In the first three parts of this series (1, 2, 3), I have suggested reforms to make the British parliamentary system better equipped for what could be an especially turbulent period in our history. I proposed: greater devolution; a slimmer, punchier House of Commons; and a House of Lords with a mix of elected, co-opted and politically-appointed members.

Now: some thoughts on elections, which are – as things stand – the epitome of everything people hate about the public sector (inconvenient, confusing, dingy, etc). With a little redesign, we could make them so much more entertaining, user friendly, and festive: fit for the modern media age.

Consider. We live in the age of live. The online revolution has destroyed many business models, but it is driving the value of one-off events through the roof. Rock stars release albums to promote their live shows (ten years ago, it was the other way round). Sky’s business model is based on the capture of live sport, especially football.

Master manipulator, Derren Brown, understands this better than anyone. His recent series was structured deliberately as a series of events – designed to provoke and gel together a stream of frenzied media and online coverage.

To be sure, a British general election is gripping, but almost inspite of itself. We’ll soon be having the first British general election of the Twitter era, but as always the results will dribble in the middle of the night (thus ‘were you still up for Portillo?’).

That didn’t matter a jot in the print era – and television has learned to make the most of the bad timing. But it’s surely wrong for the new media age. When we next go the polls, most of the British public will be asleep when we get to the climax.

So I suggest:

• A Democracy Day every two and a half years – with a general election in June and a mid-term in November.
• All elections – Westminster, devolved government, councils, European parliament, referenda, etc – will be held on one of these days (by-elections would be the only exception).
• Voting would be as easy as possible, with polls open throughout the week before, and voting could be made compulsory (with a ‘none of the above’ option, of course).
• Democracy Day would be a public holiday – with polls closing at 6 o’clock.
• Sunderland would then do its usual party trick and gets its result out within the hour. The rest of the action would then unfold across prime time; even in the closest years, the result would be clear before the nation went to bed.
• The TV audience would be huge; Twitter and its ilk would go berserk (think of all the local coverage from counts); while election parties and victory rallies could happen at a sensible time.

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This video interview shows Derick Ashong, an Obama supporter, getting approached by a (presumably pro-Clinton) interviewer outside Obama and Clinton’s third debate in February last year.  Here’s how the New York Times described what happened next:

“So why are you for Obama?” he asked. It was clear from his approach that he expected a dimwitted answer, an expectation that he was about to talk to another acolyte smitten by Senator Obama’s rock star persona.

But, as it turned out, Mr. Ashong, who was raised in Ghana and elsewhere, was glad to be asked. For almost six minutes — about a century in broadcast television years — Mr. Ashong, who has an immigrant’s love of democracy and the furrowed brow of a Brookings fellow, held forth on universal health care, single-payer approaches and public-private partnerships.

“A lot of these H.M.O.’s are publicly traded companies anyway, but I don’t think we want to create a market for health care per se, like we don’t want to create a futures market in health care,” he said. And so on.

Cute stuff. Highly informative. But not the kind of political discourse that generally captures a wider audience.

But here’s the weird part. On Feb. 2, the interview of Mr. Ashong was posted on a YouTube channel called “The Latest Controversy,” where supporters of both Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Obama are asked very aggressively to justify their choice of candidates. The video blew up, drawing more than 850,000 views. And after that huge response to his policy analysis, Mr. Ashong decided to double down and explain the emotional component of his support for Obama in a follow-up video that was posted Feb. 11 and received 300,000 views.

Taken together, that means a guy who was looking to (anonymously) show a little love for a candidate was able to look into the camera for more than 13 minutes combined and draw in more than a million clicks with an impassioned but reasoned pitch.

Ashong will be in the UK next month, and speaking at a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues.  Details: 6.30pm on 26 February in the Grand Committee Room in Parliament. More from the NYT piece after the jump. (more…)

A few days ago, I did a post on the UK government’s current horizon scanning exercise – part of the process leading up to its second National Security Strategy – in which I suggested that “the really stand-out risk that barely got a mention in the events I attended was the possibility that serious erosion of states’ capacity and legitimacy [will undermine] their ability to respond to all the global trends that we were discussing”. 

As regular readers will know, that observation comes straight out of the writings of ‘fourth generation warfare’ theorists like William Lind, Martin van Creveld and John Robb.  But what may come as more of a surprise is the interesting revelation that Kaiser Wilhelm II made a similar point yesterday in his birthday conversation with Lind*:

“My generation of kings and emperors were fixated on the age-old contest between dynasties. Would the houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern defeat those of Romanoff and Savoy or the other way around? We could not see the paradigm shift welling up all around us, the onward rush of democracy and equality and socialism and all the rest of that garbage. What we needed was an alliance of all monarchies against democracy. Instead we wiped each other out, putting the levellers in charge everywhere, to the world’s ruin.”

“Does that hold any lessons for our time?”, I asked.

“From Olympus, the picture could not be more clear,” His Majesty replied. “As we were mesmerized by dynastic quarrels, so your politicians cannot see beyond the state. They think only of states in conflict. Will America be threatened by China? Should India go to war with Pakistan? Is Iran a danger to Israel? They cannot see that states are now all in the same, sinking boat, just as all the dynasties were in 1914.”

“What should states then do?”, I enquired.

“Form an alliance of all states against non-state forces, what you call the Fourth Generation,” the Kaiser answered. “The hour is late, and the state system itself has grown fragile. That is the lesson of America’s quixotic war in Iraq. You destroyed the state there, and now no one can recreate it. That is what will happen almost everywhere when states fight other states. But none of your leaders can see it, because they, too, are time-blinded. It is the human condition.”

* Since you ask: in addition to being one of the top experts around on counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare, William Lind is also an ardent Prussian monarchist.  Consequently, he marks the birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm II (“my reporting senior and lawful sovereign”) with a column each year in which he records a conversation with that leader’s ghost.  Previous editions are highly recommended – e.g. here and here.

Here in Britain, one Christmas present arrives a few days late each year: the declassification of Cabinet papers that are then made available to the National Archive under the ‘Thirty Year Rule‘.  This year, the newly released documents are from 1978: the twilight period of Labour’s ill-fated Callaghan administration, famous for the ‘winter of discontent‘, when a torrent of industrial action meant that the rubbish went uncollected and the dead unburied.

You might suppose that it’s not the sort of anniversary that Gordon Brown will really want to be reminded of, not least given the obvious link back to Margaret Thatcher’s hugely successful election slogan of the time – ‘Labour isn’t working’ – and the fact that Callaghan’s administration had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout.

But superficial similarities aside, the crucial difference between late 70s Britain and late 00s Britain is that during the former, the pendulum had swung all the way to the ’state’ or ‘public’ end of the spectrum – whereas today, we find it right over at the ‘market’ or ‘private’ end.  Robert Skidelsky, writing in Prospect this month, refers to Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s The Cycles of American History, which describes this cyclical dynamic in detail:

[Schlesinger] defined a political economy cycle as “a continuing shift in national involvement between public purpose and private interest.” The swing he identified was between “liberal” (what we would call social democratic) and “conservative” epochs. The idea of the “crisis” is central. Liberal periods succumb to the corruption of power, as idealists yield to time-servers, and conservative arguments against rent-seeking excesses win the day. But the conservative era then succumbs to a corruption of money, as financiers and businessmen use the freedom of de-regulation to rip off the public. A crisis of under-regulated markets presages the return to a liberal era.

As Skidelsky summarises, the 1870s saw the pendulum start to swing towards collectivism on the back of a global depression triggered by a collapse in food prices. Most industrialised countries began to raise tariffs; social protection systems were rapidly rolled out (although not in the US).  The great depression of 1929-32 accelerated the process as Keynesian economics became orthodox.  But by the 1970s, the pendulum was about to swing the other way, as governments pursued “free trade abroad and social democracy at home”:

The crisis of liberalism, or social democracy, unfolded with stagflation and ungovernability in the 1970s. It broadly fits Schlesinger’s notion of the “corruption of power.” The Keynesian/social democratic policymakers succumbed to hubris, an intellectual corruption which convinced them that they possessed the knowledge and the tools to manage and control the economy and society from the top. This was the malady against which Hayek inveighed in his classic The Road to Serfdom (1944). The attempt in the 1970s to control inflation by wage and price controls led directly to a “crisis of governability,” as trade unions, particularly in Britain, refused to accept them.

Large state subsidies to producer groups, both public and private, fed the typical corruptions of behaviour identified by the new right: rent-seeking, moral hazard, free-riding. Palpable evidence of government failure obliterated memories of market failure. The new generation of economists abandoned Keynes and, with the help of sophisticated mathematics, reinvented the classical economics of the self-correcting market. Battered by the crises of the 1970s, governments caved in to the “inevitability” of free market forces. The swing-back became worldwide with the collapse of communism.

But today, Skidelsky notes, the crisis is that of conservatism:

The financial crisis has brought to a head a growing dissatisfaction with the corruption of money. Neo-conservatism has sought to justify fabulous rewards to a financial plutocracy while median incomes stagnate or even fall; in the name of efficiency it has promoted the off-shoring of millions of jobs, the undermining of national communities, and the rape of nature. Such a system needs to be fabulously successful to command allegiance. Spectacular failure is bound to discredit it.

The situation we are in now thus puts into question the speed and direction of progress. Will there be a pause for thought, or will we continue much as before after a cascade of minor adjustments? The answer lies in the intellectual and moral sphere. Is economics capable of rethinking its core principles? What institutions, policies and rules are needed to make markets “well behaved”? Do we have the moral resources to challenge the dominance of money without reverting to the selfish nationalisms of the 1930s?

There’s no doubt that these are the right questions to be asking (David and I sketched out a first attempt to marshal some thoughts on this area in a paper we published just before the G20 summit in November). As Skidelsky notes, we could do worse than to aim for Keynes’s basic stance:

In terms of our pendulum analogy, he was someone who instinctively sought an equipoise: not in the timeless equilibrium of classical economics, but in a balance in political economy between freedom and control, national and international wellbeing, efficiency and morality. He was an Aristotelian, who believed that vices are virtues carried to excess. This is a good philosophy for today.

This is a response to some thoughtful reactions to my earlier post on democracy in Thailand, and to arguments made in last week’s Economist about the situation there.

My arguments are no vindication of the PAD, whose reckless actions I find condemnable and ultimately counter-productive and whose proposals (including the 70% vote) are misguided. My intention was to provide some background on the current political situation, background that I found lacking in my main news sources. And to challenge the simplistic notion that what we are seeing is a rejection of democracy by rich urban elites who feel threatened by a democratic government that cares for and represents the poor. There are many valid reasons why ordinary citizens from all walks of life united against an elected government: their primary motive was not to defeat democracy, rather to fight its abuses.

The portrayal of the current political crisis as a battle of rich urban elites versus a majority of poor rural folk united behind the popular Mr. Thaksin is inaccurate and unhelpful. Poor farmers in the north like Mr. Thaksin. Poor city-folk in Bangkok don’t. Poor Muslims in the south hate him. While Mr. Thaksin’s party gained the most seats in parliament, more people voted against him than voted for him. He doesn’t have the kind of broad-based popular mandate that many commentators credit him with.

Conversely the PAD are not a homogenous group. As last week’s Economist put it: “the PAD is a motley bunch, united only in its fanatical hatred of Mr. Thaksin”. It is Mr. Thaksin’s abuses of power that they are outraged about, not his policies to help the poor. People did not take to the streets in protest when Mr. Thaksin first announced and implemented his “populist” policies. Neither were there street protests when his crack-down on drugs led to extrajudicial killings of hundreds (thousands?) of supposed drug traffickers many in dubious circumstances. Neither did they take to the streets when he botched up the relative peace in the south. Thais have a high tolerance for politicians’ professional shortcomings.

But what many Thais could not stomach was Mr. Thaksin’s reckless bending of the system to suit his own personal needs. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Thaksin used some cunning structures to avoid paying tax on the sale of Shin Corp to Temasek. He also had changed a law to aid in this sale. That was what brought people into the streets in protest, and led to the formation of the PAD.

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The Barclay twins – billionaire owners of the UK’s Telegraph newspapers and various other interests – are famously reclusive. So in the early 1990s, they bought the island of Brecqhou, which can be seen in the picture below from its (not much larger – it’s three miles long) neighbour Sark.

On Brecqhou, they built a huge castle, said to be the largest built in the 20th century, and at a cost of £60m or so. Sark’s inhabitants weren’t happy:

Round-the-clock construction is said to have polluted the pristine skies of the island, which has nary a streetlight, with a sodium glow. And size is its main architectural achievement; from the air it has been mistaken for a prison, and indeed the construction crew is said to have called it Alcatraz. One islander said of the brothers, “They have the taste of Saddam Hussein.”

In 1996, the Barclay brothers tried to declare Brecqhou’s independence. They took no services from Sark and travelled to and from their island by helicopter. They were said to resent visits from Sark’s police (when, say, a worker on their estate met an accidental death). They may also have been looking to more fully protect their financial affairs from scrutiny.

When their plans were frustrated, they began to lobby for replacement of Sark’s political system – often described as the last remants of feudalism in the Western world. Thus began a long legal battle, with the brothers fighting for what they describe as “modern democratic principles and the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Meanwhile, they embarked on a buying spree, which saw them took control of large swathes of Sark itself. According to the FT, they bought hotels, shops, golf courses – and were said to be pushing for an end to the ban on cars (and helicopters) on the island. 

Finally yesterday, Sark’s 474 voters headed to the polls for the island’s first ever democratic election (even Afghanistan didn’t have to wait so long). You can see what the islanders made of it here. The Telegraph’s Chief Reporter, Gordon Rayner was sent to cover this momentous event. The owners of his paper, he reported, had endorsed a slate of ‘reform’ candidates. They’d better get the result they wanted or there’d be trouble:

The Barclays, proprietors of Telegraph Media Group, feel so strongly about the future of Sark that they have threatened to withdraw their multi-million pound investments in the island if pro-reform candidates do not hold sway in the new parliament.

The Barclays have invested in hotels, property and agricultural land on Sark, employing around 140 people either directly or indirectly.

But all did not go according to plan. After each of the intricate ballot papers was read out aloud, in a session lasting ten hours or so, it became clear that the Barclay’s candidates had been heavily defeated – the ‘establishment’ had gained a clear majority of seats.

So how have the Barclays reacted? Well it seems they have done just what they threatened to do – immediately close down all their businesses, throwing about a sixth of the population out of work (the island has no welfare state). The twins’ lawyer told the BBC that:

The people of Sark are reaping what they sowed the day before. They only have themselves to blame. They could have co-operated with Barclays Investment but they chose to obstruct it. It was clear the Barclays were clear on their commitment to the island with support – they got no support at all.

Sark doesn’t appear to want or appreciate the Barclays’ investment and so it doesn’t have it. The island cannot at the same time treat the Barclay family in the way that it has and expect them to continue investing large sums of money into its economy.

Sark is going back to where it was before the Barclay brothers were there.

I just heard from a BBC reporter who was not expecting his hotel to be open when he got back to it. Sark’s voters have not come up with the ‘right’ democratic answer. And they’ll be punished, it seems…

Update: Another sympathetic quote from Gordon Dawes – the Barclay twins’ lawyer:

I find it very hard, particularly at this time of year, not to wonder about the old saying to do with turkeys and whether or not they would vote for Christmas; well it seems we have our answer. I am genuinely saddened. The people of Sark have spoken.

Apparently the Barclays produced a newsletter characterising one of their opponents as a “feudal talibanist” and another as having a “socialist streak”. Can’t think why that didn’t go down well with Sark’s electorate…

According to John Robb a Hollow State has:

The trappings of a modern nation-state but it lacks any of the legitimacy, services, and control of its historical counter-part. It is merely a shell that has some influence over the spoils of the economy. The real power rests in the hands of corporations and criminal/guerrilla groups that vie with each other for control of sectors of wealth production. For the individual living within this state, life goes on, but it is debased in a myriad of ways.

A good example of a Hollow State is Zimbabwe where the Government under Mugabe no longer has legitimacy. Government systems are either in a state of collapse (witness the looting of food carried out by the Army) or are non existent (the health system). State infrastructure is broken (water) and the population has to rely on other sources, from charities or private citizens.

Zimbabwe has been spiralling out of control for years, and it’s only recently that the international community has had sufficient leverage over the Mugabe regime to bring about change, but the results have been limited. The failure by the international community to intervene both early on and with force (not necessarily hard power) has allowed Mugabe to operate with only a few (in some cases meaningless) constraints.

The widely reported cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe seems to have motivated the international community to speak out once again. Today Gordon Brown argued that:

“This is now an international rather than a national emergency. International because disease crosses borders. International because the systems of government in Zimbabwe are now broken. There is no state capable or willing of protecting its people. International because – not least in the week of the 60th anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights – we must stand together to defend human rights and democracy, to say firmly to Mugabe that enough is enough.”

But let’s be realistic. We can ramp up the rhetoric to the nth degree but without firm action, under a UN mandate, Mugabe and his horrifc regime isn’t going to disappear. Unless an individual or organisation takes the initiative this tragedy will continue to unfold.

Update: The arguments for not doing anything with Mugabe are numerous. Two arguments stand out: first the lack of an international mandate; second, a deficeincy in our collective moral responsibility. But I notice in today’s Observer online that the Archbishop of York is calling for President Robert Mugabe to be toppled from power and face trial for crimes against humanity. Could this be the moral outcry that creates the environment for a Chapter 7 intervention?

With my wedding in Bangkok fast approaching, I have been watching the events unfolding there closely and with trepidation. I am dismayed at the blinkered and naïve reporting and commentary in the mainstream Western press about the situation in Thailand (I refer in particular to The FT, The Economist, The Washington Post etc). The political impasse is described in clichés, as a battle of virtuous rural masses versus power-possessive urban elites, of progressives and democrats versus royalists, militarists and other hideous elements of the ‘ancien regime’. I’ve no doubt that the current events signify a failure of democracy in Thailand. It is indeed that very failure that the protesters are decrying, with resort to ever more desperate tactics.

A recent blog by the FT’s Gideon Rachman – whose pieces I frequently enjoy reading – typifies the mainstream view, which is shallow and simplistic both in its account of the situation and in its interpretation of democracy (see article here). According to Mr. Rachman (who by the way likes clichés):

“The urban middle-classes are rising up and demanding that democracy be rescinded.
Do not be fooled by the fact that the group occupying the airport call themselves the “People’s Alliance for Democracy“. Their intent is clearly anti-democratic. They have just brought down an elected government.”

In this vein, the anti-government movement (known as the People’s Alliance for Democracy, or PAD) has been widely condemned on the basis that it unlawfully rejects a government that was voted in through the ballot and thus has prima facie democratic legitimacy. It seems to be a straightforward case of foul play on the part of the urban elites, who directly challenge the people’s choice. Or is it?

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In the last couple of weeks there has been more attention heaped on little Bosnia than has been the case for years. First, Paddy Ashdown and Richard Hoolbroke argued in The Guardian that the situation was deteriorating rapidly. Immediately afterwards, William Hague travelled to Sarajevo to see things for himself followed by Foreign Secretary David Milliband.

Now the NATO Deputy Secretary-General is touring Bosnia-Herzegovina while the EU’s two foreign policy supremos -– Enlargement Commissioner Oli Rehn and Javier Solana, the foreign policy “czar” –  have issued a document that underlines the bloc’s determination to “sort out the situation in Bosnia-Hercegovina,“ while double-hatting EU Miroslav Lajčak as head of the European Commission office too.

Though this renwed attention on Bosnia is welcome, a new report (pdf) by the Democratization Policy Council makes clear more will have to be done to put Bosnia back on the right track.

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President-elect Obama to the world:

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security – we support you.

And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America – that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Photo from alexandra.matzke (creative commons license).

Update: I can’t find embeddable video of today’s victory speech, but here’s the BBC version. Contrast though with Obama’s speech after he stormed to victory in the Iowa caucuses back in January:

You see how immediately how Obama has withdrawn into himself, become more dignified, more Presidential – after Iowa he was looser, happier, free of that foreboding he must feel now that the USA (and the mess it’s in) is his responsibility.

It reminds me of the famous picture of Cherie hugging Blair as they arrived in Downing Street the morning after Labour’s 1997 victory – where she has that poignant ‘oh shit – what have we done?’ look on her face:

Update II: Sad to see McCain having to quiet the boos (for Obama) as he conceded the race, though the crowd did get more gracious as the speech went on. As I have argued, this is probably one of those elections where the loser is driven into a temporary period of insanity by its defeat.

Rather ominous, then, that the only full-throated cheer of the night was for (a slightly tearful) Sarah Palin, who McCain described as: “one of the most impressive campaigners I have ever seen and an impressive new voice in our party for reform, and for the principles that have always been our greatest strength.”

Thought the body language between the two was pretty chilly, though. And remember this vicious quote from a few days ago, from an unnamed McCain adviser:

She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone. She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.

Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.

Update III: Have to say, I’m feeling pretty happy about my prediction of a 5% victory in the popular vote, which I made not long after Iowa and have stuck to steadfastly ever since. Have also been irritating people by saying that Obama is already a two-term President – time will tell on that one.

Update IV: Celebrating in Brooklyn:

Photo under CC license from Flickr user:  FlySi

Update V: Surprising factoid of the night – via Kos:

Something to look at in the next couple of days – turnout sucked. Not all ballots are in, but we’re currently at almost 119M for the night. We had 122M vote in 2004. So we may get to 2004 levels. A quick spot check confirmed numbers down in many states (e.g. CA, NY, OH, etc). Could it be Republicans staying home? A look at the exit polls will be on my agenda tomorrow.

Or maybe not – Politico has the opposite story:

More than 130 million people turned out to vote Tuesday, the most ever to vote in a presidential election. 

With ballots still being counted in some precincts into Wednesday morning, an estimated 64 percent of the electorate turned out, making 2008 the highest percentage turnout in generations. 

In 2004, 122.3 million voted in what was then the highest recorded turnout in the contest between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry. 

Previously red states targeted by the Barack Obama campaign demonstrated remarkable turnout, setting records in North Carolina and elsewhere. Increased turnout was also reported in states including Virginia and Indiana. 

Update VI – Here’s an eye watering statistic. The election cost $4.2bn ($5.3bn if you include the congressional and senate races). 120-130m Americans voted. So that’s nearly $35 spent for every vote cast.

Update VII – From the department of sore losers, the batshit crazy Debbie Schlussel:

With Black Panthers ruling the polling places and idiocy ruling the minds, America is now unstable. This election will instantly change our lives . . . for the worse. And dummies and the mob mentality are dominating voting booths across America. Our country is now unstable like those of Europe. The numbers of Muslim aliens and U.S.-born Muslims will eventually mirror those of Europe. We’re just a decade or so behind.

Congrats, America. We’re the new Europe.

(No deodorant, lack of showers, and women without shaved pits and legs can’t be far behind . . . along with the Islamic wildings and mobs. I can already smell it. And it’s malodorous.)

The (often endearingly) grumpy John Derbyshire:

Just watched Wonder Boy’s speech. Hmph. “Callused hands?” When did he ever have callused hands?

All right, I’m sour. The most liberal member of the U.S. Senate! And that shakedown-artist of a wife, with the permanent frown! And Joe Biden! …

I’m sour about the GOP too. What did it all get us, those 8 years of pandering and spending? If GWB had turned his face against new entitlements, closed the borders, deported the illegals, held the line on calls to loosen mortgage-lending standards, starved the Department of Education, and declined those invitations to mosque functions, would the GOP be in any worse shape now?

What won this election was the packaging skills of David Axelrod, the swooning complicity of the media, the ruthless opportunism of Barack Obama, and the unprincipled thuggishness of his supporters.

And a scared bloke in the crowd when McCain conceded:

Before McCain took the stage, Nathaniel Eyler, 29, of Phoenix, mouthed the words as the song “God Bless the USA” played.

“Scared,” he said in response to how he felt about the outcome, calling Obama a “socialist.”

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I’m scared. Just the idea of Barack Obama as president of the United States scares me. It does not embody the idealism I grew up with and am passionate about. We’re Americans. We’re resilient. We’ll bounce back. Our government’s idiot-proof. There’s nothing he can do that we can’t fix in the end.”

Still, he said, “We’re going to be taking steps backwards.”

Andy McCarthy:

Obama professes a love for this country. One needn’t doubt his sincerity to grasp that what he loves is a vision of America, not America as she is. The object of his affection is not our Unum [as in E Pluribus Unumh- the motto on the US seal], the glorious inheritance we Many cherish through generations past, present, and (one prays) future. For The One, that One earns only disdain. Eroding it has been his life’s work. 

Move through Obama’s career as a community organizer, his embrace of ACORN, his radical associations: the common denominator is a purpose to break down the Unum at its foundations, what he calls the “grass-roots.” For America, he plans an atom bomb. Or, to be precise, an atoms bomb: countless communities in cities and towns across the land, organized along the Marxist principles of Saul Alinsky into socialist enclaves. Each atom smothers the individual freedom and enterprise that have defined the American character, replacing them with welfare states that prize dysfunction and reward the rabble-rousers. 

To be sure, there is an Unum that Obama sees. It is in his mind’s eye — clearer on the horizon now than when he began his project 23 years ago. It will arrive when the atoms reach critical mass and finally devour the hollowing carcass of our present society…

For Obama and his allies, capitalist democracy is an abject failure, habituated to racism, relentless in its materialism. It is an ironic critique: The senator and his fellow travelers are driven by nothing if not a crass materialism: They see themselves entitled to society’s benefits without the burden of its toils. They are, moreover, such prisoners of their own racism — have you ever heard anyone else describe his own grandmother as “a typical white person”? — that race has become their unified field theory for all of life’s disparities. It is a stubborn theory, heedless of the fact that, in our free society, members of all races, ethnicities, and economic classes move up and down the ladder of opportunity by the yardstick of merit. 

Obama will tolerate no such yardstick. He derides the very core of what makes American society exceptional: individual liberty. Freedom. “We have this strong bias toward individual action,” Obama ruefully told De Zutter — and note the crafty shift: his choice of the amorphous action instead of the value-laden freedom, lest the listener realize just what is at stake. “You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”

Of course, we already have collective institutions and organizations. They are the branches of a limited government, designed by our Constitution precisely to promote individual liberty and national security. They are the churches, synagogues, PTAs, neighborhood clubs, and other social organizations by which each citizen may freely set the balance between his personal fulfillment and his interaction with fellow citizens. They are the arts, the sports arenas, the charities, the congeries of fulfillment for those who know the personal is not the political. That is American democracy, ourUnum.

In this article for the National Review, McCarthy – a former federal prosecutor who led the case against the 1993 WTC bombers – weaves together every insane, paranoid, and self-serving myth (racial, ideological and otherwise) about who Obama is and what he plans for America. You should read the whole thing and weep.

Ross Douthat has a good take on the wilderness his fellow right-wingers are driving themselves into. They should all take time to see what happened to the British left, after Thatcher drove it insane. Or compare the dark night of the Tories, after Blair accomplished the same trick.

Once you start frothing at the mouth and ranting in public, it’s a long hard road before you’re fit to be in polite company again…

Nils Gilman at Small Precautions:

Six months ago (specifically: March 8, before even Bear Stearns had collapsed) I undertook a scenario planning exercise with Peter Schwartz, Steve Weber, and several other colleagues, trying to assess where this whole “sucker” (to use Bush’s choice phrase) could possibly end up. We spent a lovely, sunny afternoon on Peter’s balcony in the Berkeley Hills thinking rational but black thoughts about where it could all end up. 

By the end of the exercise, as we discussed the various risks in the system, and how it might all play out, we had laid out a scenario whereby the money center banks, that is, the very core of the Western financial system (in the U.S., these are Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America) could end up insolvent, necessitating a wholesale nationalization of the banking sector. We then looked around the table at each other and tried to imagine what this would mean for Western capitalism and democracy, and it just seemed too crazy to even consider. Political and ideological apocalypse on a scale of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We all sat there, feeling a little crazy, and then finally one of us (who shall remain, for now, unnamed) uttered the most taboo words in scenario planning: “That could never happen. Impossible.” 

And we all agreed, and wrapped up the session.

The wholesale ideological and political collapse of Communism? There were lots of smart people as late as 1989 who said that couldn’t ever happen, either….

Listening to Gordon Brown’s speech today, Philip Stephens notes that “Mr Brown kept his audience in its comfort zone”:

Though he set out the challenges Britain faces in a period of tumultuous global upheaval, Mr Brown did little to challenge his audience’s preconception that the present mess was all the fault of greedy capitalists.

Reading that brought to mind another Labour Conference speech in times of global upheaval: Tony Blair’s back in 2001.  Remember this?

This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

I re-read the whole thing this afternoon, and was struck by a) its brilliance, b) its insight, c) how it soars compared to Brown’s speech today and d) the extent to which - in retrospect, with all that’s happened since – it shines with an eerie messianic fervour.  It’s well worth another look: full text below the jump.

(more…)

One way or another, it’s bad news for Spain if John McCain makes it to President. Either he doesn’t know where the country is, or he’s going to refuse to meet Spanish leader, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, until he shows a greater dedication to ‘human rights, democracy and freedom.’

This bizarre story, which is going viral in the Spanish language press, springs from an interview where McCain appeared to lump Zapatero with Castro and Chavez – leaders he would be cold shouldering until they mended their wicked ways.

Twice the Spanish reporter tried to emphasize that she was referring to a leader from Europe not Latin America, but McCain was not to be distracted. “All I can tell you is that I have a clear record of working with leaders in the Hemisphere that are friends with us and standing up to those who are not,” he said. “And that’s judged on the basis of the importance of our relationship with Latin America and the entire region.”

Later his campaign refused to take the easy way out (blame the reporter’s accent) or admit what seems to be the truth (McCain just got muddled). Instead, a spokesman claimed that the dissing of Zapatero had been a deliberate one (neocons hate him, of course, for what they see as the ‘betrayal’ that followed the Madrid bombings).

Josh Marshall has been all over the story – or there’s a good rundown in the Washington Post. You can listen to the interview here.

Is this what to expect from public diplomacy, McCain  style?

The idea that EU personnel should help keep the peace in Georgia – noted here yesterday but in the air since last week – is gaining traction.  Today, the European Council said that the EU would boost OSCE observers there, but that just means more Euros under the OSCE’s flag.  But the Council left open the possibility of a mission under its own banner, and that’s reportedly being discussed in private.

Russia has indicated that it is open to a greater “international aspect”.  One potential problem: the Russians may also insist that EU monitors operate within the framework of, or in very close coordination with, the existing (Russian-led) CIS “peacekeeping force” in South Ossetia.  That could mean EU-badged troops taking orders from Russian officers, or at least having to defer to them.

That may be the price to pay to avoid more bloodshed (the European Council says it’ll support “every effort” and while it stipulates the UN and OSCE, that could mean the CIS too).  And the EU would demand that the force in South Ossetia come under a UN mandate – previously, it’s relied on an agreement between Georgia and Moscow that the Georgians have voided by quitting the CIS. 

But a Russian-EU hook-up will not impress those Georgians who had hoped that the EU might come to their aid during the war – experience in Kosovo and elsewhere indicates that it won’t be long before an angry war vet decides to take personal revenge.  And it will be greeted with hoots from the Washington neocons: is this the marvellous European Security and Defence Policy?  Are some EU members more comfortable with Russian command than with the U.S. in Afghanistan?

How can the EU limit the damage to its image?  In operational terms, the answer must be to maximize the autonomy of its contingent as much as possible (in recent days, I’ve kicked ideas to and fro with Nicu Popescu of ECFR on this, and he’s reproduced part of the exchange on his blog).  But the key is to ensure that the EU is also seen to be delivering humanitarian and reconstruction aid, and boosting Georgian democracy every way it knows.  But the U.S. is ahead in that game – and this is Korski’s turf, so I challenge him to put forward a plan…