build wealth through investment in people, ideas and technology. When Adair Turner, then chairman of the Financial Services Authority, declared in 2009 that much of what banks did was ‘socially useless’, this was viewed as an extraordinary attack on one of Britain’s last globally competitive sectors. In 2024, it would almost be surprising to discover that great wealth (or even a basic level of financial security) could be achieved by doing something socially useful.

 

The expanded remit of the Bank of England, now encompassing responsibility for the overall health of the financial sector, is the outstanding constitutional and political consequence of the financial crisis in the UK. The use of quantitative easing to stimulate a stagnant economy during the post-2008 years, to boost it a couple of months after the Brexit referendum, then to put it on life support under Covid, was the distinguishing economic policy of the era. The distributional effects of QE have been sharply regressive, pumping up asset portfolios, but because the policy was enacted outside the democratic arena by an independent Bank of England, party-political and media attention to these effects has been minimal.”

 

SOURCE: William Davies, London Review of Books

 

 

HONG KONG IMPRISONS DEMOCRACY PROTESTERS, LAUNCHES NEW CULTURE STRATEGY

 

“The road map is part of government efforts to create new economic drivers while also offering more opportunities in professions popular among young people, in a bid to make Hong Kong a more appealing global city.

 

“The blueprint will also outline the city’s efforts to align with the mandate from Beijing’s 14th five-year development plan for Hong Kong to become an “East-meets-West” centre for international cultural exchange. . . . “

 

“The insiders also said the latest version of the blueprint mapped out four key positions: promoting Chinese culture; developing diverse creative industries; building an international platform for East-meets-West cultural exchanges; and refining the ecosystem for creative industries.

 

“The push to promote Chinese culture will cover the intangible heritage of the country’s south and involve collaborations with the Greater Bay Area.

 

“The bay area is an emerging economic zone that combines Hong Kong, Macau and nine mainland Chinese cities and has a population totalling about 87 million.

 

“The road map also covers 71 measures to bolster the development of industries such as the performing and visual arts, music, animation, dance, film and fashion, among other sectors. . .  .”

 

“The same source said the government would also put the existing funding schemes under review so that grants could reflect market demand.

 

“’It does not necessarily mean that funding is market-driven, at least, a performance or a show has to include some market elements,’ the insider said.

 

The source explained that some shows that received government funding sometimes were too niche, and did not have a clear market.

 

SOURCE: Denise Tsang, South China Morning Post