Politics

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Trussed or Bust?

Ten seconds.

Oh, maybe fifteen.

That’s how long it takes to realize that there will be no change.

Not, at least, if the morning’s op-ed in the Financial Times is to be believed.  Written by Kwasi Kwarteng the article is, I assume, an effort to anticipate potential critics and to set forth the outline of an economic game plan for the new Truss administration in the UK.  The administration is new.  The policies are, however, a tad threadbare.  They are well worn to a degree that suggests a complete lack of novel thinking.  These are early days though, so let’s hope that Kwarteng has something else up his sleeve when he takes over as Chancellor.

The problem for the author of the article is that the Conservatives have been in power for twelve years already.  So this is, essentially, their economy.  So to say the following is a bit odd:

“The same old managerialism has left us with stagnating economy and anemic growth, with labour productivity growing at just 0.4 per cent a year since the financial crisis.  taxes are now at their highest in 70 years.  This toxic combination needs to be urgently addressed.”

Toxic combination?  Same old managerialism?

Twelve years in and the Conservatives, having produced old managerialism and a toxic combination of low growth and high taxes, now realize the error of their ways?

A less cynical reader of the article than I would surely then look for both a repudiation of the last twelve years and an outline of novel ideas to accomplish this new start.

Such a reader would, I fear, be disappointed.  There is nothing Kwarteng says that has not been said during those twelve fateful years he seems to be in a hurry to brush aside. For instance:

“This means cutting taxes, putting money back into people’s pockets and unshackling our businesses from burdensome taxes and unsuitable regulations.”

Forgive me while I yawn.

Since this is normal neoliberal claptrap — it looks suspiciously like the normal trickle down rubbish that has failed for forty years — what, exactly have the Conservatives been doing these past long twelve years?  Writing unsuitable regulations?  raising taxes on business?  Wasn’t one of the main objectives of Brexit to rid the UK of all those mountains of rules imposed by distant bureaucrats?  Has that not worked out the way the Brexiteers expected?

Actually we know the answer to the regulatory question.  Brexit has added to the regulatory burden.  The Brexiteers, in the zeal to get the deal done, failed to notice that in order to trade with Europe UK businesses had to adhere to European rules.  This were the exact rules that Brexit was meant to get rid of.  Then, in order to declare sovereignty over regulation, the Brexiteers added a wad of purely British regulations.  So business ended up having a bigger mountain of rules to pay attention to than pre-Brexit.  But we aren’t supposed to notice.

I have advice for Kwarteng: in order to reduce the regulatory burden he could simply revert back to Euro rules and get rid of all the UK-only rules.  Of course, having left the EC, the UK will simply have to follow along and have no input into any future rules, but at least the burden would be reduced.

Another insight into how backward looking the new regime wants to be is the following, which is supposed to an answer to the problem of getting things back on track “for good”:

“That means focusing on how we unlock investment and growth, rather than how we tax and spend.  It is about growing the size of the UK economy, not burying our heads in a redistributive fight over what is left.”

Does the phrase “lifting all boats” mean anything to anyone at this point?

This is so old hat that even someone as steeped in the past forty years as me might be forgiven for reaching for a history book to examine the origin of it.

Let me see.

We are cutting taxes in order to unlock investment.  That’s a form of redistribution.  Upwards of course.  Tax cuts of the conservative kind always benefit the upper echelon, after all they have the cash we need to be invested, so any “unlocking” implies leaving them with more after tax income.  Then, after redistributing upwards, we are supposed to stop “burying our heads in a redistributive fight over what is left”.  Interesting.  What is left will be smaller.  Kwarteng is quite clear that the new administration is committed to small government.  So we are told to expect smaller budgets.  The redistribution of those smaller budgets would, under normal circumstances, be a little more fraught than were the budgets more spacious.  But, never fear, we are not going to get bogged down in such fighting.  The Truss era is a sunny one devoid of ugly redistributive chatter.  All those happy boats will be sufficiently lifted that it will occur to no one to worry about the distributive impact of small government and tax cuts that benefit the wealthy.  Social services will miraculously be fully funded because … well because all that growth will produce higher tax revenues.

Forgive me for my lack of enthusiasm.

This is so out if date and totally discredited that I worry for the FT.  Presumably it printed the article as a courtesy to the incoming financial team.  As a segment of modern fiscal management, however, it suggests there will be nothing new.  After twelve years in power, and having produced the post-fiscal crisis economy, the Conservatives have, apparently, nothing new to say.

And this represents a challenge.  Because, in his conclusion, Kwarteng says that we have nothing to fear.  Truss will reject the failed consensus.  It’s just that she represents the consensus.  So does Kwarteng. So when he says we ought not fear anything, we ought be really fearful.

Plus ca change.

 

 

 

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Democracy? Surely Not!

Let’s stir things up for the New Year by continuing with one of my recent themes.

A quote from an opinion piece in the NYT this morning [January 3rd]:

“James Madison boasted that the Constitution achieved “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity.” Its elaborate political mechanics reflect the elite dislike and mistrust of majority rule that Madison voiced when he wrote, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” Madison’s condescension has never gone away. Walter Lippmann, perhaps the most prominent intellectual of the short American Century, reckoned that citizens were ignorant, confused and emotional. Democracy brought “an intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance” to whatever it touched.” 

I love that phrase: “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity”.  What other capacity can the people have, other than collective?  Madison was hedging.  He wanted to be aristocratic with a popular twist.  And there was that awful reference to “we the people” in the background that needed proper definition.  So the people were invited in.  Just not collectively.  They were let in selectively instead.

To this day the threat of democracy is a real and present danger in America.  The bedrock of the constitution remains firmly anti-democratic.  Various bolt-ons have attempted to bring it into the democratic era, but they have failed.  America is not a democracy.  So there is no existential threat to it.  You can’t lose something you don’t have.  Our project for the New Year ought not to be dedicated to fixing the governance system.  It ought to be dedicated to reforming it.  Making it democratic would be a good start.  Just think: had America been a democracy Trump would not have been elected.  He lost the 2016 election by three million votes.  He lost in 2020 by seven million.  Due to the undemocratic nature of the constitution, switching a mere 46,000 of those seven million — in the right states — would have secured a win for Trump and his attempted coup would have been unnecessary.  No wonder he’s upset.

Still, it’s an uphill fight against a hero like Madison.

Another quote, this time in the context of economic policy:

“The past 20 years, the very rise of independent central banks, is all about getting priorities right, getting rid of democratic money which is always short-sighted, bad money”

That’s Rudiger Dornbusch of MIT talking in 2000.  I get the quote from Adam Tooze’s recent book “Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World’s Economy”.  Dornbusch was praising the Reagan/Thatcher adoption of neoliberal political economy in an effort to rebalance the public and private sectors firmly in the latter’s favor.  Key was the insulation of monetary policy from democratic politics, which in true Madisonian style, was assumed to be rotten to the core.

Since the 1980s it has been commonplace in the Anglo-Saxon world to treat democratic urges as leading, inevitably, to the degradation of the economy and the debasement of the currency.  So policy has been constructed consistently to act as bulwark to protect “the system”.   Preserving the economic status-quo has been of paramount importance.  So we expended vast energy to preserve the banks in 2008, but ignored the people.  We shifted too rapidly to austerity and slowed the haul back to normality in order to avoid inflation.  But that didn’t matter because the labor force needed to be disciplined.  Neoliberalism, at its core, has always been about privatizing gains and socializing losses.  It is, as Hayek et al would argue, stubbornly opposed to the people who simply cannot be trusted to run their own lives.

Which is odd, as I have observed before, since orthodox economics treats customers as supremely rational when they act as economic agents.  This rationality is critical to the preservation of market supremacy as a vehicle of resource allocation.  Yet those same consumers are hopelessly reckless when they vote, which is why Madisonians everywhere treat the people with such disdain.  No wonder the world is such a mess.  The people either suffer from excessive rationality or excessive self-interest.  Oh wait.  Maybe they’re the same thing?  Maybe they vote in their self interest?  Perhaps they’re rational after all in politics?  Perhaps it’s just that our Madisonian leaders don’t like the result?

And yet …

In the past two years we have seen a complete reversal.  Neoliberalism has been tossed overboard by the institutions most dedicated to its propagation.  The IMF, for instance, has berated the left-of-center Mexican government for not running a large enough budget deficit.  Yes, you read that correctly.  The IMF was urging what was previously thought of as reckless policy.  What happened?

Reality happened.

Neoliberal orthodoxy ran headlong into a crisis that no market could self-fix.  The markets themselves needed fixing.  So we had a burst of democracy.  We monetized the debt in an astonishing reversal of orthodoxy.  We succumbed to the realities of the mob.  We could collapse or we could democratize policy.

The question now, and for 2022 as a whole, is: do we go back?  Do we revert to preserving the system alone?  Or do we continue with our democratic experiment?  Should policy makers take workers into account, or right them off once more as an expensive input prone to destabilizing equilibrium and, gasp, asset prices?

Democratic [small “d”] economic policy has been an astounding success only because the interests of the people were aligned temporarily with those of the financial markets.  When the dust settles who will we care about more?

My money is on reversion.  The specter of inflation will be used to suppress the democratic uprising.  The shadow of Madison is a long one.  We must avoid the mob disrupting the genteel and profitable life of the system.  We must make democracy safe for capitalism.

By stifling it.

I think I can hear our “independent” central banks working on that project already.

What a shame.

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January 6th, One Month On

It’s been a month.  It seems a great deal longer.

Trump has slunk off the stage and the first signs of what the post-Trump political arena might look like are emerging.  It isn’t hopeful.  Not if you’re looking for peaceful politics.

As we become more able to adjust our focus and ask “what just happened?” with a better degree of clarity, it becomes more obvious, to me at least, that the entire movement that has come to be known as Trumpism was not actually Trump’s at all.  It pre-existed him.  He simply packaged and branded it as if it were one of those buildings that bears his name but which he does not own.  Trump was and remains a veneer.  He is always willing to push to the head of a crowd and claim it was his idea to gather.  He is always willing to present himself as the prime mover of a movement already well in motion.  He is a shallow person incapable of the intricacies of creating something complex, but quite capable enough of providing the gilded gloss once it does exist.

So it is with Trumpism.

It isn’t actually Trumpism.  The term is a gloss that satisfies Trump’s insatiable ego.  He did not summon the movement into being.  It searched for, and found him.  He needed the movement more than the movement needed him.  It gave him strength where he had none.  It gave him purpose where he had none.  It gave him courage where he had none. It gave him a path too the presidency where he had none.  It gave him substance to hide his triviality.  All he had to do was to apply some finishing touches.

What we call Trumpism has roots way back in the darker recesses of American life.  Trump himself pre-dates Trumpism in this sense.  Those dark spaces are filled with a mixture of fear and hatred of the incessant changes encroaching on the way of life of millions of Americans who see their conception of reality being challenged in ways they dislike intensely.  That conception of reality is an odd mix of traditional values, myths, and religious beliefs that allow the believers to feel that they, and they alone, are “real” Americans.  Everyone else is somehow an outsider or a usurper attempting to subvert the real America and exploit it for “unpatriotic” reasons or shallow personal gains.  Those outsiders are now so numerous that they are swamping the traditional ship.  The risk is now so great that the true patriots need to take to the streets, just as their mythical founding fathers did, in order to reclaim what is rightfully theirs.

The unresolved civil war and the failure to follow through with reconstruction sit at the heart of the myth the movement holds dear.  The impertinence of minorities to assert that they, too, have an active role in defining the true America, or that they can wield political power, is in defiance of the myth.  Traditional Americans are not black, or brown, or Asian, or anything other than vague agglomeration of various Euro-centric ethnicities that comprise the white population that brought civilization to the Americas and filled its vast empty spaces with energetic, enterprising, and God fearing warrior citizens.  This mangling of history is the bedrock upon which modern conservatism has been rebuilt.  It is the explanation for the total opposition by members of the movement to the recent effort to re-interpret American history through the eyes of its black population, or to extend the origins of America back into its deep pre-conquest era.  The shock of a black person rising to the presidency was too much to bear.  The entire so-called birther conspiracy theory, which is where Trump first made claim to being a full member of the movement, could not possibly exist were it not for the mythical history that emerged from failure of the late 1800s too close the book on slavery.  America has never dealt with its suspect past.  It may never be able to.

But the myth is powerful enough that those who believe it can take to the streets and defile their own government in complete confidence that it is their right to do so.  Only they are the true America.  And only they, in their twisted logic, have the right to defy their own constitution.  It belongs to them, not to the others who are encroaching on their space.  So it becomes patriotic to commit treason.  It is an authentic act of patriotism to install an imposter on the throne because there can be no legitimacy in the claim of anyone who is not part of the movement.

Looked at this way, the attempted coup, call it what you will, was an effort not to overturn an election, but to assert a God given right.  Only true patriots can be allowed to determine who sits on the throne.  It’s that simple.  So the entire circus of January 6th can be seen as the movement assembling in order to do just that: assert that it, and it alone, has the right to determine legitimacy in America.  That Trump was its chosen leader, and that he both fed and fed off the spectacle, was a side show.  Like many such uprisings throughout history the movement needed a face.  Trump was that face.  And even after the face has gone the movement lives on.

A second issue to contemplate is the role of conservatism in fostering the rise of the movement in its contemporary form.

The Republican Party owes its current prominence to the shift executed decades ago by its various leaders who calculated that the Democrat’s support of civil rights would create an opening it could exploit.  This cynical political maneuver stands as a stark acknowledgment of the existence of the self-described true Americans who became the soldiers for Trump.  This so-called southern strategy exploited resentment of the extension of rights to people beyond the boundaries of the true Americans and was the foundation of Trumpism.  Reagan followed up with his lies about welfare mothers.  The Reagan attacks on the state’s extent and competency were grounded in the belief that the state was a vehicle for coddling the undeserving.  And those undeserving were leeches on the real America whose solid mythological self-image was grounded in a false notion of self-reliance and exploitation of whatever opportunity presented itself.  Real Americans stood on their own two feet.  Outsiders — inevitably portrayed as minorities —  leeched on the solid body politic.

This gives rise to a paradox that echoes to this day throughout the Republican conscience: how does a modern conservative square a hatred of government with a desire to govern?  The answer is found in the Trumpism movement.  Governance is the right to assert power and to determine who is designated as a true American.  It is the right to turn the engine of state violence inward in order to establish so-called law and order.  This power is essential to the maintenance of the supremacy of true Americans and their protection from interlopers.  The problem then becomes sustaining this power in the face of the challenge represented by changing demographics and cultural shifts.  The solution is to abandon any pretense to democracy, for democracy is an open door to interlopers, and to emphasize the acquisition of raw power through whatever means necessary.  This explains the rise of various efforts by Republicans to undermine elections by suppressing votes, gerrymandering district boundaries, and, eventually, simply ignoring the outcome of an election if it turned up an unacceptable result.  It explains why conversations about deeper electoral reforms are always met with hasty and extreme opposition fro conservatives.  And it explains the attraction to the movement of packing courts with suitably minded justices — even if in order to do so the Republicans have to all sorts of highly un-conservative things like overturning historic norms and contradicting themselves within a year or so of having made up new rules.

This is not to say, of course, that the left does not want to assert political power.  It does.  Its historic trajectory has always to been to extend the right to enjoy the full benefits of citizenship to the greatest number.  You need power to do that.  But the extension of rights beyond current boundaries has a moral core and an ethical purpose.  The assertion of raw power for the sake of limiting rights to a shrinking minority does not.  Not in a democracy, at least.

Which brings us back to the Trumpist movement and the Republican paradox.  The movement’s assertion of power on January 6th was a visceral recognition of the ebbing of that power.  It was a representation of the clash between movement’s vision of a true America on the one hand and a rising new, and more diverse America on the other. They are irreconcilable realities at least until the work of re-imagining America’s origins and history have been thoroughly seen through.  Which is why appeals to unity will have to fail.  There can be no unity whilst two visions of America co-exist and contend for the title of truth.  Because of this we live in an era of raw power.  Getting, and holding power, whilst always the point of politics, has a singular edge to it.  The movement of true Americans, with their Trump paraphernalia already knew this.  After January 6th everyone else knows it too.  This is a pivotal moment in American history.  Let’s hope the errors of the late 1800s are not repeated.

 

 

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Epistemic Revolution? The Search for Algorithmic Justice

This is a long speculation, for which I apologize, provoked by the following:

“In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup.”  — Shoshanna Zuboff, New York Times,  January 2021 

Coups are all the rage right now.  Is Zuboff right that we are the victims of an “epistemic coup”?  What do we even mean by an epistemic coup?

It gets complicated.

For years now we have been bombarded by articles, many of which emanate from the business consulting world where Zuboff made a living,  arguing that we are moving from a world dominated by material supply and demand into world dominated by digital supply and demand.  This new world has to be differentiated from its predecessor, so people have taken to calling it the “knowledge economy”.  This is trivial and well known to all of us.  Information has emerged as the critical ingredient.  Knowledge workers are the darlings of the media and political class.  Education is the panacea for all ills, especially the so-called hollowing out of the middle class.  The “learning”organization is the business idea du jour.

Well, not to be too curmudgeonly, but this is all a bit of an over reaction.  Yes, we are living in a digital world, but the epistemic revolution occurred ages ago.  Zuboff is right, though, to speak of an urgent need to recognize what’s going on.

What we call the Industrial Revolution, that period in history during which our recent ancestors hurtled us all out of the languor of the long Middle Ages during which progress was repressed by various aristocratic, military, and religious elites, was actually an epistemic revolution.  We lose sight of this fact when we turn our gaze and get bedazzled by the feats of engineering and practical discovery that mark the onset of industrialization.  More to the point, we are also likely to get lost in the various explanations of the social and political upheaval surrounding that revolution.  Marxism and neoclassical economics are both utopian ideologies rooted in the explosion of prosperity where humanity suddenly could contemplate a future stripped of drudgery.  Their optimistic roots misguide and mislead us when we need to be practical and recognize the uncertainties of reality. 

We can get a clue to the actual nature of the change when we consider that the word “revolution” itself is a bit controversial.  We tend to think of revolutions as short, sharp events with some definitive change occurring rapidly.  The industrial revolution is hardly such an event.  It was a long slog.  In some senses it lasted pretty much the entire nineteenth century and didn’t reach full fruition until into the twentieth.  The entire process of moving us out of an archaic agriculturally-based world and into what we call an industrially-based modern world was spread well over more than a century.  

Why did it take so long?  It takes that amount of time to create the knowledge that drove the entire thing forward.  Practical inventions sometimes got ahead of the science, as in the steam engine.  Sometimes it was the other way around.  Innovations take time to work their way to their fullest exploitation — again steam is a good example.  But the common feature is the learning necessary to make the change both possible and practical.  Learning is laborious, and is never without setbacks.

Not only this, but as many have argued, squeezing all that prosperity from the new ideas, needs a context in which such value extraction is both socially and politically tenable: there has to be a culture in place that accepts and can absorb the change.  And, as countless economic historians tell us, that culture has to gel periodically into institutions to provide the structure and support for change.

None of this is novel.  But all the drivers of the industrial revolution: the new knowledge and know-how; the cultural support; and the creation of the institutional framework, are epistemic in their origins.  You can’t build the world’s first iron bridge without first conceiving of it.  The idea pre-dates the event.

So, with all that said, and let me repeat my acknowledgement of its triviality, what are we to make of Zuboff’s identification of a current epistemic revolution under way?

There is clearly a sea-change going on in the nature of society and thus the economy.  Our contemporary understanding of, and ability to process, information is running far ahead of our cultural and institutional ability to contain it and extract social, rather than purely economic, value from it.  That distance between our capacity to process information and our ability to adapt society to that capacity is the source of great discomfort to many of us.  Worse, the realization that everything, absolutely everything, can be viewed through the lens of information is even more disturbing.  While undoubtedly correct, viewing everything as information requires us to adapt ourselves to the vision and not ignore its consequences.

Nowhere is this discomfort more evident than in the application of algorithmic analysis to our day-to-day lives.

One of the great factors in economics has always been the existence of consumer preferences.  These are assumed to be the inscrutable, but pervasive, drivers of our economic activity. Our preferences are our wants and desires expressed, or “revealed” in the jargon, when we go out and buy things.  Economists have grappled with this inscrutability.  The identification of preferences is vital to the smooth functioning of the theories underlying basic supply and demand.  That we cannot know them precisely because they exist only in the minds of consumers until they are acted upon, is why economics has long had an air of being kluged together.  They drive the entire market theory, yet they are ethereal, they exist only at the moment of impact.  Then they disappear again into the vapor.  This is why economists were reduced to the notion of revelation.  

All this is being overturned by the advent of algorithmic analysis.

Now, because so much of our existence includes activity in a digital domain, our actions can be captured.  Our histories can be stored.  Our tendencies can be identified.  We leave our preferential footprints in the sands of the internet where electronic surveillance collects them and makes them amenable to interpretation.  Our preferences are not just revealed, but they are predicted.  There is a machine looking inside your head.  It is thinking what you are thinking.  

And, so powerful are these machines, and so acute are their predictions, that the owners of these machines are able to bend the arc of your preferences by putting in front of you options that you are predisposed to accept.  You have become the raw material for the production and the sale of the product that you desire even before you are aware of that desire.  This is a perverse digital update of Say’s Law: supply creates its own demand.

All this is just one dire consequence of the onset of the information civilization that Zuboff mentions.  It is the arrival of a dystopia driven by the potential elimination of human indecision or whimsy and its replacement by prediction and the illusion of reliability dependent upon the pervasive collection and analysis of information.  We are de-humanizing humanity in order to extract a profit.

Remember: all is information, information is all.

You and I are simply packages of information. That was a dull obscure philosophical statement in the era before the explosion in our computational ability coupled with the incessant collection of information.  Now it is a practical expression of reality.  We are information.  We can be computed.  We can be predicted.  We can be reduced to machines.  By other machines.

Or can we?

All life is information, but the value of that information comes in two contradictory forms.  The first is the predictability and replicability of information.  Codes are useful.  They allow us to memorize and replicate useful things.  When we unpack the code and embody its information in a physical form we get a reliable and recognizable output.  But codes are only as useful as their context.  Change the context and the code becomes less reliable.  This is where the second value of information comes in.  Feedback from its context allows an information processor to evolve.  New codes can be discovered.  Life adapts.  But, the ability to learn is a cost, it is a burden because it implies error and discovery: there is potential waste in both. This redundancy in learning makes it the bane of efficiency.  Pursue efficiency at all costs, and you abandon, or diminish, the ability to learn.

So a challenge for an owner of an algorithm is how to get their code to learn.  Or, conversely, how to get their code to unlearn any human biases expressed in the original code.

Algorithms have their origins as human constructs.  They suffer from human biases.  A recent example being the digital portrayal of various human beings.  The portrayals are now so well expressed that they appear to be photographic representations of actual human beings.  But they are not.  They are artifacts of an algorithmic imagination.  Or rather the imagination of the human that created the algorithm.  So when researchers asked a machine to portray people in various forms of dress, over half the females created were in bikinis.  The men were all soberly dressed in suitable office attire.  Or thereabouts.  Bias?  Obviously.  Concerning?  No kidding.

We get similar biases in pretty much all algorithms.  The lack of transparency in their development and application is what Zuboff cries out against.  The owners of the machines own the information.  That means they own us.  They have tilted, dangerously, the balance towards profit and away from democracy.  

Here’s another despatch from the front lines of Zuboff’s coup: when you look for something using a search engine, how do you know that what you find is valid or the full extent of the possible available information?  You don’t.  You cannot.  You are reliant on the utility of the search engine.  But search engines are owned by people trying to make a profit.  The profit motive introduces a source of bias.  What the search engine returns might engender a profit opportunity for the search engine owner.  Your search is raw material for profit.  You are information.  Being mined for profit.

But enough.

I have lingered too long.  

Two things:  first, all economic growth and especially that of our modern era is epistemic in nature.  Economies are learning devices with the learning expressed in new opportunities and material progress, prosperity, and health improvements or other advances.  Second, the current exploitation of our impressive ability to understand and manipulate information is running far ahead of our cultural and institutional reaction to it.  There ought to be an urgency in getting democratic control over the owners of the machines.  It is one thing to innovate — or to use their jargon “disrupt” — it is another to impose biases on or to intrude untrammeled into our lives.  Disruption needs to be met by a counter construction to satisfy all of us.  

We are information and we own ourselves.  So we own our information.  We have a right to determine its fair use.  Such algorithmic justice is a new concept.  We will be hearing a lot more about it as we re-balance, once more, the contest between capitalism and democracy. 

The capitalists, as usual, are ahead of us.  We, as usual, must rein them in.  Quickly.

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Memo to Self

This is short:

I have been accused recently of mis-using the word “coup” when I discuss the events of January 6th.  Worse, I have been called ignorant.

Here is what the dictionary says:

Coup = a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government.

Perhaps my critics would feel safer with “insurrection” which seems to be the preferred word in the media.

Here is what the dictionary says:

Insurrection = a violent uprising against an authority or government.

The subtlety of the difference between the two words seems to revolve around the first being seizure of power, whilst the second is an uprising against those in power.  Beyond that they are both a reference to violence and an attempt to unseat, or change government.  Presumably a failed coup implies that power was not wrested from the government despite the attempt.

Let’s review January 6th:

A large crowed assembled in Washington at the behest of the recent loser of an election

That loser had insisted since the election that it was unfair and that the exposure of the fraud would result in a victory, rather than a loss, for him.

Indeed, the loser of the election had been preparing the ground for this post-election position during the months leading up to the election.  He had routinely claimed that if he lost it could only be because of fraud.

The loser’s supporters were thus primed to suspect the election result, and were ready to reject it.  So some of them made plans to target specific opponents; they brought weaponry for the purpose; they carried out intelligence-gathering in order to find their way around the Capitol; and they cooperated in groups in order to amplify their strength.  They were intent on violence.

So, when the loser of the election issued a summons to his supporters in December, saying that they should assemble in Washington on January 6th and that the day would be “wild”, this supporters, or at least the more agitated of them, took the summons as a call to arms.

The significance of January 6th is clear: it is the day on which Congress assembled to accept, as a matter of pro-forma protocol, the election result.

But this year protocol was ignored.  The loser’s party, incited by the loser, and in order to show loyalty to him, also rejected the election result.  So instead of a pro-forma event, the assembly of Congress was a heated confrontation.  Calls were loud and insistent for members of Congress to vote against the election result.

This created the possibility, in the minds of the loser’s more ardent supporters, that the result might, indeed, be overturned.  A false belief was created.  It was false because the loser’s party does not have exclusive control of the process, and the winner’s party could enforce the election result.

Nonetheless the loser of the election encouraged and abetted his supporters in this false belief and staged the aforementioned rally on the day Congress met.

At the outset of the rally the loser and various of his notable confidantes excited and incited the crowd, not only in this belief, but in the thought that they could march on the Capitol where Congress was meeting and challenge the election result directly.

In particular, the loser of the election sought to identify the soon to be ex Vice President, whose role that day was to preside over the meeting of Congress, as a potential traitor to the loser’s cause if he failed to overturn the election result.  Other figures in Congress were also identified during  rally speeches as enemies — they were said to be perpetuating a fraud against the supporters of the loser of the election.

So the scene was set.  The loser of the election himself then urged the crowd to head to the Capitol and intercede in the proceedings. His intent was clear: he was urging his supporters to prevent the affirmation of the election result.  His words were specific.

A large and especially ardent section of the rally crowd took the loser of the election at his word and headed to the Capitol with the consequence that we now are well aware of.

Was this an attempted coup?

It was certainly an illegal attempt to seize power from the government.  And it was manifestly violent.  That the government being attacked was, in fact, led by the very person inciting the uprising and violence, does not diminish the effort.  It was a very specific and organized attempt to prevent the reins of power moving from one faction to another.  It was a violent attempt to prevent the orderly transition from one government to another.

So, yes, in my mind it was an attempted coup.  Call it an insurrection if you want.  If the nuanced differences satisfy you in some way, go ahead.

It was a coup.  It failed.

We need to account for it properly so that history can write the correct narrative.

And those who participated in the attempted sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from our government, must be punished.

This is not a moment to split hairs, nor to try to sugar coat reality.

There was coup attempt.  It failed.  Now let’s pick up the pieces and stop throwing silly epithets about rather than in getting on with the task of rebuilding.

/rant

 

 

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