The True Conservatism

Reading The American Conservative magazine has been an illuminating experience for me over the last couple of years. The conservatism that the writers of the magazine often describe is not the grotesque, cartoonish, venal version of Fox News or Karl Rove or Rush Limbaugh, or of the cheerful, thoughtless bromides-generating WSJ editorial pages. I found American Conservative version of conservatism unexpected and refreshing.

This latest article is a good summary of that worldview. The author doesn’t waste any time weeding out the usual suspects:

(Fans of Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman will want to stop reading here and flip to the next article. If Ronald Reagan’s your hero, sorry—you won’t like what’s coming. Ditto regarding Ron Paul. And if in search of wisdom you rely on anyone whose byline appears regularly in any publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, well, you’ve picked up the wrong magazine.)

So I continued reading.

As human beings, our first responsibility lies in stewardship, preserving our common inheritance and protecting that which possesses lasting value. This implies an ability to discriminate between what is permanent and what is transient, between what ought to endure and what is rightly destined for the trash heap. Please note this does not signify opposition to all change—no standing athwart history, yelling Stop—but fostering change that enhances rather than undermines that which qualifies as true.

As someone who became weary of the ubiquitous and dogmatic neoliberal notion of self-determination as an ultimate virtue, no matter the price to society, I can appreciate the idea that not all change is good. If everyone wallows in and celebrates his own uniqueness then what is left of social bonds and social contract? Wall Street and DC are great examples of what can go wrong when everyone thinks he’s unique and special and should be celebrated for his aptitude and sheer will.

But this kind of conservatism celebrates community. It’s antithetical to the idea encapsulated by Margaret Thatcher, who is also considered a conservative, that “There’s no such thing as society.” It attacks the current market culture, the hunger for profit as destroying the individual (ironically, individual is so worshipped in the right-wing circles, but only when he consumes or buys guns) and turning him into a mere consumer.

Conservatives take human relationships seriously and know that they require nurturing. In community lies our best hope of enjoying a meaningful earthly existence. But community does not emerge spontaneously. Conservatives understand that the most basic community, the little platoon of family, is under unrelenting assault, from both left and right. Emphasizing autonomy, the forces of modernity are intent on supplanting the family with the hyper-empowered—if also alienated—individual, who exists to gratify appetite and ambition. With its insatiable hunger for profit, the market is intent on transforming the family into a cluster of consumers who just happen to live under the same roof. One more thing: conservatives don’t confuse intimacy with sex.

Further, it acknowledges the futility of the culture wars and dismantling of the safety net – the two biggest platform planks of the current “conservative” flag bearer, the Republican Party.

So forget about dismantling the welfare state. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and, yes, Obamacare are here to stay. Forget about outlawing abortion or prohibiting gay marriage. Conservatives may judge the fruits produced by the sexual revolution poisonous, but the revolution itself is irreversible.

The solutions offered by the author can find resonance in the entire political spectrum, including the far-left and far-right. He sites the environment, excessive militarism, deficit reduction (this one, I think, can wait) as issues that require national attention, although he doubts that the modern-day Republican party will jump at the chance to champion anything that doesn’t involve the coddling of the well-to-do.

It probably won’t, but at least someone on the right is talking about it.

Ruminations on Trading (Book Excerpt #2)

The biggest secret that traders don’t want the world to know is that anyone with a more or less sane disposition can do what they’re doing. The trick is getting access to the trough, to the P&L, to the “book.” The road toward it is tough, treacherous and crowded. On the way there, you will be misled into believing that in order to be a trader you must have a physics PhD, or know how to write code and build models, or have a top-school MBA, or, when all else fails, just be a young Caucasian male. But in the end, it doesn’t matter who made it to the top. In the end, it all comes down to merely placing a bet. The ideas of those who made it become validated by the platform on which they stand, by the levers they can pull.

Becoming a trader is like reaching a craps table on your twenty-first birthday with your rich uncle’s money in your hand; without that craps table and without that money, you are a nobody. Without a seat and a desk and a Bloomberg terminal, your ideas aren’t worth shit. Whatever you do at home with your 401(k) doesn’t matter; your trades have to be big and visible to everyone or, at the very least, to those who dispense your reward at the end of the year. If you know how to drive but don’t have a fancy car to demonstrate your prowess, no one cares about your prowess. The platform becomes a powerful communication tool: One should have great ideas and only act on them using a big podium.

The “book” is the medium through which you can communicate your entire worldview and let fools know that they’re fools without needing to actually say anything. If you’re right on your trades, you will become rich; you can then fancy yourself to be Bruce Wayne or John Pierpont Morgan or James Bond. You can establish scholarships in your name and start foundations to spread your gospel — conservative, liberal, libertarian, whatever floats your boat. If you’re wrong, well, you won’t get more money from your uncle, but you will gain an invaluable experience. You will earn your bona fides to speak about the irrational players and stupid monetary policies and dysfunctional government, and still insist that your general strategy was correct and would most likely work next year. And you’ll probably be right, too, at some point. You can’t lose! Becoming a trader is the greatest trade of all.

In this newfound realm, Vika had developed a new moral compass. Indecisiveness was an especially grievous offense according to her new standards. One should do the analysis, pick a side and stick with it — not question it afterward, not wring hands and second-guess. But those who overanalyzed and became paralyzed by the weight of their knowledge as a result immediately made it into Vika’s mental black book. Those chin-stroking pointy-heads who can argue both sides just don’t have the stones to take the plunge. They mask their fear and inaction with perpetual pettifoggery.

“If my grandma had balls, she would have been my grandpa,” Vika liked to say, mocking the absurd mental contortions of someone complaining about the way a trade had gone. “Take a loss and move on. What use is it to dwell?” Stepping into the abyss requires a certain skill, a special mental disposition, an ability to let go. This philosophy of letting go, of abandon, fascinated Vika. Once she’d decided on a trade, she would fight off the doubts. And with shaky, sweaty hands, Vika would pick up the phone and make a trade. And then… the weightlessness, the fall.

Why is it that we claim to want certainty? Only fools and cowards seek certainty. Certainty is a dead end; it’s a rich old widow living out the rest of her days on the Upper East Side with a little dog and big memories. Unless you are a senior citizen, you’ll go nuts after a few weeks of knowing what the rest of your life will bring. You’ll die of boredom. But uncertainty is what keeps us alive. It is that flip of a coin, that brief moment when it’s in the air or spinning on its side, that snaps us out of our daily stasis. Some invisible Odds Gods are giving you a chance to become better, smarter, richer. What fun it is to get paid if you earned it by the skin of your teeth, by the close call. And how dreadful it is to shoot fish in a barrel. Exposure to uncertainty earns you membership in a select tribe: You are a Padawan mastering the Force.  Once the trade is on, once the die has been cast, you’re in a parallel, auspicious universe. There’s only one way forward and there are only two ways out: Take it off at a loss or take it off at a profit.

My Book Has a Website.

TAS_cover_beta1 (2)

The American Spellbound will be released on Nov 11th in both paperback and as an e-book.

For now here’s a website with the info, full first chapter and some of my thoughts on the book’s themes. Katya G. Cohen is my penname.

I’m especially fond of the cover that Chicago artist Kevin Loesch has created. It depicts a corrupt superhero (in this case Wonder Woman-like character) playing with dice. Obviously, it’s a metaphor for our corrupt elites who are confused about their place in society.

My Little Homage To Atlantic City

Atlantic City is anti-Vegas. In Vegas, like at Venice masque-ball, all the life’s drudgery is hidden away; in AC it’s on open display, with not even a half-hearted attempt at disguising it. Vegas is a high class prostitute with silicone breasts and facial injections and perfect ass that will charge you a fortune and will leave you disappointed. AC is a 45-year waitress at Harrah’s, too old and unattractive to flirt, too weary of life, with saggy everything. Happy to have a job. At this point, AC doesn’t even try to sell you anything, because it knows it’s in the gutter and doesn’t have the money or desire to put on a mask. You get what you see. If you don’t like what you see you can go fuck yourself. The heart of AC is its authenticity. No city in America can command such connection to reality as AC. Well, maybe Detroit or Camden. Atlantic City is a Steinbeck-worthy shithole where all those polished, self-assured story-telling billionaires giving us lectures on CNBC wished they came from. Oh, what a perfect place to put on one’s resume, beefing up one’s down-to-earth, up-by-the-bootstraps, common man credentials! There’s just something irresistible about AC’s decrepitude with its boarded-up houses and hard luck and real-world sensibility. Even AC remaining patrons are symbolic of decline and loss. You see some retiree named Morty in the poker room all the time, and then, one day you realize you haven’t seen him in a while. He stops coming to the game. Maybe he got tired, or maybe he ran out of money. Or moved to Florida. Who knows. In the surviving casinos you will find a fine vertical slice, as they like to say on Wall Street, of society: at the poker table you have a smart-ass Asian guy to your right making fun of your Blackberry and to your left you have a grandpa with a flip phone. But still the slice is heavy on the down side: it’s full of hustlers and lowlifes and Jesse Pinkmans, and small businessmen with garish gold jewelry, hairy chests and oiled hair. In Manhattan such fashion choices would be considered good for Halloween. Here’s it’s the real deal. Cab drivers are grateful to give you a ride and are especially appreciative of an extra dollar you throw in as a tip. “50 dollars a day, on a good day,” one chatty driver told me about his daily haul. Maybe he was fishing for sympathy, but maybe not. It’s hard to imagine making much more driving people around this town: customers are scarce. AC is pristine in its realism; is ugly and beautiful as life itself. Pampered Manhattanites, desperate for a real, unstructured adventure, secretly nostalgic for good old times when Times Square had hookers and Washington Square Park had drug dealers, commute in a zombified state between the City and the Hamptons, without realizing what haven – not heaven, but haven – they have just 150 miles to the South. But fuck them. Let them suffocate, let them look in vain for thrills in the sterilized, anesthetized, risk-free Manhattan Green Zone. I don’t want them to contaminate my own little untouched, ungentrified playground with their Starbucks and yoga and irony. Oh, irony. How sick I am of irony. Irony is the last refuge of someone who has nothing to say. Atlantic City is devoid of irony. That’s what I like about it. It’s an antidote to all those effete, overeducated, self-conscious ironic types. It’s been down on its luck for too long to care anymore. It’s too battered to even pretend to keep up appearances. It shows the world a big fat middle finger and then goes about its business. If you come it’s nice, if you don’t – it don’t give a shit. It already lost all its family jewels. Revel was AC’s last attempt to live large, to splurge and to go down in style. It’s that Pontiac Firebird that Lester Burnham bought, on a whim, before leaving this shitty world. Now, when you approach Atlantic City it stands there, beautiful and dead, towering over the skyline, reminding us all of the eventual demise.

Excerpt #1 from my upcoming book “The American Spellbound”

My book is set to be released on November 11th. It’s fiction based on real-life events. I will be posting random excerpts between now and November.

Here’s the first sample.

In the fall of 2006, everyone flew down to Florida for the 12th Annual Mortgage Industry Conference.  Over the years, the industry’s annual soiree became the hottest ticket for every player, big and small, attracting inevitable hordes of private lenders, regional banks, broker-dealers, government agencies, media, and various vendors pushing analytics software. The outing was the place to be for Who’s Who of the industry. Manhattan and Greenwich, Conn., became ghost towns during these three-day bashes in the warmer climates. Trading desks were left to be tended by younger aspirants. But no major market moves were expected during those days, as all the rainmakers were busy drinking and schmoozing on yachts’ decks and at nightclubs down in Miami.

The biggest parties were headlined by the Doobie Brothers and ZZ Top — darlings of the middle-aged white men. The men assumed a relaxed, giddy mood, donning print shorts and worn-out boat shoes without socks, the kind of fashion statement intended to evoke their boyhood of forty years ago — a time when things were simpler and carefree, when their major daily preoccupations consisted of smoking weed and playing in a garage band. In their minds, in those moments, they were still those young boys. What a great venue to show the world their playful, human side, a side carefully and deliberately buried under the suit and tie and shoptalk during the usual business conduct back in New York.

For the industry women, a younger, prettier and less numerous lot, it was a time to shine. They wore their cocktail dresses and high heels, and danced to classic rock hits as if it were disco, hoisting drinks in the air. The drunken conversations were a much-needed break — the escape from the office, the chance to get out of the suffocating suits — a pseudo liberation, an attempt at playing up their humanity and normalcy.

Vika had attended this annual gathering for several years. During her first conference, she made sure to audit all of the relevant panels, studiously scribbling bits of wisdom from industry bigwigs. But the real intel, the kind that would make one fly to Miami and endure the small talk face-to-face, always floated at private parties by the pool or at the bar, where each side tried to gauge what the other was up to. The buy side tried to figure out where to get yield, and the sell side tried to figure out what the buy side was interested in and how much money they were prepared to spend.

Nascent concerns about the “frothy” mortgage market were squashed by the optimism of big-name economists associated with big investment houses. They pulled out their graphs and charts and assured everyone that, given the historical data, there was nothing to worry about. Whatever small disruptions may occur would be over rather quickly and should be viewed as an opportunity to buy.

If the fancy charts weren’t enough to convince the skeptics, the forever-elated salesmen — the professional carriers of good news — came in to finish the job: “You worry too much,” they would say to the deep-pocketed fence-sitters. A good salesman knows you better than you know yourself. If you are Chinese, they will sell you yield. If you’re European, they will stroke your sense of superiority. If you’re an ambitious manager of an American pension fund, sitting on piles of money but bound by rules and regulations, they will find a kosher way for you to become the big swinging dick you always knew you were. And if you are an American hedge fund — a serious fund, not two guys and a Bloomberg — a smart salesman cuts the bullshit and both of you reach an understanding.

The big fish out there — pension funds, the cash-rich Chinese, the dumb Europeans, the assortment of late-to-the-party bottom-feeders with cash — are there to be used as a buffer if things go wrong for both of you. And it’s not like the clients put up much resistance. Throw in a couple of steak dinners at Peter Luger, and any concern evaporates.

“Eightee percen yier! I rike!” Vika overheard a salesman describe his Chinese client’s investment strategies to the delight of the group of bankers having drinks, who then burst into a smug, loud laughter. “That’s all it takes, man!”

The Value of NOT Doing Things

For decades all the self-help books and all the commencement addresses and all the motivational speakers told us to just go for it because we’re worth it. And so we do. We have internalized our own specialness and thus are looking for ways to show it to the world. And sociopaths do it better than the rest of us. You see, when we’re not doing anything, we’re nobodies. If you do nothing there’s no hope, no updates to post on Facebook, no one liners for Twitter, no cool pictures for the Instagram. No stories to tell. Without stories you do not exist.

Thus the concept of NOT doing things is anathema for many, especially when they have access to tools that enable them to do those things. Moreover, let’s not beat around the bush here, we are actively looking for such access. Once we get access, the idea of restraint then becomes obsolete. We didn’t spent all that time and effort on acquiring access to just sit around and do nothing with it. For similar reasons a poker player can’t lay down pocket aces when he’s obviously beat. It took him such a long time to get it. Power lays in doing things, not in restraint.

“Why do you need to wreck this company?” Bud Fox asks Gordon Gekko. “Because it’s wreckable!” he answers, frustrated with such a stupid question. SAC hedge fund manager Steve Cohen displayed a similar mindset when he famously wondered: “What else is there to do?” And that’s it in a nutshell: you’re either doing something or you are a bum. When the music is right and you got your dancing shoes on, well, you go dancing.

Of course, the men of action don’t view themselves as bad guys. Wall Street banker selling high-yielding crap will tell you that he was providing services to his clients who were supposed to know about the product and that he didn’t break any laws; besides he’s on board of several charities, so will you please leave him alone already.

George Zimmerman will tell you that he was standing his ground against a thug and acted within the Florida law.

The Russian rebels will tell you that that all they want is peace, to go home and to cook borsch. That they ended up shooting down a civilian airplane is something that is beyond their control, besides we’re in a war, so shit happens. It’s a plane’s pilot fault that he chose to fly this route, anyway.

I’m trying to think what was going through the mind of a Russian rebel who pulled the BUK trigger that brought down the Malaysian Airlines MH17. Oh, surely, he wasn’t thinking “Let’s shoot down a civilian plane”. No. He was more likely thinking, with a trademark Russian abandon: “This device is some cool shit! There’s war going on so we can pretty much do whatever we want. Eh, fuck it. Let’s shoot and see what happens.” Obviously, it sounds more colorful in Russian. That the war is of his own making and that “what happens” can take an unexpected and grim turn is not part of his consideration.

None of them will stop and think about the true reason for their actions. But I sense a lot of similar thinking. They were looking, actively seeking for the opportunity to demonstrate their potency to the world. For them, such a demonstration is a subconscious message to the rest of us: Behold! I’m here, I exist, look at my footprint. It’s a dark, deadly version of “Look, ma. No hands!”

And yet, all of them had a choice of NOT doing things. What would take that Russian rebel to NOT press a button on a missile? What would take a banker to refuse to sell crap to unsuspecting clients? What would take a George Zimmerman to go about his business? It appears that not doing things requires the possession of qualities that are out of fashion, like humanity, consideration for others, emotional maturity, conscience and restraint. Even putting down those words makes one sound like a loser – it’s embarrassing to have “consideration for others” in your vocabulary these days. It makes you sound like some kind of social worker or a weak-minded hippie. A person with no power in other words. Instead, great value is attached to self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, search for heroism (however dubious), and winning at all costs. It’s all about you, about your personal brand. You do therefore you exist. Do what exactly? Who cares if it puts your name into history books.

We were conditioned to “act”, to be “pro-active”, to crush the competition. Thus very few of us are capable to stand next to the “button” and do nothing. We just don’t have that kind of mental fortitude, we have never developed those qualities and were never encouraged to possess them. One has to be able to NOT take the ring. And if he possesses the ring he has to be able to lay it down. And it is very hard to do. I know this.

The calls for restraint carry a measure of anti-progressive flavor. I realize that. Perhaps that makes me into a small ‘c’ conservative. So what? I have a problem with such progress. I have a problem with those who seek destruction for the sake of destruction. A revolutionary and an asshole usually go hand in hand. If progress means self-determination of assholes, fuck such progress.

Rick Santelli Gets Schooled.

I don’t know if those of you who follow this whole Fed/QE/inflation debacle saw this yesterday, but this is a must see. Inflation hawk, but really an approval-seeking, hissy-fit throwing man-child Rick Santelli got finally taken to school by other CNBC talking heads. I wonder how he didn’t end up rolling on the floor, stomping his feet on the ground.

Here’s a detailed article on Business Insider with a longer video (worth 10 min of your time) with excerpts.

Steve Liesman delivers the knockout punch in the end:

It’s impossible for you to have been more wrong, Rick. Your call for inflation, the destruction of the dollar, the failure of the U.S. economy to rebound. Rick, it’s impossible for you to have been more wrong. Every single bit of advice you gave would’ve lost people money, Rick.

As you might know I have been in Bernanke/Yellen camp for a long time. It’s hard for me to believe that some people are angry at the Fed for merely following its mandate. I think that anger is stemming from theirs missing the rally. The rally shouldn’t have happened because they were supposed to be right and Bernanke was supposed to be wrong. But that’s not how things turned out. And instead of acknowledging their mistake and moving on they are stuck in the assigning blame page and screaming “I was right” as if we’re not hearing them. We hear you just fine, it’s just that you don’t have a case.

A nice description of brief history of the conflict is here.

 

 

Protecting the Weak.

Why is the baptism scene from The Godfather so powerful? Why do we connect and empathize with Michael Corleone but not with his victims? While you might cringe at the violence, deep down you cheer for Michael taking down his enemies. Perhaps because we know that those opponents would do the same thing to Michael if given the chance. They are formidable opponents. We can appreciate that. We like ourselves a good Godzilla vs Muto, Rocky vs Ivan Drago smack down.

What does it say, then, about our morality, if we approve of such violence? I think the answer is that morality is malleable. It lives in some curved space-time, in some undefined superposition, and it depends on the tools we use to measure it. The context of violence is important to us. We know it was justified, we know it’s just business. We also learn that The Mob, with all its flaws and violent tactics, actually cares about the community it is operating in. Not out of some benevolence, but out of simple understanding that it needs an environment, a functioning community to operate. Sure, it could ask you to do things, but in return you got protection. You knew you had a recourse if someone fucked with you. Furthermore, we see that the Mob’s rivals and antagonists are on equal footing. The rules are clear, the participants are well-equipped and well-informed of the rules of the game. “Senator, we’re two sides of the same hypocrisy,” Michael Corleone would say.

A mob boss understands that he acts outside of law and when he chooses this path, he’s aware of and prepared to deal with the consequences. He’s prepared to go to jail or be killed. Such a choice should be respected. It’s a mensch-y thing to do. He made his choice. The instruments of his trade are understood: bribery, intimidation and murder. The game that a mob boss plays is on even terms with his opponents.

Because the terms of such business model are understood by all, a trust in the system is not broken when a drug lord does his business. A trust in the system is broken when the elites – the best and brightest among us – undermine the system within the law. Today, labor and ordinary citizens are not on equal footing with capital. Walmart doesn’t care if you scrape by. An investment banker has no qualms about saddling some small town with loads of debt. A credit trader has no qualms about shorting a municipal bond that will spell doom for a bunch of country bumpkins in a flyover country. A hedge fund has no qualms about stiffing a municipality of taxes it owes. A private equity firm has no problem “unlocking” someone else’s value.

The game between labor and capital today is happening on uneven terms. Capital, like the Mob, also asks you to do things, but instead of getting protection, you’re then asked to try harder. Today the weak, the unaware can’t protect themselves because they don’t know, have no way of knowing what’s going on. They have no recourse.

Thus a crafty and clever hedge fund manager, exploiting the loopholes but operating within the law is worse, in my moral universe, than a drug lord operating outside the law: a hedge fund manager targets the weak and the unaware – those who can’t fight back. In such a scenario, a revered libertarian notion of free will carries no value: To have a free will one must first be aware of the circumstances in which he needs to use that will. Drug lord’s customer base are junkies, who, while addicted and chained by their habit, knew what they were getting into. Drug lord’s rivals are well-informed and well-armed. Labor and working class, on the other hand, do not have that luxury. They don’t have the luxury of knowing the new rules of the game and thus are not in a position to say “no” to such a game. A retired public worker whose pension fund is being raided can’t fight back because in most cases he doesn’t even know that his fund is being raided. And even if he knew he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it because the raid is carried out within the construct of the current law. The raid is kosher, even if it smells bad. The courts won’t care if it smells bad, they will care that it’s kosher.

The tools and means of those who act within the law are murky. This kind of game is played very subtly: there’s no shooting, no bloodshed. The target audience has no way of knowing whether they are being fucked or not. There’s no face to face confrontation with those whom you fleece; in fact you don’t even think you’re fleecing them at all. In a remarkable act of self-delusion, in their air-conditioned offices, the elites actually think they keep the wheels of commerce and growth well-oiled and spinning. They think that to take advantage of the unwashed who don’t pay attention because they are too busy surviving or too exhausted to do anything about it is fair game. It is legal, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that you fight a cripple and then have the balls to declare yourself a rightful winner.

The metaphorical cripple is a laid-off factory worker, or better yet, to taunt my liberal friends, an illiterate redneck in Appalachia. We should be equally concerned about both. We should do our best to protect them. By “we” I mean spoiled, self-righteous, self-absorbed, overeducated bi-coastal liberals. We have to protect, or at least to speak for even the most depraved trailer trash out there, simply because they don’t know, they can’t do it themselves. If not us then who? If they can’t engage in this game, then we should do it on their behalf. We shouldn’t care whether they like us or not, they probably won’t and that is not our concern. But we have to become their advocates. If they notice – it’s an added benefit; if they don’t – it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to agree with those we seek to protect and they don’t have to agree with us. This is more important than guns and gays. This isn’t about holding hands and singing kumbaya.

Next time you see a Tea Partier spewing illegible nonsense on some website, don’t wallow in your superiority and laugh at his spelling mistakes. Remember that he’s hurting and upset and lost. Remember, no one is coming for his rescue. Don’t laugh at him for buying gold coins and fearing inflation: that’s what Fox News has been telling him to do for several years. How can we expect him to know what’s going on? What, you think he’s reading Krugman’s blog or knows who Bernanke or Yellen are?

Protecting the most vulnerable member of society is the right thing to do. The welfare of the weak is a buffer against a gated-community type society. Many don’t think it’s a big deal, because they think if it comes to that they will end up on the right side of that gated community. I know I would. But I also know I wouldn’t enjoy it.

Our Libertarian Age.

I stumbled upon another great long read. It’s too good not to distill into a few readable points, for many don’t have 2 hours to sit and read it and absorb. The author makes such great, unorthodox and profound points, that it needs to be made available to a busy reader.

  1. After the end of the Cold War many thought that, perhaps, now was the “end of history.”
  2. Everyone got busy with either building democracy or bringing democracy overseas; the triumphal tandem of democracy/liberal economics began its march around the world.
  3. The end of the Cold War, however, left an ideological vacuum. When the two opposing views were in constant struggle it kept the ideologies in good shape, prepared to constantly explain and defend their worldview. When the need for the intellectual debate disappeared, so did the thinking and the rigor.
  4. This lack of political adversary led to disappearance of ideology that required some kind of intellectual/historical/social basis and replaced it with dogma that needs no basis.
  5. Speak to modern day students about ideology and you will be faced with blank stares. Sure, they know a thing or two about fascism – “evil”, or communism – “a few good things”, but they are in no shape to carry any sort of thoughtful discussion with arguments that are routed in history and tradition; what’s worse they even lack the curiosity to do so. “Societies are too complex, human motivations too various, and institutions too opaque for us to get a static picture of reality or discern the invariable laws governing it.”
  6. The new, reigning “hegemonic worldview” – “democratic capitalism” for Americans and “neoliberalism” for Europeans postulates that the concept of democracy is the only political form that can claim global recognition today and treats as axiomatic the primacy of individual self-determination over traditional social ties. This is our new Libertarian age.
  7. It’s libertarian by default: whatever has before restrained an individual autonomy – ideas or beliefs or traditions – all of that has atrophied. Libertarianism does not tolerate any customs or national or social peculiarities. Self-determination trumps all. I think of any political mess today and I can trace it all back to the idea of self-determination: ISIS, Syria, Ukraine. They all have something to say, grievances to address and to dismiss it is to invite the ire of libertarian dogma.
  8. The distinction between ideology and dogma is that ideology, however flawed, masters the historical forces, tries to understand them first and then shape the society. Current-day libertarianism is supremely dogmatic, and like every dogma it sanctions ignorance about the world and blinds adherents to its effects in that world. “It begins with basic liberal principles – the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, distrust of public authority, tolerance – and advances no further. It has no taste for reality, no curiosity about how we got here or where we are going.”

  9. “Libertarianism’s dogmatic simplicity explains why people who otherwise share little can subscribe to it: small-government fundamentalists on the American right, anarchists on the European and Latin American left, democratization prophets, civil liberties absolutists, human rights crusaders, neoliberal growth evangelists, rogue hackers, gun fanatics, porn manufacturers, and Chicago School economists the world over. The dogma that unites them is implicit and does not require explication; it is a mentality, a mood, a presumption – what used to be called non-pejoratively, a prejudice. Maintaining an ideology requires work because political developments always threaten its plausibility. Theories must be tweaked, revisions must be revised. Since ideology makes a claim about the way the world actually works, it invites and resists refutation. A dogma, by contrast, does not. That is why our libertarian age is an illegible age.”

  10. The author then gives an example of the European Union. The integration of European states have been guided by neoliberalism. But neoliberal economic approach jeopardizes the principles of democratic self-government. Thus today we have a collection of states, each with their separate and distinct identities, tied together in an ungovernable mess. How do you turn Scots and Sicilians into compatriots who feel they share a destiny and recognize the same institutions?
  11. Americans are better at living democracy than at understanding it. They think it’s been a universal aspiration for the last two millennia, rather than a form of government that has gained legitimacy only in the past 25 years. Such amnesia spreads even into the political science quarters. Political science scholars didn’t bother to study other non-democratic forms of government, such as monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy and tyranny. Instead they placed all existing regimes on a straight line from democracy to totalitarianism and rated them. This way of thinking led them to naively believe that the fall of Soviet Union will automatically give rise to democracy worldwide. Of course, now they have been presented with unpleasant things that democratic elections can produce.
  12. Yet, in the minds of American politicians and journalists, still only two political categories exist: democracy and le deluge. Think tanks produce annual reports that rate levels of democracy in each country, ranking them from “free” to “not free”. They seem determined not to notice that since the fall of Soviet Union all kinds of different forms of non-democratic government reappeared: oligarchy in the post-Soviet states; the advance of political Islam; tribes, clans and sects in Africa, etc. How are you supposed to account for all those nuances when you promote democracy? How do you recognize that there are things, that are hard to understand for an average American libertarian, that are prized in other communities? Things like deference to tradition, a commitment to place, respect for elders, obligations to family or clan, a devotion to piety and virtue – things that individualism destroys.
  13. The truth is that billions of people will not be living in a democracy in our lifetime, or ever. And not only for cultural reasons. Without the rule of law and professional bureaucracies that treat citizens impartially, without military that is subordinate to civilian rule, without regulatory bodies, without social norms liberal democracy is not possible. So lacking all of the above, what is plan B?
  14. There’s no plan B. We can’t have a plan B before we explore the possibility of having non-democratic regimes without trying to bring them to either American or European denominator. We would have to abandon the dogma that individual freedom is the only and the highest political good in every historical circumstance and accept the trade-offs.

  15. “The libertarian age is an illegible age. It has given birth to a new kind of hubris unlike that of the old master thinkers. Our hubris is to think that we no longer have to think hard or pay attention or look for connections, that all we have to do is stick to our “democratic values” and economic models and faith in the individual and all will be well. Having witnessed unpleasant scenes of intellectual drunkenness, we have become self-satisfied abstainers removed from history and unprepared for the challenges it is already bringing. The end of the cold war destroyed whatever confidence in ideology still remained in the West. But it also seems to have destroyed our will to understand. We have abdicated. The libertarian dogma of our time is turning our policies, economies, and cultures upside down – and blinding us to this by making us even more self-absorbed and incurious than we naturally are. The world we are making with our hands is as remote from our minds as the farthest black hole. Once we had a nostalgia for the future. Today we have an amnesia for the present.”