UnHerd: What’s killing the Conservatives?

That’s certainly the case for the UK’s market economy, which just isn’t working properly for a lot of the people in it. If you want to preserve markets, you have to make them work better. Sermons about the evils of socialism and the glories of capitalism are meaningless to most voters, who are more likely to be worried about how far their wages stretch each month and the persistent sense that the businesses which sell them things are out to rip them off. [...]

More than two years on from the EU referendum vote, there are still Conservatives intent on constructing the Leave vote as a demand for deregulation and the dismantlement of social and economic protections. The disconnect between ‘Singapore’ Brexiteers in London and Sunderland Leavers has always been striking, but has never jarred more than in reports that Sajid Javid is arguing in Cabinet that a no-deal Brexit should be followed by the suspension of employment rights and the auto-enrolment rules that have given three million people their first private pension savings. [...]

Some Conservatives insist that their party must reject the option of offering ‘Corbyn Lite’ positions on the economy. Yet that fails to differentiate between diagnosis and prescription. It’s possible to see merit in the Corbyn analysis of markets without endorsing the remedies he proposes. Indeed, I’d argue that enduring support for the Corbyn Labour Party makes it all the more important for Tories to offer their own answers to the questions he asks. [...]

Conservatives, so quick to warn against the problems of state monopoly, should be much keener to tackle the concentration of economic power in private hands: too many British consumer markets are dominated by a handful of big incumbents. Tories should support the challengers who would disrupt that dominance and deliver better for consumers. [...]

Sooner or later, Conservatives must walk back from nativism and accept that the widespread movement of people and demographic change are inevitable parts of modern life and modern Britain. Until the Conservative idea of Britain better matches the reality of Britain, they will always struggle to capture what Disraeli called the “spirit of conservation and optimism” they need to win decisively in this century.

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UnHerd: How Corbyn captured the middle class

This generated a centre-Left politics which pitched itself largely to the middle classes – with a nod to the poor through policies such as increased social security payments. When Tony Blair boasted in 1997 that under New Labour Britain would retain the toughest anti-trade union laws in the western world, he was consigning Labour’s hitherto electoral base to the dustbin of history. [...]

But the Corbyn project is also a response to changing electoral realities. During the Blair years, the centre-Left fashioned a rod for its own back by hanging everything on electoral expediency. Thus, when the compromisers of the third-way stopped winning elections after the financial crisis, their project was an empty husk. If Labour was going to lose anyway – and the centre-Left has been doing that just about everywhere of late – then better, surely, to lose on its own terms and with policies activists actually believe in. [...]

Where continuity with New Labour remains, though, is in Corbynism’s pitch to the middle classes. Indeed, the Left that is in the ascendance in Britain is marked by a combination of hard-Left rhetoric and centre-Left policies that – on paper at least – would benefit the middle classes. In this sense Corbynism is an inversion of a central New Labour principle. Blair and New Labour sought to appease the Daily Mail in public, while pushing redistributory policies via stealth. In contrast, Corbynism scares the hell out of the Right-wing newspapers while pursuing – in public at least – a fairly orthodox social democratic agenda.  [...]

To be sure, Labour’s tentative economic agenda for Britain appears to be brimming with interesting ideas and initiatives. It is just not socialist in any recognisable sense. The current fetish for nationalisation among Labour activists, for example, is not matched by a radical party platform. Labour is pledging to renationalise just a handful of key services – the railways, the postal service, water and electricity.

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The Guardian: How a disastrous change in perspective disempowered the left and let the right rise

Moore had grown up in the union town of Flint, Michigan, and in many respects his book was an excoriation of the new administration for its cruel indifference to blue-collar Americans. But his title also reflected, as the anti-corporate global justice movement with which he’d been associated disintegrated, the new hegemony of what we might call “smug politics”. [...]

Moore’s book drew a simple conclusion. “[I]f you live in a country,” he wrote, “where 44 million can’t read – and perhaps close to another 200 million can read but usually don’t – well, friends, you and I are living in one very scary place.” The moron president remained in power because the American people were themselves moronic. Stupid White Men described Bush as the “idiot leader of an idiot nation”, and explained that “it comes as no surprise to foreigners that Americans, who love to revel in their stupidity, would ‘elect’ a president who rarely reads anything – including his own briefing papers”. [...]

Yet Moore’s argument that the people themselves were responsible for Bush’s antics implicitly reinforced the Republican case. The right equated the president with the American electorate, and distinguished them both from sneering elitists. Moore did exactly the same – except with the polarities reversed. Conservatives insisted the people and their leaders were wise; Moore judged them both moronic. [...]

The smug politics of the Bush era depended on the progressive embrace of savviness. The Daily Show–style gags only worked for a savvy crowd. Such jokes weren’t intended to convince anyone. In fact, almost by their nature, they couldn’t convince anyone. To get the sketch – which often consisted of little more than a clip of a conservative saying something stupid, followed by the liberal host mugging to the camera in mock amazement – the audience needed to already know and already accept the correct position.

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Aeon: The greatest use of life

It was chilly at the top. I looked across to the Statue of Liberty in the harbour and then back into Manhattan where James had grown up. Then I looked down. There was a terrifying liberty in this – the choice to live and die in a particular moment, as time stretches out endlessly in either direction. After reading James for most of my adult life, this liberty still has its appeal. I think it always will. In the first decade of the 20th century, James developed American pragmatism, a philosophy that held that truth should be judged by its practical consequences. It was a world-ready philosophy that, at its most basic, was supposed to make life more liveable. And it does, for the most part. But if pragmatism does save your life, it’s never once and for all. This is a philosophy that remains attuned to experiences, attitudes, things and events, even when they are the tragic ones. While James occasionally disparaged Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism (and refused to give a cent to a memorial in honour of the 19th-century German philosopher), James’s posthumous writings reveal a deep respect for the grim thinker’s willingness to stare clear-eyed into the gloom of human existence. There was something like courage in this brutal confrontation with quickly impending darkness.

According to James, the sign at the bottom of the bridge should be repainted or at least amended: LIFE IS WORTH LIVING – MAYBE. As he said to a crowd of young men from the Harvard YMCA in 1895: ‘Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.’ It is up to each of us to, literally, make of life ‘what we will’. These days, when I peer down from great heights, in addition to experiencing vertigo, I almost always think about Steve Rose, a young black psychology graduate who threw himself off the William James Hall at Harvard University in 2014. Perhaps James’s way of thinking could have saved him – the suggestion that he was still in charge of his life, that the decision to end it all might be reasonable, even respectable, but so too was the possibility of continuing to live. The possibility was right there – still, always, even in the shit and rancour of it – for him to explore. Perhaps he thought that choosing to die was the only free decision at his disposal, but James always suggested there might be other options. [...]

I think one surefire way to send jumpers off the edge is to pretend that you know something they don’t: that life has unconditional value, and that they are missing something that is so patently obvious. On the ledge, I suspect that they’d detect some deep insecurity or hubris in this assertion. And they might jump just to prove you wrong. Because you would, in fact, be wrong. In James’s final entreaty in his essay ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’ (1899), he reminded his readers that they often don’t have a clue about how other people experience the meaning of their lives. Better to leave it at ‘maybe’.

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Haaretz: The Netherlands’ Surprise New Best Seller: Hitler's ‘Mein Kampf’

Its publisher, Prometheus – which also publishes Anne Frank’s diary – writes that Melching’s introductions “place the book in its historical context,” providing the reader with a “trustworthy” way in which “to become acquainted with this influential book.”

Nevertheless, the book has caused controversy in the Netherlands, with Op-Eds and television debates questioning whether the introductions are adequate and whether the book should have been published at all. [...]

“If you want to fight evil, you have to look it in the eye. That’s what this critical edition is aiming for,” says van Vree. According to the professor, who was a member of the scholarly advisory board that oversaw the book’s publication, the edition’s new introduction, critical chapter intros and footnotes make “Mijn Strijd” suitable for a wider audience, including high school students. [...]

Luden, however, wonders whether the German approach may be better. She highlights that while a whole team of experts was hired to annotate the German version, only one historian ended up writing introductions for the Dutch translation.

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