There are few funny stories to emerge from American politics over the last two months, especially during the constitutional embarrassment of the latest faux and cursed impeachment. There is, however, one story that stands out as laugh-out-loud funny, and symptomatic of the cultural decay, which has been a constant theme of this blog since its… Continue reading Sound and fury told by the American cultural “elite”
Yuval Levin argues that the institutions of contemporary society, primarily America in his account, have become degraded. There is a good discussion with Yuval Levin on this topic over at the Hoover Institution Youtube channel. We have lost trust in these institutions, he argues, because simply they have become less trustworthy. Their performance has been… Continue reading The failure of institutions in the pandemic crisis
Could it be that the current unrest in America and the disintegration of its political, social and cultural institutions are the beginning of its own 21st century version of the Chinese Qing Empire's Century of Humiliation - 百年耻辱? Could it even be that the leaders of China - who by the account of Michael Pillsbury,… Continue reading America’s Coming Century of Humiliation
Over the last week I have read the K.T. (Kathleen Troia) McFarland's Revolution: Trump, Washington and 'We the People' (2020). I was led to this book by the remarkable case of injustice perpetrated on General Michael Flynn. K.T. McFarland was Michael Flynn's deputy, Deputy National Security Adviser in the first months of Trump's presidency, and… Continue reading K.T. McFarland’s Revolution in Tamerlane’s Shadow
I found on my bookshelf by chance yesterday the 2018 jeremiad by two Harvard University professors (of government and the "science of government" no less!), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals about our Future. It was a book that created something of a sensation at the time as the ruling… Continue reading How democracies really die
"A generation after the commissars left the scene, positive freedom is more difficult to attain, and the West is populated by people who are less and less capable of an agency free from the banalities of the marketplace, the media, and mass opinion. It is not clear that our institutions can survive without a free… Continue reading Degeneration
My old boss and sometime mentor, Terry Moran, has given an oration in which he sets out a diagnosis and remedy for the troubles of government and democracy today. Terry is the former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in Australia, and, less impressively, the Victorian Premier's Department where I worked with… Continue reading Do we repair our republics with big ideas or ordinary virtues?
Over the last couple of months I have been reading history. Simon Sebag Montefiore's The Romanovs: 1613-1918, Orlando Figes A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution 1891-1924, and Ian Kershaw's Rollercoaster: Europe 1950-2017. All of this reading has been valuable and fascinating to me. The intricate catastrophes of the Romanov dynasty, the myriad tragedies of the… Continue reading The slow death of my history
"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." Joseph Campbell "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."… Continue reading The Abyss and cultural rebirth
It is a dark age when learning is despised; when violence prowls our streets; when the cherished teachings of our wisest culture falls disused and forgotten. Apocalypses are not fashionable, though innovation and disruption are. We celebrate the piracy of wanton wealth and mock the traditionalists who sit in their cells and speak alone with… Continue reading A new dark age
For much of my life I have thought about questions of politics and government. How can government respond to any one of dozens of social issues that have occupied my professional life? What can government do? How can a policy issue be presented to political decision-makers in a way that holds their attention, if briefly,… Continue reading Traditions beyond politics
The French Revolution was in part a revolt against a degraded court, whose profligacy in prestige goods was in stark contrast to its bankruptcy in pursuing national prestige in war, and in part the collapse of authority of a political order, so disabling its most essential task, taxation. The crucial preliminary chapters of any good… Continue reading The return of the venal office and tax-farmer
If there has been a single problem facing contemporary democracies, either aspiring or well established, it has been centred in their failure to provide the substance of what people want from government: personal security, shared economic growth, and quality basic public services like education, health and infrastructure that are needed to achieve individual opportunity." Francis… Continue reading Political order and political decay in Australia
Paris. London. New York. Perhaps Tokyo. Never Sao Paolo. Never Mumbai. So sings the liberal cultural fantasy of the tourist consumer who shops in the great cities of the world before returning to home base, where they gather in the inner city and try to impose their strangely rural visions of the 20 minute city… Continue reading Millennial predictions: cities will wither
Mario Vargas Llosa reviews, in the overture to this work, four influential essays on the traumatic descent into death of culture, as he says, in the meaning traditionally ascribed to that term. First, he reviews T.S. Eliot's Notes towards a definition of culture (1948), in which Eliot anticipates today's burning archive: "I see no reason… Continue reading Notes on the death of culture (Mario Vargas Llosa)
