Category Archives: Britain

UPDATED: The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture

Britain, China, Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Old Right, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

“The French Revolution did not generate only a new politics … Along with the new politics there came a new concept of personhood, a self-caressing egotism … a moral and aesthetic theory based upon sentiment” (p. 122). And relativism too (p. 146). In my experience, this malady affects conservatives and liberals alike in the US. Hierarchy, so essential to ordered liberty, is no longer. Lost is the distinction between men and women of character, and those without it; between adults and youth (the latter are usually elevated and worshiped by ever-errant adults); between experience and a lack of it; between quality in intellectual and cultural products, and its absence. Faction has replaced the fellow-feelings that ought to accompany a shared purpose. Talk to me about what you’ve dubbed the Zeitgeist’s ‘moronizing dialectic.’

This was one of the questions I posed to Prof. Dennis O’Keeffe in the second part of our WND.COM interview, “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.” (Last week’s Part I was entitled “Thomas Paine: 18th–century Che Guevara.”)

Still on the topic of the remarkable “Edmund Burke,” my conversation with Dennis O’Keeffe continues this week on WND.COM. O’Keeffe is Professor of Sociology at the University of Buckingham, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, “the UK’s original free-market think-tank, founded in 1955.”

The column is “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.”

UPDATE (Oct. 29): Writes Ron S.:

To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: Please, no more tantalizing via..

…Edmund Burke by Dennis O’Keeffe when it costs $130 at Amazon. Best, Ron S.”

This is why I have resisted a request from an academic press to view my completed manuscript, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For The West From Post-Apartheid South Africa. With 800 end-notes, and a considerable level of abstraction and originality that do not compromise its readability—my book more than meets the requirements. However, as Ron has discovered, an academic press prints a few hundred copies and sells them to libraries at prohibitive costs.

I am lucky: the academic friends I approve send me their books; I get them free. I say “approve” because I never bother with boring second-handers, writing unoriginal stuff; with topics I do not care for. Nor do I bore myself with the works of people I have no time for. I have a passion for Burke. I have no time for “clever” smarmy comments about the man—comments which may or may not be correct. Burke is too important and too neglected in American public life to mess with.

Dennis’s little gem of a book conveys just this sentiment.

Obama's "Spendership" (Vs. British Stewardship?)

Barack Obama, Britain, Bush, Debt, The State

“Obama spending stimulates the national debt by $3,039,000,000,000,” blares Andrew Malcolm’s headline in the Los Angeles Times.

The information comes courtesy of “Mark Knoller of CBS News, who is the White House press corps’ chief cruncher of all things numbers.”

“national debt has increased by $3,039,000,000,000, as in, that much more than it was when he took the oath on Jan. 20, 2009, in front of millions of excited witnesses and Aretha Franklin’s huge hat.

“Obama prefers to lay the blame or credit for this gargantuan spending increase at the cowboy-booted feet of his Lone Star Republican predecessor,” writes Malcolm. “During George W. Bush’s Oval Office tenure, the national debt increased more — by $4.9 trillion, in fact.”

“However, Bush took 96 months to do that.”

“Obama has accomplished his spending feat in less than 21 months. Under his spendership the national debt has grown about $4.8 billion every day since he took the oath of office twice, just to be safe.”

[SNIP]

The problem is that no one who follows him will be able to reverse this. How do you turn this around? You can’t, given that the interest alone on such stratospheric debt is insurmountable. There is no returning America to a place of financial safety.

Putting up a pretense means, at the very least, doing what David Cameron is attempting in the UK.

Incidentally, can you imagine how apoplectic National Review (with the exception of the two non-neocons on staff) would become if BHO “announced plans to cut its military personnel by 10 percent, scrap 40 percent of the army’s artillery and tanks, withdraw all of its troops from Germany within 10 years, and cut 25,000 civilian jobs in its Defense Ministry”?

UPDATE (Oct. 20): British Stewardship? To listen to Daniel Hannan—English politician, commentator on all things American—the US is not as deep in trouble as the UK. Understandably, a rabid rah-rah for America comes with being a Fox News expert.

Yes we have fabulous founding documents and principles, but these have been flouted for at least a century. According to the facts mentioned in “Statism Starts With YOU!”, most Americans adore “Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which combined, account for close to half of the federal government’s budget.” And “only 7 percent of the country will consider slashing the first two welfare programs; a mere eleven percent of those living in the ‘Land of the Free’ are prepared to pare down Medicaid.” (One Tea Party slogan read: “Keep the government out of my Medicare!”)

I cannot comment with any degree of authority whether there are differences in attitudes to entitlements between us and our cousins across the pond.

One thing is indisputable: Unlike in the UK, successive American governments—and the governing class—have been unique in working against the economic interests of their countrymen and their country. (Treason?)

BBC News: “Chancellor George Osborne has unveiled the biggest UK spending cuts for decades, with welfare, councils and police budgets all hit.”

A “19% average cuts to departmental budgets,” as well cutting “higher education spending by 40%, flood defences by 15% and sport England and UK Sport by 30%”—this is better than increasing spending as we are. Of course, price controls, such as on rail fares, are being tinkered with, namely “allowed to increase by 3% above RPI inflation from 2012.”

No doubt, certain cuts are an illusion, to be replaced by other, slightly modified programs. But again: better to fire 500,000 state workers than to hire 1.4 million census stalkers.

The Blair Third-Way Blur

Britain, Conservatism, Economy, Europe, Republicans, Socialism, The State

How serious are Republican boosters about liberty? Tony Blair serious. Sean Hannity interviews Mr. Blair, and tries to get this consummate Third-Way politician to repeat the Hannity inanities, among which are the following catch phrases: We want a small government (translation: you call the state behemoth small when a Republican is at the helm), and a strong national defense (translated: defend the indefensible invasions so long as they are started by Republicans).

Republican economics: condemn the Keynesian voodoo, as you grope obscenely for the “stimulus packages,” and while rudely wanking your business buddies in full view of disgusted onlookers.

Blair is way cleverer. He re-branded “the Keynesian model” as a Third Way sort of kosher statism about which your host (support her, please!) wrote way back in … 2000, in the Calgary Herald column, “Third Way is Socialism’s New Bandwagon.”

To the request that he make a token grumble against Sean Hannity’s ostensible peeve, Blair replied:

“I happen to think in this case there’s a third way, which is a state that is strategic and empowering, where your welfare and public service policies are reformed and modernized from the 1940s.”

What a sweet molester is our Uncle Sam and his cousin across the pond.

Send Us Your Cameron; We’re Tired Of Our Crazyman

Britain, Debt, Economy, Government, Inflation, Political Economy, Socialism, The State

He has “unveiled 23 bills (and one draft bill) detailing ambitious plans for major reform of schools, welfare, the police and the political system. Every week brings another policy, proposal or white paper,” and all ­aim at “dismantling the British welfare system and rolling back the state; to make changes which … ‘will affect [that country’s] economy, [its] society – indeed, [its] whole way of life.'” He is David Cameron, Britain’s Prime Minister. And he is making the Fabian socialists at the New Statesman furious for not being more like FDR.

The Keynesians at TNS consider Tony Blair and Gordon Brown proponents of the free market. In this essay, the argument for the continuation of deficit spending, state-sector growth and endless stims and bailouts—until the English economic Eden is restored (not)—takes the form of The Complaint. Mehdi Hasan believes that he need not argue his case for the merit of FDR-like government growth, massive public works, regulation of banking and Wall Street, and subsidies for agriculture and labor. These “proven” state initiatives are good on their face.

On the other hand, doesn’t everyone know that living within your means is a dangerous gamble, the province of reckless high rollers?

In his zeal to cut an already falling deficit and “balance the books”, for example, Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, have delivered £40bn of tax rises and public spending cuts on top of the £73bn target they inherited from Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. In the US, cutting the deficit may be a medium-term challenge, but here in the UK, for the Cameron-led coalition, it has become an obsession – “the most urgent issue facing Britain”, according to a letter sent by Cameron and Clegg to their cabinet colleagues on 2 August.
Inside the space of 50 days, and behind the cover of an “emergency” and “unavoidable” Budget, Cameron and Osborne have taken one of the biggest macroeconomic gambles of any prime minister and chancellor to have entered Downing Street.

Hasan takes credit for having warned his homies of the impending austerity.

We cannot say we were not warned. In his speech to the Conservative party conference, in October 2009, Cameron declared that his mission as prime minister would be to tear down so-called big government. The phrase “big government” appeared 14 times in that one speech, in which, studiously ignoring the role played by bankers in causing the worst financial crisis in living memory, he claimed: “It is more government that got us into this mess.”

AND:

“Despite appearances to the contrary, Cameron is less a Whiggish pragmatist than a radical, in the Margaret Thatcher mould. His combination of market-oriented reforms to the public sector and savage cuts to public spending – hailed by the investment bank Seymour Pierce as heralding a ‘golden age of outsourcing’ – suggests that he is intent on completing the neoliberal, state-shrinking revolution that Thatcher began and which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did little to reverse.”

“Cameron’s right-wing instincts on the economy, however, have never been properly acknowledged by a press pack beguiled by his ‘rebranding’ of the Conservative Party and distracted by his ‘progressive’ stance on gender, sexuality and race issues, [classical-liberal like] as well as his self-professed passion for civil liberties and the environment. …

Disregard the rhetoric and image, and consider instead the record: in his first 100 days, Cameron has gone further than Thatcher – and much faster, too. His ‘modernising’ ally and minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, has said that the Tories always planned to outstrip the Iron Lady.”

[SNIP]

The nation of shopkeepers may soon leave the US in the dust.