Reform is a slogan, not an activity
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
By Guallendra – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=200809764
Last week, we looked at the grip that the western Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC), and its political expression, The Party, has progressively acquired on western political life, and how it happened. We noted that many traditional political issues, and indeed much of the European electorate, had been rudely consigned to the rubbish-bin of “extremism.” I pointed out that if a party of the Left (I instanced Mr Mélenchon’s LFI) were ever to look like taking power, then we could anticipate a return to the intellectual sewers of the Cold War, but that, in the first instance, the vitriol of the Party was mostly directed at those they claimed were of the “extreme Right,” or simply said or did things that allegedly “strengthened” that amorphous entity. The result, paradoxically but logically enough, has been to create a notional “extreme Right” in many European countries made up of parties and voters with historically moderate views, as well as to strengthen any parties that actually listen to the concerns of voters, as the Left used to do, rather than arrogantly rejecting them, and dismissing those who express them as ‘“racists” or worse.
I argued, and I think this is indisputable, that the process cannot go on forever, and that in the hallowed formulation, it will thus have to stop at some point. The Extreme Right card will no doubt be played once more in elections over the next few years, but not only is it losing its force through endless repetition, it is widening to almost caricatural levels the gap between political elites and ordinary people. The Extreme Left card may be playable at a later date, but we are nowhere near that yet. Neither card, in my view, can obstruct an inevitable change.
Now human nature being what it is, then no matter how much you earnestly desire a change in the system in theory, there are all sorts of mundane reasons why you might not want it to come tomorrow. If you were born after about 1980, you will simply not remember a time before neoliberalism, and it will be a challenge to imagine what an alternative would even look like. There is also the very reasonable fear that, if things are bad now, change could easily make them worse rather than better. There is a masochistic (if unhistorical) belief in some quarters that They will always be too powerful and attempted system change will inevitably fail. On the other hand, there is also a nihilist approach which views the System as beyond saving anyway, and wants to smash it definitively, like, now.
Today, though, I am going to take as a point of departure the conclusion that fundamental change is inevitable. By “change” I mean a significant political and economic transformation of western nations that may be gradual and reformist, sudden and discontinuous, or some mixture of the two. I am deliberately avoiding the charged vocabulary of “revolution,” because that makes all sorts of assumptions about how change will come and who will bring it about, that over-simplify what are very often complex situations with different causes. What more commonly happens with discontinuous change, in fact, is the breakdown of a system and a resulting power vacuum, which may be filled in various ways, or not filled at all. So the first question is whether that can be prevented by reforms.
Well, history suggests that the point of departure is the strength, or otherwise, of the system itself, including its capacity for reform, and here we must admit that most historical judgements both oversimplify what “strength” means, and, in hindsight, judge systems to be either stronger or weaker than they really were. Much depends on criteria of course. The simplest is longevity: the House of Saud has outlasted generations of its critics, and is not done yet. The political system of Lebanon, the modern equivalent of the Schleswig-Holstein question, continues to function, more or less, somehow. Meanwhile, entire political systems (Iraq, Afghanistan …) have come and gone before our eyes. Drawing general conclusions is pretty much impossible: all we can say is that systems and regimes hang on so long as they are the least worst alternative, or so long as the opposition is even weaker. Many African regimes and political systems survive because of the absence of serious opposition and competition rather than because of any inherent strength. When systems fail, it is generally because they are weakened by internal stresses to the point where they can no longer deal with challenges to their survival. But some of those challenges can take a long time to be effective.
It’s important in this context not to get involved in political geekery, and to avoid assuming that just tinkering with systems can turn a bad situation into a better one. For example, in spite of the chaos in France at the moment, the structure of the political system hasn’t changed fundamentally since 1958. It worked pretty well in the early years: why doesn’t it work now? Or in Britain, many would argue that the political system has in fact been improved and modernised in recent years, yet the political life of the country is now in as much chaos as in France. And there are other, very similar, examples. By contrast, administrative tinkering in crisis states (“I know, let’s set up an Anti-Corruption Supremo!) or even wholesale political change (introducing a multi-party system from nothing) have a pretty unbroken history of failure. Whilst structural and procedural change can have a helpful or harmful influence, it’s hard to point to a case of where it has had a decisive effect in resolving problems. On the other hand, there are plenty of cases where structural changes have actually exacerbated the problem. A good example is the progressive transfer of powers from Belgrade to the regions after Tito’s death, that was supposed to appease nationalist fervour in the Former Yugoslavia , but in fact just made it more powerful.
So whatever the problems may be, the answer is not to be found in the kind of administrative tweaking that the PMC loves, and is in fact all it knows how to do. “Reform,” if in fact it is possible, may include institutional changes, but can’t be limited to them. A good example is proportional representation (PR), which is often put forward as a solution to political blockages. It is argued, quite fairly, that in non-PR systems, most votes are wasted, few seats actually change hands, and so many voters do not feel enfranchised. PR would allocate seats, at least in theory, according to votes cast, but, even if you could settle on a PR variant that was generally acceptable, the effect would be to increase the number of parties, especially the small ones. The more fragmented and divided a political system is, the worse it becomes under PR: the problem is the system itself, not the electoral mechanism. Thus, there’s been a current of thought in France for several decades now that wants a “Sixth Republic,” with PR and more powers for Parliament, arguing that the current system is too centralised. That may be true, but as I say to critics, we actually have the Sixth Republic now, in the sense that Parliament consists of a large number of mutually-hostile groups from which no stable majority can ever be constructed. PR will only make the situation worse, because the essential problem is the fragmentation of the political system itself.
I’ve made that little detour, because it’s important to emphasise that Reform cannot be limited to technical fiddling if it is to be effective: it must have a strong political impetus behind it. The large-scale administrative reforms carried out in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century can be studied as purely technical operations, but the real story is the recognition by the political and business classes of the urgent need to modernise a decrepit and corrupt state, to avoid being politically and economically marginalised in Europe. Across the Channel, the educational reforms post-1870 were a fundamental part of the creation of the Third Republic. Education was taken out of the hands of the Church and entrusted to specially recruited young men and women, often from the working class, who were the shock troops of secularisation and modernity. There are interesting technical comparisons with educational reforms in other countries, but it’s the political determination of the Republican parties in France that really matters, and sets that episode apart.
Historically, the death of regimes and empires was often preceded by attempted but failed reforms. One famous example is the Tanzimat, the ambitious reform programme extending over several generations, intended to modernise and westernise the Ottoman Empire. Religious equality and human rights were improved, steps were taken against the slave trade, the Army and bureaucracy were fundamentally reformed, and so forth. But there was huge opposition from those who stood to lose—notably the traditionalist clergy—and the reforms eventually petered out: some historians go so far as to argue that they speeded up the eventual fragmentation of the Empire. The contrast with Japan at the same period, where widespread reforms were successfully forced on traditional power structures, is interesting. Both the Hapsburg Empire (with the creation of the Dual Monarchy in 1867) and the Romanovs (with the creation of the Duma in 1906) recognised the need for reform, but were overtaken by events.
Whilst the reform of western societies today would be very different from these examples, even if it was agreed what “reform” would mean, it’s worth setting out the three absolute and non-negotiable requirements for any reform programme to even begin to work. The first and most obvious is a sense of crisis, widely shared and deeply felt. One major reason for all the education reforms of the nineteenth century was that the complexity of the world, and emerging technological developments, meant that countries required skilled workforces they simply didn’t have, so the future of the country itself was at stake. There were also special factors: for the French, ending the Church’s intellectual control and political influence, for the Japanese trying not to become another colony, and for the Ottomans trying to hang on to colonies of their own. If our elites see a similar problem today, they give no sign of it. After all, AI will do everything, won’t it, including the jobs of teachers? Indeed, apart from sporadic “crises” whose purpose seems to be to separate the poor from the little they still have, the PMC appears to think that everything is humming along nicely, and it only reminds to evict Putin from the Kremlin and bring the price of oil down.
The second, as a consequence, is an elite consensus about what needs to be done. This in turn requires at a minimum a central power strong enough to enforce a reformist agenda. This is the reason for relative success in Japan, as against relative failure in the Ottoman Empire. Increasing the percentage of people who could vote in Europe was not necessarily attractive to parts of the elite, but they accepted it because they realised it was inevitable for the future. This was linked to the need for widespread literacy, which was also controversial, but was recognised to be essential if a proper industrial and administrative workforce was ever to be recruited. In turn, this meant the foundation of universities and other institutes of higher education outside the existing power structures and the Church. Unattractive to some, perhaps, but seen as necessary and inevitable. By comparison, today’s elites seem to balk at the very prospect of doing anything at all except at the purely performative level. You may have read about troubles in the school system in France this week: riots and demonstrations, teachers attacked, schools set on fire. And if you had to guess the reaction of the government, and if you said, set up enquiries, hold meetings, convene committees, well, that’s about it. Given time, after all, the problem will go away. Won’t it?
The third is a global approach to reform. I don’t mean massive and complex plans, but rather that the consequences of proposed reforms are thought through, and other necessary and consequent things are done as well. Western society has largely lost its capacity to do this, and at best fiddles with problems, This in turn is because western elites no longer think beyond next week, and are incapable of holding two separate but related ideas in their heads at the same time. The great political and social reform movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, did have this essential unity. The French Republic after 1870 knew that to survive, it had to break the influence of the Church, especially in the countryside, where priests told their parishioners either that voting in a Republican election was a deadly sin, or that at least they should vote for the most anti-Republican candidate. This meant creating from scratch a corps of highly-motivated secular teachers to combat the Church. For that, they had to be trained, and of course the training establishments had first to be built. Students were recruited, often from the working class, and because the Republic didn’t mess around, they were paid a salary to be trained, before going off to teach in schools that had meanwhile been built all over the country. With the final separation of Church and State in 1905, the government sent police and soldiers into the schools to expel the nuns and priests who refused to leave.
They don’t do that kind of thing any more, because reform is a slogan, not an activity, and it’s often only half-accomplished. Typically, for example, African states will provide education for young people, who will then leave the land, to go to the cities to look for work that isn’t there, often with destabilising political consequences. It is not necessarily fair to blame governments alone, for that situation, but it does illustrate rather well that reforms have to go together: the worrying thing is that a variant of this is now happening in the West as well.
So even if it were possible to agree a reform plan in some area (and to be fair it’s hard to know where to start), there is no real vision, no capability, no strategy and no group of dedicated individuals, all of which have been necessary for reform programmes to succeed. Such individuals don’t come from nowhere (a point I’ll return to) but you need a critical mass both of numbers and skills, and most of all you need a political culture which thinks, at a minimum, in decades. So far as I can see, for example, the western university system will mostly crash and burn by the end of the next ten years. In five years it may well have gone beyond the point where it can be saved, as good people leave, universities sink deeper into debt and students no longer see a degree as essential. What would you need to do to reform the universities? Depending on the country, perhaps reduce student places by a quarter or a third, close a number of universities, in some cases completely change the system of financing, get rid of two-thirds of the administrative staff, increase academic salaries at junior level, move away from the model of students as consumers, and aggressively remove entire departments that are not academically serious. Draconian? Of course, but something like that would have to be done. But it won’t be, and so the western university system will collapse.
At first sight, this opposition to reform may seem strange. OK, vested interests play a part, but vested interests can be and have been overcome in emergencies. I often feel, by contrast, that today’s ruling class has tendencies verging on the suicidal: they have constructed a system that is slowly destroying itself, slowly eating itself alive, slowly consuming what little productive capability remains. After all, you would think that the ruling class would want a decently educated population as a minimum, wouldn’t you, as their predecessors did two centuries ago? Yes, education is a threat to power, but a society that cannot read and write properly is surely a greater one, as current events in France are demonstrating.
The result of all that, is that Reform is actually impossible. Take politics. The political systems of western countries have been hollowed out: in the decade since Brexit, Britain has been through as many Prime Ministers as in the previous sixty years. And the quality (subject to mild optimism about Mr Burnham) has been getting lower, even while the diversity of the political class itself has increased out of all recognition. A serious movement to reform British politics would simply not be able to find the people with the necessary skills and motivation from the existing or prospective political class. In France, people are looking with the kind of mesmerised horror you bring to an unfolding car crash at the prospects for the Presidential and Legislative elections next year. There are something between 20-25 Presidential candidates already declared (depending on how you count them) and the results of the first round could be unbelievably complex, with the two candidates for the run-off getting through by fractions of one per cent. In any event, in spite of the same massive increase in the diversity of the French political class, there is the same widespread sense of despair about the quality of the candidates. And it is virtually certain that the Legislative elections that follow will produce an even more divided and ineffective National Assembly than the current one, and forming a government will be impossible. Again, an attempted effort at reform, no matter how serious, would never find the necessary ingredients to make it possible. In fact, I think that there’s a general rule in politics that it’s impossible to genuinely reform a system using the same people who screwed it up in the first place, even if they go through some improbable Damascene conversion. The solution, as we’ll see, often comes from outside.
The decay of the political system is paralleled in the wanton destruction of state capability, including even the police and military, which for an unpopular ruling class seems frankly stupid. And instead of an orderly system of imports and exports and local production, we have long, complex and extremely fragile supply chains which depend for their effectiveness on everything working perfectly all the time. If it doesn’t, western states no longer have the capability to do very much about it. Some limited re-shoring can take place, but rebuilding western industry and productive capability generally at scale is effectively impossible. (The same is probably true of agriculture, incidentally.) It would require among things a decade-long process of training engineers of all disciplines, investing in facilities, reviving apprenticeships and securing raw materials before you could even begin. And here’s a dash of cold water for you: after this week’s school violence in France, the government has said it will fund more teaching posts. One of the biggest deficits is in mathematics teachers because, simply, no-one wants to teach mathematics, and the professional standard of most newly qualified maths teachers is disturbingly low. Given that the engineers and technicians of tomorrow, if there are any, are being taught mathematics by the teachers of today, it’s hard to be optimistic about the prospects for an industrial revival.
I could go on, but you’ve probably read much of this before, at least in pieces. My conclusion is a general one: there is no way of halting, let alone reversing, the social, political and economic decline of the West since the 1980s under anything like current conditions. The best that we can hope to do is arrest the decline in certain areas, but the problem is that we’ve largely got past the point where intentions matter very much, and we are living inside a machine which is dis-assembling itself without human intervention. It would be comforting to believe that Somebody is in Control of all this, but, as the inane statements of the rich and powerful demonstrate, they are as lost as everybody else. Some developments—re-nationalisation of some services, for example—will force themselves on governments because the alternative is too awful to contemplate. But you can’t nationalise once-great industries that no longer exist.
This was, of course predictable and predicted. Once the blind processes of neoliberalism were put in motion, everything inevitably moved in the direction of short-term rent extraction. (Large Language Models can be seen as the meta-version, or the epitome, of rent-seeking. Soon they will be feeding off each other.) The accompanying demolition of the capacity and effectiveness of the state meant that this tendency was allowed to run out of control, and that states today have no effective capability to rescue the situation, even if the will to do so existed. This is why I find piracy a useful historical analogue, because it was entirely parasitic and short-term. In an age when state capacity was limited, pirates operated on a large scale: Algiers was actually an independent Regency under the Ottoman Empire, a kind of mercenary state supporting itself by piracy and slave-trading, until the French invasion of 1830. There’s nothing new, then, about multinational companies with resources exceeding those of some states.
Given these difficulties, it’s possible to imagine one of two futures. The first is a slow(ish) decline in western societies which could in principle last for a long time. The other is a Discontinuity, and I’ll explain what I mean by that in a second. The problem with the idea of slow decline is that we live in a fantastically complex and interdependent society, where quite small effects in one area can have enormous and unpredictable ones elsewhere. I don’t think for example, people have really understood some of the consequences of higher diesel prices and shortages. If farmers, already hit by fertiliser shortages and costs, cannot transport their crops to market because they cannot afford the diesel, or because there is simply no diesel, then what happens in a country like Canada or the US with its vast distances? Mass starvation? The temptation is to say that that won’t be “allowed to happen.” But who will do the not allowing? Where will the remedial resources come from? Who is capable of coordinating the feeding of huge areas of a country with horse-drawn transport or whatever? For the first time in history, we have the combination of both a highly complex, fragile, unstable and interdependent world, and a whole series of environmental, resource, economic and political challenges, any one of which is observably beyond the capability of our ruling class to deal with. It is this combination of factors, rather than the individual seriousness of, say, climate change, that is the risk. Sea-levels have risen before, but they have never risen in a world where coastal cities like Lagos and Bangkok, with their millions of people, could be flooded overnight. It’s not simply that we can expect mega-catastrophes, it’s that an unexpected combination of events could produce completely unexpected and dangerous results, which would lead to an unstoppable cascade of consequences.
Let’s take a very mundane, short-term illustration. There has been an explosion in low-cost air travel in the last generation caused by neoliberal deregulation, and new airlines start up and fail all the time. Even between major European capitals, flights can be sub-contracted to outfits you’ve never heard of. Now many of these capitals, in countries that have throughly de-industrialised themselves, have little but tourism left to hold their economies together, and much of their city centre consists of holiday rentals. Yet the insane level of competition has driven air fares down, and even established national airlines are now run on a knife-edge. If you want to travel from a major European city (Berlin, perhaps) to a popular weekend tourist destination (Venice, Barcelona …) the only direct flights will probably be by budget airlines, most of which will already be on the edge of bankruptcy: some have already gone, more are about to follow. Quite quickly, the tourist industry in many of these cities will contract sharply, restaurants and hotels will close, city centres will die and there will be large populations of migrants unemployed (since no indigenous inhabitants can afford to live and work there.)
All this can be multiplied almost infinitely, but I think the point is made. This is not the fall of the Roman Empire, withdrawing the Legions from the provinces. We are in a situation of infinitely greater complexity and interdependence, which I suspect would reduce a contemporary Spengler or Toynbee to gibbering incomprehension. This is why I talk of “Discontinuity,” because it could come at any time and in any form, or in several forms at the same time. It’s not just political crisis, or economic crisis, or conflict, or environmental crisis, it’s varying and unpredictable mixtures of all of them. The question is, what if anything can be done? Cometh the hour, OK, but it’s not very clear where people capable of addressing the problems will come from. It should be evident by now, though, that they will not come from the existing structures of the political class, nor from the top layers of the bureaucracy, nor from the superheroes of finance and information technology, who daily demonstrate that they have learned nothing and forgotten everything. When really large-scale bankruptcies of “AI”-related companies begin (in 2027 according to most estimates) not only will large parts of the IT industry be taken down, but the effects on governments, banks, stock markets and the immensely complicated world supply chain could be anything from inconvenient to catastrophic. So don’t expect any help from there. Indeed, formal governments no longer have the resources or the capabilities to influence events very much: a natural if ironic consequence of the auto-castration they have performed on themselves in recent years.
Thus, we are in one of those situations where we shall have to do what we can ourselves. This means districts and towns (probably not large cities), communities and local organisations: the local authority is probably going to be the last functioning unit of government. And here, of course, we run into the obvious problems: societies and families have been fractured, much official capacity has been destroyed, there are no community leaders in the traditional sense (and indeed not much in the way of communities) and entire generations have been brought up to value ruthless individualism above all other things.
And yet. We know a certain amount about how societies and large groups cope with disasters and emergencies. Far from producing anarchy and savagery, there are now shelves of studies that show how disasters in fact induce people to cooperate and display altruistic tendencies. Even deeply corrupted by psychotic Liberal individualism, our societies probably retain the ability to work together. This implies, of course, that conditions have become really bad, which I think will be the case. But it also illustrates some common sense: there are things you simply can’t do yourself. Things like food and water distribution, rudimentary health services and collective security simply can’t be done by individuals for themselves. Watch, or participate in, any large group confronted with a problem, and natural leaders will emerge: not necessarily those who shout the loudest either.
On the other hand, we need to be very wary of the arrival of would-be saviours and figures of destiny. There are probably those in western politics who see themselves in this role, but it never works, because such figures are essentially fantasy projections without substance behind them. Pétain, for example, was revered (correctly) as a great military leader who had saved the French Army, but politically he was a nonentity. Few of the millions of French people who looked to him for leadership were interested in Vichy’s reactionary rag-bag of ideologies. He was seen above all as a figure of stability and protection, a guarantor against the chaos resulting from a stunning and unexpected defeat. And such leader-worship can easily become pathological: I studied Spanish in the days of Franco, when the Press still called him El Caudillo, as Mussolini had once been called Il Duce and of course Hitler Der Fuhrer: “the boss.” He viewed himself as a “god-given” figure engaged in a “Crusade” to preserve traditionalist, Catholic, Absolutist values. We don’t need any more like him.
What does all that leave us with? Not a gentle decline, but not a sudden and catastrophic disintegration either. More like a series of punches to the stomach coming at unpredictable points from unexpected directions, and no effective way of dealing with them with the institutions and the political class we have. Of course, you may still believe that Reform is possible, and I wouldn’t dispute that with energy and enthusiasm, some of the decline could be arrested, at least temporarily. But in practical terms, I seriously doubt that in any major area of western society, politics or economy, worthwhile reforms are really going to be possible, although I would be happy to be proved wrong.
Let me conclude on a note of modest hope, though. What happens historically is that in periods of Discontinuity, old forces are swept away, new people and new forces take over, and often it’s impossible to know in advance where they will come from. Let me suggest again that you run and see the new two-part film about De Gaulle starring Simon Abrakian. What’s striking about the film, especially its second part, is how resistance to the Germans, on the ground as well as in London, depended overwhelmingly on marginal, minor and obscure figures, who saw what needed to be done and did it, where the great and the good of the French establishment either stood prudently aside, or actively collaborated. The Resistance was an initiative of ordinary people, but the different groups needed organising if they were to be effective. One single senior government official, the Prefect Jean Moulin, (played by Felix Kysyl) joined De Gaulle in London, and was sent back to use his administrative and organisational skills to bring the movements together into the National Resistance Council, which he did successfully before being arrested and tortured to death by the Gestapo.
One single junior officer, Philippe de Hautecloque, (Niels Schneider) brilliant and unconventional, escaped to London and was sent, under the nom de guerre Leclerc to organise resistance from French territories in Africa. He fought his way up from Chad to the Mediterranean coast with an amazing rag-tag Army (well depicted in the film) made up of French deserters and African regular troops and volunteers, some literally riding camels, before leading the newly formed Second Armoured Division to link up with the Resistance forces in Paris. In peacetime he’d have been lucky to get beyond the rank of Colonel. And the Governor of Chad was Félix Éboué (Vincent Fontano), born in French Guyana, and one of the relatively large number of non-whites in the Colonial administration, who was the only Governor to declare for De Gaulle in 1940, and gave him French territory to operate from. A grateful nation later transferred his remains to the Pantheon.
Whilst France between 1940-44 is an extreme case, it’s generally true, nonetheless, that large-scale emergencies tend to replace people who know what to say with people who know what to do. Churchill himself (played by Simon Russell Beale in the film) was a failed politician in peacetime, but exactly the right man in 1940. More generally, though, the mobilisation of the British state after 1939, about which pages could be written here, was a master-class in how people from all walks of life were plucked from their jobs or retirement and put to work in the war effort in everything from engineering to agriculture. Setters of crossword puzzles and experts on German literature were sent to Bletchley Park to break German codes, for example, and all sorts of marginal and passed-over experts and military officers suddenly found that their skills were needed. Mathematicians planned anti-submarine tactics, and railway timetable schedulers organised food distribution.
If it happens, it will be like that. There is nothing to be hoped for from the political class we have, except that it will have the decency to fade away quietly. The one worthwhile characteristic to look out for in today’s politicians is whether they might, just, be capable of adapting to a totally new and different situation in a few years time. Indeed I would suggest that almost the only question worth asking of any politician today is not, will they win this or that election, not, will they survive this or that scandal, but rather, when things get really bad, can they step out of their Party incarnations and do anything useful at all? Or will they just disappear into the Recycle Bin of History with all the others? Because in the end, and in spite of the hysteria, the results of elections in various countries over the next couple of years may just not matter that much.
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