Weekend Reading #4
Unpopulism, Sinn Féin channels New Labour, Climate therapy, against TED, Stalin's books, not the 1970s again, vegan pets, banning books, America in crisis & the last slave ship.
Thank you for supporting Fault Lines. I hope you enjoy this weekend’s most diverting and thought-provoking readings.
You’re out of touch
Duncan Robinson is absolutely slaying it as the new Bagehot columnist for the Economist!
Why Tories give the British people what they do not want
Part of the cause of unpopulism is anthropological. After an electoral realignment, politicians do not necessarily understand their new voters. Tory ministers speak to their new voters like nervous British holidaymakers in a Spanish restaurant, loudly and slowly (“We…Would…Like…To…Level…You…Up”). The existence of a large, prosperous middle class outside the south-east is little understood in sw1. Instead, caricatures of the red wall are given credence: a land populated entirely by old, working-class men. It is much easier for politicians to project their own views onto voters than to learn what voters actually think.
Unpopulism is to be expected when old methods of gauging public opinion have failed. Tabloids have become a poor guide. In the 1990s British newspapers sold almost 15m copies each day. Now they muster barely 3m between them. Their remaining readers are much older than the average Briton, with a worldview to match. That tabloids still hold any influence at all is due not to their connection with voters, but to their hold over the elite. Mr Johnson and his team pore over them daily. A front page may not be read by many, but will be covered by the BBC.
I served with Tony Blair, I knew Tony Blair. Tony Blair was a friend of mine. Mary Lou, you're no Tony Blair - yet
Andrew Adonis: Sinn Féin is starting to look a lot like New Labour
Talking to leaders and delegates at the ard fheis, I was struck by the disciplined pragmatism and thirst for power. It was like New Labour in 1997. The fateful question is whether McDonald’s Sinn Féin not only looks new, but is new.
However, the striking absence is of any Sinn Féin plan for economic growth and wealth creation. The word “business” was only mentioned at the ard fheis as a term of abuse, and there was barely any reference to Ireland’s inadequate higher education system and dilapidated national infrastructure. Dublin recruited a fair group of digital companies during the tech boom, but it lacks a single university in the global top 100 (Trinity College Dublin long ago dropped out of that league). Its inter-city transport network is deplorable—it takes two hours to travel the 100 miles from Dublin to Belfast on a train that only runs every two hours—and the 2008-2009 crisis exposed clientelist corruption in Ireland’s financial sector of Greek and Sicilian proportions. The field is wide open for a party pushing a bold Irish growth strategy spanning north and south. McDonald shows no hint of recognising this and strikes largely “old Labour” high tax and regulatory poses, alarming to many of Ireland’s business leaders. It may be even worse than that.
Climate change on the couch
Climate change enters the therapy room
Though there is little empirical data on effective treatments, the field is expanding swiftly. The Climate Psychology Alliance provides an online directory of climate-aware therapists; the Good Grief Network, a peer support network modeled on 12-step addiction programs, has spawned more than 50 groups; professional certification programs in climate psychology have begun to appear.
As for Dr. Doherty, so many people now come to him for this problem that he has built an entire practice around them: an 18-year-old student who sometimes experiences panic attacks so severe that she can’t get out of bed; a 69-year-old glacial geologist who is sometimes overwhelmed with sadness when he looks at his grandchildren; a man in his 50s who erupts in frustration over his friends’ consumption choices, unable to tolerate their chatter about vacations in Tuscany.
Pulling no punches
I like to call this fusion “the inspiresting.” Stylistically, the inspiresting is earnest and contrived. It is smart but not quite intellectual, personal but not sincere, jokey but not funny. It is an aesthetic of populist elitism. Politically, the inspiresting performs a certain kind of progressivism, as it is concerned with making the world a better place, however vaguely. “The speaker’s work and words move you and fill you with an expanded sense of possibility and excitement,” Anderson writes of the successful TED talk. “You want to go out and be a better person.”
All this can be achieved, Anderson proposes, without any serious transfers of power. In fact, in Anderson’s view, not only is culture upstream from politics, but politics itself — dependent on what he calls “tribal thinking” — destroys the free movement of ideas, with all its world-changing potential. “The toxicity of our political… nonconversations is a true tragedy of the modern world,” he writes. “When people aren’t prepared or ready to listen, communication can’t happen.”
The dictator in his library
In his youth, Stalin was himself a published poet, writing patriotic and tender romantic lyrics in his native Georgian before politics began absorbing his energies. As an all-powerful ruler, he was terrifyingly arbitrary in his treatment of writers, presiding over the deaths of loyal but critical Bolsheviks such as Mayakovsky, and possibly Gorky too, yet defending anti-communists like Bulgakov (whose pro-Whites play The Day of the Turbins he saw 15 times) and Pasternak, whom he protected from persecution with the words: ‘Leave this cloud-dweller alone.’
Not that 70’s show
Adam Tooze: Why inflation and the cost-of-living crisis won’t take us back to the 1970s
Pandemics are perhaps the most general and fast-moving threat we can imagine. But extreme climate events will bring disruption to oil fields and pipelines. Drought and spikes in temperature will produce harvest failure and unpredictable surges in food prices. And, as we move to comprehensive reliance on wind and solar energy, we will have to contend with the variability of the weather far more than we are used to. All of these will deliver one “idiosyncratic” economic shock after another. The price system will still contain useful information, but we will have to develop a new intelligence in deciphering its meaning. We may need to consider a new range of fiscal and monetary tools with which to react. If Covid was the first comprehensive economic crisis of the Anthropocene, then we still have a lot of learning to do.
Best in faux
Conscious consumers turn to vegan pet food
According to research conducted by Insight Partners, the global market for vegan pet food is forecasted to grow from roughly US$9 billion in 2021 to almost US$16.7 billion by 2028. What’s driving that growth? The rise in vegan pet owners and plant-based diets is a major factor. Pet food companies like Hill’s are also looking to reduce their carbon footprints.
In a 2017 study, Environmental Impacts of Food Consumption by Dogs and Cats, University of California Los Angeles professor Gregory Okin found that meat consumed by cats and dogs in the U.S. alone produces the equivalent of roughly 64 million tons of CO2 per year – an impact equal to 13 million cars being driven for a year. The study calculated that pets are responsible for 25 to 30% of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the U.S. “If Americans’ 163 million Fidos and Felixes comprised a separate country, their fluffy nation would rank fifth in global meat consumption,” reads a UCLA press release, “behind only Russia, Brazil, the United States and China.”
The right to offend
Read the Books That Schools Want to Ban
The truth of the Holocaust is both abstracted and explicitly rendered in the graphic memoir Maus, which was banned in a Tennessee county last month by a unanimous vote. Spiegelman draws his Jewish family and protagonists as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs, but this style doesn’t fully blunt the hideousness of the victims’ suffering. Some of the topics that got the book banned, such as Spiegelman’s mother’s suicide, are essential to rendering the effects of the war. Without them, it would be a different story entirely.
The unmaking of America
Eight photos showing a US in crisis
This picture of Miami by the Russian-American artist Anastasia Samoylova is from a 2017 project called FloodZone, which charts the effects of rising sea levels on her adopted state of Florida. The photograph shows the aftereffects of Hurricane Irma that September, one of the most destructive storms ever to hit the state. By the standards of disaster photography, it looks weirdly peaceful. Four slender palm trees lean against the white walls of sleek, high-end condo buildings, almost as if they're resting. Other than a scattering of leaf litter on the pastel-coloured sidewalk, barely any other signs of damage are visible.
But the implication is clear: given that much of Miami is only a few metres above sea level and exposed to hurricanes of ever-increasing velocity, it's about as securely rooted as those decorative palm trees. "It's a really strong metaphorical image for what is happening to America," says Wright.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past
The last known ship of the US slave trade
The story of how Patterson's relative arrived in America aboard an illegal slaver started as a shockingly flippant bet. Fifty-two years after the US banned the importation of enslaved people, in 1860, a wealthy Alabama business owner named Timothy Meaher wagered that he could orchestrate for a haul of kidnapped Africans to sail under the noses of federal officers and evade capture.
With the assistance of Captain William Foster at the helm of an 80ft, two-mast schooner, and following a gruelling six-week transatlantic passage, he succeeded. The ship sneaked into Mobile Bay on 9 July under a veil of darkness. To conceal evidence of the crime, the distinctive-looking schooner – made from white oak frames and southern yellow pine planking – was set ablaze and scuttled to the depths of the swampy Mobile River, where it lay concealed beneath the water, its existence relegated to lore.