Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Ideology Page 1 of 3

Can You Just Out-Breed Your Domestic Enemies?

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On December 29, 2025

25 Comments

There’s a constant trope on the right that the best way to win is to have more kids because eventually you’ll outnumber your enemies?

Seems like it makes sense. It is part of why Christianity won in the Roman Empire: they forbade anal and oral sex and contraceptives (yes, they had clumsy contraceptives back then) and emphasized that sex was for having kids and out-bred the pagans.

But it wouldn’t have worked if the children had preferred the pagan life. Christianity at the time offered a ton of social support, including very practical support like food and housing. Most Romans were poor, and if you were poor you needed the community that Christianity (and some other mystery religions) offered. Christianity offered a better life and a better after-life, for that matter.

Christians today think “we’ll just out-breed them” but it only works if when your kids grow up they don’t go to the big city and discover that there’s a more enjoyable and dignified way to live. Women may realize they don’t want to have multiple children and would like to have sex without necessarily getting pregnant. Ideas of social justice and equality may appeal to both sides, and arguments for atheism and agnosticism start looking mighty convincing when you see how many different religions there are all claiming that they’re the true religion.

The same is true for political ideology. If you’re poor and have no hope for the future maybe socialism looks a lot better than capitalism or the day’s version of MAGA. Maybe communism or anarchism. Or even just standard liberalism with individual rights.

This is what has been happening for well over a century to religion in advanced countries. Fewer and fewer believers, even when the religious breed like rabbits, because secular society or ideologies offer more hope and self-respect. Same with the decline in belief in capitalism. Capitalism says that people earn what they deserve. If you’re not making it are you going to believe you suck and deserve a shitty life or are you going to find an ideology which says “actually, the game is rigged, you aren’t a loser and we can make the world better for people like us.”

I know which one I’d choose.

Breeding is fine, but it only matters if you can hold onto the kids you spawn. And you can only do that if you are seen to offer a better life. This is at the heart of the right wing hatred of universities: kids go to university and realize that a better life is possible if they don’t buy into right wing arguments. They also meet brown people and discover, “hey, they’re just people.”

For a long time, when each generation was better off than the one before it, liberalism basically took the majority of non-liberals and turned them into liberal capitalists. Why wouldn’t it? It was clear that if they bought in they’d have a better life than if they didn’t.

Now liberalism and capitalism are failing. The right is trying to offer an alternative, and a lot of people have gone for it, but it’s also failing to deliver. Watching Trump basically destroy farming communities is instructive. And when it fails and is seen to fail, well, it’s going to be hard to hold on to those kids.

Breed all you want. It’s irrelevant if what you offer isn’t better that the lives possible to people by changing their ideology and loyalty. True victory isn’t having the most descendants, it’s having people act as you would have them act.

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We Don’t Have To Live In Hell

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On December 18, 2025

29 Comments

A friend of mine once used the metaphor of “The Lords of Hell” to describe most of the world. There are a few people with lots of money and power, a few billion people who live in constant fear of not having enough, and a billion or so who don’t have enough. There is more than sufficient food in the world to feed everyone, but people go hungry. The entire western world has more empty homes than it does homeless people, yet there are increasing numbers of homeless. It costs less to give everyone health care than it does to “optimize returns” yet sick people go without medicine and help, and the disabled at left to rot with the least possible care in many countries. (Britain has literally stopped paying for wheelchairs for many disabled.)

Over the years my writing has had many themes, but they all boil down to one Ur-Theme.

We don’t have to live hell. It’s a choice.

We have other choices. There are ways to make the economy work for everyone, and ways that we, the human species, can live well without driving mass numbers of other species to extinction. Indeed, by destroying the environment and extincting other species, we damage the very ecosystem which, long term, makes our own prosperity and well-being possible.

The worst lie in the world is always some version of “there is no other option. This is as good as it can be.”

It has many variants. “Capitalism is the only thing that can work.” “Some people must be homeless and poor for the economy to work.” “We need that oil no matter how many species die.” “People will only work if they’re driven by fear.” “Rich people are job creators”. “Human nature means we’ll always be evil and mean.” “Everything has to be owned by someone because commons don’t work.” (They have worked for hundreds of years at a time.)

Many, many more.

They are all lies. As humans we have an angelic nature as well as a demonic one. One of the most useful books to read in this regard is “A Heaven Made In Hell.” The author studied how people act after great catastrophes. Strangely enough behaviour like looting occurs far less than people helping each other, coming together and fixing things. In fact, people who go through this often find it was heavenly: for once almost everyone is taking care of everyone. Trust and community flourish.

There is great joy in helping. Great joy in care. Great joy in not being scared all the time. The best economies are always full of optimism and hope and have a rising tide that lifts all boats. (Rising tides don’t lift all boats unless we make sure that no boats have holes in their hulls.)

China has, recently, proved this yet again, despite some significant flaws. (FDR proved it before, and he was not the first.) We can take care of each other. We can live without fear that one bad bounce means homelessness, misery and death.

It’s a choice. We have made other choices far too often, but we can choose to be happy, prosperous and realistically optimistic because we take care of each other.

And while my writing often seems negative, this is the hope that underpins my criticisms. There is no point in criticizing something if some law of nature means that it must be so. But there is, despite claims otherwise, no law of nature which says we have to be bastards to each other or to the species we share this world with.

And in that is a genuine hope.

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By The People? For the People?

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On November 25, 2025

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The simplest measure of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it works for the benefit of the people. Democrats also believe the government should be selected by the people.

America does not meet either criterion at this time. Yes, there are elections, but the duopoly means that voters tend to choose from a small slate, pre-selected by others. The most visible occasion of this was when Obama had every Democratic presidential nominee candidate drop out so that Biden could defeat Bernie Sanders. Year in, year out, most of the candidates put up for election are those chosen by party insiders.

This is not always true, of course. It is less true on the Republican side, where primarying incumbents often works and where a vocal but grassroots minority does have significant power in choosing candidates. On the Democratic side it’s mostly true, but some candidates do slip thru: Mamdani for New York City mayor being the most recent example.

Still, overall, it’s questionable that Americans really choose their own government, and that’s true in most Western countries. In Romania, for example, the unacceptable candidate who was going to win was simply arrested and banned from running and there is a movement to make Germany’s AfD illegal. In Canada the party leaders simply refuse to allow pro-Palestine candidates, even those who are selected as candidate by their riding, to run.

The more accurate view is that political parties in most ostensibly democratic countries are political oligarchies. How much this is true varies. First past the post system tend to have very strong oligopolies, while proportional representation countries allow more flexibility.

Perhaps worse when outsider candidates do break thru and win they usually don’t wind up voting for and doing what they ran on. You can see this (though it’s a bit of a stretch to call him an outsider) with Trump. It’s visible with AOC, the darling of the left who has voted for almost all Israeli aid packages and who has clearly decided to become an insider.

So first there’s a huge barrier to electing people who support outsider views, then most of them are co-opted. If there’s a real threat of an outsider taking the top seat, the establishment works hard against them. We saw that with Corbyn, where one academic study found that about 80% of all news stories lied about his policies.

It’s fair to say that most Western countries don’t really have “government by the people.” The mechanisms still, partially, exist. The form is there, but the reality isn’t. They’re political oligarchies. (The EU is worse than the US.)

And we all know that most Western governments aren’t “for the people.” For fifty years they’ve been immiserating their own people, becoming rich themselves and forcing money upwards, creating a financial oligopoly on top of the political oligopoly. I often say that for most Westerners their most dangerous enemies are their own politicians. Putin isn’t a danger to you as a EU member or America. But Macron or Von Der Leyen are. They’re the ones destroying your standard of living and piecemeal destroying social supports. This is even more the case in Britain, where there hasn’t been a Prime Minister whose primary legacy wasn’t hurting most Britons since the 70s. (Well, maybe Tony Blair had that as his secondary goal, his primary goal being hurting Iraqis to toady to America.)

Great systems are judged by their great opponents. For much of the 20th century that was the USSR and it is not entirely a coincidence that when the USSR was strong, Western governments treated their people well. Of course that isn’t all there is to it, there were the oil shocks, Vietnam, etc… But the West was ideologically scared of communism and when it seemed to work, they felt they had to make capitalism work.

These days the great opponent is China, and the one party communist state running a hybrid capitalist/socialist economy. And the problem for the West is that China’s government, while not “by the people” is definitely “for the people”. They’ve brought more people out of poverty than anyone else ever has. They keep rent and housing and health care prices low, as deliberate policy. Incomes are lower than in the West, but costs are much lower. You can buy enough food to feed someone for a week for $50 in most of China, with ease.

They also create the future: high speed trains, for example. They build real public infrastructure. I was very impressed when they built rest and relaxation places for delivery workers: they cared that such workers were miserable and exploited. And they build things like this:

Now it’s fair to say that this isn’t precisely “socialism” vs. “capitalism”. There was a time when the West built lots of public parks and so on. It’s the difference between a real rich society and a financialized society. One has plenty of excess capacity, the other has plenty of money but very little actual ability to build and create and no desire to do so if someone can’t make an unfair profit from it.

The problem for the West is simple: China is better governed than almost any (perhaps actually any) Western country. And that governance shows plenty of signs of being in the interests of the vast majority of Chinese, whose lives it has vastly improved. Democracy itself is in danger. If it doesn’t produce better results for ordinary people, and if it’s basically fake anyway, why keep it?

The risk here is that the anti-democratic forces in the West aren’t the CPC, they’re billionaires who think the problem with the current government is that it still does some things for ordinary people which aren’t primarily about benefiting billionaires. They’re fascists, at best.

Democracy, if it wants to survive as a major force in the world, needs real reform (all so-called reforms in the West over the past 50 years have been about hurting ordinary people to benefit rich people). If it isn’t re-aligned to work for the majority, its day as a major force in the world faces a bloody sunset.

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Revisiting Original Sin and Identity Politics In the Age of Woke Backlash

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On October 14, 2025

30 Comments

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If you’re anything like me every time you hear the word woke used you wince. Conservatives don’t know what it is and just use it as a hobgoblin, Liberals created it but pretend they didn’t and the left is forced to reluctantly defend basic principles like “everyone should be treated equally”, and “people should have control over their own bodies” after Liberals made doing so noxious.

All of this is based on two thing: cold hard economic math, and the ideology of identity politics as original sin. We’ll look at both, but let’s see some of the results first:

But it’s not just the Youngs:

Now some of this is straight up economic competition. Women get most of the college degrees, they dominate in multiple professions including law, and despite the wage gap, they’re bringing home the bacon. When I was at an elite all-male school in the 80s some of us mentioned to Mr. Skinner, the resident socialist history Prof, that we thought having girls around would be marvelous.

“If we had girls, half of you wouldn’t be here.” And he pointed some fingers.

Chilling.

The bottom line is that there are men who would be more successful if women were restricted to various pink collar ghettos like they were in the 50s and 60s. There’s no denying it and pretending otherwise is stupid and dishonest. So some of “get back in the kitchen” is pure self-interest, whether or not most men will admit it.

But part of it is the original sin of identity politics. I was first introduced in a big way in the early 90s, when I went back to university. As it was explained to me, repeatedly, since I was white, I was racist, and since I was male I was sexist and apparently being heterosexual was somehow dubious. I was willing to accept the first two: I grew up in a somewhat patriarchal (it wasn’t Republican Rome) white society, and sure, I’d taken in some of the values. (As for heterosexuality, well, women are wonderful and no, I’m not changing that preference.)

So, OK, if you’re male you’re probably sexist and if white probably racist (though they would have said 100% for sure.)

OK. I’m bad. It’s not my fault, really, I was raised that way. How do I fix it.

And this is where the problem came in. Apparently no matter what you did, or said, or however much you were re-educated, if male you’d always be sexist and if white you’d always be racist.

“Wait, so you’re saying I’m a bad person, and that I can never be a not bad person?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, I don’t think I want to be part of your movement.”

Here’s the thing, folks, if your religion (and ideology is religion without the appeal to the supernatural) insists people are bad, it has to give them a way out. Even Catholics, obsessed with the original sin, allow that it is possible for humans to become good and wind up in Heaven. Evanglicals, with their “born again” shtick, offer forgiveness for anything.

First you make people feel bad, then you offer a way for them to feel good about themselves. Many will jump thru quite a few flaming hoops to “not be a bad person” and “be a good person.”

Identity politics didn’t offer that. You were bad. You would always be bad. There was no salvation, no good deeds, thoughts or words cold ever truly cleanse of you of your sexism or racism or whatever. (-Isms expanded over the years, till everything had an -ism.)

Identity politics did have its victories, for sure, as with Catholic guilt, people will strive even against the impossible. “Can I be a male feminist, please?” “I’m an ally, right, not one of the bad ones?”

But it also alienated a lot of people with its message of “you’re bad and you’ll always be bad.” The explosion of -isms, of various disadvantaged groups which, as epistemological given, could never really understand each other created a flock of interest groups, some small, some medium sized and all of them undercutting the mass solidarity required to pursue shared interests. (Like not letting the rich impoverish us all.)

Mass political movements are about solidarity, shared interests and an agreement not to make separate peace. I’m 57 and male, but I still care passionately about abortion rights, even though it’s an issue which is unlikely to ever effect me personally. I’ve defended trans people, even though I’m not trans, because I feel they should have the right to bodily autonomy and that they’re being picked on because they’re weak and an easy wedge to use against the larger LGBTQ movement. I’m happy for China that they lifted a billion people out of poverty, even though I’m not Chinese and it’s probably going to fuck me over personally as a Canadian. (That’s mostly the fault of US and Canadian politicians, not Chinese, so I don’t blame the Chinese.)

Identity politics was political malpractice on an epic scale. “Don’t break solidarity” is the first and last rule of mass politics, especially any sort of real populism which seeks to make the weak strong by forming them into a mass capable of demanding their interests be met, or else.

This is the reverse of the rule of the powerful. “Keep the masses divided and fighting themselves, so they can’t fight us.”

Anyone who destroys solidarity is working for the masters, not for the people, whatever they personally believe.

We’ve spent 50 years destroying the political basis of New Deal prosperity. It’s dead, Jim, with about a thousand stab wounds. Identity politics pressed a lot of those daggers home.

Let’s hope we can find something better, a way that unites us and takes care of all of us (well, except for the oligarchs). The world’s looking mighty dark in the West these days, and if we don’t pull together, most of us are assuredly going to hang separately

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Is Good Or Evil More Effective? The Case of America and China.

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On October 8, 2025

14 Comments

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(Second in a series. Read the first: “Is it more fun to be evil than good?“)

As I’ve repeatedly noted, China is now the most powerful nation in the world. If the US was to go to war with China, it would be crushed. After the first two to three weeks it wouldn’t even be close. China has magnitudes more ability to manufacture weapons, and there’s reason to believe that their missiles, drones and fighters are superior to Western ones.

It’s over. China won, and the US lost.

Why?

Well, one reason, bear with me, is that the people who ran China from Deng onwards were a lot less evil than those running America. Or if you prefer, more good.

One of the things you notice if you read Chinese documents about successes of government policy is that they almost never express success in currency. No “the new industry made ten billion Yuan.” It’s always “2 million apartments were built” or “12 nuclear plants are now operational” or “we have reduced the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere by X many thousands of tons” or “we now produce 50,000 tons more of wheat” or “we’ve built 5,000 of the 10,000 parks we promised and will finish the rest in four years.”

There’s no question that China had a lot of corruption till Xi’s crackdowns, and still has a fair bit, but China’s policy makers are focused on improving the lot of ordinary people. You can get rich helping do so, but you have to deliver. The CPC increased how long Chinese lived, gave them more education, gave them better homes, made access to health care cheap, and turned China into the world’s technological leader and primary industrial power.

This is because they were trying to make Chinese better off. It’s almost a side effect. If you make people healthier and better educated and give them good jobs, well, that’s good for the economy. China’s leaders weren’t primarily focused on making a small group rich, they were focused on making all Chinese richer, and on making China strong. You got rich by helping, not by hindering.

To give a recent example,  after Chinese complained that they couldn’t afford homes or rent, Xi said “homes are for living, not for speculation.” The government deliberately crashed the real-estate market, reducing the prices of both homes and rent.

Rent as proportion in income

 

It is literally inconceivable that the American government would do this. Developers went bankrupt, major landlords lost billions. Rich people were hurt! Instead, despite having far more homes than homeless people, the US has a homeless crisis and the response to it isn’t China’s (they cleaned this up recently by giving homeless people jobs and a place to live) it’s to put spikes anywhere people might sleep and when they form a tent camp to have cops kick everyone out violently and destroy their possessions. Some homeless people were even honored by having California’s government, Gavin Newsom, personally help kick them out and destroy their possessions. American values.

Next notice the lack of war-making in the last four and a half decades. Even in the recent clashes with India, weapons were forbidden. How many countries has the US invaded or bombed since 1979?  All that “not making war” has allowed China’s efforts to concentrate on China and Chinese. They focused on butter, not guns. Even today, the entire military is 2 million strong, in the world’s strongest economy (yes, it is) out of a population of 1.4 billion people.

There’s a trope that evil always wins. It doesn’t. I make no claim the CPC is full of Saints or always does good, but among major countries I can’t think of any where the leaders are as focused on the broad good of their people more than China right now. And polling all shows that Chinese agree—they’re far happier with their leaders than any Western population is. Turns out it’s not so much “democracy” that matters (not that we have that, as the EU is going out of its way to demonstrate) as whether your leaders are evil or not, and if the only choices you are allowed to make is “chocolate evil or vanilla evil”, the choice means nothing.

Good is very often stronger than evil. Evil consumes itself, as our elites have consumed their own countries power and real wealth in order to enrich themselves.

Good is bounty, it makes all those under its sway stronger and better.

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Should You Kill or Mourn Nazis and Commies? (Charlie Kirk Edition)

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On September 11, 2025

23 Comments

My favorite Charlie Kirk quote is:

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually, I think it’s a made up new age term, and it does a lot of damage.

But Charlie wasn’t just a one-note ideological thinker.

I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

Kirk was, needless to say, all for the Gaza genocide, but he was for it by lying about it. Most famously, he denied starvation in Gaza.

Anyway, Kirk was an evil, pro-genocide douchebag, who was shot, which he said was an acceptable price to pay for the second amendment. I’m not going to waste crocodile tears on someone who actively worked for the mass murder of civilians and who died in a way he thought was an acceptable sacrifice.

But we need to unpack this properly. One thing commenters on the right have been saying is that Charlie may have died, in full of in part, because of neo-liberals and the left calling him and people like him Nazi or fascist.

Now I don’t know the motives of who killed him, but in our society many people do genuinely believe that killing Nazis was justified and the right way to deal with them. There’s a version that swings left, of course. “The only good Commie, is a dead Commie.” The Black Book of Communism and the constant reminders of deaths under Mao and Stalin are meant to justify this sort of hatred, as reminders of the Holocaust and German war crimes are to justify killing Nazis.

So the right isn’t wrong. If you call someone a Nazi there’s a certain subtext where “and killing him would be justified” is implied. Fascist is weaker, but same general idea.

But the reverse version is Communist/Marxist/Socialist. The right calls their enemies this all the time and it has the same implication. “Cultural Marxist” was the battle cry used by people like Kirk to justify purges of the university system of left wing professors.

I don’t want to imply these are mirror phenomena. The fact is that since the early 20th century being Communist, Marxist or Socialist has been much more likely get one fired, jailed, deported, beaten or killed than being a fascist. Indeed, there was a huge taboo against calling anyone a Nazi, so much so that doing so was considered “losing the argument.”

It took a lot of boundary pushing in the right for that taboo to be partially broken.

Back in 2016, during Trump’s first run for the Presidency, I wrote that constantly calling him a fascist or Nazi, and branding resistance ANTIFA would naturally lead to violence, because if someone is a Nazi, violence isn’t just justified to stop them, it’s a moral imperative to use any means necessary including violence to oppose them.

But in America, the same is true of stopping Communism or socialism or Marxism. And the same is true of calling Abortion a holocaust.

So what’s happened here is that the shoe is now on both feet. The right had their Commies and their abortion Holocaust to justify their actions. Now the center has Nazis and the left has Nazis and the Gaza genocide to justify their violence.

By their lights, all three sides are justified in violence. If Commies and Nazis and Genocide are true evil, and if all sides have committed genocides and are Nazis (right) and Commies (left/center) then, indeed, it is ethically required to use any means necessary to stop them.

What we’re seeing right now is a cry from all the “responsible people” of “don’t resort of political violence! It’s never justified!” (This in a country formed by violent revolution, who’s almost always mass murdering people for political reasons.)

But the issue is that the right and, actually, the center, are acting like fascists, at the least, and really like Nazis. (That whole inconvenient genocide thing.)

The right’s case is weaker, unless you do view abortion as a Holocaust, in which case, yes, you are hard pressed not to find yourself wondering why you aren’t murdering the abortionists. Neoliberals aren’t left wing, socialists or communist and there are no socialists or communists anywhere near power in the US. The right calls neoliberals the left and pretends “cultural Marxism” is Marxism, so they’re really Stalinists, which is ludicrous to anyone who knows the politically correct crew that the right calls “cultural Marxists.”

If you want avoid domestic political violence over these issues (though it’s all really a proxy for the impoverishment of the majority of the population) you either have to decide that being a Nazi (pro genocide, pro gestapo/ICE thugs) is OK, or stop being a Nazi. On the other side, you have to give up abortion or decide that it isn’t a Holocaust. And since “cultural Marxism” is really proxy for a series of policies meant to help women and various racial and sexual minorities, you have to decide whether prejudice, including legal prejudice against them is OK (Issue one) and whether or not they deserve any sort of helping hand (a separate issue. You could keep them legally equal and let them keep their rights like gay marriage and the female vote but get rid of affirmative action and so on.)

In other words, to avoid political violence over ideology, you need to have the vast majority of the population agree on what is acceptable. Is genocide is OK? Abortion? Affirmative Action. Women having the vote? (Peter Thiel, who bankrolled Vance, has suggested women shouldn’t have the right to vote.) Gays marrying. People being able to choose their own gender. Police raids by badgeless masked men without warrants from unmarked vans.

If people don’t agree on what is right and the red lines being crossed are of “this is a holocaust” or “this is completely destroying millions of people’s lives” then of course it’s going to break out into political violence. Expecting otherwise and hand waving that “we should kill over difference in opinion about whether it’s OK to commit genocide” are ludicrous and pathetic and foolish.

There’s political violence because Americans disagree over life and death issues as large as, but not limited to “should we commit genocides?” Well, again, that and general immiseration, which lowers the ignition point.

If you don’t want political violence, don’t wag your finger and say “political violence is bad, ‘kay”, either agree as a society to be a bunch of Nazis with an immiserated population, or decide not to be Nazis and make sure that almost everyone has a good life.

As for Kirk, I’m glad he got a death in line with his beliefs: making the ultimate sacrifice for the right of Americans to bear arms. It was “worth it” and I will assume he meant that, and if he still exists he’s at peace, having died for what he truly believed.

***

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Does Zohran Mamdani Matter?

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On June 26, 2025

19 Comments

So, Democratic Socialist (ie. has politics a 70s liberal would have agreed with, but is less racist) Zohran Mamdani has won the nomination as the Democratic candidate for New York City Mayor.

The best analysis I’ve read of this is definitely from Matt Stoller. He says this win helps define this as a “system-defining election,” that is, an attempt to not just to change who runs a system, but how that system is run. Read the article.

I’ll point out here that there have been a few such attempts. Stoller writes about Lamont’s challenge to Lieberman, in which Lamont won the primary, then Lieberman won the election. It’s similar to what will be tried here: The oligarchical part of the Democratic party will align behind another candidate, possibly even the Republican one. Those who don’t will try to co-opt Mamdani, and turn him into a centrist left-winger.

Mamdani is more radical than Sanders; he isn’t a Zionist, for example. But he’s basically suggesting policies than no Democrat during the 50s, 60s, and even into the 70s would have found extraordinary.

What Stoller calls system-defining elections, I call sub-ideological revolutions. FDR changed the form of capitalism practiced in the US, so did Carter and Reagan. Mamdani, for all the screams from rich operatives like Larry Summers and various oligarchs, isn’t a radical — any more than FDR was. He doesn’t want to switch to economic Communism (i.e., worker ownership of the means of production or Soviet-style central control), say, or a single-party state. He wants real changes in how capitalism is practiced, and some changes to who has power in Democracy.

Sanders’ runs in 2016 and 2020 were an attempt at a sub-ideological revolution, or, system-defining elections. This is why Obama intervened and lined everyone up behind Biden, a nearly unprecedented step.

Likewise, Corbyn represented such an attempt, except Corybn got further, winning the Labour leadership. It’s not an accident that (and we have receipts, so don’t argue) Labour operatives actually sabotaged him in two elections to ensure a Conservative win. They wanted the old ideology/system to keep running more than they wanted their party to win. And once Corbyn was removed, his successor, Starmer, purged the party of the democratic socialist left. Once in power, Starmer doubled down on austerity and politics no different in substance, but actually more punitive, than those followed by the Conservative party.

The Reform Party in the UK is now coming on hard.

Be clear that sub-ideological transitions/system changes can be bad. Neoliberalism was a bad change. In the UK, if Reform sets the new system/ideological norm, it will be awful.

This is one reason why I said that Corbyn was the UK’s last chance: If the left failed, the right would then get its shot, and what the right wants to do is beyond awful.

It’s why Germany is beyond hosed: Doubling down on military Keynesianism (which won’t work in a corrupt, neoliberal system), while cutting social welfare will simply lead to the new-right getting into power. Their policies will make most people worse off, not better.

As for Mamdani, he’s a good sign. The fact that men, as well as the youngs, went for him is also excellent, because it shows that men and youngsters aren’t really “right-wing” in any way that matters. Yet. What they want is change. If they are offered good change, they’ll take it. However, they’re so desperate that if all that’s on the menu is shitty change, or the status quo, they’ll take shitty change.

This was obviously going to happen. I wrote years ago that we wouldn’t see real change until the mid-2020s, at the earliest, because it required generational change as well.

Mamdani tells us that what sort of change will finally win in the US is not yet decided. It doesn’t have to be MAGA stupidity and meanness.

So if you want something better in the US, if you want a chance at a New New Deal, get behind Mamdani and people like him — hard.

There still remains a question of whether Mamdani can deliver, even if he is elected. Will he be be co-opted? Will he run into opposition from enemies so powerful he either can’t overcome them? Or will he use them as a rallying call? Is he competent enough to create and run a new system like the one he’s suggesting?

This is a chance because, if Mamdani wins and then improves New Yorker’s lives, he’ll be copied. And if you’re in a position to do something to improve the chance of this happening and then working, I suggest you do so.

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Us vs. Them / Our Government vs. the Government

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On May 30, 2025

28 Comments

I think it’s clear that democracy and capitalism don’t work together. Capitalists always wind up buying the government, and the only solution is a Great Depression-sized catastrophe to help reset capitalist wealth. But then, over time, they will capture the government again.

This isn’t to say much good may not be done at various times. Usually, after things get bad enough, a generation winds up in power who is determined to make government work “for the people” because they’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t. War, revolution, poverty, depression, and so on. The second generation staggers on. They don’t really understand in their bones that government must be made to work for the people, and they compromise, but they keep it going, more or less. Then the third generation says, “Hey! If we ran the government for us and the people who can afford to pay us the most, well, we could live very, very well. Who cares about the “people?”

Often, the third generation needs to lie to themselves. They believe some intellectual charlatans: Milton, Friedman, Laffer…and later on, Fukuyama (of “We’ve won, it’s all over, it’s the end of history!” fame). The fourth generation doesn’t even pretend. It’s their government, and you peons can suck it up. (Everyone from Bush Jr. to Bush Sr. thought that neoliberalism was garbage, even as he implemented some of it. Billy Clinton appears to have been a true believer and made it work on sheer brilliance and micromanagement.)

But there’s another problem with representative government: Much like with the police, most people who want the power of government are the sort of people who shouldn’t have it.

What happens, one way or the other, is that government is run by people who run it for themselves, not for the people. It’s “the government,” not “our government.”

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I’ve come down on the side of sortition. Just pick leaders based on a lottery. Then run some medical tests on the ones chosen, to make sure they aren’t chronically sick or mentally disabled. Give them ten-year terms so they are in office long enough to have some institutional knowledge and have elections every two years for one-fifth of the number.

Anyone who serves gets a full pension of three times median income for the rest of their lives, and is disallowed from any other income. If you aren’t willing to do that, you can decline office.

I’m quite positive that random people who know that they’re going back to being almost regular citizens whose income is dependent on how society performs in the future will do a better job than normal politicians.

Oh, there are plenty of details to sort out, to be sure, but this is far more likely to produce “our government” than the current regime.

The next article on this subject will be on the next important change: How we do taxation? How do people contribute to “our government” and “society?” Spoiler: Taxing money is not the right way.

 

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