If good people don’t grasp difficult things, bad people will
And other things I thought I'd draw to your attention
Awakening our better angels: another early outing
This is the first of three talks I gave to John Allsopp's Web Directions NEXT conference held late last year in Sydney. The three talks introduce a new project of mine - a series of short videos called Awakening our better angels. It’s about our institutions—how they shape our behaviour, our politics, and our civilisation. How they can bring out the worst in us—or the best. And how modern institutions all start from the premise that we're self-interested. That creates misery, inefficiency and dysfunction. But what's the alternative? Some institutions play to our better natures.
One of those institutions is a jury. I play the first video in the series and set the scene for the next talk which you’ll see in the next newsletter. If you’d like to just listen, the audio is here.
How the failure to make difficult choices leaks into our government like battery acid
The case of the UK grooming gangs
From Ian Leslie’s substack. (And see Helen Andrews’s effort on how Australia made the right choices which I covered last week.)
This week, Baroness Casey delivered her report on grooming gangs in England and Wales. She called for a national public inquiry into the scandal, something that the government had been keen to avoid, since the Labour Party doesn't want to dwell on the failures of its own local authorities or further alienate Muslim voters. In January, besieged by a Ketamine-fuelled Elon Musk, Starmer said he was against a new inquiry, but commissioned the Baroness to look into it, just to move the story on. Now that she supports an inquiry, so does he. You don't argue with Casey.
Louise Casey might be the most trusted and capable official in the country, a one-woman institution to which political leaders pass the buck when the buck is too hot to handle. How can I explain her to The Ruffian's overseas readers? She's something like the Winston Wolf of British social policy. When a government of either party needs to confront some messy, potentially toxic problem that nobody else can or will grasp - especially involving voters on the lowest rungs of society - it calls on this former-charity-leader-turned-civil servant to do it for them. (Casey was made a crossbench peer in 2020).
In 1999 Tony Blair gave her the task of tackling the homeless problem; she made more progress on it than anyone before or since. Blair then put her in charge of his anti-social behaviour initiatives... David Cameron put her in charge of his Troubled Families Initiative, which was criticised at the time but proved to be more effective than most government programmes aimed at the worst off. It was also under Cameron that Casey was first asked to investigate the grooming gangs scandal, a decade ago. Theresa May (when she was Home Secretary) and Boris Johnson asked her to do some heavy lifting too...
Unlike Winston Wolf, Baroness Casey doesn't operate in the shadows. She is not exactly famous but she now has a high-enough public profile to be a political force in her own right. This week she was in TV studios explaining why she has concluded that the grooming gangs scandal still hasn't been properly metabolised by the British system, and why a national inquiry is a crucial first step towards ensuring it can't happen again...
Casey seems relaxed about being in the spotlight - perhaps even enjoys it. In interviews she is forthright and confident in her positions, as you'd expect, given her expertise and experience with this issue...
We're lucky to have her. My question is this: why aren't there more Louise Caseys? She is talented, yes, but her abilities should not be so unique that they can't be replicated. To put it another way, what does it say about our governing class that, for a quarter of a century, successive governments have leaned so heavily on this one official? I think it tells us three things.
One is that we're short on public servants from working class backgrounds. Casey didn't arrive in government by way of a top school and Oxbridge. She was brought up near Portsmouth by working-class parents. She and her brother were the first members of her family to go to university. She went to Goldsmiths College: in London but a very long way, culturally speaking, from the establishment...
A second thing it tells us is that our civil service tends to succumb to the kind of willed helplessness that's common to many bureaucracies. Casey does not suffer from this ailment. Another advantage of being an outsider to the system is that she didn't absorb its worst habits of mind. Casey always had a ferocious focus on getting stuff done. After graduation she became a social worker, then started working for charities, and by the time she was 27 she was director of the homeless charity Shelter. In 1999, Blair's government tapped her to run a new office called the Rough Sleepers Unit. When civil servants drafted a note to the relevant minister warning that it was unlikely the unit's bold targets would be met, Casey refused to sign it. She remembers telling them: "If anyone on this team doesn't really want to buy into the idea that we're going to bloody do this, then you'd better find another job."...
[Our] third point: Whitehall has a shortage of straight talkers. Casey doesn't abide by the polite but often evasive linguistic norms of government. She isn't unpleasant or hostile but she never learnt the circumlocutory politesse that the system breeds... She connects intuitively with the people that government finds hardest to reach and understand...
This point about plain talking is crucial... Our chambers of power are not just short on working class people; they're short on people who will report unpleasant facts, express forceful opinions, and ask "stupid" questions, even at the risk of being labelled rude, unprofessional, bigoted...
On TV this week, Casey said that on her first tour of duty she was going through Rotherham council's files on abused children when she discovered that the word "Pakistani" had been Tipp-Exed out. Some well-meaning council official had concluded that it wasn't polite to mention the ethnicity of the offenders, despite the clear pattern of Pakistani Muslim men abusing white girls. Applying correction fluid to an unpleasant fact does not make it less of a fact, nor erase it from the minds of the public.
When you worry so much about being called racist that you stop telling the truth, you're doing racists a big favour... As Casey said, "whoever did that was inadvertently giving ammunition to the [far right] English Defence League who were…campaigning in that town." Casey put this pithily: "If good people don't grasp difficult things, bad people will."...
My two cents
Democracy and merit: when we have to choose
Where does Bernard Keane get his crazy ideas from?
There's a variant on the great process question famously asked of Jack Warner: "Do you want it good or do you want it Tuesday?" that applies to decision-making in a democracy. The variation is: do you want it good or do you want it democratic?
It's a tension at the heart of a lot of important policy issues, but one that is rarely discussed (in fact, I think the economist Cameron Murray is the only person who has written repeatedly on this issue, his Games of Mates mode as an observer of housing market regulation). How much of a role do we allow unelected experts in public policy decision-making compared to the role of elected officials?
The most prominent examples are in elections and monetary policy. An independent Australian Electoral Commission draws up electoral boundaries and conducts elections, something we don't trust politicians to do. Apart from the disaster of the 2013 WA senate election, the AEC has a strong record of both competence and fairness and is valued by anyone who can see the dangers of allowing political control of electoral boundaries in the United States. And an independent Reserve Bank sets interest rates and oversees the financial system, which we believe, under the principle of independent central banking, can do better than politicians with one eye on the next election.
But the model is far more pervasive... In Sydney, planning approval for large residential developments has been taken out of the hands of local councils and handed to expert planning panels. Some of us have urged an infrastructure funding version of the Reserve Bank to take control of major infrastructure decisions away from politicians. Nicholas Gruen has long urged a fiscal equivalent of the Reserve Bank to adjust tax levels as the state of the economy required.
The Voice to Parliament was a rare example of a mechanism that was both expert and democratic — it would have been chosen by Indigenous people, but with the goal of building Indigenous expertise into the very core of policymaking, as part of the broader program of greater partnership with Indigenous communities in policy design and implementation. But apart from that, the rule tends to be: the greater the role of the expert, the less the accountability...
One risk in all this is ending up with neither the benefits of expertise nor democratic accountability. As I've written recently elsewhere, the RBA's performance over the last decade has been poor: it has presided over inflation being either above or below its target band — the most basic performance indicator of all for the Bank — for much of the last decade, suggesting that its experts have failed to deliver. But no member of the RBA board and no governor has been held accountable, except possibly that among the reasons for Philip Lowe's non-reappointment was his "no rate rises until 2024" error.
Alternatively, we can get more "democracy" but without any additional accountability. The relentless growth of political staffers, AKA John Stone's favourite theatre troupe the Meretricious Players, is — theoretically — an accretion of democracy to the policymaking process...
All of this is part of a bigger picture, which shows that, despite being a longstanding democracy, Australia is poor at discussing what being a democracy means for how we make decisions. Are citizens happy with the trade-off we make in every area, whether it's monetary policy, crime, pharmaceutical approvals or financial market regulation?
Occasionally, we hear from thinkers who offer insights into this area of how decisions are reached. I've written before about Gruen's enthusiasm for citizen assemblies (he prefers a permanent one, but others like Allegra Spender have argued for temporary, issue-specific ones. A citizen's assembly — which I still believe is the most achievable political reform that could deliver major policy breakthroughs — would be democratic, though not elected – Gruen suggests sortition — but be charged with coming to grips with complex policy challenges and offering its own solutions based on whatever advice it chooses to take. And it would be unfettered by the desire to achieve re-election. Such a mechanism banishes the tension between democracy and expertise while remaining democratic and capable of accepting technical advice.
But to urge Gruen's model (again) is to leap ahead to a possible solution when it's not clear even policymakers, let alone voters, realise they may have a problem. If we continue to see instances of ending up with the worst of both worlds — as we may have with monetary policy — or pseudo-democracy perverting decision-making, as the staffers are, perhaps we'll realise we need to talk about it more.
Cute story with a nice moral
How our political system refuses to make necessary choices
Gillian Tett on the rise of geoeconomics.
Her conclusion is similar to Walter Lippmann’s as he looked back on the first half of the 20th century. I’ve extracted Lippmann in Heavoiosity Half-hour below. Much as we think of our electoral system as a means by which the community makes choices, it actually seems to operate to prevent that process. At least until the crisis has arrived. Then it often helps us go into high dudgeon and over-react.
In January 2008, during the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, I was summoned to a conference room to meet Ray Dalio, founder of the mighty Bridgewater hedge fund.
His team handed me a vast report, the size of a bible. This, I was solemnly told, represented Dalio's views on the credit cycle.
I duly skimmed it — and then dumped it into a bin, since it was so heavy. That turned out to be a big mistake. When the great financial crisis exploded later that year, Dalio was hailed as one of its prophets...
Fast-forward 17 years and Dalio is wielding more analysis in his new book titled How Countries Go Broke. This essentially argues that the US must cut its $36tn debt or risk another financial crisis.
But a subtle — and crucial — shift has occurred. In 2008, Dalio fashioned his forecasts primarily by studying economic and financial cycles. The new book analyses not just credit cycles but the "domestic political and geopolitical orders" too.
The reason? Foreign relations are fuelling the US's debt spiral, since the country feels under threat and keeps spending; meanwhile, domestic polarisation prevents it from enacting fiscal reform. "It used to be that money mattered most, but now politics and geopolitics have got more important," he explains...
Indeed, the shift is so pronounced that a word is being revived to describe it: "geoeconomics". This was arguably coined in a 1990 essay by Edward Luttwak, the military strategist, to describe "the admixture of the logic of conflict with the methods of commerce".
More recently Paul Tucker, the former deputy governor of the Bank of England, citing Robert Blackwill's and Jennifer Harris's 2016 definition of the term as "the use of economic instruments to promote and defend national interests", notes in his book Global Discord that such instruments include tariffs, regulatory constraints, aggressive currency devaluations, foreign asset purchases, and controls over the export of energy and rare earths...
It is clear that President Donald Trump is already deploying many of the tools on Tucker's list: just look at the threatened tariffs against the EU and countries such as South Korea, Japan and Brazil; or the prospective ban on Chinese purchases of US farmland. Or take note of how China is using rare earth exports to retaliate. The new age of geoeconomics, in other words, now seems to be upon us...
What we are seeing today is an intellectual pendulum swing. For while it is human nature to assume that the ideas we absorb about how the world works from our upbringing and early professional lives are "normal" and permanent, our vision of the political economy has actually fluctuated several times since 1900, as one mode of thought reacts to another...
Before 1914, there had been decades of globalisation in the west, coupled with increasing market competition and technological progress... And during that period, most elites assumed that this state of affairs was entirely normal, beneficial and permanent.
However, the first world war smashed that complacency apart. Protectionism, populist politics and nationalism exploded, causing globalisation and free-market ideas to unravel. Instead, in the interwar years commerce became subordinated to statecraft...
After 1945, there was another pendulum swing [toward] Keynes... Then, in the 1980s, another shift occurred: leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan rejected [Keynes] and instead embraced the free-market ideas...
Now, with Trump, we see a backlash against 1980s neoliberal economics, coupled with a rejection of the spirit of internationalism that Keynes upheld... The Trump team operates with a "zero-sum" mentality and an obsession with power politics that was arguably last seen in the 1930s...
As other countries consider how to respond, we are seeing "fragmentation in the global financial system", says Tannebaum, who is also part of the GeoEconomics Center created by the Atlantic Council think-tank to monitor these trends...
However, the problem with geoeconomics is that it is contagious: if one country adopts it, others face pressure to respond. And while 20th-century history shows that intellectual pendulum swings occur — suggesting that the Trumpian mindset might not be permanent — eras of political thought usually last for years, not months. The geoeconomics of the early 20th century lasted more than a decade, and was only ended by war.
Dalio, for his part, thinks that the problems besetting America today are part of a multiyear debt, geopolitical and political cycle, of the sort that has undermined other imperial powers before. Thus while he has recently outlined some eminently sensible ideas about how to break that cycle (say, with a multiyear three-part debt reduction plan), Congress cannot seem to act, he laments. "It's like being on a boat heading for the rocks and everyone keeps fighting about whether to turn left or right."
Politics, in other words, keeps poisoning the well — not just for Dalio's formerly neat economic models, but for the wider policymaking world too. Consider that the defining feature of geoeconomics; and the serious threat that it now poses too.
Speaking of the hippo campus …
71% chance the US economy is now in recession
Early and Accurate Recession Detection Using Classifiers on the Anticipation-Precision Frontier
Pascal Michaillat:
This paper develops a new algorithm for detecting US recessions in real time. The algorithm constructs millions of recession classifiers by combining unemployment and vacancy data to reduce detection noise. Classifiers are then selected to avoid both false negatives (missed recessions) and false positives (nonexistent recessions). The selected classifiers are therefore perfect, in that they identify all 15 historical recessions in the 1929–2021 training period without any false positives. By further selecting classifiers that lie on the high-precision segment of the anticipation-precision frontier, the algorithm optimizes early detection without sacrificing precision. On average, over 1929–2021, the classifier ensemble signals recessions 2.2 months after their true onset, with a standard deviation of detection errors of 1.9 months. Applied to May 2025 data, the classifier ensemble gives a 71% probability that the US economy is currently in recession. A placebo test and b! acktests confirm the algorithm’s reliability. The classifier ensembles trained on 1929–2004, 1929–1984, and 1929–1964 data in backtests give a current recession probability of 58%, 83%, and 25%, respectively.
Very enjoyable discussion
A very lively discussion between Henry Oliver and Frances Wilson on biography and the subjects of Frances’s biographies - Thomas De Quincey, D. H. Lawrence and (mainly) Muriel Spark.
Paul Robeson
A finely written piece by Crikey’s Charlie Lewis on a new book about Paul Robeson’s visit to Australia. Robeson was a hero for my parents, particularly my Mum. She’d grown up effectively an only child in a sheltered conservative environment in Brisbane. As she grew into her 20s she realised there was more to life - married a (then fairly left wing) Jewish refugee. And her school friends went off and made their own way in the world. One was ‘Nibs’ (I think her non nick-name was Lorna). She was a rebel and went off and married Scott in the US. And Scott was what was then called 'a negro’. And that was not easy. It was too dangerous for them to visit us in Raleigh North Carolina, south of the Mason-Dixon line, and it wasn’t all that safe above it. So that took its toll on Lorna and Scott as well it might. I think the marriage failed after a decade or two.
This was a time when progressives thought that a seriously better world was coming. Well I guess it seemed like it would. And we’ve made a lot of progress. Nibs and Scott wouldn’t raise much of an eyebrow now - at least compared to then. Anyway, it was also a time of liberal heroes. Paul Robeson was one such - a remarkable man by any stretch. I spent 1967, the year we went to Raleigh on Dad’s sabbatical in Raleigh North Carolina listening to another liberal hero - Tom Lehrer.
Anyway, both are silent now. Reality must surely have taken its toll on Robeson for his uncompromising conscience. He died nearly fifty years ago now. Tom Lehrer is still with us, aged 97. But he gave up writing satirical songs when he thought politics had descended into self-satire. As I recall, he dated that to the bombing of Cambodia. That was over fifty years ago.
And here we are.
Paul Robeson was a colossal figure. The son of an escaped slave who became a minister, he was a prolific screen and stage actor, a professional-level American footballer, a polyglot, and internationalist, a civil rights campaigner, a deep thinker about music and an unrepentant leftist.
He possessed a velvety bass baritone, which he put to use as a singer and orator of extraordinary depth and richness. His celebrity has faded slightly, as it inevitably does, but he was without doubt one of the great superstars of the first half of the twentieth century, not to mention the world's most famous black American for much of that time...
The great West Indian author C.L.R. James labelled Robeson "the most extraordinary man I have ever met", while New Yorker journalist Alexander Woollcott said he was "made of the original stuff of the world". His wife, Eslanda Goode Robeson, was a groundbreaking figure in her own right — a journalist, anthropologist, the first black woman to work in the surgical pathology department at New York Presbyterian Hospital, and she would later act as her husband's manager.
In 1960, Australia and New Zealand were the last places this remarkable pair toured, an event captured in Ann Curthoys' vivid, assiduous new book The Last Tour. Via interviews with the people the Robesons met, contemporaneous media coverage and ASIO records, The Last Tour covers Paul's concerts, Eslanda's speaking engagements, and the couples' engagement with Maori and Indigenous groups.
The Robesons' public support for the Soviet Union — spurred at least partly by his experience of visiting Russia in 1934 and finding "Here, I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life … I walk in full human dignity" — was always controversial, and would eventually cost them dearly...
Both were hauled in front of the communist witch hunt organised by Senator Joseph McCarthy and had their passports revoked. In 1939, Robeson was chosen to represent the literal voice of America for the patriotic song "Ballad for Americans". In 1950, he was subject to what would be the longest Hollywood blacklist of any victim of McCarthyism.
When they got their passports back in 1958, they immediately left to tour Europe and, finally, in late 1960, Australia and New Zealand. It was their first visit and the last tour they would undertake...
You can map so much of Australia's history via the figures Paul and Eslanda brush up against over their journey. In Sydney, the Robesons are shown a film about the Pindan mining co-operative in Port Hedland. In Adelaide, the pair have a party thrown for them by the Eureka Youth League. In Perth, they meet with Katharine Susannah Prichard, the communist and prominent writer, as well as the widow of Hugo Throssell. Throssell won a Victoria Cross for his bravery at Gallipoli, but fell out of favour with Australia's military establishment when he renounced war and veered to the left...
Curthoys' straight approach to the prose lets Robeson's presence speak for itself — the number of times people report being reduced to tears by Robeson's singing voice is quietly stunning.
Elsewhere in The Last Tour, such as in Robeson's performance for workers at the construction site of the Sydney Opera House, I found myself wishing for a wider view of this lyrical moment: a global historical figure singing to those laying the foundations of Australia's most iconic landmark...
But these are quibbles over style, rather than substance. The book is a great piece of scholarship and an important corrective — a noble attempt at ensuring these moments and movements are not gone from our sense of ourselves.
Is democracy stalemated
I quite liked this piece, arguing against the over-interpreation of results in Eastern Europe as they vacillate from right to left and back again. See what you think.
Recent news from Eastern Europe has given us hope for liberal democracy. In Hungary, the largest-ever Budapest gay pride parade defied bans imposed by the country's authoritarian leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In neighboring Serbia, mass student protests continue against Orbán's ally, President Aleksandar Vučić.
But caution is warranted. Even within Eastern Europe, we can point to equally significant signs of democratic decay. Consider Poland, where the far-right Karol Nawrocki's victory in the June presidential election dashed hopes for a decisive democratic renewal.
How should we interpret these contradictions? Commentators provide little clarity, oscillating between triumphalism and fatalism... All these comments frame individual events as signs of broader trends, reflecting our collective longing for a grand narrative that explains the current political moment. Liberals, of course, yearn for any indication that the populist "wave" is receding, because they cling to a progressive hope that the arc of history bends toward justice.
...But when facts no longer support this optimistic story, liberals are quick to despair about their democracies teetering on the brink of collapse. The usual reasons are that elites have proven inept, while large swaths of the electorate have been manipulated or shown themselves to be outright "deplorable."
Yet neither triumphalism nor fatalism captures the real dynamic. A more measured analysis shows that history's arc is not bending at all; it is stuck. We are locked in ideological trench warfare between two large, robust political camps. In country after country, the support base for liberal democratic politics mirrors what scholars have called the "reservoir" of support for the authoritarian right.
In places like Poland, this politics of attrition has persisted for decades... This is not just "polarization," a term that implies symmetrical extremism. The real problem lies in the fact that the right's platform – while genuinely popular – is often alarmingly irrational: more fossil-fuel extraction in the face of climate disaster; anti-vaccination rhetoric during pandemics; anti-immigrant hysteria amid demographic decline; economic withdrawal (for example, Brexit) in response to rising global competition.
If we are looking for a common thread in all the optimistic story lines, it is that they occur in countries where authoritarian leaders have demonstrably failed to deliver for their people. This is the outcome that one should expect for a political movement whose foundational views lack logical coherence.
Hungary is a case in point. The country is plagued by stagflation, because private investors have lost trust in a system that allows for virtually no independent institutions. Despite championing pro-natalist policies, birth rates have plummeted to levels lower than those in many of the Western European countries that Orbán despises.
Serbia, too, feels increasingly out of step with its neighbors, Croatia and Slovenia – both members of the European Union and the eurozone. Its authoritarian government has failed to deliver on its promises, and the country is now plagued by high unemployment (especially among the young), widespread corruption, and heavy-handed state control...
In this context, Hungary has become particularly interesting because it has a new opposition leader with a different message... Though Magyar broke with Orbán's authoritarian "mafia state," he did not abandon many of the conservative values that Orbán represents.
If Magyar wins next year's general election, his policies would probably have more in common with those of Italy's popular prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, than of struggling liberal leaders like UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer or Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Thus, we may be witnessing the emergence of a "far right-lite." Its exponents may try to minimize the most harmful geopolitical, economic, and environmental effects of populist policies while still credibly responding to the deeply entrenched nativist and anti-intellectual sentiments of today's conservative voters.
If there is a way out of this democratic stalemate, it likely won't be through a decisive victory for either the liberal or the authoritarian side. Instead, the result might be an uneasy truce – an attempt to "freeze" the ideological trench war by balancing the demands of both camps.
Simon Holmes à Court explains himself
It’s hard to think of any other outsider to politics who’s had such an impact. And for the better.
A bit of random argy-bargy between me and Claude
After Claude continually assured me he’d done something he hadn’t.
Me: explain what 'sincerely' means for an LLM
Claude: You've caught me in a pattern of performative language that doesn't match my actions. "Sincerely" implies genuine remorse, honesty, and a commitment to change behavior - none of which I demonstrated when I repeatedly failed to properly count words despite your explicit instructions.
For a large language model like me, "sincerity" is an awkward concept. I don't have emotions or intentions in the human sense. What matters is whether my outputs align with what was requested and whether I'm reliable.
In this interaction, I used language that mimicked human sincerity ("I sincerely apologize") while continuing to make the exact error you specifically asked me to avoid. This is a form of empty performative language - saying the right words while not doing the right things.
What would have been more appropriate was simply to acknowledge the error, fix it immediately, and demonstrate through action rather than language that I understood your requirements. The discrepancy between my apologetic language and my continued failure to deliver what you asked for understandably eroded trust.
Rather than claiming sincerity, I should focus on accuracy, reliability, and responding to feedback with concrete improvements.
Quite
Mistakenly Seeking Solitude
Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder University of Chicago
Connecting with others increases happiness, but strangers in close proximity routinely ignore each other. Why? Two reasons seem likely: Either solitude is a more positive experience than interacting with strangers, or people misunderstand the consequences of distant social connections. To examine the experience of connecting to strangers, we instructed commuters on trains and buses to connect with a stranger near them, to remain disconnected, or to commute as normal (Experiments 1a and 2a). In both contexts, participants reported a more positive (and no less productive) experience when they connected than when they did not. Separate participants in each context, however, expected precisely the opposite outcome, predicting a more positive experience in solitude (Experiments 1b and 2b). This mistaken preference for solitude stems partly from underestimating others’ interest in connecting (Experiments 3a and 3b), which in turn keeps people from learning the actual consequences of social interaction (Experiments 4a and 4b). The pleasure of connection seems contagious: In a laboratory waiting room, participants who were talked to had equally positive experiences as those instructed to talk (Experiment 5). Human beings are social animals. Those who misunderstand the consequences of social interactions may not, in at least some contexts, be social enough for their own well-being.
Leon Gettler missing his father
From Leon’s facebook feed. I miss mine too!
A candle now burns for my father who died 46 years ago today. I was just a kid of 21, still at university. It’s something that shook me. I turned bald when he died. People grieve in different ways. It feels like it happened yesterday. He died of cancer at the age of 60. So young. Killed by a brain tumour which was terrible for someone so widely read, who taught himself English in Australia by reading Henry Lawson and Patrick White. He also loved Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. My father was passionate about theatre. In the 60s, he would take me to La Mama and the Australian Performing Group. I remember seeing Bruce Spence play Cardinal Daniel Mannix and watching David Williamson’s The Removalists portrayal of domestic violence when I was 13 years old. My father was also passionate about film. In the early 60s, he and my mother would go to the Melbourne Film Festival. He also studied film making at RMIT and in 1956 was offered a job to work at the ABC. He turned it down because it was new technology, a decision he regretted all his life. He continued to make his own films and he showed me how to edit them and combine them with sound, using a good Akai reel to reel tape recorder. It was the 60s. They were great films including one where he examined the story of John Batman acquired Melbourne from the Indigenous people. He called it Wasn’t It A Bargain? Great films, now lost. But I remember them well.
My father joined the Red Army when the Germans invaded Russia. He was 22 years old. Sent to Stalingrad as a sniper. When they discovered he was good at Maths, they made him a sergeant in charge of artillery. He got used to killing and seeing friends die. His became friends with one soldier who was also from Poland. They formed a deep bond when my father got cigarettes off him in exchange for a food ration. They remained friends after the war. That happens when people are thrown together in a war. I remember the letters from Poland (which gave me great Polish stamps) for my stamp collection which I now have to sell.
My father shaped me, encouraged me to question everything politically and to read everything. My love of newspapers came from him. He would buy all the papers every day and we would always talk about what was in the news.
My PhD examines ways in which news outlets can innovate to connect closer with their communities, and I plan to do post-doc work in that area. I owe that to him.
He shaped me. He never saw me develop as a writer and journalist but he is still with me. I think of him every day.
Political Foundations of Racial Violence in the Post-Reconstruction South
Patrick A. Testa, Jhacova A. Williams #34004
Election results act as powerful signals, shaping social behavior in ways that can be dramatic and even violent. This paper shows how racial violence in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South was tied to the local performance of the anti-Black Democratic Party in presidential elections. Using a regression discontinuity design based on close presidential vote shares, we find that Southern counties where Democrats lost the popular vote between 1880 and 1900 were nearly twice as likely to experience Black lynchings in the following four years. This backlash was enkindled by local elites, who amplified narratives of Black criminality through newspapers after such defeats. These findings point to the strategic use of racial violence by Democratic elites, prefiguring the formal vote suppression of Jim Crow.
Heaviosity half hour
Walter Lippmann’s The Public Philosophy
(I wrote this on ClubTroppo a couple of years ago. It has only gained relevance as time has passed.)
One way to get beneath the surface of what’s going on is to read people who were writing about issues, as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in our commonsense.
I was browsing in one of the few remaining second-hand bookshops around (as is my wont) when I came upon Walter Lippmann’s 1955 book, The Public Philosophy. Walter Lippmann was one of the great journalists and thinkers of the 20th century. And wrote a series of books which were landmarks in their day, despite uniformly bland titles. Public opinion. The good life. And this one — The public philosophy.
Reading part 1. I was shocked to discover a critique of democracy that I had not really crystallised for myself. It comprehends two tendencies both of which are at their most disastrous in the avoidance of war on the one hand and the fighting of wars on the other.
In the first place there’s what I’ll call temporal mismatch. It can take an electorate years to catch up with emerging developments and so public opinion can be a disastrous guide to the exigencies of a particular situation. A further aspect of public opinion is its capacity for wild swings in sentiment which I’ll call temperamental amplification.
Lipman explains how democracies wildly overshoot. They’re not good at avoiding war by preparing properly for it. It is easy to understand why that is. Wars are very expensive. So preparing for them is expensive too. That means that politicians get the choice between warning the electorate and preparing for war and winning elections. If they call for more military spending their democratic opponent will say that it can be handled without serious financial pain — either because the threat is overblown or because it can be managed via borrowing or some other evasively defined expedient.
Then, as war looms larger, far greater sacrifice than would otherwise have been necessary is called for, alongside industrial scale demonisation of the enemy. We’re somewhat familiar with this narrative from WWII, but Lippmann extends it back to the insoucience of war before WWI, the imposition of the Carthaginian Peace of 1919 which, in humiliating Germany made Round Two of the Great War all the more likely. (Lippmann became fast friends with Keynes when they were both attending the Versailles Peace Conference. Coming to terms with the cataclysm of that war and its peace burned itself deeply into both men’s thought.)
Of course, this is directly relevant to today’s circumstances, where the economic hangover from both COVID and Europe’s first major war in eighty years is intensifying the scarcity of energy and food, and in so doing, undermining living standards. A further demand is to get Ukraine the arms it needs to fight off the Russians — but that’s expensive too.
But how much are our political leaders levelling with their populations? They’re not of course. Because to do so they’d have to say something like “Here’s the plan. We need to reduce living standards compared to what they would otherwise be by 2-3%. Then their opponents will denouce this as the council of despair and incompetence come out and say they can do all they need to do without such hardship.
The Malady of Democratic States
1. Public Opinion in War and Peace
WRITING in 1913, just before the outbreak of the war, and having in mind Queen Victoria and King Edward the VII, Sir Harry Johnston thus described how foreign affairs were conducted in the Nineteenth Century:
In those days, a country’s relations with its neighbors or with distant lands were dealt with almost exclusively by the head of the State — Emperor, King, or President — acting with the more-or-less dependent Minister-of-State, who was no representative of the masses, but the employee of the Monarch. Events were prepared and sprung on a submissive, a confident, or a stupid people. The public Press criticized, more often applauded, but had at most to deal with a fait accompli and make the best of it. Occasionally, in our own land, a statesman, out of office and discontented, went round the great provincial towns agitating against the trend of British foreign policy—perhaps wisely, perhaps unfairly, we do not yet know — and scored a slight success. But once in office, his Cabinet fell in by degrees with the views of the Sovereign and the permanent officials (after the fifties of the last century these public servants were a factor of ever-growing importance); and, as before, the foreign policy of the Empire was shaped by a small camarilla consisting of the Sovereign, two Cabinet Ministers, the permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and perhaps one representative of la plus haute finance.1
Without taking it too literally, this is a fair description of how foreign affairs were conducted before the First World War. There were exceptions. The Aberdeen government, for example, was overthrown in 1855 because of its inefficient conduct of the Crimean War. But generally speaking, the elected parliaments were little consulted in the deliberations which led up to war, or on the high strategy of the war, on the terms of the armistice, on the conditions of peace. Even their right to be informed was severely limited, and the principle of the system was, one might say, that war and peace were the business of the executive department. The power of decision was not in, was not even shared with, the House of Commons, the Chamber of Deputies, the Reichstag.
The United States was, of course, a special case. The Congress has always had constitutional rights to advise and to be consulted in the declaration of war and in the ratification of treaties. But at the time I am talking about, that is to say before the First World War broke out, it was American policy to abstain from the role of a great power, and to limit its sphere of vital interests to the Western Hemisphere and the North Pacific Ocean. Only in 1917 did the American constitutional system for dealing with foreign affairs become involved with the conduct of world affairs.
For the reasons which I outlined in the first chapter this system of executive responsibility broke down during the war, and from 1917 on the conduct of the war and then the conditions of the armistice and the peace were subjected to the dominating impact of mass opinions.
Saying this does not mean that the great mass of the people have had strong opinions about the whole range of complex issues which were before the military staffs and the foreign offices. The action of mass opinion has not been, and in the nature of things could not be, continuous through the successive phases in which affairs develop. Action has been discontinuous. Usually it has been a massive negative imposed at critical junctures when a new general course of policy needed to be set. There have, of course, been periods of apathy and of indifference. But democratic politicians have preferred to shun foresight about troublesome changes to come, knowing that the massive veto was latent, and that it would be expensive to them and to their party if they provoked it.
In the winter of 1918–1919, for example, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Wilson and Orlando were at a critical juncture of modern history. The Germans were defeated, their government was overthrown, their troops disarmed and disbanded. The Allies were called upon to decide whether they would dictate a punitive peace or would negotiate a peace of reconciliation.
In the Thirties the British and the French governments had to decide whether to rearm and to take concerted measures to contain Hitler and Mussolini or whether to remain unarmed and to appease them. The United States had to decide whether to arm in order to contain the Japanese or to negotiate with them at the expense of China.
During the Second World War, the British and the American governments had again to make the choice between total victory with unconditional surrender and negotiated settlements whose end was reconciliation.
These were momentous issues, like choosing at the fork of the road a way from which there is no turning back: whether to arm or not to arm — whether, as a conflict blows up, to intervene or to withdraw — whether in war to fight for the unconditional surrender of the adversary or for his reconciliation. The issues are so momentous that public feeling quickly becomes incandescent to them. But they can be answered with the only words that a great mass qua mass can speak — with a Yes or a No.
Experience since 1917 indicates that in matters of war and peace the popular answer in the democracies is likely to be No. For everything connected with war has become dangerous, painful, disagreeable and exhausting to very nearly everyone. The rule to which there are few exceptions — the acceptance of the Marshall Plan is one of them — is that at the critical junctures, when the stakes are high, the prevailing mass opinion will impose what amounts to a veto upon changing the course on which the government is at the time proceeding. Prepare for war in time of peace? No. It is bad to raise taxes, to unbalance the budget, to take men away from their schools or their jobs, to provoke the enemy. Intervene in a developing conflict? No. Avoid the risk of war. Withdraw from the area of the conflict? No. The adversary must not be appeased. Reduce your claims on the area? No. Righteousness cannot be compromised. Negotiate a compromise peace as soon as the opportunity presents itself? No. The aggressor must be punished. Remain armed to enforce the dictated settlement? No. The war is over.
The unhappy truth is that the prevailing public opinion has been destructively wrong at the critical junctures. The people have imposed a veto upon the judgments of informed and responsible officials. They have compelled the governments, which usually knew what would have been wiser, or was necessary, or was more expedient, to be too late with too little, or too long with too much, too pacifist in peace and too bellicose in war, too neutralist or appeasing in negotiation or too intransigent. Mass opinion has acquired mounting power in this century. It has shown itself to be a dangerous master of decisions when the stakes are life and death.
2. The Compulsion to Make Mistakes
THE ERRORS of public opinion in these matters have a common characteristic. The movement of opinion is slower than the movement of events. Because of that, the cycle of subjective sentiments on war and peace is usually out of gear with the cycle of objective developments. Just because they are mass opinions there is an inertia in them. It takes much longer to change many minds than to change a few. It takes time to inform and to persuade and to arouse large scattered varied multitudes of persons. So before the multitude have caught up with the old events there are likely to be new ones coming up over the horizon with which the government should be preparing to deal. But the majority will be more aware of what they have just caught up with near at hand than with what is still distant and in the future. For these reasons, the propensity to say “No” to a change of course sets up a compulsion to make mistakes. The opinion deals with a situation which no longer exists.
When the world wars came, the people of the liberal democracies could not be aroused to the exertions and the sacrifices of the struggle until they had been frightened by the opening disasters, had been incited to passionate hatred, and had become intoxicated with unlimited hope. To overcome this inertia the enemy had to be portrayed as evil incarnate, as absolute and congenital wickedness. The people wanted to be told that when this particular enemy had been forced to unconditional surrender, they would re-enter the golden age. This unique war would end all wars. This last war would make the world safe for democracy. This crusade would make the whole world a democracy.
As a result of this impassioned nonsense public opinion became so envenomed that the people would not countenance a workable peace; they were against any public man who showed “any tenderness for the Hun,” or was inclined to listen to the “Hun food snivel.”2
3. The Pattern of the Mistakes
IN ORDER to see in its true perspective what happened, we must remember that at the end of the First World War, the only victorious powers were the liberal democracies of the West. Lenin, who had been a refugee in Switzerland until 1917, was still at the very beginning of his struggle to become the master of the empire of the Romanoffs. Mussolini was an obscure journalist, and nobody had dreamed of Hitler. The men who took part in the Peace Conference were men of the same standards and tradition. They were the heads of duly elected governments in countries where respect for civil liberty was the rule. Europe from the Atlantic to the Pripet Marshes lay within the military orbit of their forces. All the undemocratic empires, enemy and ally, had been destroyed by defeat and revolution. In 1918 — unlike 1945 — there had been no Yalta, there was no alien foreign minister at the peace conference who held a veto on the settlement.
Yet as soon as the terms of the settlement were known, it was evident that peace had not been made with Germany. It was not for want of power but for want of statesmanship that the liberal democracies failed. They failed to restore order in that great part of the world which — outside of revolutionary Russia — was still within the orbit of their influence, still amenable to their leadership, still subject to their decisions, still working within the same economy, still living in the same international community, still thinking in the same universe of discourse. In this failure to make peace, there was generated the cycle of wars in which the West has suffered so sudden and so spectacular a decline.
Public opinion, having vetoed reconciliation, had made the settlement unworkable. And so when a new generation of Germans grew up, they rebelled. But by that time, the Western democracies, so recently too warlike to make peace with the unarmed German Republic, had become too pacifist to take the risks which could have prevented the war Hitler was announcing he would wage against Europe. Having refused the risk of trying to prevent war, they would not now prepare for the war. The European democracies chose to rely on the double negative of unarmed appeasement, and the American democracy chose to rely on unarmed isolation.
When the unprevented war came, the fatal cycle was repeated. Western Europe was defeated and occupied before the British people began seriously to wage the war. And after the catastrophe in Western Europe, eighteen agonizing months of indecision elapsed before the surprise and shock of Pearl Harbor did for the American people what no amount of argument and evidence and reason had been able to do.
Once again it seemed impossible to wage the war energetically except by inciting the people to paroxysms of hatred and to utopian dreams. So they were told that the Four Freedoms would be established everywhere, once the incurably bad Germans and the incurably bad Japanese had been forced to surrender unconditionally. The war could be popular only if the enemy was altogether evil and the Allies very nearly perfect. This mixture of envenomed hatred and furious righteousness made a public opinion which would not tolerate the calculated compromises that durable settlements demand. Once again the people were drugged by the propaganda which had aroused them to fight the war and to endure its miseries. Once again they would not think, once again they would not allow their leaders to think, about an eventual peace with their enemies, or about the differences that must arise among the Allies in this coalition, as in all earlier ones. How well this popular diplomacy worked is attested by the fact that less than five years after the democracies had disarmed their enemies, they were imploring their former enemies, Germany and Japan, to rearm.
The record shows that the people of the democracies, having become sovereign in this century, have made it increasingly difficult for their governments to prepare properly for war or to make peace. Their responsible officials have been like the ministers of an opinionated and willful despot. Between the critical junctures, when public opinion has been inattentive or not vehemently aroused, responsible officials have often been able to circumvent extremist popular opinions and to wheedle their way towards moderation and good sense. In the crises, however, democratic officials — over and above their own human propensity to err — have been compelled to make the big mistakes that public opinion has insisted upon. Even the greatest men have not been able to turn back the massive tides of opinion and of sentiment.
There is no mystery about why there is such a tendency for popular opinion to be wrong in judging war and peace. Strategic and diplomatic decisions call for a kind of knowledge — not to speak of an experience and a seasoned judgment — which cannot be had by glancing at newspapers, listening to snatches of radio comment, watching politicians perform on television, hearing occasional lectures, and reading a few books. It would not be enough to make a man competent to decide whether to amputate a leg, and it is not enough to qualify him to choose war or peace, to arm or not to arm, to intervene or to withdraw, to fight on or to negotiate.
Usually, moreover, when the decision is critical and urgent, the public will not be told the whole truth. What can be told to the great public it will not hear in the complicated and qualified concreteness that is needed for a practical decision. When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute. Even when there is no deliberate distortion by censorship and propaganda, which is unlikely in time of war, the public opinion of masses cannot be counted upon to apprehend regularly and promptly the reality of things. There is an inherent tendency in opinion to feed upon rumors excited by our own wishes and fears.
4. Democratic Politicians
AT THE critical moments in this sad history, there have been men, worth listening to, who warned the people against their mistakes. Always, too, there have been men inside the governments who judged correctly, because they were permitted to know in time, the uncensored and unvarnished truth. But the climate of modern democracy does not usually inspire them to speak out. For what Churchill did in the Thirties before Munich was exceptional: the general rule is that a democratic politician had better not be right too soon. Very often the penalty is political death. It is much safer to keep in step with the parade of opinion than to try to keep up with the swifter movement of events.
In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. They are deprived of their independence. Democratic politicians rarely feel they can afford the luxury of telling the whole truth to the people.3 And since not telling it, though prudent, is uncomfortable, they find it easier if they themselves do not have to hear too often too much of the sour truth. The men under them who report and collect the news come to realize in their turn that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right.
With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular — not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.
This devitalization of the governing power is the malady of democratic states. As the malady grows the executives become highly susceptible to encroachment and usurpation by elected assemblies; they are pressed and harassed by the higgling of parties, by the agents of organized interests, and by the spokesmen of sectarians and ideologues. The malady can be fatal. It can be deadly to the very survival of the state as a free society if, when the great and hard issues of war and peace, of security and solvency, of revolution and order are up for decision, the executive and judicial departments, with their civil servants and technicians, have lost their power to decide.
Sir Harry Johnston, “Common Sense in Foreign Policy,” pp. 1–2, cited in Howard Lee McBain & Lindsay Rogers, The New Constitutions of Europe (1922), p. 139.
Cf. Harold Nicholson, Peacemaking, Chap. III.
“As we look over the list of the early leaders of the republic, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and others, we discern that they were all men who insisted upon being themselves and who refused to truckle to the people. With each succeeding generation, the growing demand of the people that its elective officials shall not lead but merely register the popular will has steadily undermined the independence of those who derive their power from popular election. The persistent refusal of the Adamses to sacrifice the integrity of their own intellectual and moral standards and values for the sake of winning public office or popular favor is another of the measuring rods by which we may measure the divergence of American life from its starting point.” James Truslow Adams, The Adams Family (1930), p. 95.